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Gone Home: Spiele missverstehen | Video Game Tourism

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Spoilerwarnung. Was sonst? Also zuerst Gone Home spielen, erst dann diese - ich sag's gleich - recht selbstreferenziellen Meditationen weiter unten lesen. Ja, das ist ein beinhartes Ausleseverfahren hier im verhipstertsten Intellektuellen-Gaming-Blog der Wahl. Hab ich schon Dwarf Fortress gesagt? Im Ernst: Spoiler.
Der Untertitel zu diesem Text über das grandiose Gone Home  - ein, ich gebs zu, auf den ersten Blick irreführend klingendes "Spiele missverstehen" - ist ein Verweis auf eines der Bücher, das von meinem in grauer Vorzeit versuchten Publizistikstudium geblieben ist: James Monacos Buch "Film verstehen" ist ein Klassiker, der Grundlegendes zum Medium Film erläutert; eigentlich, so würde man meinen, sollte jedem Fernseher, jeder Kinokarte ein Exemplar dieses Werkes beiliegen, in dem etwas Essenzielles, aber meist Vernachlässigtes unternommen wird, nämlich die impliziten und aus Tradition erarbeiteten Grundgesetze des Mediums Film darzulegen, bewusst zu machen und so das Medium für seine Konsumenten nicht nur passiv erfahrbar, sondern aktiv analysierbar zu machen.

Meine These - und Grund für einen Untertitel, der eine derart umständliche Einleitungserklärung nötig macht - ist nun die: Wir Spieler, besonders wir Viel- und Gewohnheitsspieler, haben uns einen mechanistischen Zugang zum Medium Games angeeignet, der jenem des Gelegenheits- oder gar Erstspielers unterlegen ist und beinahe blind ist für sein Objekt. Wir "verstehen" unser Medium vielleicht, in dem Sinne, dass wir seine Zeichen zu deuten wissen und mit ihm umgehen können; zugleich engt dieses Verstehen aber unseren Umgang mit dem Medium ein und führt fatalerweise vielleicht sogar zu jener Stagnation, die wir an anderer Stelle bedauern. Gone Home ist so gesehen ein Befreiungsschlag, der demonstrativ zeigt: Wir verstehen da vielleicht was falsch.

Es ist das "Play Brain", das am Ruder ist, wenn ich die Finger auf die WASD-Tasten lege, das effizient filtert, erkennt, sucht, vergleicht und sich zurechtfindet. Ich "verstehe" den First-Person-Shooter, die Geschichte des Genres, seine Mechanismen, Konventionen, Hinweise, Übereinkünfte und Gewohnheiten. Ich weiß Bescheid: Ich bewege mich effizient durch die Spielarchitektur, sortiere Sackgassen aus, selektiere einen optimalen Weg, erkenne Rätselmechanismen genauso wie Vorboten nahender Gefechte: Oh, ein Raum voller Munition? Eine verschlossene Tür mit Code-Eingabe? Ein Zimmer voller Holzkisten? If-then.

Ich "verstehe" die Konventionen, Mechanismen und Traditionen so gut, dass ich oft durch das Spiel auf seine Abstraktion hindurchblicke: Hier eine Arena, dort ein Schlüsselrätsel, da ein Raum mit potenziell versteckten Vorräten. Egal, ob ich dabei in Rapture herumlaufe oder in Pripyat, in Columbia oder Pandora: Das Play Brain abstrahiert, lässt die Deko verschwinden, sieht nur den Mechanismus. Ich behaupte: Wir kürzen zu viel weg.

Gone Home hat mir gezeigt, dass ich mit dieser Art des "Verstehens" einem Missverständnis aufsitze, und es demonstriert somit auf erfrischende Weise, dass man elegant aus den eingefahrenen Spurrinnen aussteigen kann - ein Kunststück, das wiederum und natürlich dem Indie-Kleinwagen leichter möglich ist als, say, einem AAA-Flugzeugträger wie Infinite, das einfach klassisches Schießen bieten muss, um die nervösen Männer mit den Taschenrechnern und Statistiken zu besänftigen.

