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A history of griefing: meet the gamers who, if you're lucky, only want to ruin your day for kicks
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Passive agression, Spec Ops: The Line, and the individual onus - ben abraham dot net
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The Negative Influence of Games: An Autobiographical Essay
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A history of griefing: meet the gamers who, if you're lucky, only want to ruin your day for kicks

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A history of griefing: meet the gamers who, if you’re lucky, only want to ruin your day for kicks

A history of griefing: meet the gamers who, if you’re lucky, only want to ruin your day for kicks

Edge Staff at 11:33am January 4 2013

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You’re in the zombie nightmare of DayZ and about to be eaten by one of the charging undead when suddenly a helicopter appears. Its pilots – and simply owning a helicopter lets you know they’re big shots – gun down your pursuer and offer you a lift. What you don’t know is that instead of flying you to safety, your destination is the tiny, featureless Schadenfreude Island some 15km off the main coast of Chernarus. The only reason they’ve saved you is for the amusement of knowing you’re condemned to stand there until you waste away, and that they were smart enough to fool you.

Griefing: it comes in many forms, but any online game with a population of more than five will see its share. Sometimes it’s purely for fun, sometimes it’s to make a point, and sometimes it’s even to make a profit. In the online world of Second Life, for instance, where players purchase land with real money, griefers have been known to snap up surrounding plots and fill them with content such as giant walls to extort landowners into buying back their view. Even when the reason is just ‘because I can’, though, there’s often more to it.

At heart, griefing is about rules – the rules of the game that griefers see themselves as being smart enough to subvert, or the social rules they’re prepared to break in the name of getting their own kicks. In many cases, simply knowing that someone somewhere is screaming is enough. There are parallels across other spheres of technology, too. For instance, one of the earliest celebrity viruses, Casino, took the form of a slot machine that forced you to play a game for the fate of your hard drive’s file allocation table. Get three £ symbols and you’d get your data back, just as the virus promised. Get three ? instead and supposedly you’d get the author’s phone number, although what you really got was the message: “No fuckin’ chance, and I’m punishing you for trying to trace me down!” before the virus zapped your data. The general presentation and text is classic griefer psychology, creating invisible rules to allow him to clamber to the moral high ground, blaming the victims, and dismissing any harm as just punishment.

While their goals were different, some early game developers would use their power to punish what they saw as player transgression, too, usually piracy, but occasionally cheating as well. The original EarthBound, for instance, had code that tried to detect whether it was a pirated copy. It would then let pirate players get to the final boss, before crashing itself and deleting all their saves. The first SimCity would let you keep playing if you failed a copy-protection check, but kept inflicting disasters to make it impossible to accomplish anything. More recently, last year’s Serious Sam 3 on PC punished pirates not with an error message, but an immortal giant pink scorpion that relentlessly pursued them through the world.

Originally such tricks served little purpose bar providing a little bit of quiet satisfaction for the programmer. As time went on, they became a way for a company to immediately know it was dealing with a pirate. Calling up a hint line about a missing item, such as the handkerchief in Lure Of The Temptress, was an admission of guilt. It would be there if you hadn’t cracked the game. The practice continues today: Batman: Arkham Asylum has a room full of poisoned gas where your cape suddenly won’t work if you cracked the game. “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code,” responded Eidos’s admin when the first person complained about it.

While griefing methods vary by genre and game, players who grief can be put into three rough camps. The first are opportunists, who simply set out to annoy people. They shoot their own teammates, they kill steal, they fill the chat window with the word ‘LOL’, they camp, and they smash people’s stuff. Think cockroach, with the emphasis on the first syllable. They’re the kind of people that kick and ban buttons were invented for.

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Tags: DayZ, Eve Online, featured, Griefing, Team Fortress 2

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Edge Staff at 11:33am January 4 2013

The second tier use more advanced tricks, but don’t actually create them. They typically have some skill or experience with the game, whether it’s having a character at a high enough level to mess with people, or simply a higher understanding of the rules than the newer players who typically become their victims. They’re the ones who’ll do things like abuse their character’s teleportation power to beam someone into a fire pit, or go up to a boss in an MMOG and ‘kite’ them into a public area. Sometimes, they’ll even go outside of a game to get their kicks. Swatting, for example, involves calling the police and trying to get a SWAT team (or the local equivalent) to burst in on another player by pretending that they’re holding hostages. It has spread beyond gaming, too, with Justin Bieber recently falling victim to this kind of prank.

The top tier of griefers are the celebrities who either find and exploit issues in the first place, or simply become infamous outside of their community. The DayZ helicopter gang are the face of that scam thanks to a video of them pulling it off hitting news sites such as Kotaku, though they could just have copied someone else’s idea. Team Roomba’s videos of griefing in Team Fortress 2, including creating teleporters to send players into the line of sentry gun fire and glitching the spawn room door to lock both teams in the starting area, have clocked up over 5 million views. Going back to the days of EverQuest, Fansy The Famous Bard would simply draw trains of enemies into players, but obnoxiously enough to become a known name.

