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Dwarf Fortress: Losing is fun

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Die unglücklichen regelmäßigen Leser dieser Seite mögen aufseufzen, aber in regelmäßigen Abständen überfällt mich schon seit Jahren immer wieder die unbändige Lust, das Hohelied des besten Spieles aller Zeiten zu singen, meist gefolgt von der traurigen Erkenntnis, dass sich viel zu viele nicht daran wagen. Da müsst ihr jetzt durch: Die Fantasy-Simulation »Dwarf Fortress« ist wahrscheinlich das komplexeste Spiel aller Zeiten, das verlässlich Geschichten generiert.

Dwarf Fortress« ist ein Unikum, ein technisches Phänomen und einer der interessantesten Underground-Titel mit absolutem Kultcharakter. Das bis zum Größenwahn ambitionierte Game mit der minimalistischen Grafik ist eine gewaltige Sandbox mit dem Ziel, eine mehrere tausend Quadratkilometer große Fantasy-Welt samt ihren Einwohnern komplett prozedural zu simulieren – von der Geologie über das Klima bis hin zu einzelnen Insekten und Individuen, mit ihren jeweils eigenen psychischen Besonderheiten und Vorlieben. Einfacher ausgedrückt bedeutet das, dass nichts in »Dwarf Fortress« im Vorhinein ins Programm geschrieben ist: Die gesamte Spielwelt, ihre Städte und Bewohner und alle Ereignisse, die dem Spieler widerfahren, ergeben sich aus dem Zusammenspiel tausender komplexer Grundregeln und künstlicher Intelligenz.

Sandbox mit Zwergen

»Dwarf Fortress« ist eine virtuelle Ameisenfarm in Übergröße. Kernstück des Spiels ist der Fortress Mode, in dem der Spieler – ähnlich wie bei »Sim City«, »Dungeon Keeper« oder »The Sims«, nur ungleich komplexer – anfangs sieben Zwerge mit viel Mikromanagement zum Bau einer stetig wachsenden unterirdischen Zwergenfestung anleitet.

Der Fantasie und Findigkeit der Spieler sind keine Grenzen gesetzt: Ob man riesige Festungsanlagen, komplexe Produktionsökonomien, aufwendige Bewässerungsanlagen oder vertrackte Fallen als Schutz vor Feinden entstehen lässt, bleibt jedem selbst überlassen – wie im Indie-Hit »Minecraft«, das übrigens laut Aussagen von dessen Schöpfer Marcus »Notch« Persson stark von »Dwarf Fortress« inspiriert wurde. Und wie in »Minecraft« gibt es auch in »Dwarf Fortress« kein Spielziel, aber dafür unzählige Möglichkeiten, mehr oder weniger spektakulär zu scheitern: Ob die Kolonie wegen fehlgeschlagener Ackerbauversuche verhungert, durch unachtsames Graben von Lava- oder Wassermassen ausgelöscht wird, von depressiven Zwergen in Tobsuchtsanfällen zerlegt oder von marodierenden untoten Elchen (!), Vampiren oder Goblins ausgelöscht wird, stets steht über all diesen Katastrophen das inoffizielle Motto des Spiels: Losing is fun.

Wunder im Buchstabensalat

Was Uneingeweihte von diesem Kultspiel jedoch bislang verlässlich fernhält, sind Grafik und Bedienbarkeit. Zu verworren erscheint Anfängern der dürre ASCII-Buchstabensalat, zu undurchdringlich das teilweise kryptische User-Interface, das vom Spieler verlangt, eine Unzahl von Tastaturkommandos im Kopf zu behalten. Während letzterem Einwand mit  dem Verweis auf unzählige How-to-Videos und das umfangreiche Wiki begegnet werden kann, bleibt bei der Frage der Grafik nur wenig Trost: Es gibt zwar unterschiedliche Grafiksets, die das spartanische Originalspiel etwas aufpeppen, sowie verschiedene Visualisierungsprogramme – doch der Reiz des Spiels liegt auch mit diesen Hilfsmitteln hinter der Oberfläche.

»I don’t even see the code anymore. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead…«

Der auf den ersten Blick anachronistische Minimalismus der Darstellung täuscht allerdings: Auch wenn die Welt von »Dwarf Fortress« nur aus Satzzeichen, Buchstaben und Symbolen besteht, offenbart sich auf den zweiten Blick die Eleganz dieser Lösung: Die Vegetation verändert im Lauf der Jahreszeiten ihre Farbe, Wege, die oft beschritten werden, verwandeln sich grafisch sichtbar in Matschpisten und das bei den bis ins kleinste Detail simulierten Kämpfen vergossene Blut färbt Kampfplätze rot. Und irgendwann geschieht verlässlich das Wunder: Hat die sich hier entfaltende Welt den Spieler erst einmal gefangen genommen, geht es ihm wie jenem Charakter, der im SF-Klassiker »Matrix« im neongrünen Codegewirr schlussendlich die Parallelwelt ausmachen kann: »I don’t even see the code anymore. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead …«

Zach und Tarn Adams (v.l.)

Alphaversion der Matrix

Was hinter der trügerisch simplen Fassade von »Dwarf Fortress« vorgeht, ist komplizierteste Rechenkunst, die auch mächtige Prozessoren ins Schwitzen bringt: Die New York Times, der das Ausnahmespiel letzten Sommer einen mehrseitigen Bericht wert war, vergleicht respektvoll die Komplexität der Simulation von »Dwarf Fortress« mit jener professioneller Ingenieurssoftware in industriellen Windkanälen im Flugzeugbau. Diese Komplexität bringt bei jedem Spiel ein neues Abenteuer hervor, und vor allem: Sie generiert Geschichten, die in ihrer Aberwitzigkeit und Originalität das Gros der von professionellen Games-Autoren erdachten Plots in den Schatten stellen.

Durch die Mischung aus komplexer Simulation und offenem Spieldesign erleben einmal dem Charme des Spiels Verfallene Herausforderungen, die es so in keinem anderen Spiel gibt. Versuche ich, alle meine Zwerge mit geschickt infiziertem Brunnenwasser zu Vampiren zu verwandeln? Schaffe ich es, die riesige Höhlenwelt unter der Erdoberfläche mit ihren mythischen Monstern und Dämonen zu kolonisieren? Kann ich den unterirdischen Lavasee durch geschickte Ingenieursleistung in eine tödliche Falle verwandeln? Was tun, wenn ein wandernder Nekromant plötzlich die Überreste meiner geschlachteten Nutztiere zum Leben erweckt?

Dwarf Fortress« simuliert eine gesamte Welt, in der alle Eingriffe des Spielers komplexe, aber nachvollziehbare Reaktionen mit sich bringen. Andere Open-World-Games wie »Skyrim« oder die »GTA«-Reihe können mit der Vollständigkeit dieses künstlichen Mini-Universums nicht einmal annähernd mithalten. Der 34-jährige Schöpfer dieser aberwitzigen Weltsimulation, Tarn Adams, galt als mathematisches Wunderkind, bis er seine Tätigkeit an der University of Texas aufgab, um sich seit 2006 gemeinsam mit seinem Bruder Zach ganz seinem Lebenswerk »Dwarf Fortress« zu widmen. Hilfe von außen, etwa durch Veröffentlichung des Quellcodes, wollen die genialen Einzelkämpfer dabei nicht annehmen. Den Lebensunterhalt, auch das eine charmante Eigenheit der Independent-Games-Szene, sichern freiwillige Spenden der Community.

20 Jahre, so schätzt Tarn Adams, wird es wohl noch dauern, bis sein Megaprojekt vom perfekten Spiel her so ist, wie er und sein Bruder es sich erträumen. Bis dahin können hartgesottene Spieler mit Mut zur Einarbeitung einen Blick in eines der faszinierendsten Spiele aller Zeiten werfen.

Es lohnt sich: »Dwarf Fortress« ist schon jetzt ein Meilenstein der Games-Geschichte.

Download der aktuellen Alphaversion auf www.bay12games.com. Anfänger finden im Internet mit dem »Lazy Newb Pack« eine bequem mit Grafiksets ausgestattete Version mit weniger Einstiegshürden. Das Buch »Getting started with Dwarf Fortress« von Peter Tyson, Mitte Juni erschienen, bietet auf 238 Seiten eine Einführung.

Dieser Artikel erschien letzten Sommer für thegap 128.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 6. Februar 2013 - 18:03

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Nur eine Verschiebung, oder etwa nicht?

otixero.de

Wann auch immer ich Rayman Legends anspielen oder sehen konnte, ich kam aus dem Staunen nicht heraus. Der Bildschirm vibrierte vor Charme und ließ mich alles andere um mich herum vergessen. Schnell war klar, ich brauch dieses Spiel. Es erscheint exklusiv auf der Wii U? Dann kaufe ich halt eine Wii U. Leute ohne diese Kaufbereitschaft gehen auf andere Plattformen leider leer aus. Nicht schön, aber so funktionieren Exklusivspiele nun mal. Ich zahlte also für die Konsole, spielte mich durch das Line-up und wartete geduldig auf Rayman. Alles gut, bis Ubisoft das Spiel verschob und es nicht mehr exklusiv für die Wii U war.

Die Reaktionen waren schnell und sie waren deutlich. Ubisofts Facebook-Seite wurde überrannt, es wird zum Boykott aufgerufen und das sonst so friedliche Miiverse erreichte schnell den Gehässigkeits-Status des restlichen Internets. Öl ins Feuer streut ein/e ehemalige/r Entwickler/in des Spiels, die Verschiebung sei eine Entscheidung „von oben“. Der Publisher betreibt Schadenbegrenzung und verspricht eine weitere EXKLUSIVE Demo für die Wii U. Voll am Thema vorbei, aber was soll man jetzt auch anderes tun?

Um zu verstehen, warum es sich hierbei um mehr als „nur eine Verschiebung“ handelt, muss man sich die Situation von Nintendo und der Wii U vor Augen halten. Die Verkaufszahlen liegen deutlich unter Nintendos Erwartungen. Der Activision CEO (größter Publisher) sprach von einem etwas enttäuschenden Launch. Aktuell bietet Nintendo die aktuellste Konsole und doch scheut sich der Großteil der Publisher vor Portierungen. DmC, Dead Space 3, Borderlands 2, Far Cry 3 und mehr machen einen weiten Bogen um die Hardware, die aktuelle Releaseliste erinnert an frühe 3DS-Zeiten. Und wie sieht es in einem Jahr aus? Die nächste PlayStation und die nächste Xbox könnten dann am Markt sein, mit besserer Grafik und mit besseren Multimedia-Services. Die Wii U wird aus technischer Sicht hinterherhinken und „bestenfalls“ ambitionierte Portierungen erhalten. Aber das ahnte und wusste man schon damals und es war mehr oder minder egal. Weil: Rayman Legends.

„Warum erscheint es überhaupt exklusiv auf der Wii U?“, hätte man sich bei der Ankündigung noch fragen können. Wir reden hier von Ubisoft. Dem Publisher, der seine Spiele wenn möglich auch für Toaster und Zahnbürsten veröffentlichen würde. Aber man wollte sich das nicht wirklich fragen. Ubisoft sprach mit der Exklusivität ihr Vertrauen für Nintendos nächstes Konsolenexperiment aus, was wiederum das Vertrauen der Spieler aufbaute. Inmitten den ganzen Diskussionen und Argumenten gegen die Wii U und gegen Nintendo generell, wedelte man mit den Rayman Legends-Flaggen und ließ sich nichts anmerken. „Die werden es zusammen mit Nintendo schon richten, ZombiU ist ja immerhin auch exklusiv.“

Ubisosft dreht Nintendo den Rücken zu, verschiebt Rayman und veröffentlicht es auch auf den anderen Konsolen – Puff, weg ist das hart aufgebaute Vertrauen in die Wii U. Obwohl ich dieses Spiel liebe, hier geht es wirklich nicht um Rayman, dafür ist dieses Franchise einfach nicht wichtig genug. Es ist kein GTA. Die Verkaufszahlen des Vorgängers sind nicht herausragend, 2D-Jump´n´Runs auch nicht das beliebteste Genre der Videospielwelt. Exklusivspiele sind aber immer etwas Besonderes, nur sie können den Charakter einer Konsole definieren und zum Kauf von Hardware motivieren. Rayman wurde plötzlich zu etwas Besonderem, für viele Wii U-Spieler (wie mich) interessanter als das obligatorische 2D-Mario, vielleicht sogar der „wahre“ Kaufgrund für die Konsole. Dieses „Besondere etwas“ hat Rayman – wie alle anderen ehemaligen Exklusivspiele – nun verloren.

Ubisoft hat mit dem Revival viel riskiert und den Helden erfolgreich wieder auf die Landkarte der Videospiele positioniert. Das verdient Erfolg. Wenn es den Schritt zum Multiplattform-Titel erfordert, dann sei es so. „Die da oben“ werden die Verkaufszahlen genau im Auge behalten und auf ihrer Grundlage die Zukunft der Reihe gestalten. Aus diesem Grund sind jegliche Aufrufe zum Boykott des Spiels kontraproduktiv, um nicht zu sagen dämlich. Alle werden Schuld an den schlechten Verkäufen haben, bis auf die Schuldigen. „Die da oben“ werden die „Message“ der Spieler falsch bewerten. Rayman wird wieder begraben und die Raving Rabbids  grölen auf der Trauerfeier.

Liebe Wii U-Besitzer, lasst euch die Freude auf Rayman Legends und an der Wii U nicht nehmen. Ich kann den Frust verstehen. Frust über einen Publisher, der ein lang erwartetes Spiel kurzerhand um mehr als ein halbes Jahr verschiebt. Frust über einen Publisher, der das Spiel zu allem Überfluss auch noch auf den September verschiebt, wo es gegen GTA V, dem NextGen-Hype und den Nintendo-Titeln konkurrieren muss. Das alles ist berechtigter Frust über die falsche Entscheidung eines Publishers, der unter keinen Umständen zu Kosten eines Spiels abgelassen werden darf.

