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Die Zahl am Ende des Textes - Teil 1

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Die Zahl am Ende von Videospieltexten hat lange Tradition - und man kann durchaus geteilter Meinung sein, ob das so sein soll oder nicht. Darum zwei Texte zu dieser Debatte, und der Gast hat Vortritt: Volker Bonacker über ein daueraktuelles Thema.

Kurz nach der Aufgabe meiner Stelle als freier Journalist wurde ich in einem Interview mit dem Online-Magazin “Negativ” nach meiner Meinung zum Thema Wertungen gefragt. Die Antwort seinerzeit war, dass ich die Sache liberal sehe. Im großen und ganzen bleibe ich auch in diesem Kommentar dabei (tl;dr-Menschen können hier aussteigen), möchte allerdings ein wenig weiter ausholen und erklären, von welcher Position aus ich diesen Standpunkt eingenommen habe. Damit wird die aktuell wieder einmal laufende Debatte um die Frage, ob’s denn sein muss oder nicht, nicht abschließend geklärt, vielleicht aber um einen Farbton reicher.

Anlass ist eine Umstellung beim Online-Magazin “Gameswelt”, dessen Autoren Spiele nicht mehr per Prozentwertung mit 100er-Skala, sondern via Punktevergabe mit 10er-Skala (inklusive 0,5er-Schritten) bewerten. Das hat - wie zu erwarten - Verständnis und Unverständnis hervorgerufen, ausgelöst teilweise auch durch die vollmundige Ankündigung einer “neuen Ära”, die damit einhergehe. Das ist freilich übertrieben, denn das Fachmagazin bleibt, was es immer war: Eine Publikation, die im Servicebereich des Journalismus verortet ist, die kaufberatend vorgeht, vorgehen will, deren Tests den Sinn haben, unentschlossenen Käufern eine Hilfestellung zu bieten. Das bringt den (auch nicht neuen) Vorwurf mit sich, man sähe digitale Spiele als Konsum-, nicht als Kulturgut, man gaukle Scheinobjektivität vor, wo doch Subjektivität das viel mutigere, konsequentere Verhalten einem Kulturgut gegenüber wäre. Wir sehen: Es ist nur noch ein Steinwurf zu “Mehr Geist bitte, liebe Games-Tester” und damit höchste Zeit für einen Cut.

In meiner Zeit als Freelancer habe ich ganz unterschiedliche Formen der Spiele-Berichterstattung kennengelernt. Auch Fachpublikationen. Ich erinnere mich an Diskussionen um die Frage, ob das auf dem Screenshot denn nun ein AK-47-Sturmgewehr sei oder eine AK-47M. Auch daran, eine Prozentwertung unter einen Test gesetzt zu haben, in dessen fünfseitigem Verlauf ich vor allem auf die Features des Spiels eingegangen bin, irgendwo noch die Story unterbrachte und in Boxen erklärte, was es mit Zombie-Modus und Mehrspieler-Features auf sich hat. Es war wichtig, genau vorzugehen, möglichst wenig auszulassen.

Ganz anders im Falle eines General Interest-Mediums. Hier lautete die Zielgruppe nicht “Gamer, männlich, 14 bis 29 Jahre”, sondern möglichst alle. Das brachte eine Schreibe mit sich, die keinen Raum für Fachjargon gelassen hat, keinen Platz für Elegien über Mehrspieler-Features bot, sondern deren Sinn und Zweck es war, kurz und verständlich zu informieren. Wertungen waren zweitrangig und fanden nach Schulnotensystem statt. Rückblickend möchte ich diese Übung nicht missen, sondern jedem angehenden Journalisten nahelegen: lernen, sich kurz zu fassen, sich verständlich auszudrücken, einen Text zu schreiben, der in Sachen Verständlichkeit möglichst niemanden aus- und idealerweise jeden einschließt.

Spieler gehen mit unterschiedlichen Erwartungen an spielejournalisti-sche Erzeugnisse heran.

Es bleibt das “Titel-Magazin” und damit die feuilletonistische Schreibübung, völlig frei von Wertungen, frei in der Gestaltung, gerne Meta, sowieso abschweifend, ein Ort, an dem ich die Texte verfassen konnte, die andernorts nicht gepasst haben. Die Texte, von denen ich im eingangs erwähnten Interview sprach als Stücke, deren Leser aus der Lektüre entnehmen, ob dem Schreiber das Spiel gefallen hat oder nicht, ob es zu ihnen passt oder nicht. Texte, die voraussetzen, dass der Rezipient diesen Gedankensprung vollführen kann und - wichtiger - vollführen will.

Der letzte Punkt und eine Sache, die ich noch ausführen will, sind es, die mich die Sache mit den Wertungen liberal sehen lassen: Spieler gehen mit unterschiedlichen Erwartungen an spielejournalistische Erzeugnisse heran. Viele wollen schlicht nichts anderes als die Zahl, die am Ende des Textes steht. Warum? Weil sie sich davon eine Antwort auf die Frage erhoffen, ob die Investition von 50 oder mehr Euro gerechtfertigt sei oder in Enttäuschung münden könnte. Mir liegen die Zahlen nicht vor, aber ich würde jede Wette halten, dass bei Fachmagazinen im Netz meist der erste Klick, nachdem auf den Teaser eines Tests geklickt wurde, jener auf den Punkt “Fazit” ist. Ich mache das häufig nicht anders. Warum? Weil ich einen kurzen Überblick möchte, eine einfache Einschätzung, ehe ich weiterziehe zur nächsten Seite, um die dortige Einschätzung einzuholen.

Denn letztlich sind beide für mich nicht kaufentscheidend. Empfehlungen über soziale Medien sind die härtere Währung - eine Entwicklung übrigens, deren Auswirkungen dem Fachjournalismus seit Jahren bekannt sind. Blogposts, deren Autor über die persönliche Erfahrung mit dem Spiel schreibt, finde ich abschließend deutlich unterhaltender und fordernder als die Lektüre von Fakten-Aneinanderreihungen. Und trotzdem geht’s nicht ohne.

Denn meine Ansichten zu einem Spiel, denen letztlich eine Kaufentscheidung (nicht) folgt, speisen sich aus unterschiedlichen Quellen. Ich möchte - obschon ich jeder davon unterbewusst eine eigene Wertigkeit zukommen lasse - keine missen. Deshalb kann ich gut mit Medien leben, die Spiele mit Punkten, Prozenten oder Schulnoten bewerten - und damit manchmal (längst nicht immer!) eine andere Einstellung dem Medium gegenüber an den Tag legen, als es viele (längst nicht alle!) Blogger tun. Sie sind eine Facette der Spieleberichterstattung, der man zwar inhaltliche Stagnation vorwerfen kann, die allerdings in den rund 30 Jahren, die seit den ersten spielejournalistischen Gehversuchen mittlerweile vergangen sind, nicht grundlos Bestand hatte.

Dialog ahoi: Meinen eigenen Text zum Thema findet ihr hier.

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 13. Februar 2013 - 10:52

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Die Zahl am Ende des Textes - Teil 2

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Die Zahl am Ende von Videospieltexten hat lange Tradition - und man kann durchaus geteilter Meinung sein, ob das so sein soll oder nicht. Darum zwei Texte zu dieser Debatte - nach Volkers Meinung nun mein ganz eigener Senf dazu.

Wertungen - ja oder nein? Für jede Frage von gewisser Komplexität gibt es eine Antwort, die klar, einfach und falsch ist. Drum einen Schritt zurück: Es wird die wenigsten Leser überraschen, dass ich nicht gerade ein Verfechter der Prozent-, Sternchen- oder Zehnerwertungen unter Spieletexten bin, und auch die Argumente sind altbekannt. Kein ernstzunehmender Literaturkritiker würde seine Besprechung eines Buches abschließend in Zahlen gießen wollen, kaum eine differenzierte Filmkritik endet mit einem Fazit in Prozentschritten. Warum? Erstens aus Respekt gegenüber dem besprochenen Buch oder Film; zweitens aus dem Selbstbewusstsein der Kritiker heraus, in ihrem Text bereits diese Wertung vorzunehmen. Autoren, und als solche sehen sich auch Journalisten, sind eitel - das Zusammenkürzen einer 3000-Zeichen-Kritik auf eine schnöde Prozentbewertung am Schluss entwertet in gewisser Weise den Text, der darüber steht. 

Die Frage nach dem Sinn oder Unsinn oder Unsinn von Wertungen zu Videospielen ist somit eine Frage nach dem Wert von beidem: jenem des Spiels als ernstzunehmendes Kulturgut; und jenem der Texte, die darüber geschrieben werden. Eins vorweg: Der fünfzigste Angry Birds-Klon verdient nicht denselben Respekt wie Journey; der Text darüber lässt sich unter Umständen recht gut durch ein “30% - für Fans” zusammenfassen. Der Blick auf Spiele als reines Konsumprodukt und auf die Texte dazu als reine “Waschmaschinentests” wird  von den prozentwertenden “Spieletestern” und dem nach schneller “Kaufberatung” suchenden Spielern geteilt - eine Philosophie, die geschichtlich gewachsen, riesengroß und in Fleisch und Blut übergegangen ist.

Wertungen sind Leserservice; diese Sichtweise des Spiels als Konsumgut kann man gut oder schlecht finden, wegdiskutieren lässt sie sich nicht, auch wenn man diesen Zugang - wenn er ausschließlich ist - wie ich bedauern kann.

Mein Argument gegen Wertungen ist aber ein anderes: Sie funktionieren nicht mehr. Vor Jahrzehnten, als Space Invaders mit seinen Dutzenden Klonen und Nachfolgern verglichen wurde, ergab es Sinn, in Details zu vergleichen und dies sogar in Zahlen zu objektivieren. Grafik, Sound, Spielbarkeit lassen sich bei einfachen Spielen mit gewisser Schärfe vergleichen. Heute, da das Medium in eine Breite explodiert ist, die selbst Fachleute nicht mehr durchblicken geschweige denn beurteilen können, ist dieser Anstrich der Objektivität ein absurdes Relikt. Sowieso bei den langsam verschwindenden Einzelwertungen: Hat CoD:BLOPS 2 eine bessere Grafik als Hotline Miami oder Dyad? Ist der Sound von Botanicula besser als der von FIFA 13? Das Aufblühen unterschiedlicher Stile, unterschiedlicher Styles und Ästhetiken untergräbt das, was Scores eigentlich erreichen wollen: Vergleichbarkeit. 

Das Aufblühen und die Breite des Mediums untergraben das, was Scores eigentlich erreichen wollen: Vergleichbarkeit. 

Deshalb ziehen sich jene Medien, die an einer Wertung festhalten, zunehmend auf ein anderes Bewertungsmerkmal zurück: Es ist der “Spielspaß”, der mit der Zahl am Ende des Textes bewertet wird, und eigentlich ist das bereits der schleichende Abschied von jenem Objektivitätsanspruch, der der Idee der Zahlenwertung zugrundeliegt. Denn auch hier zeigen sich die Bruchstellen, die darauf hinweisen, dass die Ära der Wertungen zumindest in Verbindung mit der Tradition der ausführlichen “Spielebesprechung” (man wagt es kaum, von “Kritik” zu sprechen) ihrem Ende entgegenstottert: Benjamin Schmädigs vielkritisierter Text zu Far Cry 3 war deshalb kontrovers, weil er einer nachvollziehbaren, subjektiven Kritik konsequent eine “objektive” 66 als Zahl gegenüberstellte; auf Gameswelt selbst steht einem kritischen Text, der objektiv viele Schwächen von Dead Space 3 thematisiert, ein gottergebenes 83% gegenüber - Triple-A bleibt Triple-A. Die Absurdität, dass bei Titeln ab mehreren Millionen Dollar Entwicklungskosten schon eine 75er-Wertung als Ohrfeige gilt, fällt ebenso in diesen Bereich - hier gilt de facto ein anderes Bewertungssystem von 7 (schlecht) bis 10.

Die Wertungen, das glaube ich, werden nicht verschwinden, aber weniger werden: von ihrer Anzahl im Spielejournalismus ebenso wie von ihrer (Schein-)Komplexität her betrachtet. Je komplexer das Medium wird, desto simpler sollten die Bewertungen ausfallen - vom Hundertersystem zum Zehnersystem, davon zum Schulnotensystem und schließlich zu einem schlichten “Ja/Nein”, das durch den Text begründet ist. Dass die Spieler selbst ihre Tradition der “Kundenrezension” auf Amazon und Metacritic verbissen weiterverteidigen werden, kann man gut verschmerzen. Vielleicht ist also die Abkehr vom Hundertersystem der Gameswelt, die auch ich kopfschüttelnd in ihrer Ankündigung als “neue Ära” und “Revolution” verlacht habe, doch ein winziger Schritt in diese Richtung.   

