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Nostalgia vs. narrative: A series of adventure game letters

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Nostalgia vs. narrative: A series of adventure game letters

By Leigh Alexander on February 20, 2013 at 11:30a

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When freelancers Leigh Alexander and Quintin Smith strike up a correspondence, they aim to analyze games in the context of their own lives. Which means talk of babysitting, electronic music and Braid-creator Jonathan Blow.

Below, they take on the adventure game genre.

The genre is broken

To: Leigh Alexander
From: Quintin Smith
Subject: adventure games

Dear Leigh,

You want to do a letter series on adventure games? Oh, man. You’re not going to come through this in one piece.

I’ll start small: It is 1993. I am sat before the beige pomposity of my family’s Amiga 600. Legs dangling off the chair, a heady 7 MHz of processing power beneath my eager fingers. I am in pain.

I’m playing Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, and have reached the infamous spitting competition. A puzzle that sees you not only having to distract the attendees with Ship’s Horn and re-arrange the planted Flags, that not only has you combine Crazy Straw with Green Drink to get the right consistency of spit, but where you must spit when the area’s background animations indicate that the wind is blowing in the correct direction.

It’s this last part that stumps child-me, that has me roaming the game’s world like an avatar of misery, for hour after hour until finally, my eyes bloated with tears, my mum informs me it’s time for bed.

This happened a lot. My name is Quintin Smith, and I fucking hate adventure games.

I hate them for their byzantine mechanics. But they’re not mechanics. They’re not even puzzles. The adventure games everyone remembers most fondly, those sacrosanct stories handed down from the palace of Gilbert and Schafer, are defined by rubberized obstacles cut from the world’s own cartoonish logic.

The key isn’t intelligence necessarily, but in first hoovering up every object from the painted scenery into your bottomless pockets (better not miss any!), then inserting them into your situation like keys into opinionated locks (better have the right syntax!). A strange, dead-end evolution where success comes from intuition and common sense, yes, but moreso from clicking around, forever, like a blind man feeling their way down the designer’s own gaping colon. Use Baked Potato with Subwoofer. Use Sitar with Cow.

I hate these games because I played so many of them, with no fond memories to show for it. But mostly I hate them because in gaming, a field I’m desperate to evolve, so many people hold these ancient pieces that made a joke of their own obtuseness in high regard. And so long as I’m squatting in my favorite stinking hate-pit I’ll add that I hold unparalleled disregard for Monkey Island 2 because I was really fucking scared of LeChuck. I had to get my mum to play the game whenever that horrible bag of slippery pixels came on the screen.

The older I get, the more the point’n’click feels like the most unfathomably unimaginative use of our medium. But it’s OK! Because adventure games faded away. And while I’m afflicted by something not unlike temporary rabies every time I see an article asking “Whatever happened to adventure games?” I can rest easy in knowing they’re never coming back.

So. It’s 2012. I arise in your living room, rendered hot and peculiar by a quick, clothed nap on your air mattress, to find you, Leigh, playing The Walking Dead. You were casting about a plainly-rendered train for the arduous combination of buttons and levers required to turn it on.

No. No. I said goodbye to this fucking genre 12 years ago! And look at you! You’re not even enjoying it. Knitting your brow as you trundle a sedated protagonist very … slowly … between … three … screens … trying to complete something that’s still not a puzzle, but a tough struggle towards first identifying the solitary solution to the problem, the one the designer decided on, and then applying an obtuse control scheme to complete it, like inserting a square peg into a circular hole.

Here’s what worries me. People think The Walking Dead being quite so good heralds an adventure game revival. I think you have to know better than that. The Walking Dead is good for all the reasons around its flinty core of point’n’click. It’s good because it sates all of our current love of morality and story, with little of the padding in between, offered in an equally-timely episodic format.

You’re with me on this, right? You’re not going to defend adventure games, right?

Aching with anticipation,

Quinns

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge
The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead Sam & Max Monkey Island 2 Special Edition

To: Quintin Smith
From: Leigh Alexander
Subject: Re: adventure games

Dear peculiar, aching Quinns,

Yeah, we’re going to need to talk about adventure games, and how puzzles where a giant cotton swab goes in a giant ear have proven too obtuse for you in the past. I mean, it sounds like you were too young to be grasping that stuff when you tried it! But first, music.

Recently I had to explain to you why I hate genre labels. You keep trying to play me these techno songs where sterile machines tick tonelessly underneath all this migraine noise. Usually there’s some scenester howling melodramatic vocals intended to imitate the 80s. There are about a thousand bands doing that. All these people with middling taste competing to be the most enthusiastic about it on Twitter. It’s gross; it’s trendy.

And when I beg off — nah, that’s not for me; it’s kinda shit — people have all kinds of defenses at the ready: Why do I hate joy? What does it matter if it’s just “fun;” it’s just “fun stuff”!? Then they can’t really articulate it beyond that.

And you said to me something like “maybe you just don’t like electronic music,” and I proceeded to play you about 20 different artists that are sort of “electronic music” that I do like.

When it comes to these games, you don’t like the mass nostalgic rally toward something you don’t relate to. You don’t like that most people refuse to look critically at the kitchen-sink puzzle design you find problematic (and you’re onto something, there!) You don’t like LucasArts games the same way I don’t like that trendy wannabe-80s electronica. I remember you telling me once you had no interest in writing about things people had already heard of.

But just like there’s electronic music outside of that garbage that’s popular on Twitter right now, there are adventure games that are not LucasArts and Telltale (those two share a sort of similar spiritual/tonal ‘thing,’ I think).

I mean, I loved LucasArts games, and I’m surprised you don’t, actually. You love running board games and roleplay sessions with warmth and wit; they’re “all about the talking,” you told me. So are the Monkey Island games, theoretically: an amused person having a little laugh with, and sometimes at you.

But even still, there are other adventure games. The stuff you don’t like is bigger than genre.

Ask me about LOOM,

Leigh

“Walking Dead looks like what one would expect a modern adventure game on console ought to look like.”

Snatcher merges game and story

To: Leigh Alexander
From: Quintin Smith
Subject: Re: Re: adventure games

Leigh,

Call me a contrarian, sure. I’ll put my hands up and take that bullet square in the chest like a good little dissident. I don’t like Jane Jensen or Ragnar Tornquist’s work either, but whether I’d be half as resistant to a Gabriel Knight or Longest Journey game were they not talked of in such awed tones, I don’t know.

But adventure games are not about talking. They’re about reading. In a medium defined by nothing more than its interactivity, the adventure game is about basking before a CRT monitor and the static wit of a distant creator like some pallid starfish. Games are the medium that tell us “Yes,” but Adventure Game is the genre that tells us “No.” No, you can’t do that. No, that doesn’t work. No sir!

People often hold up an adventure game, something like Grim Fandango, as the pinnacle of storytelling in games. Of course it is! It’s fucking cheating! It’s not trying to create a game, but offering riddles that link together its conversations and cutscenes. The point’n’click makes us laugh, it makes us cry, but it casts no shadow in the greater landscape of games.

I’m not a total monster. I understand that in solving problems and picking your own way through conversation trees, you’re taking on a sense of agency over the plot. But if we’re going to learn from this genre, we need to learn from the right games. The popular “classics,” with their glittering writing, are paving over the adventure games we need to pay attention to. Games like 1994’s Snatcher.

(This is the part where I prove your point by screaming about a game nobody talks about.)

(This is also the bit where the label of adventure games might start to lose its stick and peel away.)

Famously, Snatcher was what Hideo Kojima created before donning the billion-dollar sneaking suit of the Metal Gear Solid series. It’s noteworthy for two things: One, being adored by the eleven people that played it. Two, showcasing Kojima’s tendency to be “inspired” by films, before he learned tact.

Snatcher’s world is Blade Runner, making it yet another much-loved Blade Runner adventure game. Snatcher’s blade runners are “junkers,” the replicants “snatchers,” but it’s all there, down to the future-noir tone and the protagonist’s flappy brown trenchcoat.

What’s worth noting about Snatcher, though, is how it knitted its plot threads into the game you were playing. The outrageous opening dips your balls into hot bathwater when you arrive at an abandoned factory, your very first day on the job, to discover your company’s best junker with his head literally torn off. Your character’s as horrified as you are. You can feel the game sidling up to you, gesturing at the corpse with a cigarette, and saying “We’re playing for keeps.”