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Contemplating The Mirror: Manhunt Revisited

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Memories

Rockstar’s Playstation 2 games were the video nasties of my generation. I remember my father reading an article in USA Today about prostitution in Grand Theft: Auto Vice City and telling me that I couldn’t have it. Likewise, the majority of my friends were forbidden from playing any of the Grand Theft Auto games. However, like most groups of adolescent male friends, we had one guy whose parents didn’t care one iota what he played, watched, listened to, or read,  so we became enamored with Vice City over at his house on the weekends.

In hindsight, I find it strange that Manhunt never kicked up as much of a fuss. With a pitch to my mother that might have untruthfully underplayed the extent of violence within the game, I was allowed to own it. Manhunt, just like Vice City, became a way for my group of friends to gather together to pass the time in a small Southern town. I’d have two or three of them over at the house during the afternoons, and we would take turns playing through each level in Rockstar’s gruesome survival action game.

Manhunt, drawing inspiration from movies like The Running Man, is about a death row inmate named James Earl Cash who is given another “chance” at life by snuff film director Lionel Starkweather (voiced by actor Brian Cox). After being released by Starkweather, Cash must stealthily make his way across the metropolitan cesspit known as Carcer City while executing gang members who have been assigned to hunt him down. Weapons include conventional items like shotguns and pistols, and unconventional ones as well: plastic bags, shards of glass, and metal baseball bats. There are a few combat-oriented levels, but Cash spends most of the time in the shadows stalking his prey. Each melee weapon has three levels of execution: hasty, violent, and gruesome. Sneaking up behind an enemy and holding the strike button longer will result in a more violent execution that rewards the player with a higher star rating at the end of each stage. More stars mean more unlocked bonus content, including some extra challenge levels. When my friends and I took turns playing, we were competing to see who could get the highest star rating: we were basically trying to one-up one another when it came to slaughtering bad dudes.

Two recent occurrences made yearn to revisit a game I hadn’t played since 2004. The first was the release of Spec Ops: The Line this past June. I won’t go into detail about my experience with Yager’s first game except to say that when the credits rolled, I mulled over the ridiculous virtual body count I had accumulated during my time as a gamer. I didn’t really understand my own feelings about the experience, except that for some reason it had made me—after fifteen years of blasting my way through every shooter on the market—incredibly anxious about virtual bloodshed. (Brendan Keogh’s critical reading provided some reassurance that this wasn’t a ludicrous experience.) And then Steam’s accursed winter sale rolled around. I had played pretty much all the big titles I was interested in this past year, so I bought a handful of cheap games I hadn’t experienced in a long time, including Manhunt.

Manhunt was an impulse purchase with little reason behind it beyond me wanting to grasp at nostalgia. But while I was installing the game, I thought about those afternoons back in 2004. What the balls had we bonded over exactly? Gruesome, shocking images of a man castrating another man with a sickle?  (Were we just redneck violence junkies?) And, moreover, I was curious whether or not Manhunt was any good; if I could view the game through a different lens than that of an impressionable, Tarantino–obsessed teenager almost a decade later, and it still be a memorable experience.

The Hunt: Would You Kindly Kill This Dumb Fuck?

Carcer City doesn’t look half-bad for a nine year old game, which is surprising given that the game runs on the same engine that GTAII and GTA:VC do. Much of that has to do with how the dark visuals cover up muddy textures and make the few aesthetic features that you can see—blood and grime on character models, mostly—pop out.

The first level, entitled “Born Again,” starts with Cash on a deserted street.  A tabloid blows by as I run, Starkweather’s words still ringing in my mind, “These streets are being controlled by gangs. They’re scum, just like you. And they’re here to hunt you down and cut you up.” Cox’s matter-of- fact delivery helps me get a good idea of who Cash is, but that’s the extent of character development we get on the protagonist until he decides halfway through the game to drop the Gordon Freeman act and yell. A lot. But in essence, Cash’s death row inmate status and willingness to kill define his character. Of course, Cash’s willingness mirrors my own: I may be killing reluctantly, but I’m still doing it to progress through the game.

My first opportunity to kill comes quickly: some graffiti catches my eye as I approach an alleyway. “KILL THIS DUMB FUCK,” the red paint screams. Peeking around the corner, there’s an idle gang member standing beneath a shadowed arch. I approach, my only weapon a blue grocery bag.

The last thought I have before I execute the man is a notion about how smoother the controls are on PC than for Playstation 2. The game switches to a low-budget hand-held camera perspective as Cash slips the bag over the thug’s head. The man struggles as Cash spins him around and punches him in the face several times. Blood erupts from the bag with each blow. Finally, Cash snaps the guy’s neck. The body crumples.

My stomach churns a little bit. Not because of the scene itself, but because I hadn’t even realized that I had held the button down long enough to perform the most gruesome execution. A reflex dredged up from almost ten years ago, but is the origin of that instinct a fourteen year old’s competitive need to beat his pals or, as Starkweather says, a desire to see some “Honest to god goreeeeee?”

It’s here that I realize that Manhunt features two protagonists. The obvious one is Cash, but, whether the player realizes it or not, he/she is playing as the sadistic Starkweather as well. (We are directing Cash, after all.) Gamers may not want to see the gruesome executions but the game’s star system encourages them to pursue the most violent executions to unlock those bonuses. Manhunt, at once, holds players hostage and allows them to indulge in violent fantasies.

On a thematic level, I also find it interesting that Manhunt doesn’t just tackle the idea of control in its narrative, but makes that notion the narrative itself—four years before the release of Bioshock. Both games feature protagonists who are nothing more than pieces—or “props”—taking part in a game being played by other parties. Jack’s a pawn in the game of war being played by Fontaine and Andrew. Cash, on the other hand, is herded from location to location (level to level) to violently kill men for the sake of a snuff film, a masturbatory game for Starkweather.  And sure enough, as soon as Cash’s part is done, the despicable SOB is more than willing to sacrifice his pawn (and, interestingly enough, opponent) to ensure that no one finds out about his operation and that the game can go on in the form of future Starkweather films. Rockstar just didn’t package the concept as a plot twist but instead tried to craft a whole narrative from it, with mixed results.

But the story does what it’s supposed to in terms of game progression, pushing the gamer onward through the dark cityscape. The environs actually has more variety than the sneak & slay gameplay, as Cash finds himself traversing junkyards, insane asylums, and even a mansion. Manhunt may not be a sandbox, but it still gives off the impression that you’re navigating a huge, decaying city. Each cluster of sections also comes with radically different enemies, gangs hired by Starkweather. They still all have the same goal (sniffing you out and bashing your bald head in), but the different personalities, masks, and tattoos make each gang distinctly different from one another. In the end, though, they’re still characterized not as society’s lost children, but its waste, the kind of villains you’d find in a Death Wish sequel.

And Cash is no better than they are—from society’s standpoint, anyway. He’s a convicted death row inmate, after all. Moreover, he displays no fear or remorse when slaughtering his foes. He also never bungles an execution; even the spurtiest ones are done “professionally.”  There are no good guys here. Manhunt is merely the story of a lesser evil (Cash) versus a greater one (Starkweather), with the player taking on both roles: the man willing to do anything in order to achieve his freedom and the sadistic voyeur who gets off on watching as someone’s eyes are gouged out with a shard of glass.

The Mirror

Manhunt isn’t a bad game but it isn’t a fantastic one, either. Its simplistic stealth mechanics are fun for a while but ultimately don’t trump anything you’ve seen in the likes of Metal Gear Solid. I find myself more preoccupied with the (possibly nonexistent) meta nature of the game, as in, what does this say about me, the player?  Manhunt has spots of brilliance—the control narrative being one of them. However, to say that it’s making a firm message about virtual violence is going a wee bit overboard.  There are points where it may seem like the game is, especially with the voyeuristic murder camera, but that message is too obtuse, if there is one.

Back in 2003, Levin Buchanan, writing for The Chicago Tribune, stated that “If Manhunt succeeds at retail, it will say more about American’s fascination with violence than any political discourse or social debate. That makes Manhunt the most important video game of the last five years.” But did/does the game add to the discussion of virtual violence? It lacks the mockery of Hotline Miami, the bite of Spec Ops: The Line. Perhaps this is simply a case of me looking at a game that I played as a younger man and hoping that its violence has some clear message, some way to absolve me of how much I enjoyed watching things like this:

But let’s play devil’s advocate. Let’s assume that Manhunt—like Spec Ops, like Hotline Miami—has some barbed message to make about the amount of virtual violence we commit in game after game after game. Can video games successfully act as mirrors for the player and make gamers socially conscious?

I remember a number of conversations that came about shortly after Spec Ops: The Line’s release that made the point about the game’s mechanics and dark violence undermining its criticism about shooters. I, for one, think the admittedly subpar mechanics reinforces game’s points, especially when the last two hours become a trudge through a difficulty spike laden hell. After all, could Coppola have made Apocalypse Now—one of the greatest films of all time and SPO:TL’s daddy— without showcasing acts of violence? Probably not.

This doesn’t mean that meaningful games can’t make those sorts of arguments without resorting to hefty amounts of onscreen violence. On the contrary, one of the most insightful games I played this past year was Paolo Pedercini’s  Unmanned, which puts you in the shoes of a drone pilot. The only obvious incident of up-close bloodshed comes when the protagonist nicks himself shaving. However, the game satirizes achievement systems in military shooters while simultaneously offering a unique, hauntingly empathetic perspective on the lives of military personnel. The most disturbing sequence in the game involves you launching a drone missile at another human being, a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. But it’s not disturbing because you see a smoldering ruin where the caricature was moments before. Instead, it’s horrifying because the two pilots are having a prosaic conversation as they do it. The protagonist has nonchalantly obliterated another human being from the face of the earth while hitting on his copilot—an effective jab at sequences like this. I don’t think that Unmanned is necessarily a better game than Spec Ops: The Line/Hotline Miami or vice versa. Each game (and possibly Manhunt) has something to say about violence, particularly the gamer’s assumed consumption of violent media.

Two weeks ago Maddy Myers wrote an article examining masculinity in Hotline Miami in which she said that “Hotline Miami tells the story of where we are now, and it is sad story. It is a story that needs telling. But is also a story that I hope we don’t have to keep telling and retelling. Eventually, these ‘wake-up call’ games need to actually wake something up.” This is a valid frustration felt by many gamers thanks to the seemingly endless line of cookie cutter AAA games the industry turns out year after year and that same industry’s ass-backwards, lazy portrayals of anyone who isn’t a rugged white dude with biceps the size of anvils. Wake-up call games, even if they operate within the conventions of said cookie cutter games (like Spec Ops does) can still create subversive, meaningful messages.

I’m talking about the potential of the medium, of crafting a variety of meaningful experiences like those featured in Journey, The Walking Dead, To the Moon, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Kentucky Route Zero.  But to get more of those games, I think it’s neccissary to reflect on what gaming culture produces. Obviously, there are plenty of writers out there who do just that and share their thoughts with everyone. But not everyone reads those pieces. Games like Spec Ops:The Line and Hotline Miami hold up a mirror to the gamer’s face and speak to them in ways that articles written for IGN, Kotaku, or Gameranx cannot. “This is what you’re playing; it’s a reflection of who you are. Is this really what you want to play?”

Call me an optimist, but I earnestly  believe that  “wake-up call”/mirror games will, along with the popularity of crowdfunding and relatively inexpensive development tools like Gamemaker:Studio and Twine, lead to more diverse experiences within games and gaming culture.  Basically, I’m expecting less of this:

And more of this:

To move forward we must be able to reflect on who we are, what we play, and what we want; and these mirrors—as cracked as they maybe—offers gamers and developers a unique avenue to that necessary self-reflection.

Let’s not waste them.

When he isn’t teaching or cobbling together a novel, Javy devotes his time to writing about these video game things. You can follow the trail of pizza crumbs to his Twitter feed @JavyIV

Further Reading: Why Are You Doing This: Hotline Miami and Drive (Medium Difficulty)

Snuff Enough: Hotline Miami, Manhunt, and the Theater of Cruelty (Medium Difficulty)

Sadistic Design in Spec Ops: The Line (Medium Difficulty)

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Hundreds of Confused Anti-Gun People Think I'm a Gun Nut—And That This Is My Gun

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Hundreds of Confused Anti-Gun People Think I’m a Gun Nut—And That This Is My Gun

Stephen Totilo

There are people on both sides of the gun debate who make good points. And then there are people who have absolutely no clue.

In that latter camp we might include Senator Lamar Alexander, who thinks that, when it comes to people getting shot to death, “video games are a bigger problem than guns.”

We might also include at least some of the 495-plus people who have shared a picture of me on Facebook and tried to make me a poster child for all that is wrong with people who like guns. These people—some of them confused, some of them ill-informed, and some of them possibly just extremely stupid—seem to think that, in the photo you see above, I’m holding a real gun and loving it.

No, people. I’m holding a gun from the video game Halo. But, hey, carry on with your great analysis about what this means about “guys like this” and the size of various parts of my body.

The photo you see above was posted on a Facebook page called “Republican Bigotry Hate Fear Lies and Distortion” on January 10. I don’t know much about this Facebook page. They have 65,389 likes on Facebook. They seem to be Hillary Clinton 2016 supporters. They post lots of images of Republicans looking dumb. They rail against oil companies.

I see that they like to use an icon of an upside-down elephant to mock Republicans. Below that symbol is a tagline: “They Lie (And Think We’re Too Stupid To Notice)”. Gee, why would “they” think that?

I don’t know why the RBHFLD people posted this particular image. (I’ve asked them; haven’t heard back yet.) I guess they thought it exemplified what was wrong with gun culture or something. On January 10, the image was posted with the text: “Don’t take away my gun.”