Verfasst von rainer sigl am 13. Februar 2013 - 12:07

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Kleinkrieg jenseits von Wertung und Feuilleton

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Es ist ein Kleinkrieg. Von beiden Seiten gleichermaßen erbittert, meist gehässig und herablassend geführt.

Kündigt Gameswelt an, künftig ein neues Wertungssystem anwenden zu wollen, hagelt es Häme und Kritik. Freilich hat sich die Redaktion dort mit vollmundigen Ankündigungen, eine “neue Ära” einzuläuten, gar von einer grundlegend überarbeiteten “Wertungsphilosophie” zu schwadronieren, selbst einen Bärendienst geleistet.
Prompt nimmt die Gegenseite die Vorlage dankend an, schießt auf den Fuß wortreich zurück. Genüsslich weidet man sich daran, wie die klassische Spielepresse angeblich mit ihrem Selbstverständnis vom technokratischen Games-TÜV im Gestern hängen geblieben ist. Ihr Sujet schon längst an Ihnen vorbei zur Kunstform gereift, die sich partout nicht in Wertungsschablonen pressen lasse, allein der Versuch eine himmelschreiende Respektlosigkeit gegenüber dem Werk.

Kündigt Superlevel an, den Autor Dennis Kogel per Crowdfunding-Aktion auf die GDC nach San Francisco schicken zu wollen, ist das wiederum ein gefundenes Fressen für die Anhänger der Wertungsfraktion. Hämisch zeigt man mit dem Finger auf die vermeintliche Unprofessionalität. Selbstverliebte Feuilletonisten, die völlig fernab jeglicher wirtschaftlicher Realität von mehr Geist und Kultur schwafeln, so der Vorwurf. Der entlarvende Beweis, dass diese Form der Berichterstattung keinen Leser interessiert und daher mit ihr auch kein Staat zu machen sei. Der Stachel von der Kritik an der neuen Gameswelt-”Wertungsphilosophie” muss tief sitzen.

Ironie-Deckmantel 

Ja, es ist ein gehässiger Kleinkrieg. In sozialen Netzwerken von den Beteiligten meist unter dem Deckmantel der Ironie geführt. So bleibt das Hintertürchen stets offen: War doch nur Spaß, alles gar nicht so gemeint, man lese die Texte der anderen ja selber ab und zu ganz gern, aber, bei aller Liebe, an der fehlgeleiteten Ansicht der anderen könne doch wohl kein ernsthafter Zweifel bestehen.

Doch warum dieser schwelende Konflikt? Warum muss das eine das andere ausschließen, gar besser oder schlechter sein? Eine technisch-analytische Betrachtung von Spielen hat genauso ihre Daseinsberechtigung wie eine kulturell-wertschätzende Interpretation ohne Prozentwertungen und Messungen der Bildwiederholfrequenz.

Ausschlussverfahren? 

Im Politikjournalismus beispielsweise käme niemand auf die Idee, den Sinn von „Sonntags-Fragen“ und deren wöchentlicher prozentualer Auswertung in Frage zu stellen oder gar die Macher mit Häme zu übergießen. Allerdings wäre die Auffassung, die “Welche Partei würden Sie wählen?”-Umfragen als alleinig gültigen Maßstab zu nehmen, um etwas oft Irrationales und Komplexes wie Realpolitik zu beschreiben, genauso deplatziert.

Beides muss sich vielmehr ergänzen und befruchten: Die Torten- und Balkendiagramme liefern Informationen über Zeitverläufe, Machtverhältnisse und Wählerwanderungen. Die müssen aber interpretiert, begleitet und in Kontext gestellt werden. Der aktuelle Umfragewert der SPD findet daher in der Zeitung genauso statt wie ein Hintergrund-Porträt des Kanzlerkanditen Steinbrück. Weil das eine das andere möglicherweise erklären kann und umgekehrt.

Analog sollte es sich im Gamesjournalismus verhalten. Spiele sind nun mal doch zuallererst handwerkliche Produkte, eine technische formalisierte Betrachtung daher durchaus angemessen. Was aber keinesfalls ausschließt, dass Spiele eben oft doch mehr sind als die Summe ihrer Einzelteile, so gar künstlerische Werke werden.

Mut zur Vielfalt

Beide Formen einer Berichterstattung sind legitim, können und sollten – wie im Beispiel der Politikpresse – miteinander kombiniert werden. Ich jedenfalls konsumiere beide gleichermaßen: Bei einem Crysis schaue ich mir gerne ein Grafikvergleichsvideo an, für Aliens: Colonial Marines reicht mir analytischer Test mit Fazitkasten und Wertung. Ein Journey darf gerne als Erlebnisbericht getestet werden. Genauso gerne lese ich ein Essay über Gewalt in Videospielen oder einen Report über Goldfarming.

Ein bisschen mehr Akribie und Nüchternheit und weniger Narzissmus würde bei manchem Kulturgut-Text Wunder wirken. Im Gegenzug darf die Wertungspresse nicht aus ihrer Pflicht entlassen werden, ihr Betrachtungsobjekt aufmerksam, hintergründig und über den bloßen Releasekatalog hinausgehend zu begleiten. Spielejournalismus muss mehr bedeuten als reine Textfabrik für Test und Vorschauen zu sein.

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Mammon-Machine (Review Criticism: "A Dead Space 3 review reignites the games-as-art debate.")

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Review Criticism: “A Dead Space 3 review reignites the games-as-art debate.”

I don’t think it does and I don’t think that the very nature of what a review should do is at stake either. I think a legitimate critique of a review is derailed by high level discussion that masks a pretty big problem in games journalism which is: never actually saying anything ever.

Here is what happened: Bennett Foddy called out Arthur Gies of Polygon for a poorly chosen sentence in his Dead Space 3 review and Arthur Gies told Foddy to read the rest of the article. Then they debated the nature of what a review “means” and what games get to be art. It isn’t a bad discussion (though it might be a useless one) but what I’m going to do instead is forget the rest of the debate and instead read those 1800 other words in the article apart from the sentence Foddy criticized, and see if, they contain the meaning the sentence “but the new crafting system and bigger, more open level structure join co-op to make Dead Space 3 one of the best action games in years” lacks. Gies told Foddy “put bluntly, if you’re saying i didn’t back up my opinion, i’m saying you’re wrong.” I think Gies in fact does not back up most of his statements about the game and the review suffers for it. I am going to spend this essay picking apart the article and I’m pretty sure that Arthur Gies will now hate me forever and I’ll be banned from the games industry, but here it goes.

Foddy said he rejected the “fundamentally mechanistic” criteria of Gies’s review. I’m not exactly sure what “mechanistic” means, but I think criteria based on mechanics are just fine. I don’t think Gies’s review adheres to a mechanistic criteria (link to the article there, but I’ll be quoting it a lot), if mechanistic means talking about the game mechanics and, more importantly, how they work and why they are in the game and how they elicit reactions from the players, what those reactions are, and how successful and original they are at doing that. Oh, just replace “reactions” with “fun” if you’re the sort who tends to not think of games in other terms, but I think Dead Space is a rare exception of a game that we can pretty clearly say is at least somewhat also about eliciting fear responses from the player. Though Gies says that most games are about nothing more than fun, and though I completely agree, not all fun looks or feels exactly the same. His review certainly reflects this sensibility as well, and I’m sure he wouldn’t say that crafting and shooting limbs elicits the same “fun” response. If it did, no video game would be different than any other. Anyways, I’m going to pull apart this article because I don’t think that it actually fulfills his criteria for a review of a game, as expressed in the tweets quoted in that buzzfeed article, because he never ends up saying why the mechanics are fun or anything specific about them, other than that they are “better” or “improved” in never stated ways from Dead Space 2 and other titles.

When the discussion devolved into what the purpose of a “review” or “criticism” is, the reason I think that it was a useless discussion was because the goals of any form of writing are fairly case by case and any all encompassing definition of either will fail as completely as a similar treatment of art. However, writers can make their case by case goals clear and then adhere to or fail at them. Gies is helpful in clearly stating what his goals are at the beginning of his article:

“Surprisingly, instead of watering the series down, Visceral has instead strengthened Dead Space’s single-player roots with some of the strongest combat design the series has seen. It’s also the biggest, most ambitious game Visceral has ever made.

But Visceral’s biggest accomplishment is attaining what I thought was impossible — Dead Space 3 avoids the traps of poorly implemented co-op, while capitalizing on all of its strengths.”

Over the course of the article I expect to see these claims supported. They’re meaningless statements by themselves, just words attached to value judgements without an indication of what, for example, poor or strong co-op is or what it means for combat design to be strong, or why it would be surprising for Visceral to not water down the series, but in the opening paragraphs the author doesn’t need to make these clear (though it wouldn’t hurt). I’m mentioning this just because I want you to know that Foddy’s point is right on— a sentence like “But the new crafting system and bigger, more open level structure join co-op to make Dead Space 3 one of the best action games in years.” is as meaningless as “Game X offers 143 hours of unique fetch quests and displays 143,000 colors on screen at once, making it the best action game this year!” These facts need to be attached to their results or they are devoid of meaning. 

Good writing tells you why those raw facts matter. Your game can have 2 billion guns and every one of them is boring; the role of the writer is to specifically detail how and why the specific facts of the game function to create an experience and what that experience is. Maybe it’s almost always “fun” but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the writing showing us how we get from flashing lights and number to fun, and if that fun is a right fit for me, the person looking to maybe buy a video game.

“In keeping with the last two games, Dead Space 3 is a third-person action-horror game with a specific mechanical twist. The undead necromorphs don’t have traditional anatomical weaknesses — instead, Isaac must cut off their limbs to take them down. Each enemy type is vulnerable in a different way, and Dead Space 3 introduces new wrinkles to that equation over the course of its 18- to 20-hour campaign. The dismemberment-oriented combat is paired with stasis, which slows enemies and environmental hazards, and kinesis, which allows Isaac to grab objects and fling them at enemies with deadly force.

Dead Space 3 further refines this combat trio with more responsive controls and better shooting than the last two games. Combat is more immediately satisfying than it’s ever been because of this, which is good, since managing multiple on-screen enemies is more important than it’s ever been. Visceral frequently gives in to the kitchen sink approach, throwing what feels like everything in its repertoire at the player.”

The first paragraph is a dry list of the features of Dead Space’s combat but not how they function. Since it is more difficult to list games in which you do not shoot enemies or parts of them, this writer has a lot of work to do he wants to distinguish how this particular form of combat is different from any other game’s. Gies does not detail why shooting limbs is interesting or fun or scary or even different from any other game which involves move a reticle over something and pressing the trigger button. Nine out of ten games I grab off a shelf at Gamestop will have this exact same format of gameplay and maybe 2/10 will do it in a way that’s fun enough that I would consider paying $60 for it. What makes Dead Space different? I would argue that it is having to shoot multiple points on a single enemy(rather than just the head) is harder and it emphasizes the unstoppable inhuman power of the alien nemesis in Dead Space, and that the action and horror compliment each other in kind of a neat way that few other games do, but Gies doesn’t say anything about that. This is the bare minimum of a mechanical analysis: this factual component of the game results in this result for the player. Instead I get the facts that I can slow down or fling around objects but not why that is a fun thing to do or if dead space implements it well. Are the puzzles as fun as Portal? As frustrating as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Why?

The bolded sentences in those paragraphs are meant to highlight the words that don’t actually mean anything. He says the game has been refined with “more responsive” controls and “better” shooting. Okay, better how? More responsive how? Does the autoaim let me hit things more often? Are Isaac’s attack animations faster with shorter startup? What specifically has changed? What feels different? What salient feature can you point out and describe that would explain this change to a reader? Articulating this specifically is not just the role of a game reviewer but the role of any writer writing about anything at all. Better doesn’t mean a thing unless we can point to something specific.

On the plus side, Gies’s critique of Visceral’s “kitchen sink” approach is a good one; it’s specific because it says “okay well the weakness of Dead Space is that it has so many buttons I never know which one to press,” but again he doesn’t detail the problem very much outside of that and he also doesn’t tell me any specific change that has fixed this weakness. Those features are all there: is the circumstance of their use more clear? Do I have to worry about them less?

