Xbox Originals

*sigh*

 Guys, what are you doing?

Look, I’m a PM, I understand that things get cut and you don’t always get to produce what you’d ideally like to produce.  That’s the reality of the situation.  I’m okay with the producer’s logo being a little choppy on the way in.  But if you’re essentially licensing out back catalog IP, is it really that much work to disable menu options that will cause the game to crash?  What if Word shipped with a big red toggle button on the ribbon that said “More Magic” on it. 

Do you really want to field all those calls with the answer that the player is just ’supposed to know’ not to push those buttons.  That’s not a good experience story.  In fact, it’s such a fucking terrible experience that it may threaten the viability of the platform.  I already have way, way too many awesome games coming out right now, I can wait until the mid-winter slump for my third copy of Psychonauts.  Go fix it. 

Even More Digital Delivery

Steam, I still love you, but we’re moving into an open relationship.

After replacing the misbehaving video card in my frankenstein-esque laptop (Replaced the keyboard 3 times, case fan twice, hard drive, batteries, and now the graphics card), I decided to celebrate with a purchase from the bargain bin (Evil Genius, which then proceeded to eat my weekend. I’m a sucker for a short fat guy with a monocle). Having firmly planted myself on the side of the people who make the things I love, I absolutely cannot stand going to GameStop/EB Games/The Den of Despair. If I’m forced to due to exclusive packages, etc., I will always buy games new, even if they cost more, so as to support the publisher and developer. Gamestop’s draconian policies around pre-ordering and the fact that their business model of making massive profits on the secondary market at the expense of the people who actually are responsible for the content they sell makes digital delivery all the more appealing. Unfortunately these same retailers have a lot of power to essentially extort publishers by threatening not to stock their games, or to carry less copies when the publishers try to work around them via the digital route. One gets the impression that there’s a lot of cloak and dagger going on between publishers and retailers.

At any rate, I’ve already purchased every game Steam offers I have any interest in with a metacritic rating above 70. This has led me to Warcry. The deal is similar to Steam, only instead of a client, you download the game installer manually (and unless you have a download manager, potentially multiple times, as browsers don’t like massive file downloads via http). The good side of things is that once you install the game and validate your account with the installation, you’re done, the game acts just like the retail copy does, and no further DRM is in place.

In other news, Microsoft has announced that it’s going to add a new digital delivery service to compliment Xbox Live Arcade. The service entitled “Xbox Originals” will allow players to download through Xbox Live games for the classic Xbox including Psychonauts, Crimson Skies, Fable, and the original Halo (Maybe not as good as Nintendo’s back catalog, but I’ll take it). The service will kick off December 4th.

Looks like I’ll be buying my third copy of Psychonauts. Tim Schaefer must be making matresses out of my money.

The Art of Theft

Yahtzee has a new Trilby game out, this time a stealth game, in distinct deviation from previous titles.  If you’ve been under a rock, the Chzo Mythos series of games are some of the best games available using the Adventure Game Studio toolkit and predominately feature a gentlemanly catburgler named Trilby.  Go check it out.

Unreliable Narrators

I love a good plot twist.  Unfortunately, most of the plot twists used incessantly in media today are not what one would call good.

The best plot twist is one that is implemented by leaving dangling threads in the plot and tying them into the twist later on.  The condition on this is that if the reader/player/viewer can guess the plot twist in advance – or is even aware that a plot twist exists – it can substantially dampen the plot experience.  The fun in the plot twist is in having all your assumptions shaken apart, being completely blind-sided.  If the individual suspects foul, they will begin concentrating on trying to detect the problem instead of experiencing your work.  Additionally, the twist needs to make sense and provide an eventual resolution to the plot.  This is where many ongoing TV shows fail – plot twists should exist by providing a plausible and coherent chain events that change in perspective because of new knowledge imparted to the audience.  Well designed twists occur by torquing the perspective of the audience, not the events of the plot.  This is where shows like LOST fail.  It’s difficult to construct an elaborate plot and continually shift the perspective of the viewer around in a way that provides a coherent narrative the entire time.  While it’s fine to answer questions with more questions, and some point you need to indicate to your audience that you know where you’re going with this and that it will all be resolved eventually.  Heroes does a much better job at this by keeping the arcs manageable – and writing out the entire outline ahead of time.