Puzzles in Snatcher demand you call back to clues from hours before, or, excellently, what looks like a puzzle is solved by an NPC as you’re trying to work it out. Or perhaps it has no solution at all, as in one scene where your car begins accelerating wildly and the game screams “WHAT DO YOU DO?” Conversations routinely snap into gunfights which can and will kill you if you’re not quick enough — which is in turn elevated through my favorite-ever use of a peripheral. The Sega CD version of Snatcher lets you draw a lightgun in real life to save yourself QUICKLY QUICKLY SHOOT.

In other words, Snatcher was entertaining because it never let you know what the rules of its game were, but you trusted that if you paid attention, you’d scrape through this shift in one piece. That’s something it has in common with the other adventure games I enjoy, like It Came From The Desert or KGB. Adventure games that are actually — wait for it — adventurous.

You could argue that The Walking Dead is trying to do the same thing, and I should be happy. A game trying to hide its fustian puzzles, like an elderly magician sucking in their gut, to instead shock us. It does, in fact, pull the same trick as Snatcher, with that conversation in Episode 2 that’s interrupted by a zombie attack.

At which point I sigh, turn up the collar of my junker’s trenchcoat against the rain and say that I just don’t think The Walking Dead is very good at it. The writing, directing and visuals are all so flat that the game plays like a pinball table. Holding you attention with the fluorescent bumpers and paddles of MORAL CHOICES and SHOCKING TWISTS, but the ball doesn’t get anywhere, it just … stops.

I’m going to remember none of those characters fondly, and you’re the same. The most fun I’ve seen you have with The Walking Dead is selecting protagonist Lee’s “…” conversation option as much as possible. The actress in you laughing as you refuse to play along with a dumb script.

I’m glad you chose to become a games writer instead of an actress. I love writing these letters to you.

So much so, I’ll be sporting and do what you said. I’ll “Ask LEIGH about LOOM.”

xox

Quinns

Grim Fandango
Snatcher
Blade Runner
The Walking Dead

Kickstarter The Colonel’s Bequest Gabriel Knight 2

To: Quintin Smith
From: Leigh Alexander
Subject: Re: Re: Re: adventure games

Quinns,

It is the rare correspondence we get through without you bringing up the things you dip your balls into. Sigh. You think if you bring up Kojima to me I’ll let you get away with anything.

It’s actually quite a big topic we’ve bitten off, here. I wanted to talk about adventure games because they are both specific and bygone, traits that have interesting implications in the crowdfunding age. People want them back to the tune of however many million Double Fine raised, and then their contemporaries all came ‘round, too.

Of course citing Kickstarter as evidence of a genre’s viability is imperfect, given that none of these successfully-funded titles have shipped yet, but cult fandom for the likes of Telltale and Wadjet Eye suggests there’s something there.

And then there’s Walking Dead, which looks like what one would expect a modern adventure game on console ought to look like. I do like that game, on the whole. Like you, I didn’t like the puzzles, inasmuch as they were “puzzles” (more like following an Ikea furniture assembly manual). Nor a lot of the action sequences. But while it’s no masterpiece of fiction, I think you’re underselling how well the writing works, given the challenges of interactive dialog.

Maybe it was imperfect, but it was a pretty good run at something it seems very hard to get right. Adventurous, even. People can build on this, now.

It’s strange you don’t like, say, the Schafer/Gilbert-voiced style of adventure game because you feel its “static wit” is holding you at a distance, but you like Snatcher. You know how much I love Kojima, but if design is a conversation, he is definitely a big over-talker. There is not much room for the player’s voice within his vision. You have agency, but the message is always his. I think maybe you do like to be at the mercy of someone else’s wit — it just has to be someone you like, and someone who isn’t so popular it triggers your contrarian urges.

I wanted to tell you about some of my favorite adventure games, but none of them invalidate your criticisms, alas. King’s Quest 4 has some mean staircases, some pixel-hunts, some obtuseness. The Colonel’s Bequest — oh, god, great game; please let me show it to you — delights in providing you with no information, no reason to fulfill certain goals. Why dislodge a church bell with a discarded cane? Why not! The Space Quest games love to trick you into killing yourself, and then they laugh at you about it. Haha. Oh man.

When I became a young teen Gabriel Knight 2 blew my mind. It had real history, German castles, romance. I felt taken to another place; I learned all about Ludwig of Bavaria from that game! I mean today I’m sure it looks ridiculous, part of that horrible live-action game phase of the ’90s, with all the bad acting and chunky special effects.

Like you, I spent swaths of my childhood sat at these things. Pulling my little friends along to sit beside me, help me solve the puzzles (or to accompany me when I got scared, like you and your mum). We’ve talked about how as close as we are in age, there was a brief window of time, say, when you were eight or 10, that I could have been your babysitter (!!).

I would have made you play adventure games with me. Aw, imagine little us, sat at some Gateway PC running Windows 95, falling in love. With the swoopy-haired, square-jawed man that plays Gabriel, that is. He has just a touch of sweet Southern accent, if I recall. Yikes. I’m feeling nostalgic. I think we both heavily dismiss nostalgia, like it’s some adulterant that clouds any proper assessment of a thing’s merit. Yet if these things were terrible and we just didn’t know any better, why are they so memorable?

OK. LOOM. I have a hunch you’ll like this one. It’s one of the right ones. Let’s put our little heads together in front of your computer and play. I will help you if you get stuck. I will even let you stay up past your bedtime.

Yours,

Leigh

“We finished LOOM that night, leaving me high on the oxygen rush of a game that offers itself up to you in a scant six hours.”

LOOM makes everything better

To: Leigh Alexander
From: Quintin Smith
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: adventure games

Dear Leigh,

So, we did it. We played LOOM. You came over to my house with box wine and a smile like a loaded gun, and we polluted my PC with SCUMM. You cracked your knuckles and peeled old code from the internet, while I watched my hard drive fill with crumbs of data I’d never totally clean up. I didn’t tell you this, but all I was thinking at the time was “If code could smell bad …”

But we got it working — sorry, we got the “correct” version of LOOM working — you poured me wine, and I settled in for a long night in a deadened bedroom. And … it’s beautiful.

Here’s an adventure game that’s not noisy with jokes, concepts, backstory or puzzles. I find myself playing Bobbin Threadbare, last of the Guild of Weavers, journeying across a disarmingly straightforward land. Bobbin’s just looking for his elders, recently (and mysteriously) turned into a flock of swans. But, with all the grace and majesty of a bolt of lightning building in a cloud, he learns to weave reality with a growing book of spells, ultimately (and accidentally) saving the world.

We finished LOOM that night, leaving me high on the oxygen rush of a game that offers itself up to you in a scant six hours. In the afterglow I’m watching the credits (“A Fantasy by Brian Moriarty”) and you tell me that Jonathon Blow loves LOOM. A little cookie of validation for you, for me.

So, thanks for that. Guess what I did today!

I Googled that quote, Leigh, and I discovered an interview with Blow bringing up LOOM — as an example of an adventure game succeeding at little more than being “compelling” despite the greater flaws of the genre. He could be quoting me: “Adventure gameplay is fundamentally broken,” he says. “It’s about fumbling.” “It’s not an accident adventure games died.” He describes how Super Meat Boy represents old school platforming, but refined, and says adventure games have yet to receive that refinement.

So now I’m blinking heavily, sobering up after your poison dose of LOOM. Where are you? You’re not here. You must have let yourself out, without even a note. But I’m remembering now, that you were telling me what to do every time I got stuck on a puzzle. Mission control to me, the ludonaut, guiding me cleanly through this space’s bad gravity, its creative flares. Letting me actually enjoy the tender plot, the postcard landscapes. You, the real Weaver, thimble-fingered and string in your teeth, fixing the genre from a distance.

No. Nice try, and thanks for the wine, but you haven’t changed my mind. The Walking Dead has tapped into a wellspring of enthusiasm, proving we need more plot and character-centric games, but to do that properly, we need them to transcend from this inflexible chrysalis of what we consider a story game to be. We have to forget. Then we can start again.

You said in your last letter that even if we shuck our nostalgia, the adventure games we played as kids are memorable, and therefore there must possess some merit. Tons of weird crap we do as kids is memorable! I have a crystalline memory of my friend Julian drinking tequila for the first time and immediately vomiting back into his cup. Or worse: Do I need to go around telling developers they need to learn from McDonald’s Global Gladiators on the Game Gear, another vivid memory of mine?

Actually, that sounds exactly like something I’d do.

Seriously though, thank you for showing me LOOM. And thanks for copying me spells into my notebook as a substitute for the game’s paper manual. With your permission, I’m going to show the people at home.