“There’s a new aesthetic sensibility, sure — most of the necromorphs Isaac faces throughout Dead Space 3 are based on creatures that have been dead for more than two centuries, rather than fresh corpses. They’re less gooey.”

 I like this part a lot actually because it clearly describes what the game looks like. What it doesn’t answer is why it matters. Does the aesthetic make the game scarier? Scarier in a different way? Emphasize the time that’s passed and presumably why that matters for some reason? Especially since he criticizes the enemies for being the same as their previous incarnations, does it do something new and is it enough?

“These stories, told via text and audio logs throughout each area, tend to feature specific characters repeatedly in a successful effort in developing these long-dead people enough to want to know what happened to them.”

A “successful” effort, but no indication why it’s successful. Specific characters is our keyword, but does the game do a good job of getting us to care about them? A lot of games have specific characters that I couldn’t care less about. Especially if they’re dead and in audio logs—I can barely bring myself to care about video game characters that are paraded in front of the screen for hours by their fawning creators, so I really need more than just that the audio logs have specific characters if I want to be convinced that Dead Space is going to make me care.

Important detail: I don’t necessarily have to agree with the evidence the writer gives me, you know. I can vehemently disagree with reviews that are ultra specific—I feel this way about ActionButton.net reviews more than I agree with them—but I understand any game they talk about a billion times better because they can talk about their games with specific words that mean things. I understand why they hate games even if I love them. There is no such thing as an objective review, remember? So the only way to write a good one is to be as detailed as possible, to punch down your reaction so specifically that someone can read it and decide whether they agree with your reasons or if they don’t, and even if they don’t, they’ll still understand better how the game works and probably even why they like it in the first place. I have instantly bought games because of bad reviews because the author was specific enough for me to be like, “you may hate that, but I know for a fact I would LOVE it.”

“These puzzles are a great palate cleanser from the more frequent firefights, and they make Isaac a more believable, relatable character.”

How does solving puzzles make him believeable or relatable? Is there dialogue during these scenes or what? The author also says the puzzles are more “organic” but what does that mean? They make more sense, sure, but what changed to make them understandable?

“No weapon upgrade is irreversible, so every piece of loot you find can be reconfigured for maximum potential. There’s an almost playful attitude present with gear that makes it easy to get caught up in its systems in a meaningful way.”

I’m a fan of this part; he gives an example and then shows you how that specific game mechanic makes him feel. It doesn’t take much to show how the game works at giving the player an experience. Since the game lets you pull apart and put together weapons at will, it encourages experimentation rather than punishes you for decisions that you may not understand.  This is a good analysis and I wish it was applied to more things other than the crafting system. 

“Dead Space 3 doesn’t fall prey to the trap of co-op design. It doesn’t feel like something is missing when you’re playing by yourself — there’s no computer-controlled partner with you all the time to make sure the game functions properly. The only time you’d even notice that you could play the game with a partner is when you come across one of a few co-op-only side missions that can’t otherwise be accessed.”

What’s a little strange here is that from what he says it feels like something actually is missing when you play single player, though that something is minor. More importantly though, it seems as if a much bigger deal is being made about co-op than I understand the context for. I guess I never would have assumed that co-op would ruin a game entirely. If this was a fear the author had when Visceral announced co-op in Dead Space 3 (maybe fearing something along the lines of Resident Evil 5) he might have started the article out by contextualizing it. Even if most gamers are probably having a similar thought process, the article should articulate their fears specifically.

Finally, we reach a 9.5 score for the game. It comes as a surprise to me. Certainly the game was described as solid, and an improvement, but for a game whose enemies are described as being almost exactly like the last game’s, I’m wondering if, wow, the second highest possible score is really what an incremental advancement of an established AAA franchise deserves but hey, numbers aren’t objective either. I guess what concerns me is that I don’t really see the correlation between the mild but firm praise and the wild enthusiasm expressed by a near perfect score. I know—editors and all that (Skullgirls would have gotten a 9/10 from me if I’d had my way)—but still, I like to hope my unrepentant love for it came through in the review copy. 

So why should you care about specificity. Well reviews aren’t objective, remember? So if I say something is “better” or “worse” I’m really not saying anything at all. You can disagree with me all you want. But if I say why, you can still disagree with my interpretation, but you at least can see how I got there. Maybe you can then understand for yourself if that sounds like a reason to buy or not buy a game. When someone hates a game I love I like to ask them why, not to prove them wrong, but to understand better how the game works. Many of my friends hate how slow DotA2 is compared to the speed and responsiveness of League of Legends, but for me, that slowness makes all of my movement decisions crucially important because I can’t escape them after I’ve made a mistake. I have to not make a mistake in the first place, which is hard but it also lets me punish my opponents rather than seeing them slip away at the last second. I hope that does a good job of articulating a specific moment in a video game and how it works and why it’s fun. 

Specificity is so important that without it you are literally saying nothing at all. Here, listen to George Orwell if you don’t believe me because he is literally ten billion times smarter than I am. 

Surely Arthur Gies will now hate me forever, but I don’t think this review is especially bad, just symptomatic of how a lot of games writing and writing in general goes. I’m not innocent of this sort of thing at all but I do think it’s something that all of us should be working on. I think about this every time an argument on twitter explodes into a high level discussion of what the “true meaning” of criticism or reviews or any other specific term means, when I kind of think the real problem is some basic sentence by sentence level work that most writing simply doesn’t do. This sort of writing is hard but it’s what we should aspire to.

mammon-machine.com

Dead Space Started Off As Horror, But Now It's So Much More

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Dead Space Started Off As Horror, But Now It’s So Much More

By Cliff Bleszinski

I beat Dead Space 1.

I nearly beat Dead Space 2, but I got so frustrated with one section near the end in which I was trapped in a room with regenerating Necromorphs that I shelved it. (This was after the amazing “needle/eye” bit.)

I come from a long history of loving sci fi, in particular, scary, gritty sci fi. Growing up I was more about “Aliens” than “Star Wars.” “Event Horizon,” as flawed as it was, still inspired a 20-something Cliff to implement similar scare gags in Unreal 1. “Sunshine” included, I love movies in which man explores space with his best intentions and all Hell breaks loose.

I’m quite familiar with the controversy over Dead Space 3 and the issue of horror versus action. Generally speaking, the scarier a game is the less empowered a player feels. Controls are often clunky on purpose, and the pacing is quite different from an action movie. It feels as if developer Visceral consciously gravitated the franchise more towards the “action” elements over the “suspense/horror” ones, and I’m quite okay with that. We look at the target audience for your average console game and it’s often a cocky young male who doesn’t want to be scared. Unfortunately, he’s the guy who wants to get in and “fuck shit up.”

Is it possible to blend the two? Yes, I do think it is, and those of you who have read my interviews in which I talk about how you could do that in Resident Evil have seen the thoughts. (Random idea 1: Alternate between two storylines, one is a first responder and the other is a terrified child.) Horror is HARD, and suspense is even HARDER. It requires a true director’s hand. A nudge this way and a moment plays as comedic, a nudge too far the other way and it’s not scary at all. To compound it all, making a scary moment is kind of like trying to tickle yourself. You think it’s scary, but you’re never sure until you test it on someone who has NEVER SEEN THE MOMENT.

(This is why James Wan is evolving into a great filmmaker. Apart from the slightly over the top 3rd act there are scares in his “Insidious” that work amazingly well.)

Regardless, I’m currently burning through the campaign of DS3 with my wife in co-op and it’s still quite a bit of fun. The dynamic of using stasis and limb shooting in a co-op environment works surprisingly well. If there are surprises and scares to be had it’s often the person who charges ahead LeeRoy Jenkins style who enjoys them. Grabbing a leg and impaling a foe is worth the effort, and it’s gratifying.

I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around the weapon crafting and upgrading system, to be honest. Generating circuits, crafting them, etc… I could have used a bit more hand holding there. (The UI borders on comedic at times when you’re starting a game, with ROTATING METAL PANELS OF STUFF FLYING AT YOU EVERYWHERE!)

Overall game pacing is something that’s really hard to get right; it’s something that a lead campaign designer or overall lead designer are responsible for and that pacing doesn’t let down. The game builds to a crescendo of exciting moments (often with ships crashing) and then it takes its time before getting back into combat. The vistas and skyboxes are breathtaking, and the weapons generally feel good. (One of the issues with making sci-fi weaponry is that the guns don’t always look like guns. I know the series was going for more of a “mining equipment” vibe but I often have a hard time figuring out which gun is which when they’re icons.)

And yes, there’s a part when the game briefly feels like Lost Planet, but it’s a welcome change of pacing from dark space corridor after dark space corridor. One of my personal quibbles with the game is the lack of memorable locations. There are just so many corridors; there aren’t a lot of areas that can be defined as “the room with the N in it.”

Oh, and as a side note the parts when you’re in space flying around in your suit are suspenseful but somehow peaceful, if that makes any sense.

At the end of the day this franchise feels like it’s starting as a solo experience, a solitary and confined horror game, and now it’s evolving into much more than that. You can either fight it or embrace it. I choose the latter, as at the end of the day it’s FUN. (We’re about 50% through…the giant drill bit section was a highlight.)

p.s. In the 60$ disc based market horror doesn’t fly—it’s the ultimate “Campaign Rental” that’s played for 2 days and traded in and I’m sure EA knows this. When we’re fully digital we’ll see more true horror games coming back. (Look at Amnesia and Slenderman on PC.)

Cliff Bleszinski is a game industry veteran. He blogs on Tumblr and can be found on Twitter at @therealcliffyb.

Republished with permission.

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kotaku.com

Minimalism Vs. Elegance

keithburgun.net

I’ve been called a “minimalist” before.  Depending on the definition of the term you go by, I either am, or am not a minimalist.  The reason that I don’t ever call myself a minimalist is because I think it has a connotation of “romanticizing the simple”, or some other kind of bias towards “simpleness”.

In actuality, my point of view is that things need to be as simple as they can be while still accomplishing their goals.  This includes the possibility that they will actually end up being incredibly complex.  There are some definitions/connotations of minimalism that this qualifies as, in which case, I’m not talking about that minimalism.

It’s also worth mentioning that when I refer to “simpleness”, I am of course only referring to inherent complexity, not emergent complexity.  It’s a basic tenet of design that you want the largest possible ratio of emergent complexity to inherent complexity.  So, if in one brush stroke, every idea in the universe could be expressed (a 1:infinity ratio), that would be theoretically optimal.

But that’s super-theoretical.  In reality, sometimes we need great levels of inherent complexity to get our ideas across.  I think that the rub I run into with people who are primarily digital gamers is simply a matter of what our standards are.

Standards:  What Is Inherently Complex?

What we live with right now is the result of a 20+ year history of a technological and content-based arms race.  Super Mario Bros. was a huge hit, so Super Mario Bros. 2 added more levels.  Super Mario Bros 3.  added more features.  Super Mario World added even more features, and so on and so on ad finitum.

With each generation of hardware, as the computing power/storage space increased, this had to be advertised proudly by the games.  SNES games would brag about the filesize of the game, I recall.  Backs of boxes, to this day, brag about stuff like “80 different levels, 200 spells, 30 hurricane kicks”, etc.  At this point, it’s almost weird if a videogame doesn’t have a TON of content.

With technological spectacle front and center for so long, is it any surprise that we’d become a culture whose standards for “what is a lot of complexity” is a bit… warped?

In short, people classify me as a minimalist because their standards for complexity are based on a paradigm of MASS CONTENT.

Games that are Too Simple

What people probably don’t realize is that I’ll happily reject a game that is too simple — it’s just that this rarely happens in digital games.  It’s much less rare that it happens, however, in boardgames.  Particularly, abstract 2-player boardgames.

For example, the boardgame Hive.  It’s a hex-based 2-player game with no board, and little pieces themed with insects that try to surround the opponent’s Queen.

The boardgame Hive

This game, in my view, is too simple.  From what I’ve played of it, it seems too solvable, flat, and it also seems like the game becomes something like a “base-race” after only a few moves, with no way for the following player to catch up.  There isn’t enough donkey space in Hive, it seems to me.  There probably needs to be more complexity. (By the way:  I might be wrong about Hive; I’ve only played it a few times.  The point is NOT about the game Hive, though, it’s about the fact that I will reject a game if I feel it’s too simple.)