The effect has a lot in common with the popularity of con artist archetypes. While we don’t necessarily approve of what’s being done, we can still appreciate the style and ingenuity of it as viewers. A successful celebrity grief is as much about showmanship as the actual scam/attack. In the DayZ ’copter example, you know what’s going to happen to the unlucky victim, with the friendly banter adding a level of ‘they’re not really going to go through with it’ tension to things. Team Roomba’s videos work as entertainment because they don’t simply show lots of people dying, but have voice chat recordings of the team’s frustration, and the griefers sometimes raise the stakes by turning the whole thing into a quiz show. It’s so audacious and yet ultimately so harmless that you can’t help but find it funny.

One of the best places to find regular griefer stories is a Something Awful thread called I Killed British (as an indication of its popularity, it ran to some 276 pages long at the time of writing). It’s a reference to a moment in the Ultima Online beta when a player managed to murder the supposedly invincible king during a public address. This wasn’t really an example of griefing, since it only worked because the developers had forgotten to put on the invincibility flag, but the player was later banned for other acts.

General it may be, but it’s a good way of seeing how regular people who grief see things, and where they draw the line. One person early on happily admits to ruining other players’ nights by drawing armies of monsters to them, but refuses to abuse another system to raid their corpse. More often than not, there’s little mention of victims’ reactions beyond “they rage quit”, with the focus primarily on the mechanics of each scam and how the griefer was smart enough to bend the rules in their favour. Where victims are brought up, it’s typically to be dismissed for their inexperience – being seen as weaker, they’re considered fair game – or mocked for taking things too seriously.

This isn’t a universal rule, however, and different griefers have their own ideas of what they want to get out of it. The group myg0t describes itself as “the harassment authority” and goes all-out for reactions, with any hack or cheat deemed fine if it gets victims shrieking into their microphones. In the world of Eve Online, where in-game currency can be used to pay for subscriptions, grifting is big business, with one record-setting Ponzi scheme pulling in enough to buy almost 3,000 months’ worth of the game.

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Edge Staff at 11:33am January 4 2013

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Griefing can have a more political side, however, and isn’t always against random targets. In 2006, Second Life saw one of the most infamous examples when virtual real-estate tycoon Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef) was chased out of an interview event on the service by a group called Room 101. In the real world, they might have jeered or thrown tomatoes. Here, they generated magic self-replicating penises, chased the event when it moved to a new location, and ultimately crashed the server with their attacks.

One of the most audacious moments in griefing history came earlier this year in Eve Online. A group of players spent months preparing what became known as ‘Burn Jita’, a concerted attempt to destroy the game’s economy by blowing up its main trade hub with an army of disposable ships. What made it particularly interesting was that it didn’t technically count as griefing, with developers CCP not only embracing it (“It’s going to be fucking brilliant,” in the words of the game’s senior producer), but also reinforcing the servers to make sure the game – not the economy, but the servers – wouldn’t buckle under the load. This is especially notable as the whole event is said to stem from one of its organisers’ annoyance at being given a temporary ban for mocking a suicidal player and encouraging other players to harass him. Even the land of do as you please has some limits when there’s more than just money at stake.

The wide range of griefing types makes it impossible to pin down a specific root cause for all this, unless you count the fact that people can be jerks. You could, for example, reach for psychology guides such as the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders fourth edition (DSM-IV). This describes antisocial personality disorder, which is the official version of what’s often referred to as psychopathic behaviour, with seemingly appropriate phrases such as “failure to conform to social norms with respect for lawful behaviours”, “use of aliases or conning others for personal profit” and “lack of remorse”. In some cases, that’s undoubtedly true. There are sociopaths and psychopaths out there, and no doubt many of them have XBLA and PSN accounts.

Even ignoring the fact that trying to diagnose someone without the appropriate expertise is a dreadful idea, though, this opens up an obvious problem: games aren’t real. When someone on YouTube gets in a flap because someone shot their space marine, it’s more than easy to laugh at the overreaction. As online pranks go, the average non-targeted grief is as mild as things get. There’s usually no direct loss for the victim, little to no personal humiliation, and unlike being trapped with a bad boss or playground bully, no shortage of ways to be somewhere else. There are exceptions, of course, but all this makes it easy for griefers to just do their thing for the ‘lulz’.

There are two sides to the story, however. New players are the most common victims of griefing, and it doesn’t take much to spoil a game. Griefs involving betrayal of trust can cut especially deep and ruin any desire to keep playing. In games like Eve Online or DayZ, griefers’ actions can be defended to some extent. After all, these worlds are cynical, harsh, and unapologetically brutal. But in a regular MMOG, the griefer’s 30 seconds of amusement at stranding a newbie somewhere horrible could well cost that player the will to play a whole game. Not that the griefers care, of course. Not when there’s always fresh meat just over the next virtual hill.

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Passive agression, Spec Ops: The Line, and the individual onus - ben abraham dot net

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Passive agression, Spec Ops: The Line, and the individual onus

- December 23rd, 2012

- Posted in Philosophy . Politics . Videogames

Andrew Vanden Bossche has a great little post up on his tumblr about the way Shinji Ikari in Evangelion reacts to being told what to do, wanting to resist doing it, while also being unable to say ‘no’ to his father. It finds its realisation in passive agression, frustration and following orders with a bare minimum of effort:

He’s a kid and this is the only possible way of saying fuck you to his dad and that is very important to him. His contempt for the life and death game the adults are making him play is obvious.