Vielleicht ist die Konzentration auf das Ästhetische, Atmosphärische in den Spielewelten, wie sie die Arbeit der In-Game-Fotografen feiert, ja eine Ersatzhandlung, ein sehnsüchtiges Innehalten und Verweisen auf das, was in unserem Medium, abseits der Gameplay-Mechanismen hier eigentlich zu sehen ist: eine Stadt unter Wasser; ein Schloss in den Wolken; eine alpine Wildnis; ein Wüstenplanet; eine verlassene Hebrideninsel. Es braucht ironischerweise vielleicht den Blick spielferner Menschen, die etwa angesichts Andy Kellys Other Places-Reihe große Augen bekommen und uns sagen: "Schönes Medium habt ihr da!" "Stimmt", antworten wir dann vielleicht zerstreut, aber geschmeichelt, "aber in Infinite kommen die Plasmide nur halb so fetzig wie in Bioshock 2." Es mag komisch klingen, aber: The more you know, the more you lost.

Zeit, zwei Missverständnisse aufzuklären:Was mit unserer Familie geschehen ist - und was das Medium Games wirklich kann.

Es ist eine besonders geniale Pointe von Gone Home, dass es anscheinend wirklich und tatsächlich eines Settings bedarf, das so wahnsinnig unspektakulär und, tja, uncool ist, um uns aufzurütteln und zu zeigen, dass unser mechanisches "Verstehen" der Konventionen des Mediums ein Missverständnis ist und wir gefälligst die Augen - und auch die Teile unsere Gehirne abseits des "Play Brains" - verwenden sollen: Ein Haus in den banalsten 90er-Jahren, und hier missverstehen wir nicht nur buchstäblich, was mit unserer Familie geschehen ist, sondern wirklich, was das Medium kann, wenn wir es so erforschen wie sonst immer: Hier warten keine Monster, hier gibt es keine Leichen, das Rot in der Badewanne ist vom Haarefärben und die Geheimverstecke im Haus bergen keine Geheimnisse, sondern Papas Pornohefte. Das heißt nicht, dass es nichts zu entdecken gibt, dass wir gebeutelt werden und unser Gehirn anstrengen müssen. Ganz nebenbei beweist Gone Home mit leichter Hand, wie Erzählen im Spiel im Bestfall auch funktioniert - und dass das ermüdende Paradigma vom filmischen Erzählen nur ein Aspekt eines Mediums ist, das eben von der Interaktion lebt. Da können sich Spielberg und Lucas noch so demonstrativ als Ignoranten outen - das hier ist das Medium, dem das 21. Jahrhundert gehört wie das vergangene dem Film.

Dear Esther hat uns gezeigt, dass man im Spiel auch spazierengehen und dabei melancholisch meditieren kann; Gone Home zeigt uns, dass wir vom Medium gewohnheitsmäßig vielleicht das Falsche erwarten und es deshalb, so könnte man weiterdenken, auch meist bekommen. Alle, wirklich alle sollten es spielen und sich danach die Frage stellen, warum zur Hölle wir diesem Missverständnis so lange erlegen sind.

Danke, Fullbright Company. Allein für diese Lektion wird Gone Home Bestand haben.

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Gone Home Review

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Giant Bomb Review

5
by Patrick Klepek on August 15, 2013

This house has a story to tell, and players patient enough to listen will be rewarded with a touching story that won’t soon leave you.

Have you ever walked by an empty house, and thought about going inside? A house is just a pile of bricks until someone lives inside, and then it becomes a home. Houses have stories to tell, so long as we’re willing to listen. Gone Home, the debut game from The Fullbright Company, is about one very specific house with one very specific story, and it’s asking you to listen closely.

Lights turn off and on, drawers open and shut—Gone Home’s house is full of unbelievable details of the mundane variety.

It’s difficult to talk about Gone Home without saying more than should be said for anyone already sold on it. Do know that Gone Home has lived up to sky-high expectations for the next project from the creative team that delivered the exceptional Minerva’s Den add-on for BioShock 2. For anyone that’s curious to know more about what makes Gone Home work so darn well, keep on reading.