Another example is a game that I helped Kickstart, which seemed pretty cool, called Rise! (these four-letter games, I tell you…).  Rise is another abstract hex-based 2 player game.  I have similar complaints with it, too.  I just don’t think there’s enough complexity for there to be any really interesting emergence.

Rise!

And while digital games tend to be way over-complicated, there are some recent attempts at what I might call “minimalist” games that I also am not crazy about.

Zaga-33, for instance.  This is a “super-boiled down roguelike”.  The screens are a very small grid (something like 12×12), and your only actions are attack and a few special spell-items you’ll find.  It’s VERY, VERY tight – probably about as tight as it can possibly be.  Again, I’m not really crazy about this game because there isn’t enough room for donkey space – for ambiguous, interesting, maybe-not-optimal-but-maybe-will-turn-out-to-be-a-kind-of-genius CREATIVE moves.  I think Zaga-33 is too simple.

Zaga-33

Elegance

What I really want from games is, for whatever their goal is, they are elegant in achieving it.  I think most videogames, due to the ease of adding complexity and more is more cultural demand for greater complexity, are almost always far too complex.  So if you’re a videogame player primarily, I can see that you’d think that I was a minimalist.

On the other side of the coin, though, someone who only plays abstract 2-player games like those found at boardspace.net might think that I was some kind of foolish complexity glutton!

In reality, what I want is for games to be no more complex than they have to be to achieve what it is they’re trying to achieve, and what they’re trying to achieve should not be “super simplicity” (which I think might have been the goal in Zaga-33), and it should not be “super complexity” which I think is the goal in most videogames. 

I think that games can be judged by the interestingness of the decisions they present, and in order to create interesting decisions, you do need a certain level of inherent complexity.  So, I think we should be seeking to find that level in the games we’re making.  It’s a very difficult thing to pinpoint, and varies from game to game.  But let it be known that I am not a minimalist.

keithburgun.net

Locomalito: The Man Behind The Myth, A Passionate Retro Games Smith

indiestatik.com

Locomalito is a developer of many brilliant freeware games. And because of that, and the respect he’s garnered over the years, he’s an individual that is high on our hitlist – our we-need-to-interview-this-person hitlist. The problem is he’s a guy who keeps very much to himself, and he has a “philosophy” that’s different to many others. For instance, he refuses to charge for any of his games, even though everyone wants to chuck money at him for his hard work.

Anyway, Spanish indie game site Indie-o-rama interviewed the man himself over a number of weeks. They wanted to get the word out about Locomalito – give him a voice, and so they contacted us about publishing the interview for an English-speaking audience. Of course, we obliged, and below is said interview. So all the thanks should go to Indie-o-rama for their hard work and for supporting one of their most treasured developers!

Indie-o-rama (IOR): With skill and patience he finishes his work; a chisel and hammer are the tools that spring to mind when I think about Locomalito. The image of a craftsman aching over the final touches of his work. Although other authors like to enjoy public exposition, in your case you are reluctant to show yourself, and only crumbs of information about you found in other interviews allow us to create your portrait. The mystery is multifaceted; we don’t know who you are, where you come from, if you pursued game development because it was the best tool to express your mind or if you have received that talent as an inheritance. So I ask: who are you, Locomalito?

Locomalito (L): Well, I’m a guy who likes to play certain games, especially the classics. No more mystery; like so many others, I was a child who grew up enjoying 8 and 16 bit consoles, and I’ve always wondered how a game made by me would turn out, with the things I like. The issue is that in my adulthood the idea hasn’t been put off in my head, and as companies have increasingly abandoned the old genres that I liked, my time for playing video games has been changing gradually into time to create video games.

I do not consider myself a professional developer, nor do I pretend to be. It’s a hobby in which I can give life to what I like and it’s what I do to clear my head and feel alive. And, eventually, it will also be a means to share the results with others who miss those games: simple, difficult and direct. So I work slowly at night, when real life allows me, achieving small daily goals and shaping these games until they are finished (or until I get bored of them, which also happens).

For the matter about not showing myself publicly, the question is: what would be the interest? What does that matter to the game? It’s much more interesting to let my flag be the visible part, so that others like me can see it and think, “Hey! I can also make the games that I like.” After all, what makes sense in the long term is to promote the traditional games scene, and trigger the development of new titles created with the legitimate values of video games (pixels, chiptunes, simple controls).

IOR: It’s unorthodox to find a profile like yours – a developer who develops altruistically, for pleasure and in order for the games they want to play to exist, accepting donations from people only rarely. I guess the fact that you’re not trying to be a professional creator is because the other face of Locomalito gets to enjoy the work they created themselves. From what little I know, your daily productivity must border on hyperactivity. For those who may aspire to create games as you do, who look in the mirror and see themselves as the next Locomalito; tell me how does Locomalito go about working on a game every day, do you start with a notepad and then with GameMaker? By the way, why did you choose this program?

L: The first is to get hooked to an idea that bites you, and soon you’re adding new parts just in your thoughts. When an idea is gaining strength, what I do is to draw things and take rough notes in my notebook (I have a notebook handy by the bedside table, the night is like my muse), and eventually, if I have a few ideas of interesting levels and situations on paper, I consider to start on the computer.

The first thing to do is simply to draw a hypothetical screenshot, and test to see if it works. From there, I make tiny daily lists with everything I could do the next day, like a sprite, a piece of code or part of a map (the lists have squares which I cross-out). I try to keep an overall plan, but it’s very flexible because plans change frequently. And this is it, working bit by bit, step by step, until I realize that it is almost to an end, finishing up with testing and the debugging phase (which is the boring part of the process, but one that refines everything to a good standard). Anyway, in order to avoid boredom, I usually keep myself watching movies and documentaries on the theme of the game, reading articles, listening to music and conversing with others about it.

“We have seen how video games have changed so quickly, and it’s pleasing to see independent developers seeking new ground with pixel art and proving that it still has much to teach.”

I started working with GameMaker because it is very intuitive when it comes to designing games. It has all the right tools for the types of games I want to work on and also when starting a new game it acts like a blank canvas. And I continued to use it because I really do not need anything more.

With the same tool, you’re able to create mentally challenging games, an FPS and several shoot ‘em ups; each new game is a surprise, handling different genres, like it could be an adventure today and tomorrow something completely different; rescuing those old playstyles, and even reinventing them such as the case with Hydorah (of which I am a faithful lover). We have seen how video games have changed so quickly, and it’s pleasing to see independent developers seeking new ground with pixel art and proving that it still has much to teach.

IOR: What can we expect to see in the future from Locomalito? After five years of development, do you think you’ll remain an arcade game developer?

L: The door is always open to experimentation, but it is true that I feel very comfortable doing arcade games, especially the relationship between the effort and the result, and because once completed they are very fun to play. I usually go by what I like doing at all times, and combine large projects (my scale, of course) with smaller ones, so something inspired by the eighties, between Verminest and Maldita Castilla, will probably be next.

IOR: I read in other interviews that you formerly developed for consoles, and learned Basic as an initial structure which made things easier with GameMaker. However, I see on your website that your first title is dated as 2008, so just five years were spent developing your last three titles – two remakes and a separate title, the famous Maldita Castilla. How do you see this panning out now that these projects are released? What game would you like to develop specifically do you think?

L: Well, I only did graphics for Amiga games once, and none of the work ended up seeing the light. Buy actually having knowledge of basic programming from that helped me ‘not to fear’ GameMaker native language (GML), which allows you to refine the program’s capabilities.

I maintain a fairly constant rate, and although 2012 saw three games of mine released, actually only one of them (Endless Forms Most Beautiful) was developed entirely in 2012. Maldita Castilla had been well under way for years and Verminest, had it not been for personal reasons and force majeure, would have been a title released in the end of 2011. This year, I’ll start with a simple game to get used to it a bit while getting used to fatherhood, and later possibly resume the game that has been frozen for years: Grialia, an adventure and puzzle game.

I find it odd that you feel Verminest is a remake but not Maldita Castilla, when in fact, the first has many more unique features than the second [laughs]. I always say that my games are bastard children of the classics, so neither are remakes nor are they something completely different.

“This year, I’ll start with a simple game to get used to it a bit while getting used to fatherhood, and later possibly resume the game that has been frozen for years: Grialia, an adventure and puzzle game.”

IOR: About Grialia, in another interview you were talking about it and we can see little pieces about it on your website, of which little is known except that it has since been frozen. It looks great and we’re glad that you’re looking to change up the adventure/exploration genre types, I guess those games with large levels and the much loved colored keys that open doors to other worlds. If you found inspiration for Maldita Castilla in Ghosts n’ Goblins, and Hydorah’s was in R-Type, what’s the inspiration behind this new title?

L: Arguably Grialia is a game like Maze of Galious (Konami, 1987) or simply a metroidvania, but the idea here is to leave out little side quests like “kill the bugs” in favor of exploration, mystery and treasure hunting. In principle, Grialia is designed to be a game of riddles and puzzles, trying to avoid the effect I call “red key, red door,” which is that of having to walk from one end of the map to the other to find objects that to allow progress, and ultimately end up resulting in some really linear game stages.

In Grialia you have access to most of the map from the beginning, but in every area there will be puzzles to solve, items that have purposes you won’t know initially, incomplete puzzles, or puzzles that do not seem to be so. The idea is that you can move freely around the map, but you have to solve a number of issues in different areas to find the treasures. Of course, this will also have a dose of action, although this is not the main reason for the game to exist [laughs].

IOR: Puzzle games, apart from those which have a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, are quite difficult to balance in regard to the ambience and the riddles. Please tell me about the greatest difficulty in the game creation process, when your own intellectual skills are challenged the most.

L: Well, I think in principle it is important to try to convert the puzzles into part of the game, and not as a procedure to drag the gameplay further. There are a number of things that make a puzzle interesting: its pieces might be placed at a different location than the puzzle itself (and not right by it, that would be too obvious); its pieces may not be easily recognizable (they don’t need to be moving parts, they could be enemies or a part of the background that subtly reacts); its solution might be part of or a clue regarding a bigger puzzle; its combinations could be different and random for every game session; it could be punishing towards errors (forcing the user to carefully plan the next movement).

“I have received many memorable comments, and I’m lucky because I feel that many people understand video games like I do.”

IOR: I love that philosophy, and as you are a developer that does not make it easy for us, I’m certain that Grialia will offer a great challenge. Now let’s talk about this, let’s set the future aside for now. How do you see yourself right now? After all this time developing, has something changed in your life despite living in anonymity. How have the critics treated you? And finally, we talked at the time of the little criticism that Derek Yu gave you. What has been the review that most impressed you, the one which made you feel excited and think “Damn, he played my game and is commenting on it”?

L: Since finishing Maldita Castilla I’ve been a little off due to one thing or another, so I have not been thinking much about the present or the future. I’m having a pretty overwhelming amount of feedback for a homebrew developer, but I do not think that things will change much in the future. The novelty is passing and slowly the situation sinks back to where it was before, which is where I find it more comfortable to sit and create games [laughs].

From the comments that have come to me in one way or another, I have the feeling that many people are enjoying the game, and that they just missed games of this type (which, after all is why I decide to make games). Of course, you can’t please everyone and there are those who see little originality in it, or find it doesn’t compare at all with the CAPCOM saga. I think people who have understood the intentions of the game have enjoyed it, because the game is not meant to be a clone of Ghosts’ n Goblins (despite the obvious similarities), but of an era of video games, around 1985-1987, when a lot of games appeared with a high level of action and memorable content.

Regarding the review from Derek Yu, I think that has generated an exaggerated controversy. You can like the game or not, and this often depends on what you expected of it and what would later actually find within it. Derek himself commented that the he expected something like Ghouls’n Ghosts; impossible fantasy levels, stages full of magic and impossible situations, but in fact I have always opted for the first instalment, Ghosts n’ Goblins, which is more raw and more in line with the books of chivalry. In general, one can receive applause and criticism for the same reasons, because what’s good for some isn’t good for others, but that is something that is always on the side of the player and I’m not one to interfere with that [laughs].

The truth is that I have received many memorable comments, and I’m lucky because I feel that many people understand video games like I do. Perhaps what impressed me most is the number of people out there who, tired of the current run of games, have decided to bring arcade cabinets into their homes by modifying them or even making them by themselves. Different people have sent me photos of the game running on their machines, saying nice things, like a guy who commented that finally someone has done what he had been waiting for years [laughs].