There is a powerful technique for creating an effective plot twist called “Unreliable narration”.  While it has been in use in books and film for decades, it has made very little traction in the realm of video games.  The underlying premise of the technique is that the player assumes what the narrator is telling him to be true and correct.  At some point in the plot, you can force the twist in plot perspective by revealing that the narrator (who is often the protagonist) has not been giving an accurate depiction of events, for whatever reason.  I can think of only three games that have used the technique in this way (one of which is the metal gear solid series, which is so convoluted I’ll avoid it entirely).  Out of respect for people who may not have played these games, if you want to avoid spoilers you’ll stop reading here.  The first game is Final Fantasy VII, one of the most successful RPGs of all time.  Cloud Strife appears initially as former member of an elite group of military called SOLDIER.  Much of the plot in the first half of the game contains flashbacks to Cloud’s past, but these stories are dotted with memory gaps that make the story inconsistent.  Later in the game Cloud regains his memory and much of the earlier story is shown to be false.  A second and more recent example would by Bioshock.  In an extremely brilliant move by Ken Levine’s team, the narrator, a gentleman named Atlas who guides the character through the first two thirds of the game is shown to be using mind control on the player based on the keyword “Would you kindly”.  The reason it’s clever is because the player has to perform these actions to progress in the game anyway, and the keyword is very well masked in the dialog.  The ‘big reveal’ in the middle of the game shows that many of the events leading up to that point, comments left in audio diaries and such, completely turn about the assumptions the player has made about himself up to that point.  Atlas is shown to be con-artist who has been using the player via the above mechanism for his own ends.  In true con-artist fashion, Atlas uses social engineering techniques to establish a bond with the player, thus allowing the delivery of foreshadowing while at the same time minimizing the likelihood that he will be suspected as being an unreliable narrator.

If anything is clear from the above assessment, it should be that writing an unreliable narrator well is extremely difficult.  Even in literature, it’s not a technique that is well-executed often.  Nevertheless, some of my favorite movies use this technique to great effect – The Usual Suspects, Lucky Number Slevin, and Memento.  I’d like a more coherant breakdown of the tools for making effective use of the technique, and to see those tools used to improve the generally dismal state of Videogame plots.  Suprises are cool.

As a more wonky alternative, I think it would be interesting to play a game where the player was made aware that the avatar was actively lying to them and had to work around it as an obstacle by forcing them into logical contradictions or social situations where the truth would come out.  There’s a mechanic, would it be possible to build a game around that?

In Search of the Casual

In the last year or so there’s been a mounting interest in gaming media on casual games.  Publishers have no doubt been looking at the casual game space for several years prior - and understandably - as the current industry is valued at approximately 2.25 billion dollars and rapidly increasing.  You know what I think would be great?  If every time people talked about the casual games industry I didn’t see the picture below.

I know that Bejeweled makes PopCap a crapload of money.  It came out 6 years ago.  The sequel, pictured above, came out 3 years ago, but really it’s the same game.  There is other stuff going on, really cool stuff too.  And if there isn’t, that market segment is screwed, because you can’t sustain an industry when all anyone ever talks about in the media is one match 3 game that came out the same year as the Gamecube and original Xbox. 

Industries - especially fledgling industries - need their heroes.  Industries need companies who compete with each other, and those companies need to be able to point to examples of brilliance and say “That right there, that’s what we’ve got to beat”.  You need more than a 6 year (and climbing) window between iconic landmarks of innovation to grow an industry.  Now I’m not saying that nothing interesting has happened in the last six years in the casual games space, I’m saying quite the opposite, but the gaming media needs to stop pointing to that particular casual gaming poster child and bring some of the other orphaned children out of the cold (Like Desktop Tower Defense!).

Am I just deaf and blind, or is there an ongoing reason for this?

Kongregate

Kongregate will consume your soul and cause you to swear Oaths of Fealty.

As mentioned previously, I’m a huge achievement whore.  The concept of badges has entranced me since I was a wee Boy Scout.  I don’t take particular pride in showing them off to anyone, I just like having a record of tasks I’ve accomplished.  If you’re a fan of Newgrounds, which is the cradle of humanity for cool flash games, you’re going to lurrrrve Kongregate. 

Additionally, and this bit is kind of weird, Kongregate is the future home of a digital collectable card game.  The current manner for aquiring these cards is to complete an acheivement for a particular game for that week.  Presumably when the game is actually launched there will also be some mechanism for purchasing/winning additional cards for your deck.  Final judgement is reserved for when the game comes out.

On top of all that, It’s just clean.  Clean like Facebook used to be, you know, back in the day before they started plastering shit all over your screen like this was 1997.  Cleanliness is highly appreciated and improves the usability story tenfold.  Go check it out.

More Gaming Crack

In the previous post I discussed the fact that addiction and enjoyment are not the same thing, and I cited several games who have the addiction (if not also the enjoyment) down square.  What I did not talk about is how exactly you go about making that happen.

Casinos have boiled one technique down to a fine art: high payout at rare intervals.  Now it’s not simply enough to randomly dole out a large reward on an arbitrary basis.  Players need to understand why they’re getting this reward, even if there’s a lot of randomness to it, it must be as a direct result of an action they took.  The reward happens to also provide a fun element, but much as Crack is is much more addictive than its more expensive counterpart Cocaine.  Because the high is so intense, and so short-lived, it triggers an extreme desire to repeat activities that led to the high in the first place.