Gone Home is set in 1995, and opens with the arrival of Kaitlin Greenbriar. That’s you. Returning from a whirlwind trip through Europe in the dead of night, Kaitlin approaches the front steps of her house during the height of a crackling thunderstorm, greeted by a hastily hand-written note from her younger sister, Sam. The note instructs Kaitlin that she’s gone and not to worry, which, of course, is every reason to worry. What happened here? Gone Home is played from a first-person-perspective, and there is no combat. This is a game about exploration, though one not without its share of tension. But you will never pick up a gun, and your primary means of interacting with the world is opening doors, shuffling papers, and closely examining nooks and crannies of your family’s house. If you think you can touch it and interact with it, chances are The Fullbright Company will give you the option to.

Though Kaitlin’s family lives in this house, everything is unfamiliar. There’s a map that fills in as you progress through the house, appropriately labeled as it becomes clear what each room’s function is. The Fullbright Company has meticulous hidden letters, books, notes, magazines, manuscripts, inscriptions, cassette tapes, labeled recordings of X-Files episodes, and countless other objects throughout the house. Hidden is the wrong word, though. If someone was tasked with combing through your home and building a narrative from what was inside, it might feel like some of your stuff was hidden, too. Instead, this place feels incredibly natural. It looks…like a home. It’s messy, there are boxes everywhere, and Kaitlin’s mom was probably upset about the lack of help. There are no objects fluttering with gold dazzles to signify their importance. It is absolutely possible to miss key bits of information, but if you never knew they existed, how important were they? The story you tell in your head is only as real as the the information in front of you. Do missing pieces matter, then?

By god, though, is it fun to look at the pieces. They are everywhere, and each colored with immaculate detail. Fans of the high-resolution image genre will fall over themselves looking through the meticulously detailed pieces of history The Fullbright Company has constructed. The few times where images aren’t detailed enough to read the tiniest bits of text are disappointing, but only because nearly every other spot in the house has been given such close attention. Heck, there are even physics associated with some of the objects. Cassette tape holders open, flip around, and reveal secret messages to those clever enough to manipulate them in the right way. And for those who are worried about causing a mess, the game even includes the ability to place things exactly as they were. It’s the kind of touch that speaks volumes about the game’s design values.

There is a path through the game, but how long you spend on that path is mostly up to you. There is very little preventing the player from barreling through the main storyline, though you’ll have to slow down to discover triggers that signal how to access locked parts of the house. These bits are deliberately easy to find, and are often closely connected to a series of voice overs by Sam, talking as though she is right next to you. (Sam is voiced by Portland voice actor Sarah Grayson, and she does excellent work here.) If anything, what’s difficult is convincing yourself to move to the next room. Patience is rewarded in Gone Home, as patience will help you discover the answers to all of your questions. Everything you want to know can be found within the house, though the game will not connect the dots for you. There is no plot summary, and material is sometimes presented out of order. This makes exploring the house, even after the story ends, continually satisfying.

Without spoiling, this all makes Gone Home sounds much more mysterious than it actually is. Still, it’s impossible to explore the house without cringing as a door creaks opens, or you start walking into the basement. Thunder and lightning strike without notice, making their appearance all the more startling, but it’s not timed to the flickering of lights or an eerie noise down the hall. There are no jump scares in Gone Home, and there are no ghosts hiding in a closet. But all the same, Gone Home feels exceedingly creepy, and the game thoughtfully plays with the differences between its dramatic presentation and the actions actually playing out on the screen. I mean, when you’re alone at home and it’s time to turn off the lights, it’s easy to tell yourself there’s nothing following you around the house, but once that idea pops into your head, it’s hard to let go.

Not everything in Gone Home is there for a reason. Much of it is there to color the world, and provide a sense of time and place.