This is super familiar to me, especially at this time of year, as Christmas is often the time of year when I feel I have the least amount of personal agency, a stifling lack of freedom regarding what to do or where to go, am often unable to retreat to a private space (when staying with relatives), locked into the schedules of adults. Christmastime frequently became a period of painful obligation and a test of endurance. But I digress.

Andrew says that this rejection of his lack of agency, expressed as resistance through resentment and acts of minimal enthusiasm, was how he played Spec Ops: The Line,

The game insists over and over that it’s my fault all the bad things that the game is forcing me to do to continue are happening. Spec Ops is barely self aware that this is the case—people are dying because you just keep going forward, a voiceover informs you. But they’re only dying because the game orders them to die. Video games are pretty eager to blame players for killing when designers are the ones that turn on slow motion every time I score a head shot.

This is absolutely spot on, and something that we also see in Far Cry 3 writer Jeffrey Yohalem’s interivews, for instance:

So in this case it’s torturing your little brother, and there’s no real reason to be doing it. You’re not saving the Earth, you’re not doing anything that makes that act okay. That was meant to really shock people.

This said with no awareness, of course, that the player knows this and has the additional piece of information – that the writer intended this to happen to the player. And yet Yohalem wipes his hands of any personal responsibility in making the player “torture” his own in-game brother. This trend (and I really do think it’s a trend) is super interesting to me, not least of all because of the way that Andrew in his post frames this as a clash of systemic responsibility with individual responsibility:

I think it would be pretty cool to have a game about how cruel oppressive systems survive by pushing on their problems onto individuals.

I agree, it would be an extremely cool game that dealt with that issue. In my PhD thesis, I’m attempting to build a case for certain types of fairly novel arguments about, for one example, the way certain ontologies give us permission to outsource responsibility, and to shift and move it around depending on which way the wind is blowing. Certainly at present, what gets called ‘neoliberalism’ (but which I’m mostly calling ‘Capitalist Realism’, following Mark Fisher) gives permission to outsource responsibility onto individuals the end results of systemic issues which result in individual cases of mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and stress.

Consider this: if your work conditions are so precarious, your conditions so utterly decided by the whims of the ‘market’ or ‘consumer demand’ or even a the will of a capricious boss who can’t keep his dick in his pants, how is it your fault that you are depressed?! Surely in those circumstances depression and severe anxiety is normal! And yet responsibility under neoliberalism always trickles downwards… was Reagan secretly right?

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a diary of sorts for the things Ben writes that don’t have a home elsewhere. The writing here is primarily an outlet for my research blogging generated through my PhD project, as well as being a foray into other fruitful thoughts and places.
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The Negative Influence of Games: An Autobiographical Essay

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Matthew Duhamel

I spent 803 days unemployed after I left college. Each day I would start by writing to companies to explain how I am just the right person for their position. I would then set about organizing and cleaning an ever-increasingly out-of-date set of thrift-store purchases. Sometimes, I even went to parties where I tried to make being unemployed sound cool. Most of the time, however, I played a lot of video games.

The time spent organizing my pile of belongings made sense to me – even without a job I feel a need to maintain my life – but the time spent playing video games was always deeply confusing. Inside video games I become a world-famous hero, and yet in the real world I have trouble even getting an interview. Why can’t the willful leader and the inspired artist in me show himself?  Why can’t I reach the next level in the real world?

I am coming to the conclusion that the answer is video games.

At age thirteen I was introduced to the first game I took seriously by a well-meaning teacher who taught at my Jr. High School. He made the whole class a deal each day: if we finished our lessons we could play on the private server he hosted on a small Pentium 3 computer in the corner near his desk. I quickly signed the manilla waiver that said Ultima Online may contain content that was not suitable for kids my age.

More like a game of make-believe than a single fantasy adventure, UO offered me a world in which I could visualize myself completely. My character could spend his days slaying skeletons, mixing potions, or even baking bread. Most exciting of all, however, was that with each click, the worth of my effort was clearly defined by the steady ticking of stats ever upward. When my Musicianship skill jumped 20 points in a single week so that I could tame Dragons my teacher praised me as “one of the smartest students I’ve met.” This when I began to try and take the same approach in my real life; this is when the end goal began to matter more than the journey.

One day when I came to school the gamer circle was talking about a new game: Everquest. Ultima Online was a joke compared to this game, they boasted. Only babies would be playing UO anymore.

To me, UO felt less like a game and more like an extension of my neighborhood; a real world with rules I was just beginning to understand and internalize. I refused to give it up, and was promptly rejected. The gamer group refused my entrance at lunch. This rejection was heartbreaking, but I consoled myself with the idea that I was getting the better end of the deal. What was the point of being on cordial terms  with a group that even on the best days could not be described as friends? I took to spending my lunches reading printouts from various Ultima Online fansites to improve my tick rate; UO, and the resulting praise from my teacher, provided me the edification I had been searching for.

The next year was filled with a series of troubles and anxieties – from professional rejection, to typecasting based on my weight, and finally my mother’s diagnosis with terminal cancer. These events combined to create a strong sense of fearful pessimism about the future; not so much a hopelessness but a deep and terrible panic. Fortunately, UO provided me with the daily routine and positive reinforcement that I so desperately craved. It became a hiding place where I could pretend that I didn’t feel powerless and incompetent in real life.