LOOM
Super Meat Boy
Super Meat Boy
Leigh’s notebook

Phantasmagoria Quintin in the tube

To: Quintin Smith
From: Leigh Alexander
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: adventure games

Hey Q (that’s what your mum called you when you were little, right?)

Sorry to leave like that. You should check that back garden door, because I went out there to have a cigarette while you were asleep, and I couldn’t for the life of me get the damn thing closed again.

Many times last night, you murmured, gorgeous, gorgeous. And now all you’ve got to say is “nice try?” Well, I swan!!

In further revisionist history, it was Brendan, not I, who told you Jon Blow likes LOOM. I would never assume Jon Blow likes anything. I mean, he certainly likes things, but I’m not going to pretend I know what those things are.

You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by linking me those quotes of his from right off, actually, because I don’t disagree with them. The adventure genre never became “refined;” it marched blindly into a corner until it stopped being pleasurable, and then it died.

I think it died because people advanced the wrong elements: visual fidelity, realism, overcomplexity (oh man, we should do a Phantasmagoria playthrough, for a laugh). But I think it’s coming back because people see something there worth salvaging. We’re making a cautious return to a once-loved rubble, sorting it out slowly, carefully, with the reverence an ancient city deserves.

Environments. Characters. Dialogue. Wit. Our nostalgia for adventure games is really a wish for storytelling and humor to matter again in games. Rebellious, noncommercial irreverence, intensely personal stuff. Individual dreams. You will remember playing LOOM with me and that matters, like your childhood blunders matter, like the page I drew you in a sketchbook matters.

You should cheer Walking Dead as the first game to’ve been broadly successful at unearthing long-forgotten design challenges, even if on an admittedly-imperfect scaffold.

I like playing games with you. Can I visit again? What will matter to us next? Hmm … you took a picture of my notebook page; I took a picture of you in the tube. Thoughts?

…

L

[Image credits: Armchair Empire, Good Old Games, LucasArts, Telltale Games, Konami, Warner Bros., Kickstarter, Sierra, Team Meat, Leigh Alexander, Quintin Smith]

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PlayStation 4: A Videogame Console - Ian Bogost

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Today, the most novel feature of new technology is ordinariness.

Alexis Madrigal

The logo for the Dutch videogame studio Guerrilla Games is an object lesson in mixed metaphor: an orange “G” contorted into the chevron shape of a military rank insignia. Guerrilla insurgencies are often organized and sometimes even state-based, but they are hardly represented by the formal emblem of command and control military structure. Guerrilla warfare is irregular, asymmetrical, and lithe. It ambushes and sabotages, seeing itself as a noble defense of the many against the oppression of the few.

Guerrilla Games’s managing director Hermen Hulst is a hulking blonde with a square jaw and a name that deserves to run an insurgency. He’s taken the stage in front of his studio’s big logo at the PlayStation 4 launch announcement in New York City, a kind of meta-marketing effort at which the electronics giant announces but doesn’t quite reveal their “next generation” videogame console.

Hulst is anything but a guerrilla. His studio has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment since 2005, during which time it has exclusively produced sequels to one title: Killzone, a first-person shooter set in a science fictional future in which human descendants have mutated to adapt to life on the harsh planet Helghan. It is a game in which burly dudes in body armor discharge big guns at shadowy men with superhuman powers in orange-eyed gasmasks. It is a game that makes you want to use the word “motherfucking” unnecessarily when you talk about it.

Hulst has taken the stage to announce the latest specimen in the franchise his studio is destined to iterate forever. Its title, Killzone: Shadow Fall, feels almost computer generated, as if chosen from a thousand candidates for the most absurdly, mind-numbingly plausible phrase to be rendered in riveted-metal or orange stenciling on a shiny, black box.

Shadow Fall is set in a sprawling, futuristic city. Like everything in this PlayStation 4 presser, it looks gorgeous: glass and metal spires, floating island-ships, fluorescing aqua ribbon-windows flanking skyscrapers that rise from waterfalls. Hulst explains that in this chapter of Helghast lore, the city has been divided by a security wall, making the game feel “like Cold War Berlin.”

The first of many boring game walkaround videos plays behind Hulst. A flyover of the environment. A player-character in a bulky suit. He (always he) maneuvers through a crowd before an explosion initiates a barrage of gunfire. A helicopter-like vehicle. Some sort of metal rope. The metal rope looks nice, I guess, if you’re into metal rope. In any case, it’s nothing like Cold War Berlin, no more than Transformers is like the Rwandan genocide.

As it turns out, Hulst isn’t the only “guerrilla” executive shilling mainstream pulp as faux-politics. Sucker Punch game director Nate Fox comes out swinging like Sean Penn, decrying the rise of the police state in contemporary America and Britain. “Our security comes at a high price: our freedom,” he moralized, waiting a beat before proposing an exit from such dystopia: “what if a handful of people developed superhuman abilities?” You can look forward to the results in inFamous: Second Son, yet another sequel in yet another franchise.

Meanwhile, as two of its invited developers use police state metaphors to introduce their titles, Sony officials announce a slew of me-too “social” features — including a “Share” button on every controller — meant to connect the console to the myriad corporate surveillance services that have become today’s norm.

Other promises of novelty seem all too familiar, including the console’s continued obsession with visual verisimilitude. Even the irascible French writer/designer David Cage equated emotional depth with visual resolution, promising that this time the hardware could finally provide it. His evidence? The empty, chestnut eyes of an old man’s disembodied head. Drive Club creator Matt Southern argued that better racing games demand more accurate seat upholstery leather grain simulation. Blizzard, Bungie, and Square Enix showed projects they’d already announced, confirming that the PS4 would serve as a decent enough host for high-gloss, big budget videogames. Sony made its own concessions, adding enough digital download, streaming, social, and touch-control features to lightly tick the boxes of current trends so as not to terrify its shareholders for a quarter or two.

It’s easy to feel disappointed by Sony’s ambitions, but perhaps that’s the wrong attitude. What if the real delusion can be found in our expectation for something “revolutionary” in Sony’s announcement rather than in their having failed to deliver such revolution? What if the problem is not the lack of novelty, but our assumption that novelty ought to be imparted in the first place? Perhaps the best thing about the PS4 is that there’s nothing very special about it.

Alexis Madrigal
What’s novel about novelty anyway? It seems like a tautological question. We get excited about newness for the novelty of it. In order to see or do something we previously couldn’t. In order to do the same things better or faster or cheaper. Novelty excites us because it promises something fresh. Novelty is the product of innovation, that favored value of our contemporary technological lives.
But innovation installs a trap for itself: it must continue endlessly. Like its parent economic growth, innovation must be ceaseless to be coherent. If a medium or a technology can simply be improved to a point beyond which further improvements become incremental or invisible, then it risks plateauing, ceding ground to another one capable of imparting even newer newness.

Over the past decade in particular, innovation in consumer electronics has become a cultural affair as much as a technical one. Internal details and outer capacities that a previous generation would have found only in esoteric enthusiast publications now produce mainstream headlines. Even the announcements themselves, previously limited to industrial and retail audiences, have become cultural events. An Apple product reveal shares more in common with a televised awards ceremony than it does with a corporate sales conference.

Of course, inevitably, everything plateaus. The new MacBooks or iPhones or PlayStations become less surprising, and yet our expectations rise with each iteration. At such a juncture, innovation becomes less about generating creativity, originality, ingenuity, and other related virtues and more about calling a set of reasonable if tepid decisions “innovative” in order to produce the rhetorical force of novelty absent its earnest payload. Innovation is often a simulation of innovation. Yet, nobody wants to run the headline, “Consumer Electronics Company Announces Slightly Revised Version of Popular Product” — nor to have it run about them.

But we need not assume that the era technical innovation has concluded to recognize that the rhetoric of innovation may exert a cognitive and cultural burden that is too onerous to bear. In order for a technology to become widespread and familiar enough to have broad influence, it must begin to disappear. We must use it more than we talk about it.

This is the paradox the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan described with a notion borrowed from Gestalt psychology: figure and ground. The figure is what we notice, the medium or technology we see and use, think and talk about. But that medium cannot exist in a vacuum; it works inside a context, or a ground. Understanding a technology requires an examination of both facets. McLuhan’s famous quip “the medium is the message” also invokes the figure/ground idea: instead of focusing on the “content” of a medium, like a television program or an app or a videogame, we ought to consider the technological forms that deliver that message.