Examples:

• Any form of Gambling, Poker, Blackjack, Slots causes you to win big only occasionally, which keeps you playing another hand or pulling the lever one more time, just in case you get lucky again.
• Match 3 games implement this by having a normal scenario be the matching of three items causing a chain of new blocks to drop.  Occasionally the blocks that drop will cause a further match, and a cascade effect may occur giving the player massive point multipliers.  This is random to a certain extent because the player is unaware of what blocks will drop next.
• Diablo/World of Warcraft acts through rare item drops.  Players will do a raid dungeon over and over again on the pure hope that an extremely powerful and rare item will drop that they may be able to obtain.  Even if a usable item does drop, there is not a guarantee that the individual player will be the one to roll for it.
• Crack Cocaine works by releasing massive amounts of Dopamine into the brain.  This high only lasts a short time, and repeated hits will not achieve the same level of euphoria as the first round did.
• In experiments with mice, a mouse will spend proporionally more time pushing a button which dispenses food at random intervals than with a button that dispenses food at regular intervals (say every ten pushes of the button).  This effect is so pronounced that a mouse will spend the majority of their life tapping away at the button given the opportunity.  If the reward is of higher value than food (a non-narcotic drug), the effect magnifies).

Good vs Addictive

Here’s a fun experiment that you can all do at home.  Get a small rodent and a degree in Neurophysiology.  Then pop the rodent’s head open and put a few cuts on the ventromedial hypothalmus.  If you haven’t botched the job and killed the poor thing, what you will discover is that the rodent will binge and binge, continually eating whatever food is available, regardless of how full it gets. 

There are other similar experiments you can do such as getting your younger siblings addicted to cocaine, but they all illustrate a rather fundamental neurological principal: Craving something and enjoying something are not the same thing, they are related, but more or less independant, in so far as anything is in that mush of cerebral goo upstairs.

The reason I bring this up is that it has ramifications for games.  While not necessarly as direct as chemical or physical intervention, it is possible to trigger the same pathways that twitchy crack addicts get to live with every day in a more mild manner using behavioral stimuli.  What drug dealers and Daniel Cook have figured out is that it is extremely profitable to do so, if you can get the formula right.  Where Danc and I disagree is that I don’t think all games are drugs, only the ones who have the addiction tricks down proper. 

There are companies who specialize in this unique blend of addiction.  Blizzard has a strong history of getting this right with games like Diablo and its larger, more voractious soul-sucking older brother World of Warcraft.  Blizzard is, in fact, so good at this, that the only thing that seems to limit their ability to create maniacly addictive games is the amount of time they have to develop them - not something most can say.  Casual Gaming generally falls into this category as well.  The more popular games in this genre such as the oft quoted Bejeweled are not a particularly thrilling experience.  Nobody is deriving actual pleasure from playing Solitaire.  People play these games because they kill time and they’re innovative only in the sense that they’ve got the addcition formula down to a fine art, a formula which can be easily cloned from clone to dreary clone.

Blizzard is in a relatively unique position of making games which are highly addictive and at the same time very enjoyable to play.  Most game designers are generally aiming for the latter.  From a business perspective, there’s not much real advantage to aiming for the addiction formula if you’re selling premium retail games - by the time they’re addicted they’ve already purchased the title.  In cases where you have an opportunity to give them the first hit for free - and to tell them to come back to get more - the addiction is key to the survival of the business model. 

This doesn’t mean you have an excuse for making shitty games.  An enjoyable and addictive game is always going to win out over an addictive game, all other things being equal.  It’s notable that companies like Infinite Interactive have attempted to take the highly successful match 3 formula and inject it with some real enjoyment by adding RPG elements (and somehow making gamer crack all the more potent at the same time).

The point I’m rambling slowly towards here is that games that are popular are not the same that games that are good.  The philosophy that large groups of people can’t be wrong has never been even remotely true, and it’s certainly not here.  If casual games are going to be a hallmark industry in the future, we need to start seeing more of an approach that takes both of these into consideration.

Erik Wolpaw

When I played Psychonauts, I knew that the writers for that game were some of my favorite people. After playing Portal, I decided that perhaps Valve had some writers who were actually my favorite people, and I just wasn’t aware of that fact at the time I played Psychonauts. Now I’ve discovered that in fact a union of the two above groups exists and I can stop getting all emotional about it and crying in the bathroom at work every half hour. Seriously.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an interview with Erik Wolpaw, who is clearly sane in the same way that John Cleese is. When I eventually decide that I have manacled to the evicerating chain of corporate too long and start my own company, you have a standing job offer from me.

P.S. Ben Croshaw, you’re welcome to join too. I hope you two will play nice together in my future nation-state of gaming.

P.P.S.  If you were under the impression that perhaps you, dear reader, were my favorite person, or that I “Like you the best”, you’re wrong.

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