The experience of playing Gone Home becomes more impressive upon reflection. We’re used to games hitting us over the head with big plot twists and character moments. Games are often the opposite of subtle out of fear the audience will not understand the magnitude of the moment. “We wrote this story, and this big thing happened, you see, and you better get it!.” As the layers are removed from Gone Home’s story, there is no suite of violins to underscore the revelations, and no characters to remind us what we just read or heard. (Chris Remo’s soundtrack is, however, hauntingly beautiful.) Gone Home places an impressive amount of faith into the player to discover what The Fullbright Company has laid out before them, and seems willing to lose players who aren’t going to put in the effort to come along. There is, for lack of a better phrase, a “holy shit” moment early on in the game, and it acts as though nothing’s happened. The house is still there, you’re still alone, and it’s time to move on.

Prepare for a nostalgia hit, too, and not just ’90s references. Gone Home will remind you what it’s like to be young, naive, and full of passion. Everything mattered and nothing mattered. No one understands you and no one ever will. The world is both infinite and unfathomably small. As the story unfolds, what’s remarkable is just how unremarkable it really is. Gone Home is an epic story, but its definition of epic is far removed from how we usually talk about scope and drama in games. It’s epic, personal and revelatory to the people involved, and that’s why it’s so special. The moments in my life that I cherish the most—my first love, realizing my brother was my best friend, moving to San Francisco, getting married—would not register against saving the universe from an alien threat, but these are the epic moments in my life. Gone Home grounds itself by reveling in life’s quiet, defining moments, the ones you might write down in a diary, underneath a set of books, only to find years later.

What a crazy kid you were.
Patrick Klepek on Google+

Game Name

Gone Home

Platform(s)

Mac PC Linux

Publisher(s)

The Fullbright Company

Developer(s)

The Fullbright Company

Genres

Adventure

Themes

Original US Release

Aug 15, 2013

ESRB

What the users think

4.33 stars 4.33/5 Stars Average score of 9 user reviews

Read the most helpful review by Tylea002

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Creative Restriction and The New Realism - Front Page - Magical Wasteland

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Much of the critical writing that has blossomed in the immediate wake of The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home sounds a bit like a sigh of relief: yes, we can do this! A big part of it is due to the subjects of its main story (which have been writtenaboutwonderfully). Another part of it, and mixed in with the first, comes with the form of the game– its willingness to work within certain creative restrictions.

A future student of this medium might find it difficult to understand what a departure this game really is from the kinds of things that came before it. Up until now, most of the major efforts that explored close human relationships and emotions through the lens of a game leaned heavily on some fantastical setting: the zombie-infested lands of The Walking Dead or The Last of Us, the child-spun fantasy worlds of Papo & Yo and Limbo, the bizarre Columbia in BioShock Infinite. Even Dear Esther’scold Hebrideanisland is best understood as representing the mental state of the main character– a rendering of his internal world– rather than as a “real” place.

Gone Home’s steadfast refusal to include the supernatural, melodrama, or even pulp is one of its most defining and most interesting qualities. We keep expecting to hear a scream, see a bloodstain, or be inundated with one-frame flashbacks. We have been trained to assume that these things go a certain way. But what we find instead is a disarming family story, left there for us to discover and take in at our own pace. Gone Home’s world is the real world, where the kids go to school and grow up, where a middle-aged couple struggles through marriage, and where the occult only exists inasmuch as the characters attempt to interact with it.

There have been many attempts to depict relationships in a gamelike format, even though humanistically representing character through a system is quite difficult. Often the interactions are too shallow, such as when carefully listening to someone’s life story for half an hour or so leads to them declaring you the love of their life. Then there are the distant, abstract representations, like you find in the sprawling procedural dynasties of strategy games like Crusader Kings, or the traits of the soldiers in Valkyria Chronicles, where a character’s particular attributes can be amusing but are really meaningful only through in their contribution to, or hinderance of, the player’s overall goal of conquest. Even in the most touching of regular systemic interactions– calling your father in Mother 2 because you’re homesick, for example, or holding Yorda’s hand in Ico– become rote activities after a while, and somewhat lose their poignancy with repetition.