Technologies like television and automobiles work so well because we have forgotten about them. We’ve put them into the backs of our minds. They are the water we swim in. That’s not to say that nothing new can arise. HDTV and electric vehicles offer examples of innovations that are rapidly and broadly comprehensible thanks to our familiarity with the domains they extend. And as a result, novelty in TV or automobiles is precious. It’s much harder to make an innovation stick precisely because we have so deeply incorporated such devices into our lives. Instead, novelty appears only when we have reason to consider it: helping your parents face the broadcast-to-HDTV transition, or familiarizing yourself with the latest display choices (plasma? OLED?) when an old TV breaks and you must select a new one.

On first blush it might seem like videogame consoles are unlike televisions and automobiles, subject to more disruptive and lurching change. After all, we need not buy new programming or new roads every time we upgrade our sets or our cars, while a new PS4 requires a new investment in games, peripherals, subscription services, and so on. But thanks to the acceleration of planned obsolescence, we have become more accustomed to losing whole libraries of media when new devices emerge. The VCR gives way to the DVD and then to the Blu-Ray. Or for that matter, the Apple device that ran your favorite apps and games effectively last year suddenly slows to a crawl with the latest OS update, one that proves necessary to run the latest program updates anyway. And besides, media like apps, movies, and games are consumables, in the sense that we use them up rather than using them over and over. The truth is, all media technologies have become seasonal fashions more than stable furnishings.

Given our increasingly promiscuous technological lives, perhaps the dissonance in Sony’s PS4 announcement has less to do with mismatches in the claims of its hardware and software designers, and more to do with the idea that anybody would bother to make such claims in the first place. It would have been enough just to say, “Look, we made a badasser PlayStation, just like you expected.”

Ian Bogost

A first-person shooter is a first-person shooter. A driving sim is a driving sim. FIFA is FIFA. There’s nothing revolutionary about them, no more than there’s anything revolutionary about a wacky family sitcom or an apocalyptic action flick. Sure, some new digital filmmaking technique or digital distribution mechanism might slightly alter our experience of such media, but the moment we focus on that purported innovation, we tend to become annoyed and distracted. Just think of Hollywood’s recent experiments in technical innovations like 3D and 48 fps — they leave audiences cold. All we really want are decent films that don’t run so damned long.

David Cage’s dreams of interactive cinema notwithstanding, big budget, high-gloss commercial videogames aren’t appealing because there’s some new zenith to reach, one only made possible by a controller with a “Share” button or a touch-pad or a streaming delivery system. They’re appealing because they have reached their zenith, and their zenith is also their nadir. In some sense, we love big budget, high-gloss videogames because they are terrible, because they have to compromise to a lowest common denominator to justify their absurd budgets, and because we secretly know that our highest aspirations for them are actually quite low. We don’t really want Cold War Berlin; we want big motherfucking guns.

This is an unpopular claim to make out in the open. Few will own up to the fact that they mostly want to shoot aliens and play Madden NFL on PlayStation, just like they mostly want to see explosions and watch football on TV. That’s not to say this is all videogames can do, of course. Just as Downton Abbey or Storage Wars or Mad Men make different uses of the plasma TV, so some games disrupt videogames’ crass pornography of playable action: Cage’s quasi-interactive drama Heavy Rain or That Game Company’s stylized environmental dreamscape Journey, or Jonathan Blow’s dense world-puzzler The Witness, a game whose PS4 launch was even revealed at the Sony announcement. But to become figures, these works have to arise from the wide, stable base of videogames’ ground. We need the tripe to make the Kobe sensical. After all, 50” TVs and surround sound home theaters weren’t invented to make Lord Crawley appear more visually captivating or more aurally directional.

Such pragmatism may seem vulgar, but it’s also weirdly bewitching. There’s something earnest about embracing the dumb ugliness of stupid games, of wanting to play the latest, shiniest versions of Killzone and Gran Turismo not because they contain anything new or different, but just because we recognize our own propensity to produce endless desire for them.

The PlayStation 4’s errs not by being something other than what it is, but by holding on to the idea that its particular brand of novelty is in any way novel, by mistaking itself for figure rather than for ground. By calling itself “PlayStation 4” instead of just “PlayStation,” because really all anyone wants is whatever PlayStation is made available, doing whatever things it ought to do at whatever moment it does them. Apple recognized this problem when it tried to correct the mistake of the “iPad 2” by reverting to its follow-up as just “the iPad,” a name that still hasn’t stuck. Leica, the old and traditional German photographic and optical equipment company, stopped numbering its digital M rangefinder cameras this year, after burning through as many numeric increments in six years as it had in the previous two decades. At some point, a camera is just a camera, no matter how nice it is.

Maybe it’s time. Our gizmos and gadgets, our phones and laptops and tablets and videogame consoles just aren’t very special anymore. And counter-intuitively, that’s what’s so newly special about them: their familiarity, their ordinariness. Their ever-accelerating status as ground rather than figure. We mistakenly believe that the label “next generation” implies newness and innovation, a promise of the technological utopia we’ve been dreaming of. But if you pause to reflect on the matter, you’ll quickly realize that all those earlier generations were once next generations themselves, for some previously current generation. Innovation is like a Chinese finger trap: the more you tug deliberately at progress, the less progress you make, because the deepest, most profund novelty is the kind that blinds us to novelty. Every “next” thing shouldn’t have to be a revolution. It can just be what comes next.

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Choose Your Own Adventure-Maker: Twine and the Art of Personal Games

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Choose Your Own Adventure-Maker: Twine and the Art of Personal Games

By Joe Bernardi

One of the best video games I played in 2012 is set about two miles from my apartment. It’s called Brooklyn Trash King, and it informed me that raccoons are gaining control of the neighborhood. It also presupposes the existence of a local island called Raccoon Island, makes fun of Kickstarter, and contains the most graphic descriptions of animal butts that I have ever read. Brooklyn Trash King only takes about five minutes to finish and, while this might be local bias talking, if I had bothered to play Call of Duty: Black Ops II, I’m sure I would say with no reservations that Brooklyn Trash King blows it out of the water.

That sounds ridiculous, but think about this: The new Call of Duty game was made by a gigantic group of people who felt a years-long interest in parting as many people as possible with fifty dollars and hundreds of hours of their time, whereas Brooklyn Trash King was made by Ben Esposito, who presumably had a few hours to kill and felt a passing interest in raccoons and making jokes about “getting huge.”

According to Wikipedia, Modern Warfare was in development for two years; let’s be generous and say BTK took Ben four hours. How did he manage to seize that moment and create BTK in roughly one four thousand three hundred-eightieth of the time it took to develop a Call of Duty game? He used something called Twine, an application that makes the creation of choose-your-own-adventure style games simpler than ever before.

Twine was created about three years ago by a guy named Chris Klimas, a writer and developer whose self-written bio claims he “likes coming up with increasingly complex ways of telling stories.” It’s free to download for Windows or Mac (most other game-creation frameworks, especially those that are easy to use, cost money), and it exports the finished product as HTML files, which are extremely simple to put online for anyone with an internet connection to access.

From Brooklyn Trash King by Ben Esposito

Creating a Twine game isn’t much more difficult or complicated than creating a PowerPoint presentation. The user makes a page, gives it a title, and links to it from a previous page based on that title. That’s it. I managed to go from downloading Twine to having a playable (albeit tiny and boring) game within about five minutes.

Frameworks for game creation generally require at least a small amount of programming-based heavy lifting, but Twine games can be created entirely from within the program’s graphical interface. Code can be used to enhance Twine games, but it’s far from necessary; users are able to explore Twine’s capabilities both at their own pace and by constantly creating, rather than by being thrown into the deep end of the pool. Letting creative whims dictate the need for technical difficulty, rather than the other way around, is where Twine distinguishes itself for beginners and those uninterested in the arduous process of learning to program. (Old school users might recognize in Twine echos of one of the earliest and most famous consumer programming tools, HyperCard, which Apple finally discontinued in 2004; other kinds of nerds will notice a whiff of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books or classic text adventures.)

While Twine has been around for years, along the way earning the disdain of more serious indie game developers, it wasn’t until Anna Anthropy got ahold of it late last year that things began to get really interesting. Anna is a game designer, critic, and writer whose evangelism of the Twine platform has helped elevate it from a potential novelty to a sort of subcultural lynchpin. (Anna literally wrote the book on this type of thing; it’s called Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, and it’s great. When she talks about finding new and interesting ways for people to make games, people listen.) As a result of Anna’s efforts, types of people who don’t usually make games are making Twine games, which means lots of these little stories are strange and funny and sad and cool in ways that games usually are not. “Everyone has stories to tell,” says Anna. “It’s just that, until now, it wasn’t cost-effective for people to tell those stories in games. The barrier to entry was a sheer rock wall, and only programmers could climb it. But anyone can write.”