IOR: Another interesting thing is that on Twitter you’ve shared lots of drawings of your games by children, or stories where families have recounted their collective battles to finish one of your games. I guess that’s what completes the goal for you? Ihe “raison d’etre” of your creation; what the game becomes out of your hands and in those of others. Are the players the cornerstone as to why you’d create a particular game and have such motivation for doing so or, indeed, why you make games at all? Do you feel you can rely on them when you get stuck?

L: Everything that comes after publishing a game is great: feedback, comments, questions, experiences and thoughts of the players. I find it very interesting how others perceive what is fresh to them after having worked on it by myself for such a while. For me, when a game release is near, when everything is planned in the notebook and working is everything that remains, is when I put my eyes on another project. And, usually, what I was doing goes to second place on my scale of values. Let’s say, that when I launch a game I’m usually working more or less focused on another game, and that is more important to me as I always want to be working because there’s a personal reason that I do it: to clear my head and try something new (or old, in most cases).

IOR: I guess the trick is just do what you want to, and in you case it’s merging retro and new, modifying and improving old rules to create new ones. The important thing is to keep moving on. And we, your players, thank you for that. This interview, after several weeks of contact comes to an end, I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have and that this enthusiasm is conveyed to you, the readers.

indiestatik.com

Four Steps to Making a Video Game In Just a Few Minutes a Day

rampantgames.com

Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Four Steps to Making a Video Game In Just a Few Minutes a Day

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 6, 2013

Last week, I had people ask me how to get indie game development done when you only have about an hour or something to get the job done in an evening.

I’m not going to pretend I’m some machine-like super-programmer here. When the Day Job has me working 12+ hours a day (sadly, a description applicable to for far too much of the last year and change…), it’s pretty dang hard for me to jump right into more software development when I get home.  And I do like to do things like spend time with my family, etc.

I’m not perfect at it. Some days I really don’t get crap done. Or I just end up “tinkering” and not really making much progress (though it’s helpful, too). But sometimes I can make it work, and I actually get ‘in the zone’ and really make progress even with a limited amount of time. Here are some things that help me make this happen:

#1 – Face Reality

Even when you do pull it off, there are some real limits to what can get accomplished on only one hour a night.  An RPG epic is going to take a lifetime to complete at that rate.  If all you can possibly devote to indie game development is a few hours a week, scattered in little 1 or 2 hour blocks, you have to scope your vision appropriately. In my case… well, I really haven’t done this very well, but I also didn’t anticipate this last year being one giant crunch for the day job. But I anticipate that changing very soon.

But if that’s all the time commitment you envision – at least at first – then you need to face reality and scope your project appropriately. At 5-8 hours a week, it will take you about one month to create a game equivalent to what you’d do in a 48-hour game jam weekend. Make sense?  Plan appropriately.  Contract out where you can (which will take time on its own). Work within your limitations. If time issues are temporary, that might be a good time to work on pieces of the game that are less time-intensive, or stuff that doesn’t have too many dependencies. And – again – working with contractors for things like art and music.

#2 – Plan out tasks

One of the most critical productivity tools for me is to maintain a task list. I have lost count of how many times I sit down for a development session (or finish a major task), and look at the screen and say, “What now?”, and end up puttering around for an hour or two surfing the web, playing a game, and dinking around with things in the code that really don’t have much goal or purpose. While these things may be useful (surfing the web may involve hitting engine tutorials or whatnot), they don’t do much to get the game done.

Having a list already planned out really helps me get in the zone faster, and stay there. It’s motivating to see items getting marked off the list, even if their impact on the game as a whole aren’t really noticeable.

If you know you are only going to be working for an hour at a time for a while, break the tasks down to things that can be completed in that time period (or less). Rather than tackling the entire main menu as a single task, break things down to their component tasks. Like getting the audio options sliders working. Or getting the load game mockup done with fake data. This sort of thing.

#3 – Vary Your Activities

If your day job has you doing pretty much the same thing as you are doing as an indie game developer, it’s helpful to plan activities that offer a chance to shift gears. This is especially true for us programmers. For those who don’t know, here’s a shocking surprise – writing game code isn’t really a fundamentally different experience from writing any other kind of programming.  The results on the screen can be a hell of a lot cooler, but when you are down in the depths of your save-game code, you might as well be writing database access code or customer report functions.

So when the day job is going into overtime and I have problems jumping right into doing Yet More Hardcore Coding, this is a fine time to plan other non-programming tasks. Writing this blog is one way I shift gears. It’s a good time to do design work, to play around with art, to do biz-related activities, or other things that don’t involve straight-up programming.

#4 – Commit and Make It a Habit

The real dark, dark secret of all of this is actually pretty simple: Commit to a time frame for which you’ll work on your game, even if it’s only fifteen minutes, and stick to it like your life depended on it. Every. Single. Day. Ideally, this should be the same time every day. Maybe even cue up a “work mix” of music in your media player to play when you start.

Make it a serious commitment. Shut off the web browser unless you come into an emergency that requires you to look something up. FOCUS.  And plan on only fifteen minutes or something – that’s all the time you’ll truly “commit” to, and at the end of the session you’ll be done, but in that little fifteen minute time frame you will be doing NOTHING but making your game and knocking out a task or two.

There are two things that will happen here:

The biggest advantage is that eventually it’ll become a habit. When it becomes a habit, you will find your brain shifting more easily into game-dev mode, and you’ll be able to take better advantage of your limited time. You’ll get “in the zone” faster. And if you have a family and other considerations, they’ll hopefully adjust and plan around it as well. It’ll become part of your life.

The other advantage – more easily realized in the short-term – is that inertia will take over in your sessions, and once you start chugging along doing the game development thing, it’s easy to keep right on going. That’s one reason I tend to work at night, after all my other commitments are done… I’ve got nothing else scheduled for the day but sleep, and I can push that one back if I really need to. So I may only be committed to getting a single task done, after which I tell myself that THEN I can play a quick gaming session or something.  But if an when I get into a zone of unbridled productivity, I can stay there for a longer time and get a heck of a lot done. I’ll ‘cheat’ in a good way.

So there you go. Four steps to making a video game in just a few minutes a day. As always, these things are easier said than done, but when I actually do them, they work for me. Maybe you’ll need to vary them in some way to make them work for you, based on your schedule and the way you work best. It’s not a miracle formula, but I find it really makes a huge difference in my own productivity when I follow them.

Good luck, and have fun!

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The Best Star Wars Games That Don't Actually Exist (But Should) - Game

wired.com

Illustration: Simon Lutrin/Chris Kohler/Wired. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

Star Wars is back. But how will that shake out for videogames?

Following Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm last year, the new owner of Star Wars has made no bones about its galaxy-spanning ambitions to continue the beloved sci-fi film series and even get solo character spin-off flicks into theaters. What it hasn’t said anything about yet are games. With Disney shutting down its Junction Point development studio as part of a concerted effort to turn the interactive division profitable, what does this mean for LucasArts? Does Disney’s pursuit of social and mobile games mean the death knell for epic-scale console versions?

Most importantly, we know J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars Episode VII, but who’ll make the next big game?

Wired spoke to 17 creators, thinkers, designers and producers, most of whom have spearheaded some of the most original and innovative game designs of recent years, to ask them what Star Wars game they’d make if they had carte blanche access to the series. In the pages that follow, David Cage (Heavy Rain), Jenova Chen (Journey), Jake Solomon (XCOM) and many more weigh in on what they’d love to see in the future.

And who knows: With the future of the franchise so up in the air, maybe some of these dreams will become reality one day.

Kim Swift, designer, Portal: I have a secret shame; I really like Ewoks. I’m often hesitant to admit this because I’ve caught hell from diehard Star Wars fans about that fact. I have also been playing a lot of strategy games lately so that genre has been floating around in my head. Based on that, the Star Wars game that I would create is an Ewok tower defense game called Def-Endor. I also like puns; I can already hear the collective groaning from the internet.

In Return of the Jedi, the Ewoks had really interesting defenses that would make for a compelling spin on the strategy game genre. In Def-Endor, you play as the tribe’s leader and you’re tasked to protect the village from an incoming invasion. Imagine building up your Ewok village, setting guerrilla warfare style traps, building look-out towers and preparing for waves of Imperial troops. Have I mentioned that Ewoks are awesome?

Derek Yu, designer, Spelunky: The best Star Wars game I’ve ever played is TIE Fighter, which put you in control of a pilot for the Galactic Empire. The space combat itself was superb, but what really made the game stand out was its unique portrayal of the Empire/rebel relationship from the perspective of a simple soldier (needless to say, the Imperials are the “good guys” in this story). I also liked that big-name characters like Vader were used sparingly but effectively — that kind of restraint is a hallmark of good design.

TIE Fighter could have been an entire series all on its own, but sadly it began and ended in 1994 — I’d love to see it resurrected for the modern era! Give me modern 3-D graphics with all the fixings. Give me an Oculus Rift, a microphone, and a good joystick and let me feel like I’m really in the cockpit. But maybe more importantly, give me a little more freedom between missions to look around and talk to my fellow soldiers and officers. For a flight simulator, TIE Fighter had a fantastic narrative and I’d like to see that pushed further in a sequel.

There’s a lot you could do with a dream game set in the Star Wars universe, but right now all I can think about is hunting down some rebel scum!

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Cara Vs. Crysis 3 Was Never A Fair Fight

rockpapershotgun.com

“Are you into BDSM?” I ask

By Cara Ellison on February 14th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

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We sent Cara Ellison to EA to play some Crysis 3. We would like to formally apologise to Crytek and EA for having sent Cara Ellison to play some Crysis 3. Here is why:

Crysis games have always been beautiful. The Crysis series is a handsome, well-buffed man with grace and presence, one you’d never say no to being photographed with, one you’d proudly say you’d dated. You probably keep all the photos of him in a drawer, ready to pull out when your friends come over so that you can say that you hit that once and wow he was amazing. But the secret is that whenever he opened his mouth he told jokes so embarrassingly unfunny and garbled it was never worth taking him to meet anyone, and your utter confusion at what he meant by anything was the final nail in the relationship coffin. Though sometimes you gaze at his face from afar and remember that time you went to space because of reasons.

From what I played, and it wasn’t for very long (less than an hour, I’d say), Crysis 3 is voluptuous as hell in the looks department. The feeling of richness and closeness and dare I say it – verisimilitude – in the environment remains unrivalled. The New York of 2047, 20 years after the events of Crysis 2, is in a big mad bio-dome, and you are dropped into a jungle-covered Chinatown at one point to have a sit down dinner with your girl and attempt to make her laugh at your interpretations of the fortunes from fortune cookies.

I’m joking – you’re there to murder stuff.

At some point after asking Michael Read, the producer of Crysis 3, about the plot, I realised I’d stopped listening. Luckily I had a recording of the explanation. It came out something like this:

“We’ve taken on a whole new form when it comes to storytelling with this one. One of the new things that actually ties into it is a new piece of technology called performance capture. We actually released a video online of Psycho. We have a new writer – we had Richard Morgan for Crysis 2, now it’s a British writer by the name of Stephen Hall who has done some sci-fi writing, he’s been working with us on Crysis 3. We have Prophet – the leader of the squad in Crysis 1, had a small cameo role in the beginning and the end of Crysis 2, and now you’re playing him in Crysis 3. So you also have another character called Claire Fontinelli, she’s one of the leaders of this rebel group that’s operating inside the dome fighting Cell and Psycho fights alongside her in this quest to basically shut CELL down. Prophet’s goal ties into this as he’s having visions of the future and things that are potentially going to happen -”

My brain somehow thinks that he has said “Prophet’s goat” which I immediately perk up at: I imagine this goat having visions and attempting to draw them in Crayola with its tiny goat hooves for this high-tech douchebag Prophet in ten kinds of body armour waiting arms crossed – “What, goat, what?”. Fifty infinitely customisable weapons lie behind Prophet, totally pointless as this is a scene about a goat and its dreams.

But sadly this is not about a goat. It is about this guy we seem to have little reason to give a shit about, because the game industry spits out dudes like Prophet every day and they land on my front lawn and make a mess. I shouldn’t have begun asking about the story, because I really quite liked the shooty-killy parts.

“He’s trying to explain to the rebels that there’s more to what’s going on than just, you know, CELL fighting for these energy resources and what they’re doing under the Dome to do this.”