This is not to say that real human interactions are not ritualized to the point of mechanic in some ways, but that procedural rhetoric about human life nearly always makes a specific argument: life works this way, life works that way. Counter to this, Gone Home eschews systems; in particular, it avoids systemizing anything about its characters. Instead of portraying the characters themselves, or providing a set of interactions with those characters, it presents instead a series of artifacts from the characters’ lives without trying to build mechanics around them. The family is only present through those artifacts, the shapes and shadows each member leaves behind. In a certain sense, you could say that the game sets its sights low. But it also hits its mark extremely well– and by doing so achieves something greater than a reductive mechanical take on those same characters ever could. Gone Home is not intended from the top down to be “a game about life”, as some ham-handed experiments have been– instead, it simply represents or evokes certain lives very well (and therefore naturally becomes about life). The game allows its characters to exist on a plane that we usually reserve for ourselves.

Chris Sullentrop, writing in the New York Times, called Gone Home “the closest thing to literary realism I’ve encountered in a video game.” This is an astute and important observation. In fact, when evaluated in the light of its companions in the average Steam library, Gone Home seems almost radically realist.

* * *

An interesting question that follows from this is: does this new kind of interactive realism have applications beyond one title? Does Gone Home lead us to a rich vein of non-abstracted, non-fantastical, and only lightly mechanical takes on the human condition through the medium of video games?

There are some big limitations to the strict environmental storytelling approach. These limitations are similar to those of the epistolary novel, where you can’t impart any action as it happens, but only as it was later filtered through someone else’s recorded experience. In this kind of framework, you must allow for the fact that what is transferred to the reader (or the player) has to be discoverable– that is, out in the open in some way and accessible to the audience. And you must strike the right balance between what feels plausible, not overtly expository, and what will get the information across that allows the full story to come into being.

The Fullbright team has brilliantly navigated these self-imposed restrictions. By having the player-protagonist come home from a year-long trip to an unfamiliar home, for example, they neatly sidestep the dissonance between a character who should be familiar with the environment (Kaitlin’s own home) and the players of that character, who are seeing it for the first time. This choice allows both us and Kaitlin to experience the home as new. By setting the game in 1995, on the early cusp of the Internet revolution, the Greenbriars would not be expected to be e-mailing or texting one another. It’s believeable, then, when much of the drama is preserved in physical artifacts instead of taking place online.

Part of the joy of playing Gone Home, to me, was to see those solutions in action– to understand the shape of the problems and appreciate the creativity involved in solving them. As many of us come to learn as we make things, one of the best things one can do to catalyze one’s creativity is to work under specific limitations. This may be especially true of games, because within them one can do nearly anything; the possibility space of all game rules and systems is so large that it might be no wonder we’ve mostly clung to known forms over the last three decades.

Perhaps what we really need to advance our medium, then, is not the development of yet more new technology, but instead new sets of rules under which to work– that is, new kinds of artistic forms.

And perhaps one of those forms takes, as its primary instrument, the eye of the literary realist.

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Meet me in Portland: The Fullbright Company's journey home

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By Mike Mahardy on August 13, 2013 at 12:00p

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How serendipity, restlessness and trust formed an independent game studio.
There’s this house in Northeast Portland. A green Cape Cod, with moss on the roof and a hammock in the backyard. The kind of place where you want to raise a family, maybe retire to, if the Pacific Northwest is your thing.

If you’re attentive, you’ll see the cats, Delicious and Adventurous, peering through a window as a guy with dreadlocks, held in place by a folded bandana, leaves on his bike. Later, you might see the rest of the residents returning from the local Hollywood Theater, famous for its atmosphere, pizza and beer.

Some know this as the Fullbright House. The residents call themselves The Fullbright Company.

Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, Johnnemann Nordhagen and Kate Craig are no strangers to game development. As individuals, they’ve worked on titles such as BioShock 2, BioShock Infinite and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. One of them even has experience making social games.

They’re making a new house. One not made of Sheetrock and timber, but code and polygons. This is Gone Home, a game devoid of violence or superpowers, in which you explore a house, searching for your lost family members in a personal story without much context beyond that. If all goes well, this title will put The Fullbright Company, and the Portland game scene, on the map.

But in the end, that really doesn’t matter. The four have poured so much of themselves into Gone Home, and received so much in return, that the trip has become more important than the destination. And somewhere along the way, they all became a family.