It was a successful post. It got shared almost 500 times in the last few weeks. It’s been liked by nearly 300 people and commented on by more than 400 people. The first Facebook user comment about it: “Dove hunting?” The second: “idiot”

The third commenter began to sense something wasn’t right about this image: “That one looks like it was put together by way of a soldering iron and a lot of solder.”

The fourth: “looks like Oswald” (later joined by: “Is it any accident that he’s a dead-ringer for Lee Harvey Oswald?” You decide!)

As people commented, a certain theme caught on: “*over compensating* me thinks 0.o”, “Laugh at my small dick now!”, “One inch penis.”, “Dude…I am SO sorry about your tiny penis!”, ” Bwahahahaha!!!!!! Of course he needs a weapon like that!!!! WTF!!! This proves so many theories to be true! Thank you :)))”, etc.

Some people seemed alarmed: “Please, please take his gun away”, “what a tool id skull fuck this dork !”, “Needs his brain removed before he does some real damage”, etc.

Some people shared their expertise: “Nice…. Military grade High Caliber Sniper rifle… ( I used one similar to this one in the Marine Corps. ) Able to punch a 5” hole in the flesh of a deer at 1K ft… Completely useless for hunting.. Unless you’re hunting dinosaurs.”

Oh, here’s a good one: “Idiot has his finger on the trigger. That’s a photoshop amatuer whackjob.”

Voice of reason popped up, too: “The art behind him gives it away- that is not a real weapon, it’s a sci-if prop. And we’ll [sic] built, too!” and ” You people do realize that this is a model of the sniper rifle from the Halo series and not a real weapon, right?”, for example.

But, really, this one said it all: “Wow. Ignorance beyond belief!”

***

That photo of me is real. It was taken on September 3, 2009 when I was visiting the old Kirkland, Washington studios of Bungie, the development studio that was then working on a new Halo game. I’d dropped by the studios—a former supermarket in a strip mall—to tour the company’s lobby and chat with some game developers in a small conference room a few feet from the studio’s front door. A few minutes before the photo was taken, a police officer had peeked into the conference room and then quickly shut the door. That wasn’t normal.

During my visit—and more or less unbeknownst to me until it was all over—cops had descended on the studio. While I had been chatting with Halo developers, police squad cars had been filing the front parking lot outside the studio.

Why?

A Bungie employee had been carrying a prop Halo sniper rifle down the sidewalk, toward the studio. They’d taken it out, for some reason. A concerned citizen had spotted him, thought it was a real gun and called 911.

I couldn’t blame people for freaking out that day. You see someone who seems to be carrying a sniper rifle down a city sidewalk, you call the cops. Once the police figured out what was going on, everyone calmed down.

The gun was just a prop. It had been created for several live-action Halo shorts that were directed by filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, who was, for a time, tapped to make a Halo movie.

After the cops left, I went back into the lobby and took a look at the fake gun that had caused that stir. I wanted to take a photo, one of the gun lying idle and one with me holding it, to sort of recreate the scene. While I was getting ready to take the latter pic, more surprise visitors showed up. In walked two Halo fans, John Henry and Desirai Labrada. They’d met a few years prior, while playing Halo online. Earlier that year, they were married by a guy wearing the armor of Halo hero Master Chief. I’d been to their wedding—covered it for MTV. On that September day, they were just dropping by Bungie, too, and they loved the idea of the photos with the prop gun. So they snapped some, too.

I’d filed that story remotely from Bungie. Former Kotaku editor-in-chief Brian Crecente wrote it up. We laughed about it. What a weird series of coincidences all that was! Little could we have guessed there’d be this odd coda more than three years later.

***

I don’t own a firearm. I’ve fired guns twice in my life.

The first time was from the deck of an aircraft carrier, into the Pacific Ocean. I was on an aircraft carrier with my brother, who was serving in the Marines. He and others on the ship were allowed to bring family members along for the final leg of their peacetime voyage. Military personnel on the ship gave tours and let people handle a rifle.

The gun I shot was an M16, I think. First, I shot blanks and then one or two live rounds right out to the horizon. It was shocking how little recoil there was, how little it felt like what I was doing had potentially deadly power. I’ll never forget that.

The second time I fired a gun was from the deck of my in-laws’ house down south. I’d married into a family of hunters. They invited me to, if not go hunting with them, at least get a feel for one of their hunting rifles. They took one out of the gun cabinet and showed me how to hold it.

From the deck, I shot a pumpkin.

My other experience with guns? Well, I held a Halo prop gun once.

And at least once on the Internet, people saw a photo of me holding a fake gun and made fools of themselves, proving that there are careless people on any side of a heated debate, people who make nasty assumptions about things they know nothing about. Yeah, that happened too.

(Thank you to Twitter user Flawless Cowboy for the tip about this. This one made me laugh.)

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Zero Dark Thirty: Warfighter

actionbude.de

von Ben am 6/02/2013

“I’m sure you’ve heard a plane crashed into World Trade Center One.”

Wir wissen was passiert ist. Die Bilder haben sich so sehr in unsere Köpfe gebrannt, dass Regisseurin Kathryn Bigelow sie nicht zu zeigen braucht. Die Leinwand bleibt schwarz, wir hören die Telefonaufzeichnungen des 11. Septembers.
Das, was sie uns kurz darauf zeigt, und zwar in in aller Ausführlichkeit, ist die Konsequenz dieses Ereignisses. Ermittlung, Überwachung, Politik, Spionage, Karriere, Gefängnis, Verhör, Folter… ein gigantischer Bürokratieapparat begibt sich auf die Suche nach dem Drahtzieher, auf die Suche nach Osama Bin Laden.

Bigelows Heldin ist die CIA-Analytikerin Maya. Klug, zielstrebig, willensstark – sie ist diejenige, die sich gegen die männlich dominierte Welt aus Terroristen, CIA, Militär und Regierung behaupten kann und deren Ehrgeiz und Besessenheit nach mehr als acht Jahren schließlich zum Erfolg führen. Sie ist unsere Identifikationsfigur deren Hoffnungen wir Teilen, in deren Gesicht sich aber auch unsere Abscheu vor den brutalen CIA-Folterszenen widerspiegelt, jedenfalls für einige Momente. Es dauert nicht lange bis Maya aus dem Schatten tritt und ihrem Kollegen beim Waterboarding assistiert. Die Schuld gibt sie dem soeben Misshandelten.

- “Please help me. Please.”
- “You can help yourself by being truthful.”

Sind Mayas Motive anfangs noch klar und vor allem von Ehrgeiz und Gerechtigkeitssinn geprägt, so verwandeln sie sich bald in eine Melange aus persönlicher Rachsucht, Überlebenswillen und Identitätskonstruktion. Die Jagd auf Osama Bin Laden ist das, was Maya über Jahre hinweg als Person definiert. Es ist ihre Berufung, eine die keinen Platz für Familie oder Beziehungen lässt und deren Nebenwirkungen mit brutaler Gewalt in jeden Hauch von Alltag oder Privatleben eindringen.
Mit Sergeant William James vom Kampfmittelräumungsdienst zeichnete Bigelow in The Hurt Locker bereits eine ganz ähnliche Figur. Ein Junkie, süchtig nach Krieg und so in dessen Strukturen gefangen, dass er am Ende nicht mehr fähig ist ein anderes Leben zu leben. Eine Figur die man mit einer Mischung aus Furcht, Mitleid und Bewunderung betrachtet. Maya funktioniert ebenso. Nachdem sie unsere anfängliche Sympathie bereits wenigen Minuten später verspielt hat, es fällt schwer sich ganz auf ihrer Seite zu sehen. Ja, sie ist scharfsinnig und hat ein beeindruckendes Durchsetzungsvermögen. Ja, ihr wird Gewalt und Unrecht angetan und ja, Bin Laden ist ein Verbrecher. Doch zu sehr scheint sich ihr Handeln und das des Systems zu verselbstständigen.
Immer wieder fragt man sich, in welcher Relation Ziel und Unterfangen eigentlich noch stehen. Ein CIA-Geheimgefängnis in Polen, Internierungslager in Afghanistan, Militärcamps irgendwo in der Wüste, bewachte Wohn- und Büroanlagen für die Ermittler vor Ort, 25 Millionen US-Dollar um einen potenziellen Informanden zu bestechen, Spezialkräfte, Satellitenüberwachung, Telefonüberwachung, Verwaltungskomplexe und systematische Folter. Das alles um einen Mann zu finden der bestenfalls als Geist über dem Film schwebt, der als Schurke definiert, aber nie erklärt wird. Wenn nach Jahren der Recherche Mayas Vorgesetzter fragt, welche Bedeutung Bin Laden eigentlich noch hat, reagiert sie voller Wut.

- “No one’s even talked to Bin Laden in four years. He’s out of the game. (…) You’re chasing a ghost.”
- “(…)you don’t understand Pakistan, and you don’t know al-Qaeda! Either give me the team I need, to follow this lead, or (…) [you’re] the first station chief to be called before Congressional Committee…”

Auch wir verstehen nichts von Pakistan oder al-Queda. Mayas heiße Spur ist ein Kurier, der Nachrichten und Videos zwischen Bin Laden und al-Queda schmuggelt. Doch Maya interessiert sich für Kontakte, für Beziehungen und Telefonanschlüsse, nicht für politische und religiöse Hintergründe. Wir sehen vereinzelt Anschläge in London, Pakistan und Afghanistan, doch inwiefern sie zum 11. September in Beziehung stehen und was Bin Laden damit zu tun hat, das bleibt uns verborgen. Es gibt die Bösen und die Guten, alles andere wissen wir aus den Nachrichten.

Daher wissen wir auch, wie es endet. Es ist Maya zu verdanken, dass ein Spezialkommando mit Tarnkappenhubschraubern nach Pakistan eindringt. 40 Minuten Hochspannung, während Männer mit Nachtsichtgeräten und Sturmgewehren einen unscheinbaren Häuserkomplex am Rande einer pakistanischen Kleinstadt angreifen. Man öffnet rostige Türschlösser mit Sprengladungen, man dringt vor, schaltet die Terroristen aus, schnell und präzise. Es sind Profis bei der Arbeit, 20 Soldaten mit Hightech-Ausrüstung gegen 4 Frauen, ein paar Kinder und 3 Männer mit einer Kalashnikov – so intensiv inszeniert, dass man glaubt der Film hätte noch einmal neu angefangen.

Am Ende sehen wir die Leiche eines bärtigen Mannes.
Maya identifiziert sie als Osama Bin Laden.
Wir glauben ihr.

So viel zum Film. Wer ihn noch nicht gesehen hat möge das nachholen. Frau Bigelow hat es drauf. Kommen wir zu Nebendingen.

Es tobt eine heftige Diskussion um die expliziten Folterszenen in Zero Dark Thirty. Während Kathryn Bigelow sich vor allem auf die Kunstfreiheit beruft, wirft ihr Unterhaltungs- und Toilettenphilosoph (das ist eher deskriptiv als abwertend zu verstehen) Slavoj Žižek im Guardian vor, Zero Dark Thiry sei schlimmer und undifferenzierter als die TV-Serie 24. Nach zahllosen der-Zweck-heiligt-die-Mittel-Folterszenen stünde an deren Ende wenigstens der Zusammenbruch ihres Protagonisten, während die Folterknechte aus Zero Dark Thirty die elegante Verwandlung zum anzutragenden Bürokraten vollziehen. Der Versuch eines “neutralen” Blickes auf Folter sei nicht möglich und wer nicht klar Stellung dagegen beziehe, der mache sich der Bagatellisierung dieser unmenschlichen Praxis schuldig. Folter verhalte sich, so Žižek, wie Vergewaltigung: Sie ist nicht zu diskutieren, sondern abzulehnen. Harte Worte.
Man muss Žižek insofern recht geben, dass Bigelow zwar die Leiden der Folteropfer in ihrer ganzen Brutalität zeigt, aber gleichzeitig den Blick auf die Täter verschiebt. Die haben es ja auch irgendwie schwer und nehmen für die gute Sache sogar Schäden an ihrer eigenen Psyche in Kauf. Doch obwohl Bigelow die Täterperspektive einnimmt, ist klar, wo ihre ethische Position liegt: In den ersten Minuten, wo sie die Opfer sprechen lässt und bei der Maya, die angesichts der grausamen Folter schockiert ist. Die Maya, die Mitgefühl zeigt und mit der wir uns identifizieren können. Auch wenn sie nach wenigen Minuten von einer kalkulierenden, besessenen, beinahe mechanischen Frau abgelöst wird, so ist ihre Perspektive da und bildet zusammen mit der letzten Einstellung einen Rahmen den Žižek unterschlägt.
Die Frage, ob der Zweck die Mittel rechtfertigt stellt Bigelow nur in sofern, als dass am Ende des Filmes eine Frau einen hat Mann töten lassen. Natürlich ist es Bin Laden, aber es darf auch niemand anderes sein. Nicht nach Jahren der Arbeit, der Fremd- und Selbstzerstörung. Welche Auswirkungen sein Tod hat, lässt Zero Dark Thirty unbeantwortet. Mayas persönlicher Rachefeldzug wurde beendet, doch was das für die Terrorkämpfer, für die Bevölkerung der USA oder die Menschen in Afghanistan bedeutet, das lässt der Film offen. Keine Siegesfeier, keine Reden, keine Perspektiven.

Worauf dagegen nicht verzichtet wird? Auf Marketing!
Irgendjemand bei Columbia Pictures kam auf die Idee, einen kritischen Film über die Terrorbekämpfung der USA nach dem 11. September mit einem Medium zu paaren, das für sein ruhiges und kluges Vorgehen bei politischen Themen einen ganz besonders guten Ruf geniesst: Video Games!
Es gibt eine Werbekooperation zwischen Columbia Pictures und EAs so genannter Project Honor Campaign. Project Honor? Lassen wir die Marketingabteilung sprechen:

“EA’s Project HONOR Campaign is dedicated to raising awareness and generating charitable contributions for fallen warriors from the Special Operations Community in honor of the sacrifices they and their families have made for their country.”