The Twine community seems to be gathering around TwineHub, a gallery of Twine games and tutorials that was, itself, created in Twine. On TwineHub you’ll find surreal set pieces such as Seven Hours Pass by Loren Schmidt, science fiction mini-epics like Eioioio by David T. Marchand, statements about psychoanalysis like Intake by Maddox Pratt, and erotic cannibalism adventures like Encylopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree by Anthropy herself. (Note that, if anything, these are among the more straightforward ones.)

Looking through the authors on TwineHub, you’ll find established games industry personalities, artists who have made their name in other media, and total newcomers. The sheer diversity of the Twine community is surprisingly unique, as game development goes; there’s been an active artistically-minded games underground for awhile now, but because of the immense technical challenge involved, it was made up mostly of talented game-maker types who were consciously opting out of the AAA gaming environment, rather than outsiders who wanted a way to express themselves and were brought in by the game scene’s inclusiveness. I’d bet the majority of Twine authors had never made a game before. “I ran a game-making workshop in Toronto,” says Anna. “I gave everyone Twine and a crash course in how to use it. There were all sorts of people there: a lot of them were in their fifties or sixties. They wouldn’t have had the time to learn [other tools such as] Game Maker or Stencyl, but they all made their first videogames in Twine that night.”

From LabNet Email Systems

This democratization of game development is critically important, both to prevent the homogenization of games as an art form and to make game-making more inclusive, providing people with new media for expressing themselves. The formation of a community surrounding Twine marks an enormous step towards that goal. Says Anna: “For years I’ve been talking about a beautiful new promised land of games by everyone, for everyone. Marginalized people, formerly silenced in games culture, rising up to shout their stories at the tops of their lungs. Can you imagine what it’s like to see your vision of the world begin to come to pass? I wanted to fall down crying. It was so beautiful.

Courtney Stanton, a blogger, project manager, and former games industry employee, was inspired by Anna’s tutorial and created a Twine game every day for the month of December 2012. Stanton had very little coding experience prior to her project, and Twine stood out among more intimidating options. “If you know how to write, you can make a Twine game, all by yourself. That’s a really different barrier to entry than most everything else in games,” she says. Courtney’s games ended up running the gamut, from weaving the heartbreaking story of a deceased pet cat to providing a short, accurate simulation of being home sick from work. They end up creating an emotional response almost alien to the world of mainstream games: they’re personal, relatable, and wonderfully flawed in a way that most video games literally can’t afford to be.

I asked Courtney how her games might differ from a blog post or an essay about the same subjects. She pointed to Twine’s design, which can make concerns about the actual content take a back seat to the ecstasy of creating something, resulting in a more stream-of-consciousness finished product. “I know the content is really personal,” she says, “but in order to noodle with a feature and experiment and see how it works in a game, I need to be able to crank out a game before I get bored. The only way to do that without Lorem Ipsuming all the text is to just write down whatever’s in my head at the time.”

Sex Cops of Tickle City by Anna Anthropy

A rule of video game design: If a game gives a player two separate problems, they’re typically able to compartmentalize and solve them both relatively easily. As soon as both problems are presented at the same time, however, a wire gets tripped in the player’s brain and they become confused and unlikely to solve either one. By compartmentalizing the technical side and allowing the game maker to focus on a single white box of plain text, Twine gets out of the way and lets its users cut to the chase. “Twine operates the same way my brain has already been trained to tell stories,” says Courtney, “and I think it’s actually faster for me to make a Twine game than for me to make notes and an outline for a Twine game. I’ve tried jotting down ideas on paper or in Notepad, but at this point I just make a bunch of cards in Twine and jot notes directly in there.”

There’s a popular myth that many of games’ most enduring franchises are the product of a single auteur. This is true to a degree; the ideas for Mario and Zelda can be traced back to Shigeru Miyamoto, Final Fantasy is the brainchild of Hironobu Sakaguchi, and so on. Ultimately, though, these games, and most games, are the product of huge teams, held back by things like branding concerns, tight timelines, and, most importantly, financial bottom lines.

What the myth speaks to, though, is a widely-felt desire for games to be more direct reflections of the people who create them. (Miyamoto, in particular, has a knack for these types of hooks. Pikmin, he claims, was inspired by his fondness for gardening; the Wii Fit came from the satisfaction of standing on his bathroom scale every morning.) Twine gives those of us who aren’t Mario-creating supergeniuses an opportunity to fulfill that impulse for ourselves, turning our experiences, however abstractly, into interactive vignettes that can be experienced by others. They certainly won’t always make for great games. But simply by virtue of being free and easy, Twine is helping to expand game-making from the myth of the auteur to the reality of the amateur.

***

Below, a sampling of compelling Twine games, including some recommended by Anna Anthropy. Anna’s made an excellent guide to Twine; also check out the Twine reference guide and the Twine Google Group.

***

Eioioio by David T. Marchand

The Ark by Matthew Marcus

CLOSET by maddox pratt

Calories by Emma Fearon

The Death of Analogue by Chris Priestman

What’s in a Name by Gaming Pixie

Develop a Leather-based Bloodstream by squidlarkin

»——-?——-> by JP LeBreton

Hunger City by Millicent Herrman

A Jousting ‘Game’ by Emmanuel Turner

love by finny

metrolith by porpentine

The Porcelain Precipice of Immanence by @SolonCubed

A Synchronous Ritual by merritt kopas

Tony the Turkey by David S. Gallant

TRASH GYRE by antibesnice

Walking Story by Michael Brough

By Joe Bernardi 4 days ago

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Joe Bernardi is a writer and web developer living in Brooklyn, New York. He’s got a tumblr at http://lemoniceforever.com and a twitter at https://twitter.com/blurstoftimes.
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Nameless

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02/13/2013

Nameless

On belonging.

Lana Polansky

458

“Well you’re attracted to men, too, right?”

“Obviously you’re straight, then.”

“This is just a phase. You’ll grow out of it.”

In so many words, this was advice I was given. It’s something I told my teenaged self over and over again until I started to believe it was true.

I spent a tearful while on the phone. I called the only friend I had that, at the time, had any significant degree of sexual experience. She seemed like the only person I could talk to without judgment, who’d reassure me. She seemed so wise. I was coming into a new awareness about my body, my attractions, my desires. Some of that awareness felt “normal.” I knew I liked boys. I giggled about my male crush with the other girls and blushed through whispers and furtive glances. I rationalized liking terrible Johnny Depp movies. I also rationalized gushing over Tia Carrere in Wayne’s World, and Brody Dalle from The Distillers, but only inside my own head.

“It’s the outfit she’s wearing, that’s all. I think it’s cute.”

“She’s kind of boyish, anyway.”

“I can find women attractive without being attracted to them.”

“I was just experimenting. She didn’t mean anything.”

I made conscious decisions to suppress whole parts of myself, in that phone call and thereafter. Now, I don’t think this is necessarily negative, depending on the context. We might seek to control or eliminate behaviours that might be hurtful or alienating out of a quest for self-improvement. But maybe we do it just to be liked. Or to fit in. We seek comfort in a common language. We need labels to define how we understand our identities, even if labels also tend to omit the nuances. I called myself “straight” because it was easy.

What’s in a Name? is a quick little Twine game by Gaming Pixie about the obstacles involved in being accepted as bisexual. It’s about the weight that labels carry. It’s about how identity can be defined by the expectations of others. It’s about stepping out of one closet only to step right into another. It’s exactly what the title suggests.

Your protagonist has effusively come to the conclusion of her own bisexuality. She’s eager to tell people—to find acceptance in a community. She begins participating in a lesbian forum, thinking she’s discovered an open-minded “sisterhood.” But, as she gradually learns, it’s not open for bi women.

“Bi women are just confused lesbian women.”

“Bi women are just lesbian women trying to claim heterosexual privilege.”

“Bi women are just ‘lipstick lesbians‘ that perform for straight men.”

“Bi women are deceptive, greedy and disease-ridden.”

Your protagonist’s newfound sense of self is shaken. She becomes isolated, alienated. She becomes confused and desperate for confirmation. She begins to call herself “lesbian,” because it’s the easiest label to take on that will allow her to achieve that confirmation within this community.

“Hooray, you’ve found a place to belong! And all you have to do to keep it is pretend a part of you no longer exists.”