The company ladder
The company ladder

Top to bottom: Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann
Nordhagen, Karla Zimonja, Kate Craig

To look at him today, at the helm of his own independent game studio, you wouldn’t know that Steve Gaynor was once the quintessential wandering college student, going through the motions, taking a bit longer to progress toward graduation than some of his Portland State professors might have preferred.

“I really didn’t know what I was aiming towards,” Gaynor says. “And I sort of had this realization like, ‘Clearly what I’m thinking about the most [is] games, over any other form of expression or entertainment.’ Even though I was drawing comics, studying sculpture and learning about the fine art world.”

Gaynor found that level design was a great way to break into game development, because of easy access to design tools. His first levels, made entirely in his free time, were for F.E.A.R., the first-person shooter.

Gaynor moved to San Francisco in 2006, and worked as a tester for Sony. Soon, though, his knowledge of the F.E.A.R. level editor landed him a job at TimeGate Studios, the Houston-based developer in charge of the F.E.A.R. expansion Perseus Mandate.

“It was a great experience,” he says. “It was a very old-school experience. It was a small number of guys ordering Chinese food in every night. It was very low pressure and I got to learn a lot without being super scared, which is a good starting point as a professional.”

A year later, at the 2008 Game Developers Conference, Gaynor followed a friend to an appointment with 2K Marin. There he met Jordan Thomas, the creative director of BioShock 2. The encounter encouraged Gaynor to apply for a job, despite his apprehension.

“It’s a mistake I think a lot of people make,” he says. “Don’t assume other people won’t be interested. If you don’t apply, no one can get back to you in the first place.”

Gone was the indecisive, unsure Gaynor, replaced by someone more confident. He took a leap, hoping to reach the opposite ledge. 2K Marin did get back to Gaynor. The job was his.

And, as luck would have it, he would soon meet Karla Zimonja and Johnnemann Nordhagen.

“Don’t assume other people won’t be interested. If you don’t apply, no one can get back to you in the first place.”

Bonding agents
Bonding agents

Back at the Fullbright House, the day is drawing to a close. The charcoals on the grill are smoldering. Kate Craig, Fullbright’s 3D artist, who works remotely from Vancouver, is in town for the weekend, and the rest of the team is enjoying her company. Tonight, they’ll hang out around the fire pit, drink beers and head over to the swing set at the nearby park.

You would think they’d get sick of one another. Or at least want more time apart. But The Fullbright Company members can’t seem to hang out enough. They recently visited Enchanted Forest, a nearby amusement park. They watch Star Trek and My So-Called Life together. Chances are, if you see one of them, another is close by.

“We were at GDC, and I compared it to being in a band,” Craig says. “It’s closer-knit than the other studios I’ve worked at. If you don’t have much money, you have to do things like share hotel rooms, share flights and sleep in their basement, with cats lying on you.”

Gaynor, Zimonja and Nordhagen have seen the other side of the fence, the side with large teams and international studios, where you’re consigned to a role for the duration of a project. Craig’s experiences with social games are similar.

But that’s not why they all left. Despite the horror stories that so often accompany game development experiences, Gaynor and his team weren’t pushed away, but pulled. They were attracted to the artistic liberty and self-management of a small game studio. They have the freedom to ride their bikes when work becomes too much, to have not only a co-worker beside them, but a friend as well.

“This has been an amazing thing,” Nordhagen says. “I can’t imagine living my life any other way now. Which is why I hope this game does well, so I don’t have to go get another job.”

“Maybe it’s foolhardy of me, but I was never worried about living with them,” Zimonja says. “I forget to go outside sometimes, and not sit in front of the computer all day. So it’s good to have someone to say, ‘Let’s go do this.’ And it’s been working well for the entire development process. We’ve become this weird little family.”

To hear Gaynor talk about his team now, more than a year after it formed, you’d be forgiven for assuming he was never afraid. His confidence belies the fact that it could have fallen apart at any time. Their funds, and personal cash flow, could have vanished. They could have collapsed under the weight of their new responsibilities. They could have hated each other.

“I’m really glad we get along well enough to live together, without driving each other super crazy,” Gaynor says. “It’s great to have this ambient ability just to hang out with people, and enjoy them … to have this group of people you can rely on.”