Mag sein, dass mir der Zugang zu Militär- und Veteranenkult fehlt, aber warum angesichts der absurden Rüstungsausgaben der USA die Sozialversorgung der Soldaten und Soldatinnen auf die freiwillige Wohlfahrt ausgelagert wird, hat sich mir noch nie erschlossen. Dass ein Computerspieleproduzent sich von solchen Aktionen Werbeeffekte in der Zielgruppe erhofft, kann ich dagegen nachvollziehen. EA kooperiert nicht umsonst mit Rüstungskonzernen und legt großen Wert auf Authentizität bei der Abbildung von Waffen und Militärgerät. Ich verweise auf dieses Feature bei Eurogamer.net.
Was das mit Zero Dark Thirty zu tun hat? Für den – bei der Kritik durchgefallenen – Militärshooter Medal of Honor Warfighter kann man ein offizielles Zero Dark Thirty Multiplayer Map Pack erwerben. Ein Bazar und ein Fabrikgelände, die selbstredend weder optisch noch inhaltlich etwas mit dem Film gemein haben, erlauben “…players to step into the boots of the soldiers who led the hunt for Bin Laden and take you to the locations where only the most elite dare enter.” Aha.

Es scheint sowohl bei EA als auch bei Columbia Pictures eine Lesart von Zero Dark Thirty zu herrschen, in der die letzten 40 Minuten einer 10 Jahre umfassenden Geschichte die entscheidenden sind. Eine Lesart, in der ein nächtlicher Überfall ein heroischer Akt ist. Wo Männer als Helden gelten, wenn sie Kinder mit einem Knicklicht beruhigen, nachdem sie deren Eltern erschossen haben und bei der Zero Dark Thirty die Geschichte über ein chirurgisch effektives Super-Killer-Spezialkommando ist, das den war against terror gewinnt. Klar dass das Kinopublikum es nicht erwarten kann, dies in einem Feuergefecht um Punkte, Flaggen und Headshots nachzuspielen. Müßig darauf hinzuweisen, dass es sich bei “who led the hunt for Bin Laden” mal um eine CIA-Analystin handelte.
Natürlich ist das albern und vermutlich ist ein halber Absatz schon mehr Beachtung, als dieser Witz einer fehlgeleiteten Werbeagentur verdient hat. Vielleicht, und hier greife ich Žižeks Kritik auf, tut Kathryn Bigelow aber auch zu wenig um solchen Lesarten entgegenzuwirken. Wer möchte, der kann in Zero Dark Thirty problemlos eine gerechte Vergeltung für 9/11 und den Triumph der US-amerikanischen Sicherheitsorgane sehen.
Ich möchte das nicht.

Zero Dark Thirty und die entsprechenden Bilder gehören Columbia Pictures.
Medal of Honor Warfighter und die entsprechenden Bilder gehören EA. Würde wohl auch niemand anderes haben wollen.
WTC Smoking on 9/11 (cc) von Michael Foran.

actionbude.de

News - Q&A: Director J.J. Abrams might have what it takes to make it in video games

gamasutra.com

February 6, 2013   |   By Kris Graft
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TV and film director J.J. Abrams wants to take the dive into video games — but this isn’t quite the same as other Hollywood-to-games forays. This time, Valve Software is involved.

At the DICE Summit in Las Vegas this morning, Abrams took the stage with Valve boss Gabe Newell, announcing (almost nonchalantly) that his company Bad Robot Productions and Newell’s Valve were in talks to create movies based on Portal and Half-Life. And the two companies are also in talks to create games together.

Gamasutra had the opportunity to talk to Abrams more about the partnership, as well as storytelling in TV, movies and video games. Abrams has a respect for video games and their potential, but he also exhibits an underlying understanding of interactive entertainment. This is a collaboration that has real potential to be fruitful.

So the announcement about Valve and Bad Robot — are you in the initial discovery phase with that?

Yes, we are talking about doing Portal and Half-Life movies, and we’re talking to Valve about doing games together.

What’s driving the interest behind that? Why do you want to get into game making and have this exchange?

Valve is obviously one of the greatest minds and producers of games that I’ve experienced. Their games have awesome humor, inspiring scope and characters that make you laugh and think.

I’ve been up to their offices. I like their culture, the way they think. It feels very much in line with how we work at Bad Robot. We’ve met enough times and have had enough discussions about various collaborations. As Gabe said, it was time to start making the stuff, and stop talking about it.

In games like Half-Life and Portal — it is more about the characters with Valve, isn’t it?

Yeah. If you look at almost everything they do, there is a level of sophistication and respect, not just for the characters and the worlds they create, but also for the audience, the game players, to put pieces together to figure things out.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with shoot-‘em-up games where that’s all it is — Valve is good at [shooters] too. But the idea that we want to do, and what excites me about working with them, the way they make games inspires me. The way they make their games, that’s something to aspire to.

What are the opportunities that you see in interactive entertainment?

Frankly, I’m someone who loves being able to work in film and television. I love working in music, I’m a fan of photography and painting and sculpting and letterpress, and all different forms of expression. I dabble. I don’t think I’m particularly good at anything. I just enjoy the experience of making various things. And games are something as a player, I’ve loved and appreciated for years. So the idea of being able to get involved and learn from a group like Valve.

Bad Robot has already been in the interactive world with the Action Movie FX app for iPhone. The idea of going deeper… I think we already took the first step into the pool with the app, and we’re ready now to dive into interactive. Dave Baronoff, who runs Bad Robot Interactive, is leading the charge in that regard. And we’re excited about the opportunities there.

When you’re thinking about goals or what you want to achieve with this foray into video games, are there any pillars to your strategy that come to mind?

Obviously, and this is not unlike the way you approach anything, but it’s “What do you want to experience?” Not “What do they like,” but “What would you like to experience.” So it’s about trying to figure out a game or a movie, you think about “What is the world? What is the drive? What are the stakes? What is the ticking clock? What am I rooting for? What do I hope happens? What am I afraid would happen?” The most fundamental, obvious things.

In line with that, there’s the fundamental question of “What’s not out there?” and “What isn’t being made?” I don’t think you can necessarily be creative deductively. I don’t think that you can say “What doesn’t exist? Let’s try to fill that space.” But still, I don’t know a writer or a game designer who wants make something that exists in the moment.

It’s human nature to want to try to push the boundaries of what is possible technologically or what is available experientially.

There is a debate in video games right now. There are people who make games who feel that storytelling and interactivity just don’t really jibe. If you’re entering that debate, what’s your argument to say “This can work”?

Well, the good news is, there are a lot of cautionary tales — games that feel very old school, where suddenly and clunkily, you get taken into a cut scene and you suddenly feel the mechanics of what’s happening, and now you’re forced to sit there and listen.

I think the key to any game is whether or not is it true to its format. Is it taking advantage of what’s available. I’m not saying the game that we produce — and there are a lot of different things that we are talking about in regards to gaming at Bad Robot — I’m not saying what we’re doing would solve that problem.

In fact, the game that we’re talking about — while we’re smart enough to be aware of things that we definitely don’t want to do, and mistakes that we’ve experienced as players that we don’t want to repeat — part of what we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily have the issue that you’re describing…

What are the specific titles have helped spark your interest in games?

Back in the day, one of the games that first really got me, and this was hundreds of years ago now, I loved the Infocom text adventures. They were brilliantly done, it was a simple parser, but they were wildly immersive and really fun. I was a huge, huge fan of what those guys did in Cambridge.

One of the first games that I really fell in love with was Tribes. I just love the idea of flying all over the place, and play capture the flag.

There’s a new one out too.

Yeah I know. Mind-blowingly cool. Then I fell in love with Tomb Raider and I played that non-stop. Over the years, a lot of things that I’ve been experiencing game-wise are games that my son plays.

But I’ve been inspired by some games like Journey, which was incredible. It was just crazy emotional, wildly beautiful. A true experience. I love that game. I love Limbo, the mood of it. I just thought it was genius. It took the whole side-scrolling thing and took the level of moodiness and tone in a way that it all worked as a whole. Everything from the music to the sound effects, the whole visual desaturated look of it. I loved it.

It’s hard not to look at what people are doing with the graphics of stuff like Call of Duty or Dead Space. You can’t help but be blown away by what’s possible. But to me, as much as the visuals will continue to improve … the sense of being in a place. It’s insane what’s possible if we all just extrapolate where it’s going. In no time, it’s going to be photorealistic to the point of preposterousness. At that point, it’s irrelevant.

So I’m not looking at the graphical stuff. That’s going to happen anyway. What I think is critical is gameplay and the emotional connection to the characters.

The games you say you like, that’s encouraging to me. The games like Limbo and Journey are the kinds of games that leverage the strengths of video games — of interactivity, of connectivity, instead of a video game trying to be a movie, which we’re all familiar with.

Yeah, but I’ve seen this often with movies and TV shows, where there is an idea sometimes that is really just better off being a movie rather than a TV show, and vice versa. A lot of movies or shows that don’t ever come to fruition don’t, because they should never have been those things to begin with.

There are some ideas that would just be better off if they were songs. There are some ideas that would be much better of if they were a poem or just a discussion, where there is nothing necessarily produced or experienced by others. We’ve all seen shows, skits or movies where we think “Yeah, I can see how that discussion went in the room, how they thought this would be cool… but they really should’ve stopped there.”

One of the things that’s really appealing about working with Valve is that they’ve got great taste, and that we will have the ability to work with people and not impose what we do on them. We’re not looking to make movies in the game space. We’re looking to make great games that take the strengths of what we know — characters, world-building, creating a sense of emotional connection — and trying ways to try to exploit that in the gaming space, which is a very different animal that movies and TV.

The game industry feels like it’s still trying to find its own identity. There are nuggets here and there where we see video games’ potential going forward.

I think that as the gaming industry evolves, it will become whatever it becomes, because the stuff that works, in a Darwinian way, will prove itself.

gamasutra.com

J.J. Abrams drops clues about his completely new game with Valve

polygon.com

J.J. Abrams drops clues about his completely new game with Valve

By Brian Crecente on Feb 06, 2013 at 5:25p @crecenteb

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J.J. Abrams isn’t making Half-Life 3.

Sitting down with Polygon shortly after the on-stage conversation he had with Valve president Gabe Newell, Abrams said that the game he’s in talks with Valve about making will be a completely new entity, with no links to existing Valve properties like Half-Life, Portal or Team Fortress or existing Bad Robot properties.

“We are at early enough stages that I can’t talk about it now, but I can’t wait to talk about it,” Abrams told Polygon. “The opportunity to work with Valve is something I couldn’t be more excited about.”

While Abrams declined to talk specifics about the forthcoming game, saying that he was in “talks with Valve” about making it, we discussed some of the ideas that spurred his interest in this game, his obsession with Valve and his desire to create something that “uses the limits of gaming in a perfect way.”

Earlier in the day, Abrams and Newell sat in front of a room full of some of the best-known developers in the world to have a conversation about the pitfalls and successes of storytelling, both in film and video games.

The back and forth between the two, peppered with examples from film and video games shown on twin screens behind the stage, ended with Newell saying that what everyone had just witnessed was essentially a recreation of the conversations he and Abrams have been having for years. It was those years-long conversations that finally convinced the two to make something together, Abrams told Polygon.

“The conversation — and it’s certainly not unique to us — about what story is in movies, what story is in gaming, the mechanics of story, what makes the experience of a game sometimes more satisfying than a film and vice versa, these are just sort of discussions we’ve had for years,” he said. “We’ve had so many meetings and finally got to a point where we said, ‘We need to start making stuff.’

“And so the ideas that we’ve had for games, the ideas they’ve had for turning Portal and Half-Life into a film, we just decided we actually have to start doing this stuff.”

Abrams says he doesn’t recall the “first volley” that launched that long conversation between the two, but said he knows it was driven by what he described as an “absolute obsession about what [Valve] did, how they did it, what their kind of culture felt like.”

“Going up to their offices in Seattle to kind of check out the way they work, it had just a kind of familiarity to me,” he said. “It felt very much like the way [Abrams’ production company] Bad Robot operates. So there was immediately a kind of connection between the two companies.”

Those early meetings led to conversations. Those conversations led to Valve creating a Super 8 interactive trailer in 2011 that showed up as an extra inside Portal 2.

Abrams described the project as “dipping our toes into the water of” game design.

While Bad Robot Interactive has been playing around with games for awhile now, making a couple of smartphone apps and Star Trek D-A-C, Abrams said that the Super 8 project was a great way to further explore that medium while working with a company like Valve.

“The fun thing for us, is again being able to work with such inspiring creators as Valve,” he said. “There are other things we’re discussing as well in the gaming space.”

The key thing that Abrams wants to impart is that he’s not coming to the gaming space to teach; he’s coming to learn.

He said the differences between a movie, which he described as a focused two-hour ride, and a video game is that you have more time to explore the peripheral of the main narrative. Games, he said, allow a creator to take a player through circuitous detours into a supporting character’s life. Movies, and their relatively condensed experience, never give people a chance to know a fraction of the characters in a film.

“I think games provide you, the player, with the ability to, in a sense, to go anywhere and do anything,” he said. “So it’s much more aligned with a novel or a TV show because the space is so much larger. What you glean is not going to be defined by a two-hour experience.”

Bad Robot, Abrams said, hopes to bring a sense of world building, of character creation and an emotional connection to an experience to gaming.

“Yes, we love spectacle, but ideally when it is connected to the eyes of a character — you know, humanity, the experience of someone or people you love — that’s how you start to feel for a character, ” he said. “I think there are certain ideas that should not be movies and should be games. There are certainly ideas that should definitely be a game and not a movie.