When the year came to an end I “graduated” into high school and the server my teacher ran was no longer available to me. At first this did not bother me; I had seen it coming and had planned to join an official server as soon as it happened. My first few hours on the Great Lakes shard felt comfortably familiar, but very quickly I came to see that nothing was the same. On a public server, Ultima Online could be best described as a mixture of Atlas Shrugged and Mad Max in Medieval England. All the uncertainty, tragedy, and betrayal caused by the collision of human begins existed as a pure distillate; unspoiled by by any limits on player conduct.

The empowering isolation of my teacher’s private server now a memory. I found myself at the mercy of people who seemed to take great delight in making me feel powerless. I still have scars on my hands from the time I slammed my fist against the wall in impotent rage as the work of hours of mining was lifted from my corpse by a PK as he recited a list of the different ways he wanted to copulate with my mother.

I lingered for a few more weeks, but reality had moved in. Its cold, cynical, girth was making itself comfortable on my couch when I cancelled my account. “It’s for the best” my family would say, “now you can focus on what is actually important.” My mother was very sick at this point. I agreed with them, using the vehemence of my words as a way to drown out the voice in my head pleading with me to find a new place to feel powerful. I thought I found what I was looking for in my High School’s JROTC program because it gave me an opportunity to follow simple rules inside of a clear worldview and earn straightforward praise in the form of ribbons and medals.

What I found was a new game that was just as troubling as the one I had just left. The difficulty of dodging player killers was replaced with the grueling work of morning physical training. What seemed so easy for everyone else felt insurmountable to the extremely obese kid I was at the time. Having to face the frustrated visages of my classmates, who had to keep running while they waited for me to finish the lap (as I had already stopped three times to catch my breath) was completely disheartening. The public UO servers had shown me the shittiness of others, but JROTC made me face my own shittiness. It held a mirror up to my own limitations, and I turned away.

I didn’t feel strong or successful standing in formation (being shown by several cadets just how bad I was at standing in formation). I just wanted to find a place where I could recapture the happy confidence of my teacher’s server. Slowly I began to put less and less effort into my duties; I traded shining shoes for searching the web for some new game to play. My mother was too sick to register the downward slide of my JROTC grades. She didn’t live to see me quit the next year.

First my virtual world, and then my real world were shattered. This was probably one of the most hopeless times in my life. One of the people I cared about the most was gone, and I felt like it had been my fault. I know now that guilt is normal, and irrational, but at the time all I could think about was how weak I was. I couldn’t hack it in JROTC, and I couldn’t even be a good enough kid to give my mother the strength to fight for her life. Despite all the hours I had played a hero in Ultima Online, I couldn’t find the strength to be one in real life.

All I could think to do was keep practicing. At this point I began what I now call “The Cycle.” It can be outlined in seven steps.

A. Decide life is too (difficult, troubling, unfair, hopeless, etc.) and choose a game that is easy, repetitive, and comforting which provides a high level of wish fulfillment. The protagonist must normally end up accomplishing things I feel incapable of.

B. Grow increasingly disillusioned with the experience and stop playing.

C. Find a new game that embodies that is incredibly difficult. Usually this means a complicated flight sim or a competitive online game. Either way it must have an incredibly high bar for success.

D. Slowly realize that I am not that good at the game from part C. Become intensely focused on succeeding, and start playing constantly. Refrain from normal activities and avoid work to spend more time practicing.

E. Come to the conclusion that success is not coming fast enough, and even if it does – which it probably won’t – the reality is I am devoting my time to a fantasy. Decide that if I am going to devote myself to something it should have something more real at the core of it. Quit what I have been playing since step C and attempt to find success in education or professional life.

F. Grow frustrated with my lack of  success and depressed with the indeterminability of my future. (Unlike game universes, the real world has no clear designer’s intent. There is no single walkthrough, and success is not guaranteed.) Begin to long for gaming experience like the one I found in my teacher’s Ultima Online server, where objectives are clear and success is inevitable and imminent.

G. Return to A.

This cycle functions because of one simple character flaw: a need to maintain my self-esteem by continually reliving my successes. I return to certain games (and even within games certain scenarios) that make me feel successful. At the time of writing Medieval 2 Total War, and Mount & Blade: Warband both have 600 hours of playtime; with many of those spent replaying the same victories over and over.

The ease with which games and especially RPGs allow us to feel powerful and to repeat ad infinitum these rituals of self-empowerment are part of what makes them so successful. It also makes them capable of becoming so tightly wired into our perception of reality that they can alter our psyche. The resultant change is very similar to what William Deresiewicz describes as the disadvantages of an elite education:

“…students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure…”

The difference between my own experience, and that of a typical hyper-successful ivy-league-bound student is that my sense of self was built around fabricated success.  Video games present a fictitious sense of trial that produce a baseless sense of accomplishment.  Saving the world feels like it’s worthy of note but it is simply the outcome for every person who plays the game and doesn’t turn off the console.

I chose to define myself by my gaming successes as a way of displacing the definition given to me by my circumstances.  This has brought with it all the consequences Deresiewicz describes, but without any of the benefits gained from the hard work real-world success requires.  I still craved the type of success that Ivy League schools looked for, but the ease with which I could turn on a video game and feel successful without any of the work was (and still is) incredibly difficult to pass up.