God I wish there was less to what’s going on. I really do. I’ve become horrifyingly more aware in the time it took me to play the Crysis 3 single player demo that videogames seem to borrow meandering, convoluted features and terms from genre fiction in order to have more weird missions to go on, and more outlandish stuff to do, without ever actually giving you a reason to do them. There is a complete lack of narrative focus. I don’t care that the planet is melting down right now, because you told me that last time and it was just a set of deus ex machina and some nice looking trinkets.

Look at that game affectionately known as Portal plants you into an easy to understand situation that immediately compels you to explore – and to escape. It then proceeds to tell you a more detailed story gradually through every facet of its environment – level design, audio, decals on the walls, even the glimpses of Chell’s body via a portal. Because the information comes in small doses, you have time to let it dissolve slowly in your mouth like a really piquant cola cube. Sometimes at night I would dream of those brand new sugary doses of story scrawled on the wall of a test chamber. But it seems like Crysis 3 will just jack open your mouth and hose down your gullet with thousands upon thousands of Jelly Babies until you’re sick on your mum’s brand new cream carpet. We’ve got to the third installment of this and it is still having us bowf up disembodied jelly heads.

“There’s a lot of character interactions that happen in this game, more so than previous games.” I hope this means that there will be a god damn you Psycho! line somewhere in the game. “I’ve been asked to sum up this Crysis in the past and the word I’d use to describe it is human.” That’s interesting – perhaps this will be the departure from Crysis 2 to story. But from what I’ve seen, it still has a little way to go. Gruff cockney men called Psycho seem suspiciously familiar to me.

Prophet has a nicely pressed Nanosuit and apparently thinks a lot of himself what with the name and everything. The suit makes you godlike, as in the previous instalments, and it seemed from the demo that far from being about story or characters, this game is primarily about the relationship between your Nanosuit and Prophet’s extremely limber Predator Bow. Throughout the demo I got a lot of purchase and satisfaction from that bow – cloaking and arrowing people in the face was my signature move. The bow was a pleasure to use – pulling an arrow back was such a viscous tease, and the arc of the arrow would appear before you release your finger, sending the arrow THUNK into an eyeball. The one thing I couldn’t figure out though, was exactly why I could click at any time to mod any number of stats on my bow. I haven’t got time, I thought. I don’t want to spend all day fiddling with the string on this thing when I am getting shot at. “You’ve got under-barrel attachments you’ve got scope attachments, different clips, you’ve got different types of ammo – the bow itself you can change the draw range, you can have a different tip type…” Mike elaborates. You can insta-mod pretty much any weapon in the game, which I think is a nice touch if you’ve got the time to sit around like Psycho who kept telling me to do stuff in the demo instead of doing it himself. Lazy sod.

Your suit has also been upgraded so that you can toggle to see where enemies are situated and how best to take them out – a sort of threat detector system, which I did like – although I have a bit of a weird aversion to being told what to do by a HUD, so I only used it a minimal amount. I’m stubborn like that. And the suit can hack towers, which is new. But there’s a combination chart for that too, you can pick and choose the highlights of your suit just like you can with the weapons. It’s about customising the way you approach things.

The only thing that’s really new here is a slight tweak to clothes and some new accessories and how it looks shinier. It’s a hollow shell of glamour, where you boot it up to render a ridiculous sandbox kill arena full of brocessories. Bro bling. This game is crawling with brotrinkets and brotrinketmongers. Nothing to do but kill bros all day, in a very stylish way, and at the end of it you go to bed having learned absolutely nothing at all about anything, but it was very nice to look at and kill bros. If Arnie had a wet dream about some armour and a bow this’d be it. It’s just bro central.

So little did I have to ask about Crysis 3 after playing the demo that I got rather antsy. Craig Pearson was floating about being point man for PC Gamer that day, and had just finished interviewing Michael, the producer I’ve already quoted above. But the poor guy didn’t know what was about to happen to him. Craig tapped me on the shoulder as he left the interview room, in the manner of what I now understand was a signal that we were in a good-cop bad-cop scenario, and tipped me to ask him why he is into PC BDSM, as he didn’t have the time. Oh yeah? I think. I will.

So I went a little off track down a path that is quite shady and is probably populated with headcrabs.

“Why do you hate PCs so much,” I ask, darkly.

“I don’t hate PCs!” he says, and bless him, I really like him, but he has no idea who has the wheel now.

“You hate them so much because you make them work really hard,” I say.

“That’s the ‘cry’ part in Crytek, right,” he smiles, slightly uneasily. I mentally give him points for the pun.

“I was going to say, I don’t know if you know that you have misspelt ‘crisis’ again,” I say, with a straight face.

“Uuuuuh yeah,” he says, “Just a little bit. But that ties in with ‘Crytek’ you know.”

“Yeah?” I say. I look expectantly at him.

He carries on. “So…. with PC gaming itself, when Crysis 1 came out we were known for this game that melted PCs, and it wouldn’t run, and… you know, but underneath all that, underneath the graphical abilities of what this game pushed I mean there was still a fantastic game in behind it. For Crysis 2 it was a whole new learning process – it had a new engine that we were iterating on for the Cry Engine 3, and in addition to that we were also developing for consoles, something we had never done before. So now we learned from those experiences, through Far Cry, Crysis 1 and Crysis 2, and really compiled all that together, and go okay how can we make this development process go smoothly but still push it out. So you start off looking at it and going, well developing for consoles is the baseline, and when you build up to a certain point you can separate the two out and really focus like – how hard can we push PCs. And we wanted to make that future-proof as well, not only for the game, but also for the engine and our licensees and all of these things that tie in together on that front.”

“So… you want to push PCs as far as they can go,” I say.

“Well you know, our CEO came out and said ‘Crysis 3 will melt your PC’ and it does push it very, very hard. We are pushing really on the boundaries of the consoles as well and what the capabilities were and what we were able to do for PS3. The amount of detail that our art guys – we have one guy who is really dedicated to lighting and any time he asks for something in the engine he typically gets it. Lighting has really become a big focus in a lot of the engines… trying to achieve that realism and pushing the graphical qualities. It also enables our designers to do more with the levels.”

“With all this customising and pushing the PC as far as you can go this really sounds a lot like PC BDSM,” I say. “Like you are fetishising technology.”

I think Mike was sort of flustered by this statement so he rambled about the engine sort of repeating himself for a little while in a bit of an adorable way. I wait until he peters out.

“Are you into BDSM?” I ask.

“…..No.”

“But you have a… relationship with your PC at home?”

He sort of smiles, and hesitates. “…….I beat my PC up a lot.”

My eyes begin to glint. I HAVE DONE IT, I think, feeling victorious. Oh press junket sheen, I have messed you all up!

“You know, occasionally you have to throw your PC across the room,” he continues, with a sly grin, “and be like work and then it magically works again.”

“I bet your PC is very sexy because it has to deal with Crysis all the time,” I say.

“It’s about me dominating my own PC,” Mike says. He’s taken a flying leap into Cara territory now. I am eating him alive.

“How good is your PC at home?” I ask, rubbing my hands together.

“Uh… it’s okay. I think I’ve got a Core I7 with a 460 in it, and like 12 gigs of RAM.”

I nod. “How big is your screen?” (Oh come on it is the obvious question.)

“Uhhhhhhh 24 inch screen.” 24 whole inches. “Yeah.” He nods, because he knows he just said it in a context he never wanted to even dip his toes into. “I’m happy with it,” he says, slightly apologetically. I try to nod understandingly. “I’m just waiting to upgrade it to the next level.” Upgrade huh. “You know… even on the low and medium settings [Crysis 3] still looks fantastic.”

I ask him why I can’t play a girl hero in it. “There was actually a female Nanosuit designed,” he said. “That’s a big secret. Nobody’s seen it and I probably shouldn’t say it. …It actually looks really cool.”

“Does it have special boob padding?” I ask.

“Well of course.”

He got his own back. A few hours ago Crysis friendzoned me.

__________________

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Features - Proteus: A Trio of Artisanal Game Reviews

gamasutra.com

By Ian Bogost

What is Proteus? How can it be appreciated? Setting aside the ongoing debate on whether or not it’s a game, Noted academic and developer Ian Bogost here presents three reviews as three lenses through which to approach and appreciate it.

One: Nil Person

Video games are narcissistic. They are about you, even when they put you in someone else’s shoes. You are a space marine among hell spawn. You are a mafioso just released from prison. You are a bear with a bird in your backpack. You are a Tebowing Tim Tebow. We may think we play video games to be someone or something else, but inevitably we do so to be ourselves as well — ourselves in the guise of someone else.

Film and television and literature may not put you in control like games do, but instead they put you outside, forcing you to take seriously the fact that the characters are not you, but rather someone else. Sometimes being in control is too facile, too misleading.

Does piloting Uncharted’s Nathan Drake from ledge to ledge lead to any greater understanding of his opaque motivations than watching House of Cards’ equally impenetrable Frank Underwood? If agency means click-guessing The Walking Dead’s Lee Everett around his family drugstore, then maybe passivity is underrated.

Even games without embodied, playable first- or third-person human characters or their synecdoches are still about “you.” In Tetris or Drop7 or Osmos, you are not anyone. Rather, “you” are the pretend god in control of a manipulable world upon which meaningful force can be exerted. These are not games you might be likely to reconstruct out of paper or mashed potatoes, but you could if you set your mind to the task. They are tiny universes in which you are the prime mover, even if not the designer. You are the player, and without you the game grinds to a halt.

It’s tempting to see Proteus as just another first-person art game, one that starts with conventional keyboard-and-mouse shuffle-looking and then strips away other verbs like “jump” and “shoot.” Only movement remains, along with the obstreperous spacebar command to “sit,” as if giving the finger to all those games in which sitting would result in an immediate bloodbath.

Many will dismiss Proteus on these grounds, concluding that it is “not a game,” before launching into some tired tirade about the proper properties of genuine games: goals, choices, victory, what have you. Those players have been successfully provoked. Proteus intends the provocation, but doesn’t do enough to follow through on it. At question is not whether the game offers sufficient choice or challenge to deserve the name “game,” but whose choice or challenge is presented in the first place.

It’s not the gameplay that’s missing from Proteus. Rather, it’s the you, the agent who would partake of it. Or, at least, in Proteus you are not the you you are used to.

The game loads. At first you think you are on a boat, or some sort of vessel, anyway. You look around. A misty island appears in the distance, appears because you can see it. You can hear the lapping water. The horizon seems to bob along to match your movements and your shifting perception. You move and look, exploring the sea, the beach, the hill, the mountain.

But there was no boat. It should have been your first clue, like the obvious sign at the start of an M. Night Shyamalan film — the blatant hint that gives away the twist before you knew there was one. What can rest unperturbed on water and on earth, but still move nimbly? A spectre. A miniature hovercraft. Jesus of Nazareth.

Things get weirder on land. Traversing Proteus feels familiar, banal even. Not the space, the island itself, but the traversal. Moving, looking — you’ve done it all before, inside Castle Wolfenstein, on Bob-omb Battlefield, in Rapture. But something’s off this time, something subtle. Different terrains can be traversed without distinction. Hills and summits can be ascended smoothly and without struggle no matter their incline. From a distance, you see a snow-capped mountain and devise a tactic for reaching its summit. But your plan is quickly proven superfluous, as contact with the peak’s foothill results in an immediate, quick assent, as if by invisible funicular.

What to make of it? Dismay, at first, even anger. Perhaps the creators of Proteus were too lazy or too inept to craft a more sophisticated locomotion system, opting instead just to couple a default camera view to first-person controls, an abstract cursor in an environment.

But this obvious analysis is also the wrong one. Rather than conclude that the work is incomplete or ill-conceived, why not instead assume that it means to be exactly what it is, and that it issues a challenge to those who might interact with it: to form credible theories about why it is the way it is, rather than criticisms about why it is not something else.

There is no “you” in Proteus, at least not in the way you thought there was. There is only an island. The experience you have on that island isn’t an experience on an island, at all. Instead, it’s an experience of an island. An island’s experience. Proteus is a game about being an island instead of a game about being on one.

What does an island do? Not much, on a human scale. Islands are accreted from submarine vulcanism over hundreds of thousands of years, as tectonic plate directions shift to yield protrusions in solid, dense rock. The Big Island of Hawaii is young at some half a million years old. The oldest seamount in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain, Mejii Seamount, is at least 80 million years old.