“My point is, we’re not looking to impose our process or our way of thinking or how we do what we do on anything. We’re looking to get involved in the creation of something that is a genre we love and we play ourselves and is not what we do; but that’s the fun of the challenge of it. We’re looking to learn as much as we can about how to make great games and to use our strengths to do that.”

It was clear from our interview with Abrams that while he and Valve are in talks about the game, he had very little he wanted to say specifically about what sort of game it will be.

Instead, Abrams talked ideas, his creative process, how he takes a single spark of imagination and traces it until it becomes something much more.

“I think like with anyone, we have ideas with different sizes and forms,” he said. “One idea might be a character, and you think that character might be so bad-ass and fun to watch and to play. Another idea might be a mood; you have no idea what it’s connected to. There might be an idea that’s a scene or a sequence or an ending.”

The originating idea for his game, he said, was about a “kind of experience that could be fun and sort of taking elements of things that I know and want to play and combining them into something I hadn’t seen before.”

“It was less about a specific thing,” he said.

“We’re not looking to make a movie in the gaming world. We’re not looking to impose what we do on that.”

And that idea, like all of his ideas that go on to form creations, snowballed, building onto itself until it was hard to identify just what you started with.

Some of his interest in the medium of gaming, Abrams said, is the excitement he feels in its ever-growing potential.

“Like with movies, anything is possible. The question becomes, ‘What do you do with the ability to do anything?’” he said. “The answer to that is you want to do something that gives you the chills, that gets you excited about doing it yourself, about playing the game.”

That’s the sort of thing he’s talking about with Valve.

“It feels like a game that uses the limits of gaming in a perfect way and hopefully will let us expand on those limits,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s not really a game that we’re going to make into a game. It feels like it should be a game.

“This is a game I want to play, and of course there are a million questions to still be answered.”

With Star Trek Into Darkness due for release in a few months, and a freshly minted deal to helm the next Star Wars movie — something he declined to talk about in our interview — Abrams is a busy guy.

How, we asked him, will he find time to work on this game? How involved will he be?

“You find time to be involved in things that you love and care about,” he said. “Obviously I’m a busy guy with the movies and the shows we’re doing. Luckily, whether it’s on the features side or the TV side or the gaming side, we’ve got amazing people at Bad Robot who are all working together. My involvement as a producer, for example, can be anything from: I have an idea. I write the script. I direct it, to: someone else has an idea and we help put together the great team to help develop it and work on it. To some version in between.

“Having never done this before I can’t tell you what the experience will be compared to other ones. But I can say that this is an idea I had and it will evolve and improve because of people like Dave Baronoff who runs Bad Robot Interactive, which are partners in this game we’re talking about with Valve. I’m looking forward to being as involved as they want me to be, as they need me to be.”

Abrams added that he’s aware of what he describes as the cautionary tales of other filmmakers who get involved in games and “things go awry.”

While Abrams’ day-to-day involvement in the blossoming project sounds yet to be determined, the framework upon which he wants this game built seems solid.

“We’re not looking to make a movie in the gaming world,” he said. “We’re not looking to impose what we do on that. We’re looking forward to taking some of our strengths and collaborating with some of these incredible minds that make some of my favorite games. Just as I think they’re looking forward to taking some of there stories and the universe for some of their games and applying it to movies. I think they need to both be approached very differently.”

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Owen Grieve January 29, 2013

Twitter

There is a conversation I’ve had three times in the last week, and it goes a little something like this: Corey Doctorow has been talking for a while now about an event he calls the ‘civil war on general computing’. The gist is that, over the last decade or so, Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been establishing a paradigm in which consumers are free to buy and sell computer hardware, but their ability to run software - even software they’ve paid for - is controlled, in real time, by distant corporate entites. Doctorow suggests that if we, as consumers, don’t rise up and demand open standards and other forms of digital emancipation, we will find ourselves in a situation where the general public are forbidden from using computer hardware for anything other than certain sanctioned activities.

If this sounds like exaggerated, Orwell-inspired cyberpunk scaremongering to you, here is a short example of how it has already impacted my life: I bought an iPhone 3G three years ago, and of course I’ve been slowly installing apps and games on it since then. At least I used to. Apple have released a number of iOS updates since I bought my phone, and when they stopped supporting my phone I just shrugged and stopped buying new things for my phone. No, what really made me sit up and get mad was when I was lying in bed one night last year and wondering if there were any good arcade cabinet deals going on eBay; I reached for my phone in the darkness, tapped in the unlock code, tapped on the eBay app and was given a digital brush-off.

“This app requires an update to run” ran the message, or words to that effect. I hopped onto the App Store, went to the eBay app page and hit Download. “This software requires a newer version of iOS”, it shrugged. I knew what was coming next, but I asked anyway - had Apple released a system update for my three-year-old hardware? “No new system updates are available” came the final response, shutting down any hopes I had of browsing through pages of Golden Tee cabinets from the comfort of my bed. I’m used to being given this kind of runaround by immigration officials, each and every deskbound form-stamper sending me to another department and rolling their eyes at the fact I haven’t had some previously unmentioned form signed by the Deputy General Of Paperwork, but I don’t appreciate this kind of attitude coming from my own phone. Slowly but surely, apps on my phone that have previously worked are now locking me out, even though nothing has changed within the boundaries of its fully-functioning hardware.

Podcast listeners will be aware that I recently bought a new Android phone. I vowed not to get another iPhone because of a number of shitty experiences I had with the last one - to be sure, it’s a nice bit of hardware and iOS is far more robust and pleasing to use, but the amount of bullshit hurdles I’ve had to jump over the years just to do anything OTHER than download stuff from the App Store is ridiculous. And like I say, I couldn’t even do much of that 12 months after I bought the thing - the only task I still routinely use it for is downloading new podcasts to listen to while I go down the shops. My new phone feels much more full of sloppy little quirks and bugs, and Google’s own Gmail app is HORRIBLE compared to the built-in iOS mail app, but I have zero regrets in making the change. The difference is that it just does what I ask it to.

When I want to rejig the music on my Android phone, I just plug it in via USB and drag and drop albums within Windows. To update my iPhone I had to use iTunes, which won’t even install on my 64-bit desktop for some reason, but even if it did it would just give me all kinds of shit about having a limited number of activations, or deleting everything off my phone whenever I tried to sync it with a new machine. Similarly, I bought the iOS and Android extensions for Game Maker just before Christmas. To test an Android build of my work I can just export the project as an .apk file, copy it to the phone memory card like any other file, then instruct Android to install it; to test an iOS build, I would have to BUY A MAC(?!), register as an Apple developer (which requires an annual fee), set up a load of security keys and then use iTunes to manage the installation.

It’s completely ridiculous. But this is the DRM ecosystem that Apple are keen to develop, and until Steve Jobs went the way of my eBay app their success seemed inevitable. Now, with their stock price arcing back down to Earth and their new products receiving much more critical receptions, Apple’s future is less certain! Still, many software companies are now looking to emulate Apple’s digital business model, and (as ever) there’s no reason not to think of commercial videogames as anything other than consumer software - Ubisoft, for example, are well-known for their ridiculous ‘always on’ DRM systems, which will punt you out of your legally-purchased game and drop you back at your desktop if you happen to lose your internet connection during play. As per Doctorow’s fears you might own your hardware, but you cannot truly ‘own’ a copy of these games - at best, you can pay the necessary fee to become a license-holder, subject to the terms and conditions of their user agreement, which include a number of cases in which your access to the game will be revoked without recompense.

That’s part one.

Part two is this: What is the lifespan of a videogame?

The whole concept is nebulous and weird, but I’m talking in terms of how much time in a typical player’s life is taken up by playing a certain game. You could expand on this a little more by thinking about how many players will still be interested in playing the game years after its release, but I’m not worrying too much about that right now - I like the idea of digital archiving, but I’m also willing to assume that most games will drop off to a small fraction of their peak within 5 years after launch. I saw a bunch of graphs at GDC last year saying that console players (you know, those people who can still actually ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ their games) usually trail off onto other games within three months, which is why it’s become so important for developers to get DLC out during this period. I digress.

Try making a list of the top ten games you’ve spent the longest total time playing. Because you’re a smart, sexy Midnight Resistance reader, I wouldn’t be shocked if your number one game ran into thousands of hours - Civilization, perhaps? World of Warcraft? For me, it’s almost certainly Pokémon. But what about your number ten game? I doubt it would be more than a few hundred hours, if that. What about number twenty? Thirty? And how many games in total have you ever played?

I’ve been thinking lately that most games have a pretty short lifespan, really. A long RPG might take 80+ hours to complete, and you might realistically play it through five or six times in your lifetime, but only the most heroic nerds would go beyond that. That’s fine too, but they are outliers. I’d say that the really long games - the ones you play for thousands of hours - are those based on systems and simulations. World of Warcraft’s dynamic social environment, Sim City or Civilization’s countless permutations, any kind of competitive game like Counter-Strike, DOTA, StarCraft or Street Fighter IV, the endless, emergent soap opera of The Sims, or games with a broad scope for slow, grinding personalisation, like Minecraft, Diablo or Pokémon. The fundamental pleasure of these games come from their systems, rather than their content - every session of play feels unique, even if you’re performing the same basic actions tens of thousands of times.

What does this mean for smaller, content-driven games? Last weekend I played through Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story. They both take less than an hour to complete, and neither make a very compelling case for replayability. That’s fine - they’re still good games - but when I think about their lifespan they seem like tiny blips, lost amid a rolling sea of franchised entertainment commodities. Is this a problem? I’m not referring to this dumb idea that games need to be at least a certain length to be worthwhile; what bothers me is the way that big, emergent, systematic games seem to ‘drown out’ smaller, content-driven games in people’s minds. It seems like content-driven games have been trying to counter this with steady flow of fresh DLC - as we speak, even Christine Love is preparing to release an expanded remake of Analogue known as Hate Plus - but I don’t think this is a sustainable strategy, and it’s starting to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Mass Effect 3 is a prime example - its DLC has been of generally decent quality, but the thing putting a lot of people off buying it is just that they just want the game to shut up and stay finished.

The competition between companies these days - not just in games, but in the digital sector generally - is as much for your attention as it is for your money. Blogging sites, including Facebook and Twitter, rely on users’ egotism to provide an immeasurable flow of free, addictively empathetic content; Google records all kinds of data about your browsing habits to make its advertising platform more appealing to clients; TV networks are constantly telling you to go online and ‘join the conversation’ about their programmes in their efforts to dominate the second screen. You pay for these products with your time, and fractional amounts of effort that they’ll bundle up and market to someone else - including other users - as their product.

It bothers me that games - both online and offline - are being increasingly tuned to hold players’ attention for longer periods of time. Attempts to shape player behaviour are nothing new - the legend goes that the original Final Fantasy games were deliberately designed to be drawn-out grind-fests to prevent players from simply renting them for a few hundred yen and finishing them in a weekend - but always-on network connections and sophisticated analytics are now being leveraged to produce much more precise models of player behaviour. Given the power of these tools, what kind of social responsibilities should game developers be subject to in their employment? At what point, if any, should a game developer stop players from playing their game?

Have you ever killed a game? It’s difficult. I mean, logistically, it’s hard work - just ask those guys who are systematically hunting down and destroying every copy of Shaq-Fu. Your task becomes a lot easier if the game relies on a connection to a central server, but even then it’s often possible to redirect clients to a fake server and run the game privately. But it can also be difficult from an emotional perspective… when you’ve spent years of your life creating a rich game space in which a community of players are enjoying themselves, it can be difficult to tear it down. Still, in the case of centralised, online games it’s almost always necesssary sooner or later - such games obviously come with certain practical pre-requisites, chiefly that the company must be making enough money to keep the servers online.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate comes out in two months, and I’m really looking forward to it! However, I’m also feeling pretty bummed out by the news that they’re turning off the Monster Hunter Tri servers a few weeks after launch. Their position is understandable, but I’m sad because it means my usual monster hunting team will probably never play together again. In the six month period we played together I racked up over 70 hours on my save file, almost all spent in the multiplayer mode. Of course, I can always just load up in singleplayer mode and keep playing like that, but that file represents more than just data, more than just the time spent grinding out potions and shock traps or building up armour sets… it holds a lot of memories for me.

Still, I wonder. Given the timing of the server shutdown, it’s impossible not to view this - at least in part - as a sort of ‘forced migration’ event. After all, what’s the point in releasing an expensive remake if people are going to keep playing the original game? Considering that Capcom are only shutting down the online component of the game, which they have never charged an additional fee for, this doesn’t sound so unreasonable. But what implications could this philosophy have in the age of DRM? If every copy of Shaq-Fu required a live internet connection to run, it would take no effort at all to have the verification server instruct every connecting copy of the game to delete itself. When you’ve already released a game that players cannot stop playing - when the greatest competition to your new game comes from your previous game - what profit-driven corporate entity WOULDN’T push the button?

Is this the future of commercial videogames? When devices can reliably fling data around over the airwaves without a second thought, should we expect developers to be releasing games that monitor your behaviour and adjust their content to ensure you never stop playing? And then - once the appropriate signal is sent out - lock themselves down and tell you to upgrade, or lose your invested time and money. This is a bit like what Apple go through whenever they release a new iPhone, banking on the idea that people have invested so much money into iTunes and App Store purchases that they can’t afford to lose it all by moving to a rival platform. If they hadn’t frozen me out of the market by discontinuning support of my hardware so quickly, it could have worked on me too. 

There isn’t much of a part three to all this, except to say that id Software are pretty cool for releasing open-source versions of their software once it becomes commercially redundant. I love the idea that, once a game has reached the end of its natural life, it be put out in public and documented for any interested parties to study and toy with.

Support open standards. And don’t take drugs.

midnightresistance.co.uk

Fighting Games

keithburgun.net

Considering that I’ve mentioned that I classify execution as an “ambiguity sauce” – meaning, a cheap, bad way of introducing ambiguity/uncertainty into your system, you might be surprised to know that I have an extensive background playing fighting games, as well as other real time games.