When I was applying for college I was right at the part of the cycle where I once again become obsessed with real-world success. My father and teachers encouraged me to study English and Writing in college. Writing had always come naturally to me, and without realizing it I had logged a significant chunk of the 10,000 hours needed to master the craft engaging in collaborative storytelling in various multiplayer games. At the time none of this was clear to me, and I perceived their encouragement as an attempt to get me to accept my limits and simply enjoy mediocrity. Choosing English felt like a conscious choice to replay a game I had already beaten over and over forever. I decided that a true winner would take on a hard game and win. I chose to attempt a degree that teachers had told me repeatedly I had no real talent for: art. I found a school that didn’t require a portfolio to prove my qualification and began a degree in Animation.

Top grades became the new win state, and being the teacher’s most promising pupil became the threshold for winning the game. Each class that found me behind someone else made the tug in my brain to retreat into games even stronger. For two years I toughed it out and through sheer determination (and many all-nighters) made a straight “A” average. But then I met a classmate who seemed capable of accomplishing any animation task (and rising to the top of the class) without any effort. I couldn’t beat him, and the tug became too strong. I retreated hard, and the cycle began again.

During a long winter break, half way into a bottle of rum, I found a gaming group that enticed my compulsion; a pseudo military unit playing Day of Defeat: Source. There were tests to pass, inspections to clear, and medals to win. It was everything I had wanted to find when I quit JROTC; an easier path to feeling like a hero. I thought that maybe if I went through the boot camp (just until break was over) I could return to class refreshed and confident.

Classes resumed, but part of me decided not to return. I was good at this new game, and I wanted to keep feeling good. As my rank rose I spent more and more time inside the “unit” as we called ourselves. My grades slipped accordingly and, though outwardly I expressed bravado, inside I was torn and afraid. I wasn’t willing to say it out loud, but part of me believed that this ‘unit’ was the only place I’d ever feel proud of myself.

My straight “As” turned into rocky “Cs” and I left school with a reputation for being unreliable. At around the same time I “retired” from the unit a Second Lieutenant. A captaincy or executive officer position – what I saw as the end goal of this game – was not something I could achieve. My superiors had decided I was “too intense, too eager” for high command. I was angry. I was ashamed. I had thrown away my college experience for a shot at winning this game. I hated myself.

I spent two years out of college unemployed because I stuck to a routine. Wake, eat, play the same games that make me feel strong, promise myself that tomorrow I will move past this, sleep, do it again.

I’ve read about how video games are shaping culture in positive ways, and heard from countless people on Twitter and in person that games have opened their eyes to new ways of viewing the world. Deep down, I feel none of this. Games have allowed me to hurt myself in ways that I am not sure I will ever recover from. At the same time, they are such a core part of my life that I don’t think I can ever give them up. So instead I pretend to agree. I talk openly and loudly about how games are one of the highest forms of art; I defend the position that games will change the world for the better; I keep writing cover letters telling game companies how excited I am to work for them. I pretend because admitting to myself that I’ve screwed my life for good is worse. I begin the cycle again.

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Co-op Horror and the Alpha Hero Problem

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In horror design these days, the big push would have to be the inclusion of Co-op. Resident 5 and 6, Dead Space 3 and the latest Silent Hill game that was a top down dungeon crawler are leading the charge. While publishers and designers think that co-op can drive sales, there is one little tiny problem with how co-op is currently used: It DOESN’T CREATE HORROR.

The Alpha

When we look at both horror games and movies, there are two types of heroes: Alpha characters and survivors. Alpha characters are those that actively fight the monsters, characters like Ash from Evil Dead, Mac-ready from The Thing or Ripley from Alien. Survivors are people that are just trying to get away, or have no means to defend themselves until they find the key to stopping the monster. Some movies that go this route are: Hell Raiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th.

Both types of movies provide a different type of horror. Those with Alpha characters are about one person or small group fighting an unimaginable force where failure would mean the end of everything. While survivors are about seeing who gets knocked off first and figuring out who will be left standing.

When it comes to video games, because of how games are built around action, designers tend to create alpha characters. This includes everyone from Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil, to Isaac in Dead Space, and even the Doom marine. In these cases you’re not supposed to be afraid because the character is weak, but because they have to fight an evil force alone.

Even characters that aren’t considered strong, like Alan Wake or Isaac still fall into the Alpha category. As they alone must fight to save everyone from the evil using whatever tools they have.

Alan Wake’s status as an alpha hero is an exception from other games, as it is a major plot point instead of as part of the setting.

However, my favorite horror games are about survivors: where they’re not actively fighting the evil, but just trying to find a way to survive. Games like Fatal Frame 3, Haunting Ground, or Amnesia.

Where the player isn’t trying to save the world, but just trying to escape the situation. Even if the player is given any weapons, they won’t make the situation calm or downplay the horror.

Instead in these games, they increase the tension as the player knows that at some point they will have to fight and hopefully survive.  It’s these types of games where I think co-op horror would work best, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

One Gun or Two?