Proteus spares us the obvious portrayals of geological time, of hot spots on the Earth’s mantle, of lava flows and shield building and erosion, of scientistic educationalism. Such features are not really of the island, after all, but of its creation. Just as Nate Drake isn’t the same as his ontogeny from zygote to fetus to infant, so being Proteus isn’t the same as its simulated, abstracted geological formation.

As for “exploration,” such is the game’s clever conceit, the ruse that tricks you into thinking the work is about you, into thinking that you are there at all. Proteus meets you partway, offering the appearance of changes in movement, of changes in view, of the ability to “sit.” But these are just metaphors, the minimum necessary invitation to provide you, the human player, a satisfactory analogy through which to grasp the island’s existence as island.

The arbitrary configurations of a computer interface, whose careless tousles along a 3D vector happen to correspond with the usual manner in which a player might navigate a virtual world. One explores Proteus less like one explores a wooded nature preserve and more like one explores a naked body — by moving it through one’s attention rather than by moving one’s attention through it.

In Proteus, we find something in between the personal time of human agency and the historical time of tectonic effects. Day and night doesn’t pass, so much as the island dresses in day and night’s clothing. Night doesn’t descend upon the island so much as the island nights, like the squirrel scurries or the leaves fall. If tousled in the right way, it relents, donning the garb of different seasons. Time doesn’t pass upon it any more than you move around it. It is you who is too dense, too stuck in your own ape body that you require time to pass before your senses kick in.

Islands. They are a common staple of video games: Myst, Uncharted, The Secret of Monkey Island. Yet, we don’t think much about these islands themselves. Even in a game like Far Cry, in which the environment has a much larger role to play, that environment is still rendered for you, you the playable character and for you the human player. Proteus’s island isn’t for you at all. It isn’t concerned with your attention span or your expectations. It’s just there. Just there, until it gets bored and turns you off.

Two: Traveler

It was springtime in Proteus when I visited. Spring is strange there: the trees dump pink and yellow petals onto the ground. I think they were petals, anyway; it’s hard to tell in Proteus, where everything looks foreign.

Imagine the most improbably regular autumn, in which leaves tumble from branches along a regular rhythm rather than in tandem with the environment, in which physics is reduced to mere downness. Now imagine that the leaves are pink, and that the tree canopies bear no foliage, but only petals. Floral kudzu, taking over.

Are there even trees underneath, I began to wonder, or only the form of trees? Scaffolds, maybe, the twisted mess of iron detritus to which, for whatever reason, petals have attached. The remains of the island of Myst, or of the planet Sera millennia hence.

As a place to visit, Proteus is beyond alien. Unworldly rather than otherworldly. Its apparent familiarity defies that otherness at first, like roads and touring buses might do in Kyoto or Khartoum. You’ve seen it all before, you’ll think when you arrive, and you won’t be wrong.

But you visit Proteus to see what clouds and flowers look like in Proteus, not to replace sights you could find just as easily at home. In Kuala Lumpur, you eat Nasi Lemak rather than steak and eggs; in Proteus, billboard trees spill flora and tousle pixel-beetles. It’s just how things are.

When you stop think about it, it’s strange that we consider travel a kind of leisure, that we talk about taking time off for it, that we call it vacation. Travel is a lot of work, after all. Not just the process of voyaging, the cars and carparks and the airports and such. Also the process of being in your destination. Finding your way around the streets and the countryside. Learning some of the language, finding a comfortable café. Taking in the pedestrian mall and the art museum. It’s exhausting.

Proteus is no different. Transiting the island is both effortless and arduous, like taking the Métro across the small diameter of Paris. Effective and ready to hand, yet meandering and inefficient. Try not to look like a tourist, WASDing around to get your bearings, or following the dirt path etched through the grass toward the abandoned hut. It will disappoint, like all places of interest. You’ll have to get acclimated on your own. There is no “tutorial” for Oslo or Ottawa, why should Proteus have one?

Eventually, all travel ceases to surprise us. It doesn’t take long. Even on a short trip to somewhere unfamiliar, the diner you chose for breakfast the first day can become stifling by the third. But returning to a once foreign place as it becomes familiar offers new depths. Transiting confidently from Charles de Gaulle to St. Michel Notre Dame by RER, then walking to the hotel you meant to choose rather than the one you guessed about. Knowing which way to turn when you alight from an exit chosen deliberately at Odéon rather than Cluny - La Sorbonne. These small gestures become an experienced traveler’s triumphs.

Most places change slowly, so expert travel entails one of two options: returning frequently, or lingering for an extended stay. And just as its petals and paths betray convention, so Proteus makes unusual demands.

In one sense, returning isn’t possible: Proteus procedurally generates itself anew with each visit, so no two trips fall upon familiar soil. But yet every version of Proteus presents an identifiable rendition, borrowing a page from Italo Calvino’s Kublai Khan: “I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced.” Each rendition is not so unfamiliar as to be wholly foreign, just as each district of an unfamiliar city still subscribes to an overall plan. In this sense, Proteus is not very protean; what changes is incidental.

Yet, since getting your bearings and finding your way are so central to your visit, the utility of familiarity melts away. Would Manhattan still be Manhattan if each face of its rectilinear blocks were torn asunder and reattached to one another at random? Yes, in a way, but it would take some getting used to. In the process, you might discover new watering holes or green grocers or parks or bodegas or buskers thanks to having your routine disrupted. Such is what it feels like to return to a new generation of Proteus, where one keeps an eye out for previously unseen wildlife instead of previously unseen gastropubs.

Still, one can evade doomsday in Proteus by saving a “postcard” for later. Pressing a key in-world takes an abstract screen capture which embeds your visit’s state in its pixel data. You can return later or share the image (and its embedded world) with others. We once went on safari to hunt animals, then to capture them on film. Now in Proteus you can capture the world around animals on disk.

Lingering comes more naturally than return. When visiting an unfamiliar place, there comes a point at which everything snaps into place. In most cases, that moment is conceptual; it’s in your head. Time and traffic and tacos pass around and through you, and eventually after enough of it, clarity overtakes confusion.

But Proteus makes this familiarity real, or material at least. A part of the landscape. Time advances in Proteus too, in the sense that day turns to night and back to day again. Personal time, anyway; historical time just lingers.

Eventually, some visitors to Proteus will find a way to move beyond the eternal spring. Growing familiar with Prague or Peoria is a matter of persistence, to be sure, but not much more than that. Simply being there with intention is enough, and it pays dividends. By contrast, lingering in Proteus takes more than persistence. It takes a certain kind of looking, and listening for time to progress beyond days and into seasons. A particular kind; there is only one, and it has to be decoded. In this sense, Proteus is more like Myst than it first seems: eventually, only one path opens. Cities don’t have solutions, but Proteus does, in a way.

Summer was pleasant, but I have to admit I began racing through autumn, which was bleak and soggy rather than vivid and crisp. By winter, I wished I hadn’t stayed so long. Something was not quite right. The petals were gone, the dragonflies and the frogs too. Just blue blueness, the simulated night reflecting off the simulated snow. The galaxy buzzing instead of the dragonflies.

The theory of alien archaeology resurfaced. In retrospect, if the trees aren’t trees, then why would the petals be petals? The best I can say in full confidence is that they are pink, and square. Pure pinkness and pure squareness, pure rectinlinear-roseness, as if borrowed from a James Turrell installation, tumbling to the ground (I’ll call it the ground) and infecting the soil with pink as well, spreading like love or like sickness.

Then something happened, and my trepidation seemed warranted. I was reflecting on the fact that the flowers were even more unearthly than I had previously realized when my trip came to an unexpected end. You’ll have to see it for yourself. Cities don’t have spoilers, but Proteus does, in a way.

I suppose every trip is a trip to nowhere. Don’t you secretly fantasize that your vacation to Fiji or San Francisco will be the last visit — not just your last, but anyone’s? Doomsday is the only day worth dreaming. Normally it’s impossible; someone always stays behind. But not in Proteus. Nothing lingers, except those postcards you captured to show off later. Don’t worry, Proteus helpfully offers a button to reveal their containing folder, so you can delete them.

Three: Habitat Modulation

Imagine a radio made out of a world. What would you tune in? The rain, maybe. The stochastic dance of its droplets. Rrr rr rr rr r r r. I like it best when it strengthens enough to chime against the windowpanes. Fluid fingernails on the glass.

Sound fills spaces. It’s called diffusion, the spreading of sonic energy in a physical environment. Perfectly diffusive spaces share the same acoustic properties all throughout. Such settings have to be engineered, whether architecturally — like a carefully designed concert hall — or prosthetically through the addition of sound diffusors like one finds in a recording studio.

Most spaces aren’t so purposefully designed; they are “non-diffusive,” which is just to say, ordinary. You configure your home theater to offer an ideal listening space around your couch. You lean in, struggling to hear your dinner companion because the restaurant was designed to maximize liveliness around your table rather than to optimize conversation upon it.

In our daily lives, we shift constantly among different sonic domains. Our bias toward visual culture means that usually we see that transition more than we hear it, but careful attention can help attenuate visual in favor of auditory sensation. Instead of seeing a morning comprised of house, yard, car, if you squint a bit you can hear one made of kettle, birds, engine, NPR Morning Edition.

Sometimes you have to close your eyes to hear. So overwhelming is the visual sensorium, and so central to our social lives. We close our eyes to calm ourselves because it’s so hard to focus on our inner thoughts with so many outer influences pouring in. The guru does not advise the meditation practitioner to cover the ears, but to close the eyes, at least temporarily, to reset the dynamic energy of vision, but not so much as to fall into slumber.

You probably do this more often than you realize, but still not often enough. Morning again. The door latches behind you, leaving behind the thud of children’s feet, the clank of the dishwasher, the chatter of Matt Lauer. Instead: a deep breath, the swoosh of nearby leaves, the whirr of a distant lawnmower. A small moment lost among larger moments, but precious for its modesty. Like seeing the big eyes of a small child, hearing the wind beetle through leaves draws out vice from the chest and spreads it across the skin, where it burns and then evaporates.

Such moments are rarer than they could be. You might visit the woods behind the park or drive out to the nature preserve or the beach, or the shopping mall even, but such propositions are too inconvenient to become habits.

We’ve tried to domesticate them: fireplaces, aquaria, the white noise generators that take the place of alarm clocks in mid-range hotel rooms: gentle rain, crashing surf, babbling brook. But these aren’t meant to be heard, just to mask out other sounds until boredom or slumber overtakes them.

Proteus offers an alternative: a sonic device one uses by moving through its spatial landscape and its temporal fluxes. If a toy like a Spirograph is used to produce complex mathematical curves by manipulating its far simpler physical apparatus, then a world like Proteus is used to produce complex sonic configurations in the same manner.

Exploring Proteus is also an optical experience, of course. The game presents a rendered 3D environment that facilitates navigation. But its imprecise, indeterminate visual style invites the player to deemphasize the usual desire for scintillation through visual verisimilitude in favor of listening for desirable auditory configurations. One moves through Proteus not to see, but to arrange a particular kind of hearing.

At first this is rough going. All you hear are random sounds, a cacophony of electronic tones and noise. A jumble. A weird mismatch, too: a pastoral nightclub run by pixel cupcakes. But it’s just the surprise of auditory novelty, like the first sonic deluge of New York City to the novice ear. Eventually patterns emerge; or rather, you become able to produce sonic patterns by orchestrating your movements. Proteus is an island you tune like a radio. Or maybe, a radio that looks like an island.

What’s playing? Spring-night-rain-meadow-fireflies. An oscillating whistle of the insects along with the sprinkle of rain, which slowly subsides as the clouds pass, giving way to the pure tone of digital owls.

The nuisance of the sunrise, whistling flute-like. It’s worse than the alarm clock’s klaxon, but like the latter you cannot escape it. Just wait it out, let the rosy dawn give way to cyan and the flutes to frequency-oscillating sine tones.

Seeking respite from the din. A tall mountain on this run of Proteus, blanched by snow and beset with the silence of dead goblin trees on one side. The wind. Finally the throbbing ebbs. Too soon really, it becomes stifling in turn. A tall castle’s keep without surrounding battlements presents itself at the opposite end of the peak, radiating abstract, oscillating squawks. The wind sounds cold when married to it.

Finding a frog or a brace of ducks. In Proteus safari is not just a matter of seeing a new creature, but of mixing it down with the background tracks, of dancing with the bounce of square amphibians and semicircular fowl. Then lingering with the frog until night falls, when it sings a rhythmic, fizzy ballad if undisturbed.