In fact, I’ve played far more hours, more seriously, of real time games in general.  The games I’ve played more than any others, hours-wise, would be Super Smash Brothers (N64), Super Smash Brothers Melee, Team Fortress 2, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Starcraft 2.  I don’t think any turn-based game has come close to to catching up with those yet (although Puzzle Strike is currently doing its best to do so).

I’ve also had numerous 2D fighter and 3D fighter phases, but these have been steadily declining as I’ve gotten older.  When I was 12, I thought that the huge move lists and difficult-to-execute inputs were “cool”.  In fact, this is the whole reason that anyone really liked Mortal Kombat over Street Fighter, the latter being a vastly better game but the former having “fatalities”, a sequence of the game that simply allowed you to show the other player that you had memorized and drilled a sequence of button presses.  That brings me to the state of the genre as I see it.

I see the 2D fighter and 3D fighter worlds as very stagnant. Now, people who play these games seriously and have never stopped – these are “fighter people”.  To them, of course the differences between 2012′s Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 vs SNK vs Tatsunoko and 2013′s Capcom 2 vs Marvel vs Pokemon Mega Battle vs Little Mermaid are huge.  To them, the addition of a new bar, or the subtraction of a bar, or the addition of some kind of move you can do – these are the kinds of changes that most people would expect to see in a sequel, but this group has been conditioned to see additions/subtractions as something akin to from-the-ground-up innovation.  It’s just the same as a “metal-head” being able to listen to hundreds of nearly-identical heavy metal albums.  When you reduce your perspective to a small, narrow field, small differences pop out at you.  This is fine to do sometimes, by the way; we should all be able to do this to appreciate small differences, because sometimes the small differences are what matter.

But if you take a step back and look at fighting games as just another kind of game, they’re… kind of all the same.  One of the best ways to point out how they’re mostly all the same is to point out a few examples that are actually different.  The two that quickly spring to mind for me are the well-known Super Smash Brothers and the less-known PSX game Bushido Blade.  A big thing that makes these games really, fundamentally different is that their goals are different.  Their goals are not to “reduce the HP sack to zero”.

The Formula

Firstly, what is the formula?  I’d say it’s one really solidified by Street Fighter 2:

Hit Points (Health Bars)

Flat, rectangular stage

A certain ratio of character size to stage size

Jumping (specifically, high enough to clear another human being’s head)

high and low attacks

a LARGE number of moves

Special moves that require complicated button inputs

Asymmetrical forces

Later additions to the Formula included “more bars and counters” for special, super special, and super ULTRA special moves, and a number of other features such as Street Fighter 3‘s parrying system.  The 3D fighter added, basically, a “side-step”, that’s roughly equivalent to a special kind of dodge (a circular kick or other circular attack might still hit you, for instance) and a few other proclivities, but the basic gameplay kernels are the same.  (EDIT: I should also mention that most 3D fighters do add a ring-out thing, which is an excellent addition… it just needs to be supported by more of the system)

I mentioned above two games that I see as really having broken the formula – Bushido Blade and Super Smash Brothers.  In Bushido Blade, the goal is to land a single killing blow.  Most of a match will be trying to either knock his weapon aside to get a clear shot, or moving around and zoning.  Some matches take several minutes to complete, but many are done in under five seconds.  Further, the game has some other very interesting concepts, such as disabling an arm or leg – crippling the opponent for the rest of the match.  I’m not really endorsing this feature, as it does have a power-snowball issue with it, but it’s interesting, at least. This is a neat way for health to actually mean something to the current game state beyond just “who has more health”.  Finally – and I’m not sure this is a good idea, but it’s certainly innovative – there are a number of weapons in the game, and characters, and you can pair any weapon with any character.  Certainly interesting, although probably difficult to balance, especially given that the weapons range from a small knife to a super long polearm weapon.

(Before I go on, there are also some creative entries that could sort of be considered in the fighting-game genre and do things differently.  One of my favorite examples would be a PSX game called Poy-Poy, a game that I’m always hoping I’ll have a reason to mention).

Super Smash Brothers

Super Smash Brothers for Nintendo 64 is probably the most sophisticated and advanced game design approach to “a fighting game” that has ever happened.  Before I explain why this is, know that this is not a shining endorsement of this game on the whole.  I’m fully aware of some major higher-level problems with the game such as infinite combos (combos that, once you get the other player in them, you can hit them repeatedly and they have no way of getting out), some character balance imperfections, and Z-cancelling (the cooldown on a few big moves can be cancelled by tapping Z at the right time;  most probably a bug).  Also “little hops” are bad in that they’re very hard to execute and extremely important to use.

But those are higher-level issues, most of which could (and really, should) be fixed in a patch of some kind (perhaps a 2nd Edition could be released on the Wii store or whatever).  Even if you hate Super Smash Brothers though, that’s fine.  What’s important to recognize, though, is it is a game that had a design philosophy behind it.

Super Smash Brothers is a game all about positioning.  Everything you do either makes you, or your opponent change position (the one exception being the “block” move).  If you attack, it knocks your opponent back.  If you dodge, it moves you.  Obviously, if you move, you’re changing position.  Those are basically all you can do in the game.  The objective is to knock the opponent out of the level (basically to some lines that are off-screen).

Instead of “hit points” that you have to reduce to zero, there is a resource that is explicitly tied to positioning – “Damage %”.  I don’t know why they used a “%” symbol, because nothing in particular happens when you reach 100, except that I guess it gets quite likely that you’ll die around 100%, but it can go way higher than 100, so it’s not really a “percentage” of anything.  Regardless, what it is is a number that increases the amount you’ll get knocked back when you take a hit.  Further, taking hits increases this number.

What this means is that you have a very dynamic health system which means a dramatically different thing based on where you are on a given level.  If you’re already up high, you could be killed with maybe just 60% damage if the other player knocks you upward.

Instead of a rectangle for a stage, stages have some level of variation to them (unfortunately, most of them have random hazard effects, and even more unfortunately, they can’t be turned off, which is something to look at for the 2nd Edition!).  Levels have platforms and ramps and other shapes, as well as moving objects that you can stand on or bumpers or other environmental factors.

This chart shows how I think the series progressed after the original game came out.  They basically started “backing off” this design and moving towards being a regular fighter.  Granted, they’re still more different than most MvCvMvM 2D fighters are from each other, but they’re moving in the direction of sameness.

When they released a sequel to Super Smash Brothers for the Gamecube, all of the moves became a little less about “changing the opponent’s position”, and a little bit more about “just increasing his damage %”.  Further, positioning simply matters less because of air-dodging (in place or in a direction of your choice!) and more “directional influence”, where you can tilt the controller in a direction you’d like to move even if your character is technically out of your control.  Hitting characters feels less like hitting a baseball with a bat and more like hitting a beach ball with a wiffle bat.

And then the next sequel, Brawl for the Wii, just totally went all-out on ruining that original vision.  Now the game is best described as “trying to push a bowling ball towards your opponent by whipping it with a shoelace”.  It’s spammy, flailing nonsense, and just to make sure that everyone knows that the developer is only interested in making a great babysitting tool, they included random “tripping”, where your character falls down on their face some small percentage of the time that you try to run.  This disables any would-be apologists from being able to defend this game, which is actually pretty nice.

The Potential Fighting Game is a direction that I personally want to explore with a future game.  I don’t have a design document or anything, but I do have a way of thinking that will guide me to eventually write one.

Experiment

To me, all of the Smash Brothers games, while much simpler than even Street Fighter 2 (one of the simplest 2D fighters), are still too inherently complex (mass inherent complexity being another ambiguity sauce).  There are too many different unique moves you can do and too many characters.  In short, to play well, you just have to know a massive amount of numbers and shapes and basically just rules.  This, more than anything else, turns me – a person actively interested in playing a fighting game – off from wanting to learn to play new ones at all.

What I wish designers of fighting games would realize is that you don’t need to do that!  You have continuous space and continuous time!  That means you already have a huge  possibility space to work with, right away.

Do this mental experiment with me.  Imagine that we have two characters who can walk left and right, attack, block, and throw, on a continuous space.  Attacks beat throws, throws beat blocks, and blocks beat attacks.  This is sort of the most basic concept behind most fighting games, and already, we do have a game, albeit not a terribly interesting one.  But now imagine how much emergent complexity you get from adding maybe just one or two more moves (maybe a jump, a longer range slower attack, and a fireball).  Assuming these moves have interlocking relationships with the previous three, that’s a huge amount of emergent complexity.  So that’s something to consider right away.

But there’s an even better approach, which Smash Brothers seemed to be considering, but didn’t really go all-out on.  What if you just had one attack, but it was totally directional?  Meaning, depending on how and when you use it, it had a totally different effect?

My favorite example is Captain Falcon’s aerial-up attack in the original Smash Brothers.  It’s a reverse-flip bicycle kick style move.  This is easily the most rich, interesting move in the game, because depending on when you use it, you can knock the enemy almost any direction.  So that’s just one move, but by using continuous time and space smartly, you get a whole range of effects (if you designed it right, it could be 360 different degrees of effects).  They, of course, took out some of this functionality for Melee, and the move is more of just a “I deal damage to you now” move.

Here’s an image showing how Captain Falcon’s up-aerial attack works

This is just an example of the kinds of emergent complexity that you can get with smart design.  I don’t think the original designers of Super Smash Brothers even knew quite what they had, a point which is proven when you look at the directions that they went.

Again, the original game has many flaws, but none of these flaws are because of these good qualities that I mention.  They are simply flaws in a 1998 console game that had no way of patching itself, and nothing more – an anecdote.  People in the fighting game community tend to believe that things will always be the way that they are now, which is probably the most self-destructive elements of that subculture.

Back to Regular Fighters

To this day, fighting games have been really held back by a desire to “simulate a fight”, when they have the potential to just “be a really great game”.  They will have to be conscious of the problems of execution and of mass content to ever achieve that, though.

Asymmetry can be exciting and interesting, but it can also be a cheap tool of simply overwhelming the player with content so that it delays the finding of optimal strategies and also just keeps the “excitement of something new” alive for longer.  Content is cheap, though, and all you’re doing by adding 40 characters is two things:  ensuring you will never balance this game, and delaying people from discovering how bland your system really is.

There is also no excuse for complicated button inputs to execute a move.  If I have a move, and it’s an option, it should be made as easy to input as possible.  This is a 100% hard-line RULE of game design, not a guideline.  If you need the move to have a delay to it, put the delay in the animation, or have the person have to hold the button down for however long before the move executes.  Again, players should never, ever, EVER “fail to input” something.  Even if it’s just one button, that’s still going to happen, but as designers, it’s our responsibility to make sure this happens as rarely as possible.

There’s also no need for 3 different punches, let alone all the ducking and jumping variations on those.  I think a Street Fighter character must have upwards of 30 different unique moves, all of which with their own hitboxes, priority, frame-count and damage boxes, which, if you want to play seriously, you simply have to just sit down and drill and study.  Again, “drilling and studying” is going to happen sometimes in almost any game, but the last thing you want to do as a designer is arbitrarily increase the complexity to force players to do that.  You can achieve more with fewer moves if each move has more in-system meaning.  Less is more.

Anyway, thanks for reading.  I hope that I can be a part of bringing the world a new generation of fighting games that are smart, elegant, dynamic, easy to learn, difficult to master, and that can stand the test of time.

keithburgun.net

Tony Hawk Errant Signal

errantsignal.com

Tony Hawk

I’m going to try something slightly different with this one: I’m going to post the script under the cut. There are a few changes – a bunch of complaining about how stupid things got was cut because it got a little too SJW-y without an egregious enough reason, and a few other minor differences where things flowed better/ran long. But people have asked for these before, and I figure this works as well as any other way to get them out to people.

Skateboarding, like other extreme sports, makes for some really interesting videogames. I mean, most popular sports are interpreted via the lens of television production. In a way sports games try to emulate watching Football or watching Basketball just as much if not more than emulating actually playing them. But skateboarding isn’t really televised outside of the X-Games, and as a result developers have focused on the actual act of skateboarding rather than how it’s presented. Each new attempt is basically a new type of platformer – they redefine what it means to move through a space in the same way Portal or Mirror’s Edge do.

While there were skating games before Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, they often felt segmented or presented an incomplete picture of the sport. California Games packaged halfpipe skateboarding in with the likes of surfing, frisbee, and hackey sack. Skate or Die was focused exclusively on skating, but still had really modal gameplay that broke up half pipes and street skating. And other games that made use of skateboards tended to be generic platformers like Adventure Island or Bart Vs. the Space Mutants where it was treated more like a powerup than a set of mechanics in its own right.

But it was Tony Hawk Pro Skater that was the first really successful attempt to encapsulate skateboarding holistically. It didn’t segment vertical skateboard tricks from or street skating or present skating as a cute minigame; instead it tried to create a complete system that emulated all aspects of skateboarding.

Ironically its closest modern analog isn’t actually any of the other Tony Hawk games, but EA’s skate. At first that sounds a little counter-intuitive – Tony Hawk is very arcadey and skate is rather technical and (at least in some ways) more realistic. But much like skate, the original Tony Hawk was very much about finding lines and positioning yourself to take advantage of them. This is before the series introduced manuals or reverts or any other way of keeping your combo aloft once you were back on solid ground. Once you had landed a grind or vert trick, that’s it – combo’s over. The result was that you had to know the paths through the level that you keep comboing without dropping to the ground. Sure, anyone could go up a half-pipe and do a kickflip or two, but being able to fly over a ramp while doing tricks, land on a grind rail, then jump off of that down into another rail to finish was how you really got big points. Knowing the levels – and knowing how to trace a line through them for the most points – was the most important part of the game. It’s why the the first Tony Hawk has downhill slope levels that were dropped in subsequent games – the original Tony Hawk really emphasized finding lines through space rather than exploration in all directions. In a way shoving the player down a tube made more sense than asking them to find lines in big open level.