Trust me, I have a plan
Trust me, I have a plan

“My favorite game developers would seriously piss off the Sorting Hat [in Harry Potter],” says Jordan Thomas, five years after his chance meeting with Gaynor at GDC, “and these three embody that. They have a deep hunger to diversify … to draw, code, write something unsolicited in the margins of their job description that reminds you, ‘Yeah, so, I can do more?’ They just can’t help it.

“They each defy classification in a way that pleasantly surprises you, over and over again.”

At this point, Thomas has worked with the trio on BioShock 2 and its single-player expansion, Minerva’s Den, on which Gaynor was the lead designer in 2010. Just beneath Gaynor was Zimonja — his story partner, and the team’s 2D artist.

After getting her foot in the door as a researcher at 2K, Zimonja was able to branch out. Take on more responsibility. Her proven mettle landed her a position on the development team for Minerva’s Den, where she fell in love with the small-team atmosphere Gaynor grew so fond of in Houston.

Zimonja is no leader. She’ll be the first to tell you that. But she functions well as a right hand, supplementing someone else’s talents with her own expertise.

“I’m a better editor than I am a writer,” she says. “I work better when there’s something to work with. I always see different things than Steve does, so it’s good for us both to be there. It’s a good collaboration.”

When Gaynor left 2K Marin in 2011 to join Irrational Games, the team making BioShock Infinite, Zimonja remained behind. She began work on The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

Gaynor and Zimonja knew they wanted to work together again, but how they would do that was easier said than done. Gaynor and his wife, Rachel Jacks, lived in Boston; Zimonja was still in San Francisco. After a while, as they so often can, things stopped clicking.

“My wife and I just realized that being somewhere strictly for a job, and being on a really big, high-profile project, were not really what we were interested in when we got there,” Gaynor says.

“I had been doing the exact same thing, every day, for too long, even now, I miss everyone at 2K. It was just time to do something else.”

Jacks’ family was from Oregon, so she knew the Portland area well. It was also Gaynor’s “adopted home,” as he calls it, after his college love affair with the city. The choice was, in a lot of ways, simple.

“We had both wanted to move back to Portland for a long time, even when we lived in San Francisco,” Jacks says. “We were both giddy about moving back here when we decided to go for it.”

Gaynor wanted to make a personal game, one with an intimate narrative, but also within the means of a small team. One they could make with the money from their own pockets, and one they could make well.

The seeds of The Fullbright Company had been planted. Now, all Gaynor needed was help to make them grow. After a few emails and phone calls, Zimonja was all but packing her bags.

“I had been doing the exact same thing, every day, for too long,” she says. “Even now, I miss everyone at 2K. It was just time to do something else. I was at a point where I was like, ‘Sure, I can move a whole bunch of states away.’ It was a good time for a change.”

But neither Zimonja nor Gaynor knew how to program very well. They needed someone versatile, someone who could take on the workload of several programmers. They wanted someone familiar.

Enter: Nordhagen. The one with the dreadlocks.

“One day, I was thinking about what I wanted to do after Irrational,” Gaynor says. “And I saw a tweet from Johnnemann. It was just sort of existentially introspective. I read it and I was like, ‘Johnnemann might be considering the possibility of what else he could be doing.’”

Nordhagen’s constant smile finally becomes a laugh.

“I remember that,” he says. “A categorical imperative. Basically, if you’re ever doing anything merely as a means to an end, you’re doing a disservice to yourself.

“Working in triple-A development had kind of turned into a means to an end — getting a paycheck and feeding myself, instead of something that inspired me purely for its own sake. Working on an indie title, that’s all there is. The game. And that’s an end in and of itself, which is great.”

So, Gaynor began chatting with Nordhagen about the possibility of coming to Portland, along with Zimonja, to form The Fullbright Company.

A whole new world
A whole new world

Jacks is managing her Etsy account. She sells jewelry, clothing and pillows with designs inspired by the stars. On the other side of the basement wall, her husband, Zimonja and Nordhagen are hard at work on Gone Home.