The problem with the inclusion of co-op elements in alpha horror design is that they remove the main source of fear in these games: isolation. The player is just one person, stuck in a horrible situation; it’s ok to give the player weapons and tools, as they are alone.

But when you add in a second player, that isolation is gone. Even if you raise the number of enemies attacking, the dread that you are just one person against the force is no longer present. Reducing the horror element and making the title play more like an action game.

For horror titles that deal with clunky controls like Dead Space or Resident Evil, the best strategy becomes putting your back to a wall and blasting anything that comes close. One idea that designers use is to limit ammo and recovery items between the two players such as in Resident Evil 5. But artificially raising the tension that way still doesn’t produce horror.

What designers need to do in my opinion to have horror in a co-op setting is to change the type of horror that they are striving for.

Situational Survivor:

Being the lone hero (or heroes) doesn’t produce horror due to the Alpha design, but when the player isn’t that unstoppable force can do a lot to raise the tension of the game.

Very few horror games, much less co-op titles put the player in a survivor role.  But when it’s done right, can make a situation scary no matter if it’s just you, or a group.

Resident Evil 5 started the co-op horror trend and was noticeably less scary compared to previous games in the series.

One of the biggest successes this year of this style of design would be the DayZ mod for Arma 2. DayZ was a total mod conversion for Arma 2, which is a hyper realistic military shooter.

The mod takes the setting and puts a server full of players into the zombie apocalypse, while keeping the realism of the game.

What happens is that all the pressure of having limited supplies, accurate weapons and realistic damage, is applied to a world where the undead have taken over. And just like many of the zombie movies, sometimes the worse enemy is man, as the game has completely open PvP.

This is where I feel co-op can work in a horror setting: Where a group of players must watch each other’s back and conserve resources while dealing with an overwhelming threat. Suddenly you can’t just run into a group of undead shooting randomly like in Left 4 Dead. As one good hit could injure you or cause you to bleed out, or conserving ammo until you have no choice but to fire your weapons.

Something like a middle ground between Left 4 Dead and Day Z, where a group of players must escape a randomly generated area while being threaten from every corner.

The important part of the design is that the group should be more powerful then each individual member, making the times where people have to split up all the more terrifying. When this is combined with limited resources will force the players to make hard decisions about how equipment should be divvied up

Because we’re dealing with survivors and not alpha heroes, the situation of dealing with a stronger force, or accomplish a difficult goal would be even tenser.

Co-op design can work in a horror setting, but not in the current template that designers use. Making the title less scary and more of an action game just makes it more generic. Just like with anything else, you can’t just add a mode or design and force it into another game and expect it to work. Coming up with a horror title that makes use of co-op design, is going to require someone creative and a different view compared to what designers are using now. Josh Bycer

Originally posted on my site: Game-Wisdom

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The Enslavement of Josef – A Machinarium Retrospective

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At the end of Machinarium, the mechanical protagonist Josef climbs a large tower to which the Black Hat Gang has strapped a bomb. He uses a roll of toilet paper – why do robots need toilet paper? – to rappel down the tower and defuse the bomb before continuing on his way.

In the foyer of the tower, at the foot of a grand staircase, a small, grey, destitute robot sits on a perch in the wall, his head bowed, his eyes closed. He is, like most things in Machinarium, dingy and decrepit. But this tower is relatively posh: red carpets, crystal chandeliers, big game animals stuffed and mounted on the walls, signifiers meant to remind us of stately Victorian gentlemen.

If Josef interacts with the robot on the shelf, the poor thing tells a piteous story: a group of soldiers – the same type of soldiers guarding the gates of the city – colonized his radish-shaped home planet and carted him to this tower in pieces. This robot seems to be imprisoned in the tower. Perhaps he is a slave, a victim of robot imperialism.

———

Machinarium emerged in 2009 as Amanita Design’s breakout point-and-click adventure game, noted for its minimalist story, lush, pencil-drawn art direction and moody, evocative atmosphere. As the name suggests, the world of Machinarium is populated exclusively by robots, their city a collection of pipes and cogs and levers and dials and cranks.

As such, most of Machinarium’s puzzles involve fixing things: completing electrical circuits, repairing clogged drains, untangling wires. In a way, the game is about restoring order, about creating verifiable, reproducible outputs from very specific inputs. Machinarium effectively marries its setting to its puzzle design, but Josef’s interaction with the little gray robot places the game in a broader, darker context.

———

Josef climbs to the top of the tower, where he finds who is colloquially known as the Royal Robot. A short scene informs us that Josef and his girlfriend were responsible for cleaning and maintaining the Royal Robot’s home until the Black Hat Gang stormed the palace. They exiled Josef, forced his girlfriend into indentured servitude, strapped a bomb to the tower and damaged the Royal Robot badly enough to leave him in a vegetative state.

The scene establishes a power dynamic between the Royal Robot and our mechanized hero: Josef is a servant, and we’re in the presence of what passes for aristocracy in a mechanical dystopia. It also suggests that the Royal Robot owns the downtrodden robot from the foyer.

The elephant in the room is that Josef, too, may have been brought to the city as a slave at some point in Machinarium’s mercurial backstory. This little discovery is perhaps best described as a plot twist, but it informs and reflects every other part of the game, from its setting to its puzzles to its genre, smoothing out Machinarium’s rough edges and giving its mechanics a context beyond point-and-click tropes. It turns Josef’s final act from one of charity or empathy to something more complex.