But with the arrival of THPS2 came the introduction of manuals – and the series began its life long obsession with mega-huge player-created combos as a core gameplay conceit. THPS1 had combos, but they were more about measuring the length of a line or the complexity of a specific grind or vert trick. It was a scoring system designed to give the guy who pulled of two kickflips and a 180 melon more points than the guy who did a simple kickflip. But with the advent of manuals it really became about chaining entire lines together rather rather than just measuring the complexity of a single trick or single line.

In the first game you had to find the ramps that gave you the biggest air and you had to know grind rails that had long lines to maximize your score. But with manuals you could string together grind rails at different parts of the map or finish a grind with a half-pipe trick. Players were still strongly tied to the limitations of the level layouts, but now you could do things like find a couple of okay grind rails, chain them together with manuals, and make one *awesome* line that the level designers never explicitly intended. This minor mechanical change heralded a huge shift in the game’s priorities from directing players through engineered lines to letting them make their own.

This push towards exploration and giving players the ability to sculpt their own paths through the gamespace was continued through to Tony Hawk 3, which introduced reverts as a method of keeping combos active after going up a halfpipe. After this mechanic, just about any action could continue a combo. Manuals let you string grinds up into halfpipe tricks, and reverts meant that you could continue the combo once you came back down. This had the effect of freeing up the player to make crazy and inventive combos, but even further reduced the importance knowing a level’s lines. At this point positioning in a level almost didn’t matter unless you were going for the highest of high scores. Some areas were better than others for maximizing combo potential, but even in areas where there weren’t as many possibilities you could still manual and revert your way through in one single unending combo.

The result was a system that felt like it had all the tools it needed to fully allow for both exploration *and* high score based competition. Arguably, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 was the high water mark for the franchise – at least mechanically speaking. This represented Tony Hawk’s mechanics both at their most fully formed and given the titles to come, also their most pure. Just about every mechanic existed for a reason; they all tied together into a cohesive singular whole. Different mechanics were emphasized by a variety of goals, and the open nature of the game’s levels meant you were always stressing different parts of the system. You know how a song can sound under produced if it’s overly simplistic or mixed poorly and it can sound overly produced if it has too many concurrent tracks and effects and cute edits? This feels like the videogame equivalent of a system hitting that sweet spot where there wasn’t really anything missing or anything that could be cut away. Any fewer movement and chaining mechanics and you’re back at tracing level designer made lines. And it’s hard to think of any additional mechanics that would benefit the system. I would posit that Tony Hawk 3 is, at least from a raw systems perspective, the aesthetically complete vision of what the series had turned into. But aesthetically complete or not the franchise was making a ton of money, and Activision being Activision had to run this thing into the ground! And so we arrive at Tony Hawk 4 – which serves as a pivotal turning point in the franchise in a lot of ways.

First of all, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 is actually the best the game ever felt – THPS3 may have had the most cohesive mechanic set, but THPS4 refined those mechanics into precision instruments of player expression. Balance meter speeds, grinding rail stickiness, and player animations were all carefully tuned to feel responsive and tight the way Super Meat Boy or Doom feel.

But as wonderfully slick as it felt in your hands, it was also clear they were out of meaningful places to take the core gameplay. Perhaps the most useful of all of the newly minted mechanics were spine transfers that allowed players to go up one side of a ramp and down the other. And while that’s sort of useful for those who prefer a lot of vertical tricks, I’d argue it really helped level designers out more than players. They could now place halfpipes back to back in small areas to maximize vertical play or ensure that certain scripted big air transfers could land you in just the right place regardless of what the physics engine might otherwise have said.

But then there are the less successful additions… Neversoft gave players the ability to skitch on the back of cars, which was kinda cool but not particularly useful – I mean it gave no more speed than a decent halfpipe drop. The fourth game also introduced flatland tricks, but because manuals and reverts had empowered the player to make lines wherever they want it was incredibly rare to find yourself stuck in a barren area that forced you to use them. In fact, both Sketchin’ and flatland tricks were so separated from the main mechanics they had to introduce missions specifically to force players to use them. I’m not saying flatland tricks – or even sketchin’ – aren’t a part of the grander skateboarding expeirence or that they shouldn’t be put in a skateboarding game, but I am saying that their implementation in this game with this emphasis on combos and lines and exploration feels tacked on and supplementary.

These problems were compounded by the new open world approach to goals. Tony Hawk had always encouraged players to attack whatever objectives interested them, but it did so by giving players a laundry list and a two minute timer. In Tony Hawk 3 players could try and get high score objectives while grinding the required rails for other objectives while collecting the SKATE letters for still others. Once you knew the levels runs in Tony Hawk became timed challenges to see how much of the level you could beat in a single two minute heat. And because there were only nine or so levels total, it was effectively an hour long game for each skater meant to be played over and over again to unlock additional characters or levels.

But Tony Hawk 4’s open world removed the timer and didn’t start missions until you manually selected them. Much like Grand Theft Auto, the open world was basically turned into a level select tool. And once you started a mission you were given only a fraction of the play area to complete just one specific task. In effect, the levels in Tony Hawk 4 and later are actually much smaller in terms of actual play area, and breaking the missions out into discreet gameplay chunks made each mission modal and separate. In effect skateboarding games were back to Skate or Die, with some levels requiring half pipe play, some requiring manuals, some all about big combos, and others about landing specific tricks. Old games required you to mix all modes of play to complete as many objectives as possible, but later Tony Hawk games try to force one play style on you one mission at a time. And the result is that all of that elegant interplay of movement mechanics doesn’t matter.

But Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 also signalled the arrival of something else to the formula. Let’s back up a bit. Activision and Neversoft always cribbed from popular culture in their attempts to create the Tony Hawk brand. Whether it was the soundtrack selection or pro skaters or promotional tie-ins, there was an attempt to pull as much from contemporary popular skater culture as they could. And part of that culture was a trend of recording your sickest stunts or most awesome bails. It’s why the early objectives in Tony Hawk were called tapes, and why professional versions of skater videos were included with the games, and why Skate uses a low angle fisheye lens that emulates the look of these videos. But because handheld cameras were so prevalent in skater culture there was a habit of recording not only their best skate stuff but any other stupid or hilarious things they did too – for example, the CKY videos. Now this was pre-YouTube – the market for clips of people doing idiotic or offensive things was there but had no outlet, so when this stuff came along it really took off. And so when Activision went to make Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, there was one cultural force that had come to not only dominate the skater scene but had blown up into a cultural force in its own right.

That’s right – it’s 2002 and America’s got Jackass fever! Now, the game had always had some amount of this snarky irreverence floating in its DNA as evidenced by stuff like having to dunk a stuffy foreman into some water or impress Neversoft Babes in Tony Hawk 3. But with Tony Hawk 4 you see the series beginning to slip from tongue in cheek comedy to outright dudebra idiocy and assholish creepiness. I mean, in London a very American pimp will ask you if you want to bet on a chick fight between two of his hookers for ingame cash as a minigame. And elephant poop jokes! Who doesn’t love a good elephant poop joke? And a football team where every player is number sixty nine? Gosh, they know that’s the name of a sex act, right?!

After Tony Hawk 4 the series would fluctuate on just how offensive and stupid it wanted to be, but it was pretty much always offensive and stupid to some degree from here on out. THUG 1 had an asian detective who, after doing some investigatory work for him, had me delivery dry cleaning to his customers… because… casual racism is funny, I guess? THUG 2 had cameos by the Jackass crew complete with crotch shots and wanton destruction. American Wasteland ???. Project 8 had Jason Lee doing… whatever the hell this is – and then this lovingly created character:

Because if there’s one thing videogames don’t do enough of it’s ostracize women and gay people. Much like Duke Nukem Forever I’m amazed how little criticism these games for their actual content – and I think it speaks a lot about who reviews games and what they’ve historically been expected to write about.

Regardless, I’m going to gloss over the majority of the remainder of the releases ostensibly because if I covered every game this would be a 45 minute video, but also because while they each try to do slightly different things, they all suffer the same fundamental problem – they didn’t want to move away from the combo system established in the series’ heyday, but they didn’t know what to add to it, either. I’ll put it this way – Tony Hawk Underground had on-foot stealth sections and car racing sections. In a skateboarding game. About chaining combos for high scores. The well had truly run dry at this point, and we had four more of these things to go. By the very next game, this happened

Ultimately the Tony Hawk games were killed by the same short-sighted Activision business strategy of annual monetization that killed Guitar Hero and will some day claim the Call of Duty franchise. A Tony Hawk game came out on home consoles every year between 1999 and 2007, and eventually people started feeling burnt out spending $60 for content packs for the same mechanics every 12 months, especially as those mechanics became more unfocused. Aside from a few stillborn titles like Ride the franchise has been more or less dead for the past five years – which is why people were excited when Tony Hawk HD was announced.

No open world schtick, no awkward board peripheral gimmicks, minimal Jackass stupidity, no stealth sections or diving minigames or pimps selling ho fights – just two minutes to tear up some awesome lines on your skateboard. The game was returning to its roots, which, no matter how wacky and stupid the rest of the franchise got were always really strong. And what followed was a lesson in how game feel is critically important.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD feels slower – the trick animations take longer to complete, rotations are slower, and jumps aren’t as high. The whole thing just feels you’re moving through molasses and that the player is crazy heavy. I don’t know if this is to make the mechanics more retro like the games the levels came from, or to tone down how insane the gameplay got later in the series’ life, or to try to frame it at least somewhat realistic in order to compete with skate. But whatever the reason, I’m not sure the result works – it doesn’t feel as kinaesthetically pleasing to play as titles even just one or two games ago. The old school feel and the return of downhill levels does imply that they want players to focus on hitting prebuilt lines with minimal exploration, but at this point in the series that feels largely antithetical to why people play Tony Hawk games.

Then there are all the little things about game feel that hurt the experience. The fact that you ragdoll and go flying means the camera often needs to teleport around after a bail, which is disorienting – and worse in a game with only two minutes on the clock, time consuming. The “big drops” mechanic makes a comeback, punishing players by forcing a bail if they fall from a large height – which is particularly obnoxious in the LA level. And in the airport level there’s an grindable route through the X-ray conveyor belt that lets you through to the helicopter in Tony Hawk 3, but in Tony Hawk HD the the collision physics prevent it. Even the simple addition of reverts in the DLC feel all wrong – in Tony Hawk 3 you got a satisfying scrape noise Here it’s so quiet that you’re not even sure you did it unless you’re watching your combo text. All of these are examples of the game’s systems no longer empowering the player to express themselves in a traversal of the game’s spaces, but instead putting up barriers that make expression more difficult. Which is fine! Hard games aren’t bad! That’s basically all skate is – a really difficult to navigate system where doing simple grinds and combos is really hard, but when you do it you feel an incredible sense of accomplishment.

And perhaps that’s ultimately the problem with this clunkier, slower Tony Hawk. It doesn’t want to work with you to let you express yourself, but neither does it give you any meaningful fulfillment when you pull off the lines it’s set up for you. It’s easy enough to not be particularly rewarding, yet difficult enough to be frustrating.

Some lessons the Tony Hawk franchise teaches us are obvious – that annual releases can cause burnout for both developers and players, that appeasing your audience by putting wacky offensive monkeycheese in your game is generally a bad idea, and that having a game feel good in your hands really can make or break a game. But I think that the real lesson of the Tony Hawk franchise is that game systems can have – not always have, but can have – some sense of aesthetic completion through a cohesive system. Where if anything were to be added it would be superfluous , but if anything were to be taken away a core facet of what unified the work would be lost. Games like Tony Hawk 3, Super Hexagon, and Doom all have systems where just about every mechanic serves a purpose and they’re all important. And those systems stand in stark contrast to games like Magic The Gathering which is specifically designed to never be complete and is full of mechanical cul de sacs and dead ends, or Minecraft where mechanics get introduced by the dev team and are reconciled months later when a meaningful use for them is found. And while you can intentionally design a system that is messy, or tangled, or never truly complete for a lot of reasons, there’s a symmetry and purity of form to a game that feels whole in this way. And in a medium and an intustry so driven by iteration and sequels, I think it’s a shame we don’t recognize or applaud that sort of perfection of form when we see it.

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/wp-content/themes/gigawatt-old

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EVE Online - EVE Insider - Dev Blog

community.eveonline.com

community spotlight - brave newbies inc.

reported by CCP Phantom | 2013.02.08 16:00:00 | Comments

Introduction

Are you new to EVE Online? Welcome to the world of Brave Newbies Inc. then, a group of people that is mainly also new to EVE Online. This group is organized in the typical EVE Online manner as corporation; a corporation which sprung into existence on January 31, 2013, just a few days ago before these lines were written. On that day an individual person started playing EVE Online, decided to give it a try and to enjoy this game universe with its infinitely rich player-created content and social interaction.

Little did that person know that only a few days later he would lead one of the largest corporations in EVE Online.

Join us to explore not only this incredible story, but also to discover the very heart of EVE Online and the power that gives birth to everything in this universe.

Brave Newbies Inc.

An idea …

Our story begins a long time ago back in 2003 when the word spread about a new world with such an incredible degree of freedom that the only limitation there would be the imagination of the inhabitations. This world still exists with a larger population and greater freedom than ever before; this world is the game universe of EVE Online called New Eden.  

Back then someone heard about this exciting world too, but lack of access to the interesting sandbox gameplay elements made him stop playing. Several years later, another visit to New Eden happened, but the idea of a conventional strategy to get later to the supposed “fun” parts of the game wasn’t appealing and so that visit was also rather short.

The whole time, however, a nagging feeling was present (which we know too well all ourselves) that out there a world was waiting with pure freedom and unscripted behavior where everything is possible for those who would just dare to dream and seize the chance.

So a third visit was inevitable and this time everything came together, even though none of this was supposed to happen according to our protagonist. All he wanted to do was to reach out and to share a little story about the exciting moments he had in EVE Online.