Playing it was like being shaken out of a daydream. I saw so much of myself not only in the protagonist, but in the barbs of the forum posts she wades through. My insecurities about being defined as “faking it,” or having my identity gatekept as “not queer enough” by some—or some kind of “attention-seeking,” titillating performance by others—are still things that swirl in the back of my head. At the same time, I can’t help but feel as though I relied on trying to “pass” as heterosexual just so that I could hide behind the privileges that come with that label. As of writing this, I’m afraid of being told that what I am is wrong, or doesn’t exist.

There are subtle signs and gestures—not just overt hate—that make a person second-guess themselves and want to hide. In What’s in a Name?, the protagonist feels the “chill” of disapproval from other forum members after she reveals that she is bisexual. She feels “ignored,” rejected and ostracized.

The default template at home for me as a kid was that I was straight, and that I’d grow up to marry a nice, preferably-Jewish boy. In everything from Sex Ed.—which was more like Heterosexual Reproduction Ed.—to the playground politics of pubescent tweens, we acted out the narratives of a culture that privileges monogamous straightness. And you could only be one or the other: straight or gay. Everything outside of that was just experimentation, or a phase. There was no real category for stepping outside of those boundaries.

I don’t blame my high school friend for her dubious advice. It didn’t come from malice. But it was a tangible realization of my own inability to find not only a label that would sit comfortably with me, but, in my adolescence, a social context that would allow me to comfortably proclaim and express the orientation that the label represented.

It’s easy for me to try to pin these realizations on video games’ oft-vaunted capacity to inspire empathy via interaction. But it’s a little more nuanced than that. What’s in a Name?, for me, is far more about introspection and self-actualization via interaction. I wasn’t just embodying the mediated role of an avatar to “step into someone else’s shoes.” In some ways these were also my shoes that I’d left gathering dust in a closet of my own.

There’s a lucidity and bluntness to the way What’s in a Name? is written and paced. The limited number of branches it offers suggests a glimmer of hope for a better outcome. Instead, the protagonist is fed more alienation and self-loathing. All roads converge on the same sense of lonely despair. Yet the gamer in me is wondering where the win condition is. Why haven’t I found it? I’ve tried every possible permutation of hyperlink clicks. Why does this experience have to lead to a dead end?

I didn’t find solidarity in What’s in a Name? through a common label. I’m not sure that “bisexual” is really the right word that applies to me. I’m not sure that my sexual and/or romantic attractions to men and women are evenly split, or that I can apply a term to myself that supports a gender binary I strongly disagree with. I put myself somewhere along the Kinsey scale, but even that is an out-of-date representation of the complexities of human sexuality, though it’s probably the most famous one. I haven’t found the “real category” that exists outside the boundaries I stuffed myself into, even if that category is only one of constant fluctuation.

I found solidarity in What’s in a Name?, through a common absence. I empathize with the feeling of an absence of external validation. I empathize with the feeling of an absence of social acceptance. I empathize with the feeling of the absence that comes when you suppress major parts of your own identity. But more than that, the self-questioning the game forced me to do was a totally personal, individual experience. It’s the kind of thing a game can set up the potential for, but can never really plan. It’s the kind of thing that can only happen if a player communicates with it.

I don’t doubt other games are capable of inspiring profound, life-altering self-realizations in players. I’m certain this is not unique to What’s in a Name? Instead, I can’t help but think that this capacity to inspire not only introspection—but personal growth—in a player is in itself an abstract form of interpretive interaction. It was as if Gaming Pixie offered me a “thought experiment” version of my own life in a very cohesive, frank, self-contained way. Trite though it may sound, What’s in a Name? helped me to characterize myself as a kind of Scrooge staring down the ghosts of my own insecurities and neglected desires.

I was stuck in this game’s dead end years before it even existed.

I just needed to see it in front of me, named.

So that now I can reject it.

[art credit]

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Lana Polansky is a game critic and writer peddling her wares at Kill Screen, Gameranx, Medium Difficulty and here at Bit Creature. Also, a ludonarrative disco-dancer.

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Gaming mit Farbenblindheit » Zockwork Orange

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Ich leide unter »Farbenblindheit« oder, um genauer zu sein, unter Protanopie, was im Deutschen Rot-Grün-Schwäche bedeutet. Wie ungefähr 10% der männlichen Bevölkerung leide ich unter einem Gendefekt, der im alltäglichen Leben nicht allzu große Auswirkungen hat. Abgesehen von Verwechslungen bei Farben — die häufig zu einer wahnsinnig lustigen Frage à la “Welche Farbe hat der Himmel?” führen — hat dies aber nur beim Zocken Auswirkungen, weswegen ich dieses Thema an dieser Stelle behandele.

Testtafeln für verschiedene Formen der Farbenfehlsichtigkeit. Quelle: Human Vision and Color Perception

Selbst beim Zocken halten sich die Probleme und Einschränkungen in Grenzen. In der Regel werden Farben verwendet die komplementär genug sind um sie ohne Probleme auseinanderzuhalten, oder Farben haben einfach keinen Einfluss auf mein Ergebnis im Spiel. Aber hin und wieder gibt es Spiele, die mich in den Wahnsinn treiben. Im Folgenden werde ich versuchen meine “Krankheit” zu beschreiben und die Probleme beim Zocken aufzuzeigen.

Wie sehe ich die Welt?

Zu 99% dürfte ich die Welt wie jeder andere Mensch auch sehen. Das eine Prozent äußert sich in der Verwechslung von Grün- und Rot-Tönen und vielen verwandten Farben. Matt Wilcox hat sich auf seinem Blog sehr gut daran versucht zu erklären, wie er die Welt sieht und dies versucht mit Beispielbildern zu simulieren. Diese können natürlich nicht perfekt wiedergeben was es bedeutet eine Farbenfehlsichtigkeit zu haben, aber sie geben einen ungefähren Eindruck. Für mich sind die Bilder, die Matt auf seinem Blog vergleicht, komplett deckungsgleich und höchstens durch minimal kräftigere Farben unterscheidbar. Wie man sieht, sind Einschränkungen kaum vorhanden, aber dennoch spürbar.

Was bedeutet das für Games?

Wie einleitend bereits erklärt, bereiten Spiele fast immer keine Probleme. Das kleine Wörtchen “fast” ist aber nicht zu vernachlässigen. Als DICE und EA vor anderthalb Jahren »Battlefield 3« auf den Markt brachten, war ich nicht in der Lage in Squads zu spielen. Das Problem, das ich hatte, war die Nähe der Farben, mit denen Squad-Mitglieder und meine Gegner gekennzeichnet waren. Allzu häufig stand ich vor einem vermeintlichen Freund, der mich sofort über den Haufen schoss und noch viel häufiger ballerte ich panisch auf die Mitglieder meines Squads, da ich beide im Eifer des Gefechts nicht auseinanderhalten konnte. Befand ich mich in einer ruhigen Situation, konnte ich mich mehr auf die Farben konzentrieren und diese auseinander halten, aber solche Situationen sind gameplaytechnisch eher selten.

Kurze Zeit nach Release gab es damals eine Online-Petition die EA aufforderte einen Modus für Farbenfehlsichtige einzuführen, wie es »Bad Company 2« auch schon besaß. Es dauerte ein paar Monate bis dann mit einem Patch Nachhilfe geleistet wurde und man nun die Gegner in einem sehr dunklen Rot, Squad-Mitglieder aber mit Gelb anstelle von Grün erkennen konnte. Da hierzu bei modernen Spielen nur ein geringfügiger Aufwand von Nöten ist — wie Ocean Quigley, Art Director von »SimCity« laut einem Video, das ihr weiter unten sehen könnt, selbst gesagt hat — stellt sich die Frage, warum dies nicht häufiger geschieht. Ich will hier keine wilden Theorien aufstellen, da ich auch ganz bestimmt keine böse Absicht dahinter vermute, aber nervig ist es dennoch.

Die Hölle auf Erden für Farbenfehlsichtige: 7x7 auf dem Android.

Ein aktuellerer Fall wäre das Smartphone-Spiel »7x7«, welches auf dem iPhone eine recht gut unterscheidbare Farbvariation bietet, das aber auf dem Android eine echte Hölle für Menschen mit einer Farbenfehlsichtigkeit darstellt. Besonders die Rot- und Orange-Töne sind für mich nicht auseinanderhaltbar — zumindest denke ich, dass es sich um diese Farben handelt — und machen es unmöglich das Spiel zufriedenstellend zu beenden, obwohl ich glaube, dass es sich um ein interessantes Puzzlegame handelt. Deutlicher voneinander getrennte Farbtöne wären nur eine geringe Änderung für den Entwickler, aber für ungefähr 10% der männlichen Bevölkerung ein Segen. Sicherlich ist hier zu beachten, dass unterschiedliche Entwickler am Werk waren, aber es bleibt festzuhalten, dass durch unterschiedliche Farben ein signifikanter Unterschied entsteht.