———

Like most artists, Machinarium designer and Amanita Design founder Jakub Dvorský hedges his bets when it comes to criticism of his work: “Of course, you can interpret [the game] any way you want,” he tells me. “There’s no deeper meaning or message hidden in the story, but we know much more about the Machinarium world, its history and about all the characters than what you can learn in the game.

“The player should feel that every character has its own story and place in that world, even if it’s not expressed in the game itself,” Dvorský continues.
.
But Machinarium and its world are, if nothing else, meticulously designed, its life and characterization are often tucked into small corners of the world. The colonized robot chained to the tower wall isn’t there by accident, and the idea of Josef’s servitude fits neatly with other themes explored by the game.

———

Machinarium’s world is populated by robots and built on circuit boards, waterworks and quietly whirring machine parts, a setting Dvorský finds “ideal for harder puzzle-based adventure games.” The world feels internally consistent and holistic throughout, both visually and mechanically.

The setting is thematically consistent as well, though. Nothing in Machinarium is abstract or flighty. In a world of machines and tools, every interaction is concrete and predictable. Because we know so little about Josef or what motivates him, though, the puzzles he solves can often seem arbitrary.

In one example, Josef finds a group of musicians whose instruments don’t work. They seem totally unconnected to the game’s larger plot, and Josef has no reason to help them except that they represent a puzzle in the game world. The game’s sparseness works well as a storytelling device, but fails when it has to account for the player’s need to fix a didgeridoo: Josef’s – and ultimately the players’ – actions are unthinking and automatic.

The game forces the issue by hiding critical inventory items behind the successful completion of unrelated puzzles. Their instruments repaired, the robot band performs an impromptu jam session in the street, causing an angry woman in a neighboring apartment to throw a potted plant at them. Josef uses the plant in a later puzzle in a greenhouse, but there’s no obvious link between the two parts of the game.

Machinarium uses a nested puzzle structure throughout, each conundrum yielding some geegaw or trinket crucial to some other part of the world. Taken on the whole, Machinarium feels efficient and graceful, each section tied inextricably to the next, no stone unturned, no item unused.

The musician section, and others like it, represents a tautology: Machinarium is a puzzle game, and therefore must feature puzzles. Josef the robot must solve puzzles, independent of the game’s plot or any perceivable cause-and-effect. The granular, moment-to-moment play is coercive.

———

Very little of Machinarium’s backstory is made explicit: there is no long-winded exposition or in-game scrolls to find. In fact, there are no words in Machinarium at all – any pertinent information is provided contextually by the environments or, in a few cases, in the form of Josef’s crude thought bubbles. Machinarium’s sparse narrative presentation was designed, according to Dvorský, in order to allow “more space for [the players’] imagination” and to limit the need for expensive and time-consuming animation.

A by-product of this minimalism, though, is that it inextricably couples Josef’s characterization to the game’s mechanics: the only way to understand Josef is in the context of the things he does over the course of the game.

With this in mind, the narrative implications of Josef’s indentured servitude are disconcerting. The Black Hat Gang exile Josef, kidnap his girlfriend, and incapacitate the Royal Robot as part of an ostensibly larger but unexplained plot. Josef eventually rescues his girlfriend, but he also saves his former master before escaping into the sunset in a helicopter.

It’s disconcerting that Josef helps the Royal Robot, as it only reinforces a skewed power dynamic that, as we’ve seen, produces something akin to robo-bondage. With such a limited look into the world of Machinarium, it’s impossible to rationalize or explain Josef’s actions at the end of the game. The most successful slave narratives offer redemption and struggle, but players will never know if Josef is powered by altruism or Stockholm syndrome.

A sadder notion might be that Josef simply has no choice – he’s a robot, after all. Automatons don’t need a story to frame or contextualize their actions, only commands. The taxidermied gazelle, the spiral staircase and the “Royal Robot” moniker are cultural signifiers of class and power; the gray robot’s story of imprisonment signifies – if not literal slavery – a lack of context and awareness, a lack of options and autonomy.

———

When asked why the adventure genre was the best way to express Machinarium’s values, Dvorský tells me, “We’ve always been making adventure games – that’s the best genre for us.” I believe him.

Restriction and specificity are traditional hallmarks of the point-and-click adventure, to be sure, but everything in Machinarium serves to reinforce that fact. The idea that Josef is the victim of some sort of robo-colonial slave trade is mirrored at every level – in the story, in the fact that he is a robot, in the structure of puzzles and in the adventure genre generally.

As players, we’re complicit in Josef’s inability to simply ignore a group of broke-down buskers and his perverse willingness to save an aristocratic slaver. But, as Dvorský points out, “Josef … is quiet, non-egoistic, unobtrusive, and therefore it’s easier for the player to empathize with him and feel like him.” Even as we guide little Josef through Machinarium, the team at Amanita Design guides us, constantly narrowing our options and ferrying us through the game world.

There’s obviously no comparison between real-world slavery and playing a videogame, but Machinarium reminds us that the world is full of top-down systems, that to play is to give up control, to acquiesce. Jakub Dvorský was kind enough to invite us into his charming world, but only on the condition that we obey its rules, just as Josef obeys his – whether they come from the Royal Robot, his own robot programming or us.