This time everything was different. Jump right into the game, bypass the traditional approach of grinding your way up to get to the “good” content, and just enjoy the moment with the available resources and some fellow new players of the same attitude; maybe ten at best. So quickly a corporation was created, a low tax rate was set in the hope to attract the odd ten people and stories about EVE Online were spread to see if other, like-minded players out there would want to join.

“I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”

… to have fun …

An eclectic mix of new players flocked in by the dozens and hundreds; new hopefuls like our protagonist, experienced veteran players steeled in, but also tired, of year longs wars in the outer, lawless rim of the New Eden universe, and just people who don’t want to grind towards exciting PVP game play somewhere in the future, but just want to have the fun right now. Some people come with loads of generous gifts gathered during years of gameplay; some people have to ask how to complete the introduction tutorials.

As to why all these people joined this corporation? Well, they just take New Eden as it is: an opportunity to set your own rules of existence and to have fun doing so! Take a look at Brave Newbies Inc’s subreddit presence to discover some of the sparkling ingenuity which is present in this group.

The goal is to inspire all those that have tried EVE Online or are thinking about trying it but are put off by the slow start. It doesn’t have to be this way and Brave Newbies Inc. seems to be determined in proving that to everyone who joins. One result of such attitude is an increased interest by grizzled veteran players when they see all the enthusiasm and jolly.

… because we can! The sandbox gameplay

As more players joined Brave Newbies Inc., they started to generate their own awesome stories from their PVP adventures and even started to create amazing propaganda posters which have been well received by the community.  Or they created videos from their brawls – for example, a video of about 70 corporation members dying to a battlecruiser fully fitted with smartbombs while merrily laughing and having incredible fun.

All of that is completely player-driven; nothing of that is part of a large, pre-written and determined quest – all of this happens and only happens because of the players. You might call it the butterfly effect or sandbox effect, but in the end it is the players that create their own fantastic and exciting universe.

How do you catch that butterfly? The founder of Brave Newbies Inc. advises to create a place where people want to be, not where people feel like they have to be. Reach out to others!

Matias Otero

Portrait of Matias Otero,
CEO of Brave Newbies Inc.

But who is our protagonist, the person behind Brave Newbies Inc.? What is his motivation and what are his plans? Let’s get a first insight by directly asking the initiator of this amazing phenomenon:

Hello, this is Matias Otero, CEO of Brave Newbies Inc. I’ve never flown in anything bigger than a cruiser. I’ve never fitted a T2 module. I’ve never done a level 2 mission. Until yesterday I had never had to upgrade a clone. I am also the founder of a 6-day old EVE corporation with 400 members.

These astounding words cannot describe better the astounding degree of freedom available in EVE Online and the incredible opportunities everyone has – Matias Otero bravely seized his chance!

While he might not be a fresh player and has a cursory understanding of most subjects in EVE, he can be considered far from being experienced. With EVE Online having the notorious reputation of being very intimidating for those who just start off due to potential overwhelming potential, the player community can be very helpful answering questions and giving advice.

For example, it might be difficult to hand out roles when you don’t know what the roles are. But people offered Matias Otero his own mumble server, to set up a website, to start rooting out spies, to organize a fleet doctrine, to start mining and to get a manufacturing base… So many things, so much help! Sometimes even the CEO doesn’t understand what everyone is talking about and then he just encourages his members to take initiative and to self-organize in the best EVE Online manner.

Certainly there are also hurdles to overcome and when asked about them, Matias mentioned his priority number one: accessibility. He considers EVE Online having by far the most complex game interface he has ever seen, and he wants things to be much more intuitive. Also he wants to see sandbox elements which certainly exist within the game to be more easily accessible, as they seem to be difficult if not even nigh-impossible to find for a new player.

At dawn in Hek … let’s go fighting!

What have the Brave Newbies Inc. archived so far? Was it worth joining this corporation and if so, for whom?

The reaction from the corporation members after a few days seems to be quite enthusiastic, even if being shot down seems to be rather common at this point of time according to public records: 1640 of their own ships were lost and only 81 hostile ships were destroyed; however, the damage inflicted was almost 10 billion ISK while less than 6 billion ISK were lost – an impressive record!

The corporation also seemed ecstatic when they got into the fight in the Egghelende solar system and Pandemic Legion moved in super-carriers. Some players, just a few days old, kept jumping into the fight and zipping out with millions in named modules while a massive supercapital brawl went on all around them. That’s the kind of reward Brave Newbie Inc. wants to give out.

Events are not structured yet, everything consist of gathering any random night, be it a 10- or 70-man gang, and going to look for trouble and treasure. Little resemblance might be seen to a efficient and disciplined fleet, some bystander might even see one “fail” after another, but the corporation members seem to have incredible amounts of fun doing what they are doing.

Wonders and miracles – the heart of EVE Online

The EVE Online community can be harsh sometimes, but sometimes it can also be very generous. In this case, Matias received resources and ships from all directions or just messages simply telling him that people are appreciating his actions. During harsh times, when things are not working out the way he envisioned them to, he remembers that he made a lot of people very happy already.

With an interesting and enthusiastic group of people, one might wonder where this will end and if one day this corporation will venture into the vast outer rims of the New Eden universe and compete with the large alliances which have ten thousand members and more. Let’s hear the CEO of Brave Newbies about this topic:

I have no idea. What is the end-game of EVE? Does it have to be nullsec? Listening in on the chatter coming out of big alliances and talking to some of my more experienced recruits, it doesn’t sound like everyone is having that much fun out there. The main concern seems to be money for money’s sake. Sovereignty and economic mechanics seem to have led to political stagnation. I don’t know. It’s a question I’ll have to face in the future.

Enthusiasm is more important than experience or wealth. The sandbox can be fun if you manage to forget for one second about optimal ISK-per-hour and just go out there and do something crazy that you do not fully understand and can’t predict. You might lose your ship. You might double your net worth. You might bring down an expensive Legion with a fleet of frigates, or get picked apart by a cleverly kiting Drake. But you’ve had an amazing experience with good friends.

Forget ISK for a moment. It’s a fictitious currency in a digital universe. What’s your fun-per-hour rating?

An unwritten future

Matias would like to get all the people out there which ever have dreamt about a free and exciting world like the New Eden universe of EVE Online, he would like to collect all the people who shared his experience in the past years when he tried EVE Online and always tried in vain and frustration to get to the “good” content while in reality all the best things were already right in front of him already.

Now Matias Otero took his chance and he cannot foretell the future. Will our brave newbies thrive and still exist in a week, month, year or decade? The future is an unwritten story and everything is possible. Considering the energy and chutzpah of the Brave Newbies Inc., their CEO is confident that they will still be there.

Thank you, Matias Otero and Brave Newbies Inc.

7o

“No man made a greater mistake by doing nothing because he felt he could only do a little.”

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

community.eveonline.com

Doom Press Release

rome.ro

This is a copy of the Press Release announcing Doom.

Id Software
1515 N. Town East Blvd. #138-297, Mesquite, TX  75150

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:        Jay Wilbur
FAX:            1-214-686-9288
Email:          jay@idsoftware.com (NeXTMail O.K.)
Anonymous FTP:  ftp.uwp.edu (/pub/msdos/games/id)
CIS:            72600,1333

Id Software to Unleash DOOM on the PC

Revolutionary Programming and Advanced Design Make For Great
Gameplay

DALLAS, Texas, January 1, 1993-Heralding another technical
revolution in PC programming, Id Software's DOOM promises to
push back the boundaries of what was thought possible on a 386sx
or better computer.  The company plans to release DOOM for the
PC in the third quarter of 1993, with versions planned for
Windows, Windows NT, and a version for the NeXTall to be
released later.

In DOOM, you play one of four off-duty soldiers suddenly thrown
into the middle of an interdimensional war!  Stationed at a
scientific research facility, your days are filled with tedium
and paperwork.  Today is a bit different.  Wave after wave of
demonic creatures are spreading through the base, killing or
possessing everyone in sight.  As you stand knee-deep in the
dead, your duty seems clear-you must eradicate the enemy and
find out where they're coming from.  When you find out the
truth, your sense of reality may be shattered!

The first episode of DOOM will be shareware.  When you register,
you'll receive the next two episodes, which feature a journey
into another dimension, filled to its hellish horizon with fire
and flesh.  Wage war against the infernal onslaught with machine
guns, missile launchers, and mysterious supernatural weapons.
Decide the fate of two universes as you battle to survive!
Succeed and you will be humanity's heroes; fail and you will
spell its doom.

The game takes up to four players through a futuristic world,
where they may cooperate or compete to beat the invading
creatures.  It boasts a much more active environment than Id's
previous effort, Wolfenstein 3-D, while retaining the
pulse-pounding action and excitement.  DOOM features a fantastic
fully texture-mapped environment, a host of technical tour de
forces to surprise the eyes, multiple player option, and smooth
gameplay on any 386 or better.

John Carmack, Id's Technical Director, is very excited about
DOOM: Wolfenstein is primitive compared to DOOM.  We're doing
DOOM the right way this time.   I've had some very good insights
and optimizations that will make the DOOM engine perform at a
great frame rate.  The game runs fine on a 386sx, and on a
486/33, we're talking 35 frames per second, fully texture-mapped
at normal detail, for a large area of the screen.  That's the
fastest texture-mapping around-period.

Texture mapping, for those not following the game magazines, is
a technique that allows the program to place fully-drawn art on
the walls of a 3-D maze.  Combined with other techniques,
texture mapping looked realistic enough in Wolfenstein 3-D that
people wrote Id complaining of motion sickness.  In DOOM, the
environment is going to look even more realistic.  Please make
the necessary preparations.

A Convenient DOOM Blurb

DOOM (Requires 386sx, VGA, 2 Meg) Id Software's DOOM is
real-time, three-dimensional, 256-color, fully texture-mapped,
multi-player battle from the safe shores of our universe into
the horrifying depths of the netherworld!    Choose one of four
characters and you're off to war with hideous hellish hulks bent
on chaos and death!  See your friends bite it!  Cause your
friends to bite it!  Bite it yourself!  And if you won't bite
it, there are plenty of demonic denizens to bite it for you!

DOOM-where the sanest place is behind a trigger.

An Overview of DOOM Features:

        Texture-Mapped Environment

DOOM offers the most realistic environment to date on the PC.
Texture-mapping, the process of rendering fully-drawn art and
scanned textures on the walls, floors, and ceilings of an
environment, makes the world much more real, thus bringing the
player more into the game experience.  Others have attempted
this, but DOOM's texture mapping is fast, accurate, and
seamless.  Texture-mapping the floors and ceilings is a big
improvement over Wolfenstein.  With their new advanced graphic
development techniques, allowing game art to be generated five
times faster, Id brings new meaning to "state-of-the-art".

        Non-Orthogonal Walls

Wolfenstein's walls were always at ninety degrees to each other,
and were always eight feet thick.  DOOM's walls can be at any
angle, and be of any thickness.  Walls can have see-through
areas, change shape, and animate.  This allows more natural
construction of levels.  If you can draw it on paper, you can
see it in the game.

        Light Diminishing/Light Sourcing

Another touch adding realism is light diminishing.  With
distance, your surroundings become enshrouded in darkness.  This
makes areas seem huge and intensifies the experience.  Light
sourcing allows lamps and lights to illuminate hallways,
explosions to light up areas, and strobe lights to briefly
reveal things near them.  These two features will make the game
frighteningly real.

        Variable Height Floors and Ceilings

Floors and ceilings can be of any height, allowing for  stairs,
poles, altars, plus low hallways and high caves-allowing a great
variety for rooms and halls.

        Environment Animation and Morphing

Walls can move and transform in DOOM, which provides an
active-and sometimes actively hostile-environment.  Rooms can
close in on you, ceilings can plunge down to crush you, and so
on.  Nothing is for certain in DOOM.

To this Id has added the ability to have animated messages on
the walls, information terminals, access stations, and more.
The environment can act on you, and you can act on the
environment.  If you shoot the walls, they get damaged, and stay
damaged.  Not only does this add realism, but provides a crude
method for marking your path, like violent bread crumbs.

        Palette Translation

Each creature and wall has its own palette which is translated
to the game's palette.  By changing palette colors, one can have
monsters of many colors, players with different weapons,
animating lights, infrared sensors that show monsters or hidden
exits, and many other effects, like indicating monster damage.

        Multiple Players

Up to four players can play over a local network, or two players
can play by modem or serial link.  You can see the other player
in the environment, and in certain situations you can switch to
their view.  This feature, added to the 3-D realism, makes DOOM
a very powerful cooperative game and its release a landmark
event in the software industry.

This is the first game to really exploit the power of LANs and
modems to their full potential.  In 1993, we fully expect to be
the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses
around the world.

        Smooth, Seamless Gameplay

The environment in DOOM is frightening, but the player can be at
ease when playing.  Much effort has been spent on the
development end to provide the smoothest control on the user
end.  And the frame rate (the rate at which the screen is
updated) is high, so you move smoothly from room to room,
turning and acting as you wish, unhampered by the slow jerky
motion of most 3-D games.  On a 386sx, the game runs well, and
on a 486/33, the normal mode frame rate is faster than movies or
television.  This allows for the most important and enjoyable
aspect of gameplay-immersion.

        An Open Game

When our last hit, WOLFENSTEIN 3D was released the public
responded with an almost immediate  deluge of home-brewed
utilities; map editors, sound editors,  trainers, etc.  All
without any help on file formats or game layout from Id
Software.  DOOM will be release as an OPEN GAME.   We will
provide file formats and technical notes for anyone who wants
them.   People will be able to easily write and share anything
from their own map editors to  communications and network
drivers.

DOOM will be available in the third quarter of 1993.
_______________________________________________________________

DOOM, Id, and Wolfenstein are trademarks of Id Software, Inc.

rome.ro

♦

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