Every channel is synesthesia and mixed metaphor. Summer is syncopated flowers. Autumn draws itself out, but still jingles with the bells of leafiness. Those chimes don’t represent the leaves like the droplets represent the rain, no more than the French horns represent clear skies. Rather, to hear the horns, escape the rain. Just before daybreak autumn creaks like a boat. Winter’s midnight jingles like the paralyzing ghost of an alien carnival where, years ago, an almond-eyed daredevil was decapitated.

A music visualizer does just what its name suggests: it makes music visible by transforming an audio input’s frequency spectrum into parameters for a moving image. You’ve seen them in Winamp and in iTunes, and in Jeff Minter’s Neon light synthesizer in the Xbox 360. But Proteus is not a music visualizer. It does not present a visual, traversable representation of a musical composition. Rather, it is a habitat receiver that can be tuned in for sound, like a radio receiver can home in on a waveform’s amplitude or frequency.

And like Winamp or iTunes, it’s best to run Proteus windowed. As your work progresses, different moods will suggest themselves. Just drop back in and tune in the right habitat. Save a few postcards like you’d fashion a playlist or save a car radio preset. You’ll know you’re using it right when you know where you are at a distance, from Word or from PowerPoint.

Eventually, I began to grow irritated that my MacBook keyboard’s play/pause button wouldn’t temporarily silence Proteus when a call came in or a meeting had to be conducted. I’d finally learned to stop looking at it, at all. It had become an audio tool, albeit an unusual one. Instead of scanning a playlist or submitting to a Spotify recommendation, I learned to relocate my auditory alter-ego.

A radio station transmits on a carrier frequency, and a radio tunes it in by converting that signal for demodulation. Proteus is transmitter and receiver in one, the simulated world doing the transmission and the player’s position within it acting the indicator on the broadcast band. But unlike a radio frequency receiver, which hides all the alternatives via filtering, Proteus has no fixed stations, no clearer or weaker signals. Any position on the habitat modulation band might be equally desirable, depending on the circumstances. A world radio without static, generating bandwidth forever.

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Copyright © 2012 UBM Techweb

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Even Cowgirls Bleed oder: Eine Twine-Love-Story

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“So really, you did the only sensible thing a girl can do: you picked up your petticoats, you bought yourself a gun, and you headed out west.”

Ich liebe Twine-Spiele. Stellt euch den Satz bitte in haushohen, laut surrenden Las Vegas-Neonleuchten in Buchstabenform geschrieben vor. Ich liebe sie von ganzem Herzen. Selbst Code-Zeilen in Zehntausendschaften, selbst jede noch so teuer und hochwertig produzierte 3D-Grafik oder jedwede orchestrale Untermalung sind ein Witz gegen das, wozu die Fantasie des Menschen fähig ist, setzt man sie denn einiger sorgfältig ausgewählter Worte aus.

Gefangen zwischen zwei Stühlen, beschnitzt mit den ehrlichen Phrasen „zu viel Literatur, um ein Spiel zu sein“ und „zu viel Spiel, um Literatur“ zu sein, wirkt sie vornehmlich abschreckend: Interactive Fiction wird von Spielern und Lesern gleichermaßen mit Skepsis betrachtet, sie sei ja nichts als langweilige Zeitverschwendung aus der Feder derer, die sich nicht dazu aufraffen konnten, Engines zu programmieren und Grafiken zu gestalten, gemacht für jene, die so viel lesen, dass sie auch den Beipackzettel jeder Schachtel Aspirin mit Begeisterung verschlingen.

Die wenigsten würden abstreiten, dass Christine Love eine ausgeprägte Vorliebe für ausgefallene, textlastige Werke hat: Die junge Entwicklerin der Visual Novel-Erfolge Digital und Analogue könnte mit stets bunt eingefärbter Haarpracht und eigenartiger Aura zweifelslos selbst einer Visual Novel – oder aber einer Punkrock-Band – entsprungen sein und präsentierte das 2010 erschienene Digital in Form eines Bulletin Board-Systems der Achtziger, in dem die Spieler den mysteriösen Toden künstlicher Intelligenzen nachgehen.

Hierbei ist nicht nur die unübliche Form bemerkenswert, sondern vor allem ihre Rechtfertigung: Love, die sich eigenen Aussagen zufolge eher als Autor denn als Spielemacher sieht, hätte das zugegeben sehr lineare Spiel ebenso gut in Form herkömmlicher Prosa veröffentlichen können, wählte aber die interaktive Fiktion als Instrument um hungrigen Augen mehr zu bieten als die bloße Lektüre eines Textes. Spieler nehmen so aktiv am Aufbau des Schriftstücks teil, entscheiden an vorgegebenen Stellen, wo es als nächstes hingeht und sehen, wie ihre Handlungen die Geschichte an unzähligen Abzweigungen entlang plätschern lassen.

Ren’Py, das freie Programm zur Erstellung von Visual Novels, dem neben Loves Liebes- und Hass-Double-Feature auch die – verzeiht meine Ausdrucksweise – Krüppelmädchenromanze Katawa Shoujo entsprang, ist nicht wie Twine. Nach getaner Arbeit werden mit Ren’Py Geschichten in Form lauffähiger Dateien für gängige Betriebssysteme ausgespuckt, sie landen aber erst im Kopf der Spielerschaft, wenn sich diese zu Download und Ausführung überreden lässt.

Twine. Twine ist unheimlich schnell. Spiele, die mit Twine gemacht wurden, sind in die Form einer herkömmlichen Website gegossen, erfordern keinerlei Plug-in (wie Flash oder Unity) und sind verzögerungsfrei in jedem Browser spielbar. Twine-Spiele erklären sich von selbst – und in Sekundenschnelle. Sofort fallen irgendwo auf den meist düsteren Hypertext-Leinwänden einzelne Worte in grellen Farben auf: Verknüpfen zur nächsten Passage, zum nächsten Häppchen der Geschichte.

Das durchschnittliche Twine-Spiel fühlt sich starr an, es bewegt sich nichts, alles sieht irgendwie… alt aus. Doch genau an dieser Stelle, an der vermutlich eine schmerzliche Quote der Besucher seufzend das Tab schließt, trügt der Schein gewaltig. So ist die Geschichte entgegen vieler Erwartungen meist innerhalb weniger Minuten fertig erzählt und erfordert lediglich eine handvoll Klicks, um ihr Ende zu finden. Zeigefingerbewegungen, die uns anderswo in spektakulärer Bedeutungslosigkeit ein paar Kugeln in die Gesichter virtueller Widersacher versenken lassen, geleiten uns hier durch zuweilen höchst persönliche Nacherzählungen invidueller Erfahrungen, die in erstaunlicher Weise aufmuntern, bedrücken, erklären, nie zu träumen gewagte Pfade beschreiten und schlichtweg faszinieren.

Spiele über Liebe, über Hass, über den ersten Schultag oder gequälte Kindheiten, über beschissene Jobs, das Leben, das Sterben, über verrückte Träume und völlig Unerklärliches, seien es Kristallkriegerinnen oder Waschbär-Monarchen – Twine hat sie alle. Twine-Spiele sind so vielfältig und einzigartig wie ihre Macher und werden jeden Tag mehr. Besonders in Zeiten, in denen ein unangenehmer Großteil der Spiele-Veröffentlichungen auf die traurig anmutende Zeichnung einer Zielgruppe zugeschnitten ist, tut es gut, einem Extremum zu begegnen, dessen peinlich generische Handlung sich nicht in wenigen Augenblicken vorhersehen lässt.

Twine-Spiele lassen sich in ähnlich hocher Geschwindigkeit erleben, in der sie entwickelt werden. Textpassagen werden in einer simplen grafischen Oberfläche als Blöcke erzeugt, getextet und mit Linien verbunden, um eine Art Spinnenetz zu bilden, das den späteren Spielverlauf und seine möglichen Pfade spiegelt. Das „Netz” kann dabei jede erdenkliche Form und Anzahl an Abzweigungen innehaben – möglich ist alles von einer geraden Linie bis zur Zettelwirtschaft von John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Die Grundlegenden Funktionen sind in wenigen Minuten erlernt, erfordern weder Programmierkenntnisse noch handwerkliches Geschick und zielen voll und ganz auf das wesentliche ab: Das Erzählen einer interaktiven Geschichte.

Selbstverständlich lässt sich aus Twine mehr herausholen als die rudimentäre Basis – einsamer, weißer Text auf schwarzem Hintergrund – zunächst hergibt. Mittels einiger zusätzlicher Zeilen lassen sich breitgefächerte Mechaniken einfügen, die die Spielerfahrung aufwerten oder sogar gänzlich bestimmen. So finden hübsche Bilder, der treibende Zeitdruck, Musik oder ganze Rollenspiel-Systeme ihren Weg in das schlanke Game-Making-Tool, dessen Macher ganz wahrscheinlich nie mit dererlei Abweichungen gerechnet hätte. Die einen nutzen dafür CSS und JavaScript, andere schlagen dem Spieler einfach ungezwungen vor, nebenbei den passenden Soundtrack laufen zu lassen. Twine und seine Nutzer scheißen auf Konventionen. Punkrock!

“Next thing you know, you’re in her apartment, being slammed against a wooden wall in exactly the way you’ve always dreamed of.”

Christine Love und Even Cowgirls Bleed sind Ausreißer. Es ist ihr erstes veröffentlichtes Twine-Projekt und erzählt die Geschichte eines Großstadtmädchens, das sich in den Wilden Westen aufmacht und nebenbei ihre Eigenschaft, vorzugsweise mit Frauen zu tanzen, teilt. Das Interactive Fiction-Skelett liegt brach, kein großes Spektakel, lediglich reiner Text auf farblich angepasster Kulisse, hervorgehobene Worte, die sich mittels Maus— BLAM!

Beim ersten Knall zucke ich schlagartig zusammen, weil mir auch nach Dutzenden Spielen dieses Typus keines unterkam, das auf diese wohlvertraute und als harmlos geglaubte Geste, das bloße Berühren eines Links, reagierte. Ich fühle mich, als hätte sich tatsächlich ein Schuss gelöst, in einem Revolver in meiner Hand. Dieser Link, diese rot gefärbten und unschädlichen Buchstaben, haben mich verarscht. Christine Love hat mit meinen Erwartungen gespielt, mich betrogen, mir einen Schrecken eingejagt. Und es hat sich großartig angefühlt. Auch sie hat Twines Grundgerüst mit einfachen Mitteln um ungewöhnliche Funktionen erweitert und erzählt eine Geschichte, die sich nicht nur lesen, sondern erleben lässt. Ich werfe die Waffe von Hand zu Hand, ziele auf alles, was sich mir in den Weg stellt, zack, Treffer.

Werke wie Even Cowgirls Bleed befördern Interactive Fiction, die auch ich selbst anfänglich für stagnierend hielt, auf die nächste Stufe. Twine und seine Mutationen sind next level. Aus dem Lesen wird durch Experimentierfreude und etwas Code-Geschick ein Handeln und Fühlen, das den Spieler und das Gespielte miteinander verbindet und positiv überrascht. Es ist zu viel Literatur, um ein Spiel zu sein und zu viel Spiel, um Literatur zu sein. Und es ist genau diese seltsame Mischung, die nirgends so richtig hin passen will, die wir schätzen sollten. Wäre Twine eine Musikrichtung, dann wäre es dreckiger, lauter Punkrock mit selbstgemalten Covern und Plakaten, verstimmten Instrumenten und bunten Frisuren.

Jeder kann den Verstärker auf 11 drehen, drei Akkorde auf der Les Paul-Kopie schrammeln und seinem Publikum unter ohrenbetäubendem Lärm sämtliche Regeln der Musik aus dem Kopf blasen. Genau so kann jeder ein Spiel machen, das eine Geschichte erzählt, die noch nie erzählt wurde. Twine-Spiele sind unglaublich laut und seltsam. Und das tut unglaublich gut.

Dieser Beitrag hätte auch zwei Absätze lang sein und als bloßer Hinweis aufs Spiel funktionieren können, wurde aber spontan zum Loblied auf eines der meiner Meinung nach wichtigsten Game-Making-Tools unserer Zeit. Wer mehr über Twine erfahren will, sei auf Anna Anthropys Twine-Guide und die offizielle Dokumentation verwiesen.

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