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Mighty Vision: 2012 introspection

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I’m not usually much moved by new years, the calendar being such an arbitrary division of time. But recently reading a lot of other people talking about what they’ve achieved in the last year and their plans for the next has got me thinking about the same. Putting things in context, in 2011 I released , which I’d been making in the background for years. This was massively stressful: first I overworked myself crunching to finish it while simultaneously trying to do a PhD, then at release some new bugs showed up - this isn’t unusual but I panicked over each one, and then sales were very poor and it became clear that I’d failed in a lot of what I’d tried to achieve with it (I’m still proud of it, but it’s not what I wanted it to be). This was followed by a period of depression in which I did very little. Gradually towards the end of the year I started recovering by jamming on small games, I moved back to the UK, and released - which I’m massively proud of. 2012 largely continued on from there; I’d gotten into a rhythm that worked really well for me, and I’ve managed to mostly stay there. I had a ridiculously productive year, in fact. The things that I’ve released are only the iceberg-tip; finding good ideas involves a lot of time spent filtering through bad ones, trying things out, making prototypes. Here are some highlights: - Released . Most of these games were made in late 2011, but I’d kept them sitting for a while. - . This is an event focused on making lots of games in just a couple of hours each - I find this is usually too short for me to do anything I’m satisfied with, but the experience of making things so fast is worthwhile in itself. is a worthwhile companion to Kompendium, it came out better for my having spent a lot of time exploring similar ideas already. and ended up taking much longer than the prescribed time, but were well worth it, and have made some appearances on people’s which is wonderful! - The bundle featured Vertex Dispenser, which was really great for me. It was lucky enough to be alongside a first-person-shooting-thingummy that people actually wanted, and so sold a substantial number of copies. It’s keeping me going. I jammed out an interesting for the bundle, which was worthwhile, used a couple of ideas that I’d had floating around for a while. - Made for the , following it up with an expanded version later. I had tried making roguelike games before, but each time I got over-ambitious and ended up in a sprawling mess; I wanted to make something that did everything all the games I loved did and more. With Zaga-33, I took the opposite approach: instead of adding features, I dropped them, pruning down to a delicate bonsai of a game, and I found something quite special in the process. - Continued updating Glitch Tank, and it’s gotten even better. We still play it quite a bit, more than a year on. Seriously happy with it. - Started Helix at a Cambridge jam back in August, have been working on it on and off since. I have mixed feelings about it. It very consistently evokes a positive response from people I show it to. It might turn out to be the most popular thing I’ve made, that will be because its virtues are more obvious rather than because they are greater. It’s very conventional. But still, it’s quite a good game. - Made . It’s kind of silly, it’s just one simple idea, it completely baffles me how well received it has been. It’s by far the most viewed post on here, and it’s been mentioned on a few different people’s - which is all lovely, but completely unexpected, I don’t really know what to make of it all. I love seeing the sporadic flurries of discussion about it that crop up on twitter; people speculating about the tiniest details. - Finally quit my PhD. A slow and painful process of something that I loved becoming a burden to me. It was tough, but I feel much better now that it’s over, and now that I have no formal obligations to the subject I’m able to approach it more comfortably. - Made . This is just so good. It’s the platonic archetype of touchscreen multiplayer. It goes down amazingly well with almost everyone I show it to. Groups of friends or relatives gathered around watching heated matches, taking turns. The delight when someone realises they can throw off-colour balls to disrupt their opponent’s scoring, or gather great handfuls on the screen to collect all in one bunch. So pleased with it. - Made . This was a beautiful ordeal. Nobody who wasn’t present when I was making it will realise how difficult it was to put together: everything had to be arranged just so or the whole thing would fall apart. It’s not perfect; I don’t think there exists a perfect solution to all the constraints I was under; but it’s pretty great. - edit: just reminded me I made . I’d forgotten this because it was so quick to make, but that frenzied speed is what’s interesting about it. is an amazing tool for making games in the moment without anything getting in the way. Lots of good stuff. On balance it was an amazing year. There have been a couple of negatives though: - Aside from the bundle, nothing has brought in much money. To some extent that’s okay; the bundle makes up for it; but it doesn’t bode well for future sustainability. My wife’s income is similarly volatile; more regular at the moment but equally uncertain for the future. I expect to keep going for another year or two and then have to give up and get a real job. - I feel like I’ve failed O and Glitch Tank. These are the best things I’ve made, but they haven’t reached many people. This isn’t about money, it’s about people missing out on playing them because I haven’t managed to communicate that they’d love to. The games deserve better marketing than I’m capable of. This makes me really sad, and I don’t know what to do about it.
Plans for 2013: continue on in very similar form to 2012. I have a few games I’m working on at the moment to finish, and many ideas for more, and no doubt new ideas will take hold of me along the way. Multiplayer games are important, and I’m finding the iPad ideal for them, so expect more of those. Corrypt was very satisfying to make, so expect more of that sort of complex level design and weird world-sense. I’m trying a bunch of ideas for roguelikes (or zagalikes), so expect something there. I’ll follow inspiration wherever it leads; can’t predict where that will end me up. Looking forward to it.

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