Es geht auch anders!

Dass es auch anders geht und Menschen mit Farbenfehlsichtigkeit nicht im Spielerlebnis benachteiligt werden müssen, zeigen Maxis mit »SimCity«, die von Haus aus verschiedene Filter anbieten, welche entsprechend starke Kontraste und/oder direkt andere Farben anbieten. Da »SimCity« Daten als Overlay über die Stadt legt und dabei mit Farbverläufen arbeitet ist es also durchaus wichtig, dass man erkennt, wo die Unterschiede liegen. Das folgende Video von PC Gamer stellt mehrere Filter, die das Spielerlebnis mit Farbfehlsichtigkeit simulieren, vor:

Diese Filter wurden eingesetzt, nachdem einer der Angestellten aus der Qualitätssicherung beliebig Zonen gesetzt hat, damit er herausfindet, welche Zonen wofür zuständig sind und Ocean Quigley, Art Director bei Maxis, einen Filter baute, welcher Rot-Grün-Schwäche simuliert um zu wissen, wie sich das Spielerlebnis ändert. Als er feststellte, dass »SimCity« unspielbar geworden ist, wurden neue Filter für verschiedene Formen der Farbfehlsichtigkeit eingebaut. Durch Zufall hat Maxis also von Beginn an Modi für Farbenblinde implementiert, was aber bei Weitem noch kein Standard ist.

Und nun?

In den meisten Fällen ist es ziemlich egal ob ein Spieler alle Farben auseinanderhalten kann, aber es gibt genug Beispiele, in denen es nunmal wichtig ist, das zu können. Solche Modi für Spieler mit einer Farbenfehlsichtigkeit sind besonders bei Teamspielen unglaublich wichtig, denn schließlich will keiner ständig von seinem Teamkameraden abgeschossen werden, weil dieser nicht auseinanderhalten kann wer Feind und wer Freund ist. Solche Modi sind für Entwickler wohl nur ein kleiner Aufwand, können aber unglaublich viel im Erlebnis einer nicht zu vernachlässigenden Anzahl an Spielern ausmachen. Ich werde hier nicht viel ändern, das ist mir bewusst, aber vielleicht kann ich ja ein paar Leute mehr auf die Problematik aufmerksam machen. Damit wäre ich schon mehr als glücklich.

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Silence Is Golden - For Our Consideration

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For Our Consideration

Silence Is Golden

Just because games can talk doesn’t mean they should.

By Anthony John Agnello • February 12, 2013

I love the characters of Persona 4 because they are so wonderfully human. Yukiko, a young heiress, troubled like any other teenager, burdened by the family business she’ll inherit and her maintenance of a proper, well-studied schoolroom identity. The truth is she’s a geek. Puns and Groucho Marx glasses make her laugh like a hyena. She’s loyal to her friends, but she can be jealous and possessive. Her cooking is awful. She is, like every one else in the game, a convincingly wrought person.

The thing is, I have no real idea what her voice sounds like. The first thing I do when I fire up a new Persona is to check the options to see if I can turn off the voices. Persona doesn’t need voices to be good. Not every game does. Most games would be better off without it, but voices are a ubiquitous tic of modern game-making. It doesn’t need to be this way. Silence can be golden.

Decades ago, voices were a tantalizing impossibility in games because the software relied almost entirely on computer-generated noise for sound effects. A recorded voice was an almost insane data-storage demand on old machines, so it didn’t pop up often, and when it did it was rarely pleasing to the ear. There were exceptions: The old arcade shooter Sinistar is remembered 30 years later because its skull-shaped spaceship bad guy threatened the player. “I AM SINISTAR!” It turned heads in an arcade full of pew-pew pews and wakka-wakka-wakkas.

By the end of the 1980s, when CD-ROMs loosened data restrictions, there were plenty of PC games and “full-motion video” games (interactive cartoons and movies like Sewer Shark) that featured talking characters, but their actors were almost universally terrible. The internet is littered with the bones of those games; the atrocious performances of Resident Evil and Legend Of Zelda: Wand Of Gamelon are legendary. It wasn’t until games like Metal Gear Solid started throwing more respectable (though still not great) dialogue into the flow of the action—rendering scripted scenes with the game’s graphics engine to avoid the inconsistent look of pre-rendered videos—that game characters started to speak with alarming regularity.

It was a welcome change for the most part. Quantic Dream’s two most notable thrillers, Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, wouldn’t even be possible if their characters couldn’t speak to one another. The games’ director, David Cage, uses voice to give his characters humanity and create drama. The same goes for Mass Effect. If a detailed human figure like Commander Shepard is screaming at his crew, you need to hear that voice. It’s awkward enough when the game lapses into silence while you decide what Shepard will say next.

A voice can also give characters depth they wouldn’t otherwise have. Naughty Dog’s pulpy Uncharted adventures are pretty barebones in the story department, with archetypal characters going through predictable plot twists. Nathan Drake—the handsome lead character voiced by ubiquitous video game voice actor Nolan North—is a personable guy, but he’s not a fully fleshed-out human being. Instead, Drake builds his likability with offhand remarks in tough situations. An out-of-breath “Shit!” while balancing on the edge of a cliff, a hasty “No, no, no!” while trying to stay out of sight of gun-toting guards—these are the moments that make Drake somewhat human, not the direct-to-DVD tomb-raiding cutscenes. Of course he needs to talk.

But Uncharted and the other examples are games that present opportunities for brief verbal asides and regular conversation, where characters won’t have to repeat themselves—unlike, say, New Super Mario Bros. U. Mario was a colorful character even during his silent era, but his chirping, enthusiastic voice made him even more lovable the first time he yelled it out in Super Mario 64. If only he had kept his mouth shut after that.

In more recent games, the obnoxious plumber won’t close his yap for even 30 seconds. He yelps and wa-hoos his way through every level. Does he really need to implore us, “Let’s a-go!” every time we hit “start”? Or remind us once again that it’s a-him, Mario? All that noise has a cost; it detracts from the music and sounds that were so pleasurable in the original Super Mario Bros. Koji Kondo’s theme song is seared into a generation’s mind because there wasn’t bogged down in aural clutter.

Repetition like that can be brutal in a long game. Released last month, Ni No Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch, has some excellent voice work. Your companion Mr. Drippy, for instance, sounds like a hilarious cross between Scrooge McDuck and a blustering, magical city bureaucrat. Not every exchange in Ni No Kuni is vocalized, though. Aside from pivotal story scenes, most dialogue is expressed the old-fashioned way, with subtitles. And yet Ni No Kuni can’t resist Mario-style catchphrases—like the boy hero, Oliver, exclaiming, “Here goes!” at the start of every fight. If game creators insist on these repetitious vocal flourishes, I would rather have the whole game go unvoiced. It would mean sacrificing the good characterizations, like Mr. Drippy, to maintain a consistent, coherent presentation. And reading subtitled dialogue isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Silent characters can still have a voice. Part of why I love the Persona cast so much is that, since I’m given the option to just read what they have to say, I can imagine what they sound like for myself. After all, this is already a game where I get to project my whims into the main character, deciding how he behaves and who he spends time with. It’s only natural that I also imagine what he sounds like. Persona is an impressionistic game; its characters move in an simple, exaggerated motions, and its town is just a few static bucolic scenes. A realist touch like voice acting only clashes with the atmosphere.

It’s as simple as that: Not every game needs characters who speak. They don’t even need to grunt. If Link and his compatriots aren’t going to talk in The Legend Of Zelda, don’t half-ass it. Let them be quiet. If they have something to say, we can read. Voices are like anything else in a game, just one more tool that can be used to tell the story you need to tell. If it doesn’t need to be there, leave it out. If the characters do speak, then at least guarantee that they only speak when they need to, and if that’s not possible, give people the option to turn those voices off entirely. It’s great that games have learned to speak—now if only they would learn to be quiet.

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Greener Pastures

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There’s a pervading notion that people who spend a good part of their day peering into the tiny screen of their mobile phone are somehow missing the glorious moments of life as it whirls on around them. Those who hold that opinion must live in a really nice place because when I’m standing around in the Target Starbucks waiting for my soy latte or dining at Red Robin, one of the finer establishments in Apple Valley, California, I can honestly say that there is nothing miraculous, beautiful, enlightening or even remotely lovely happening around me. In fact, that magical little device I keep in my pocket is a window to a world where despair and banality is slightly less all-consuming. It is an escape hatch out of the bland purgatory of suburbia to someplace, anyplace else. If I didn’t have my wife (and forthcoming son) in my life I’d figure out a way to cram my head into that screen and climb out the other side.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate life. I have grown to love the desert where I live – or at least the parts that haven’t been fouled with trash and broken glass. The barren, rocky hills in the distance are very appealing to me. That’s probably because I can’t see all the cigarette butts and pull tabs from here. I appreciate the local color around here. I live just off old Route 66, so the landscape is peppered with vintage motels and other remnants of a bygone age, like the huge buffalo on the sign over the neighborhood dentist. These are all enriching things.

What I’m saying is that there’s only so much sustenance a person can cull from these oases of culture. Most people in this country live in bland, pre-fab honeycombs where beauty is scarce and enrichment hard to come by. That’s why millions still play games like World of Warcraft. Azeroth isn’t just a place to pass the time. It’s a place to escape to, like Narnia. Except, hell, I bet the England those kids were fleeing was pretty nice compared to Victorville.

Since I have a kid on the way, I have at least twenty years of presence in my future. I will try to live without screens – to be in the moment and occupy the landscape around me, no matter how squalid. I want to spend as much of that twenty years or so with my son. If I’m lucky enough to live to the point that my family can’t take care of me, I can promise you won’t find me staring out a retirement home window.

I’ve seen the news stories about Wii bowling in old folks’ homes. That’s all well and good for a generation who have an ambivalent relationship with videogames. I predict that retirement will be significantly different for those weaned on videogames. Forget those screenings of Cocoon every Friday night. If I am still kicking at that age. I will be jacked, plugged or logged into the the future equivalent of World of WarCraft, living it up as a virtual badass as long as I can. Don’t bother coming to visit in person. The assisted living complex is a dreary place anyway. It you want to hang out with 80-year-old me you’d better have a Battle.net account.

———

Pretension +1 is a weekly column about the intersections of life, culture and videogames. Follow Gus Mastrapa on Twitter @Triphibian.

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Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

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Mike Rose is Gamasutra’s UK video game editor (and traffic correspondent, apparently).

After the first SimCity beta weekend had ended, I read an article by Norman Chan over at Tested.com in which he attempted to discover the best suburban city layout according to the game. It’s hugely interesting stuff, and quite frankly I hadn’t considered the idea of putting this new SimCity to real-world use.

So when the second beta weekend rolled around, I decided to have a crack at testing some theories that I have about my own hometown of Northenden, Manchester (population of roughly 15,000, as far as I can tell).

Northenden is a pretty small place that you can drive straight through in around five minutes. The town mainly consists of residental housing, with a strip of shops that is known at the center of the town. And yet, considering the low number of people who live here, coupled with the low number of reasons to want to be driving around the town, you still wouldn’t want to visit during rush hour. We’re talking standstill traffic that you can sometimes expect to sit around in for up to an hour.

Look at a map of the area, and it’s not hugely difficult to see why. The town features connections onto multiple motorways, plus the extremely busy Princess Parkway, which goes all the way into the center of Manchester city. To its North, you’ve got a straight road surrounded by golf courses, that leads to the bustling Didsbury areas.

Essentially, during both the morning commute and the drive back home from work in the evening, Northenden becomes a traffic bottleneck, with hundreds of cars either trying to get onto the motorway, or out into Didsbury. I have to pick up and drop my child off at nursery in Didsbury a couple of times a week, and quite honestly, the drive is like hell on Earth at the worst of times.

At least, this is my reasoning for the ugly traffic. In fact, I’ve contemplated numerous times exactly what causes the pileups in Northenden, sometimes wondering whether it’s simply that the town is laid out in an awful fashion. Now, with the incredibly scientific power of SimCity, I will finally get to the bottom of what is the real cause.

Question 1: Is it the layout of the town that causes the traffic?

I began by sticking Google Maps on my second screen, and then building Northenden in SimCity as best as I could. I wasn’t meticulous about the design - I mean, I’m not submitting this to the council or anything - but I made sure that the layout was roughly the same as the real-life town, especially when it came to the main through roads. At the bottom of the following screenshot you can see the town connecting up to Princess Parkway/the motorway, while at the top left, the road connects to Didsbury (or a railway track, as is the case here - more on that later).

My version of Northenden - click to expand

Switching to the zoning view shows exactly what types of housing you can see here. The blue indicates the line of shops through Northenden center, while the yellow to the right is Sharston Industrial Estate (I added this in since if I didn’t have industrial buildings, not many people would actually choose to move into my town!). What’s lovely is that my town’s population appears to have peaked at around 18,000, which is only just slightly more than the real Northenden. I wish I could say that I did that on purpose.

Zoning in Northenden

There’s a 4-way junction in the heart of Northenden that everyone just calls “Tesco”, mainly because it has a big old Tesco store on the corner. This is one of the main areas where traffic usually builds up and causes the bottlenecking, so I decided to keep a close eye on how my SimCity traffic piled up there.

As it turns out, it wasn’t too bad at all. During the morning rush hour, there was a slight build up but nothing too notable. I surely wouldn’t have minded sitting in that level of traffic, and it’s a country mile better than the real deal. In the below screenshot you can see the peak of the rush hour, with the robot store in place of where Tesco sits in real life.

The Tesco 4-way junction

This isn’t hugely surprising. In its current form, the through-roads aren’t really acting as through-roads, since Northenden residents don’t have a huge number of places to go along those roads. No, what I really want to test is whether funnelling traffic through the center of Northenden causes jams.

Question 2: Is the issue that Northenden is used as a through-town?

The issue is that SimCity’s maps are rather small - at least, in the beta - and as such, I had to improvise a bit. Where Northenden hits SimCity’s outlying railway track is where a stretching single road reaches into West and East Didsbury, both very busy areas. In place of this, I built a long stretching road at a 90 degrees angle, parallel to the railway, to replicate the Didsbury area. I created a built-up area filled with shops, and dumped a large casino at the far end (there’s a large casino complex in East Didsbury called Parrswood). I then stretched a strip of highway from the casino all the way round to the other end of Northenden - an extremely simple but near-faithful version of the real-world area.

East Didsbury and the Parrswood Casino

With this set-up in place, the hope was that Northenden residents would venture out to Didsbury en masse, and mix in with the traffic from the tourist traffic from the motorway, on their way to visit the casino. Within 10 minutes, the effects were clearly notable - as per the below screenshot.

How the traffic looks after adding East Didsbury into the mix - note the strips of red running through Northenden center and into Didsbury

Most areas of Northenden were fine, with green and yellow strips on the road signifying no-to-light traffic. However, much of the main road going through town is red or orange, meaning pile-ups and standstill traffic. In particular, the road into East Didsbury was red all the way down.

This definitely echoes the sort of traffic you’d expect to find during the rush hour - that latter road in particular can take a good half an hour to get down when things get particularly bad. In fact, this setup even highlights a little trick that I know of for dodging some of the traffic: when coming from East Didsbury (up at the top right) into Northenden (alongside that bright red strip of road), if you take the second left along Northenden high street, you can skim through some of the back roads and pop out in a relatively lighter area, backpassing the through-road slog. Look at the SimCity map, and it seems to work here too!

Jump ahead to the time when the real rush hour traffic starts to kick in, and that once easy going junction at Tesco is suddenly rammed with cars.

The Tesco 4-way junction after East Didsbury has been added

So what does this all prove? Is it indeed true that through-traffic coming from Didsbury and the motorway is causing the Northenden bottlenecks? And what can the council do to fix the issue?

Well… the answer is, of course, that it means absolutely nothing. This was but a mere video game experiment, and nothing here even closely resembles scientific evidence to support my theories, nor can it be used to diagnose the issues. Everything I did was hugely vague and nothing at all like real life.

That being said, this little project definitely gave me a sense for what could be accomplished with SimCity if put in the right hands. I noticed plenty of other little interesting takeaways from my hour of play, including the fact that once I’d built East Didsbury, the strip of shops in Northenden stopped making as much money as they once were, and some were even beginning to close down as my time ran out. Walk along Northenden high street, and you’ll know that feeling.

For me personally, I can’t wait to see what happens when the game is released, and people with real scientific experiments give it a run for its money.

And this is what I’ll have to work my way through to take my son to nursery in Didsbury tomorrow *sigh*

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