“I’m constantly listening to talk about the game,” Jacks says. “I have a kind of weird inside-but-outside perspective on the whole thing.”

Every once in a while, Gaynor or Zimonja will ask Jacks’ opinion on a product or logo. (“Protex,” the tampon brand you may or may not stumble across in Gone Home — that name was Jacks’ idea.)

“When he worked on BioShock 2, Steven went off to the office all day, and I didn’t really know what exactly went on there,” Jacks says. “I now have a much better idea of how a game is made, and I’m really impressed by all the work that goes into it.”

Jacks isn’t the only one learning new things. Gaynor knew from the beginning that every member of the team would need to branch out and take on more responsibility, as the specialization inherent to a bigger studio with hundreds of members wouldn’t work here.

“We needed people that had a broad skill set,” Gaynor says. “In an indie studio that’s small, everyone’s going to be doing a lot of jobs. We all knew that we could work together, because of Minerva’s Den, and we all had similar desires, as far as the kind of game we wanted to make.”

On prior projects, Gaynor was a level designer. Now, he’s in charge of music licensing, writing, recording sound, even publicity and marketing.

Zimonja helps direct voice acting in Gone Home, researches the title’s 1990s setting and handles the 2D art.

Nordhagen is in charge of programming throughout the entire project, a far cry from the specialization of BioShock 2.

And as far as 3D art goes, well, no one had any clue where they’d get that at first.

They had enough of a budget to hire contractors for the 3D work, or even buy samples online, and edit them as they saw fit. For whatever reason, they avoided this route. The decision paid off.

One of Gaynor’s favorite comic and video game fan artists, Emily Carroll, was in Portland one weekend in May 2012. The two decided to grab lunch, and Carroll’s wife Kate Craig happened to be there.

“We got to talking about what she did, and Kate said, ‘Oh, I make 3D art for video games,’” Gaynor says.

At this point, Gaynor doesn’t even seem fazed at the turn of events. The entirety of development on Gone Home has been one fortunate event after another.

“It’s sort of intimidating when you’ve never met Steve Gaynor before,” Craig says. “When they first talked to me, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, these BioShock dudes are talking to me?’ They’ve worked on Minerva’s Den and impressive stuff, and I haven’t done any of that just yet. I feel really lucky to work with these dudes.”

After working part time with Craig for a few weeks, while she continued working on the social game Margaritaville, Gaynor offered her a full-time gig.

“She’s been insanely important, and it was super serendipitous,” Gaynor says. “Kate was just the perfect match for what we needed. She’s right on the exact wavelength of artistic outlook that fits with Gone Home.”

With that, The Fullbright Company was complete. The four adapted to their new roles in a small team. For 15 months, they leaned on one another, supported one another. They learned how to work together and, more importantly, how to live together.

“I am merely a curious explorer, who has become entwined in this family tale … These people matter and deserve to be remembered.”

Ad infinitum
Ad infinitum

Just as he did when he applied to 2K Marin, Gaynor took a leap of faith with The Fullbright Company and Gone Home. There was no guarantee of success, and he couldn’t promise Zimonja, Nordhagen or Craig that it wouldn’t be a disaster.

But maybe that’s why they all cherish the payoff even more. For The Fullbright Company, Gone Home is more than a game. It’s 15 months worth of poise and daring, of the team members’ faith in one another.

“I am … merely a curious explorer, who has become entwined in this family tale … These people matter and deserve to be remembered.”

This excerpt, from writer Michael Gakuran’s blog series, describes the thrill of Haikyo. Literally translated, this Japanese word means “ruins.” It’s also a term for urban exploration, the act of investigating abandoned buildings and houses.

The blog series, detailing the exploration of the forgotten Royal House in Japan, inspired Gaynor to create a title based around the idea — finding a story through voyeurism and exploration. In Gone Home, you explore the house on Arbor Hill, trying to discern the whereabouts of your family, all the while getting to know them on a personal level through diaries and bedside notes.

If The Fullbright Company vanished today, without explanation, you could still get to know the team. You could read their emails, grocery lists, birthday cards and journals. It would take some digging, but eventually you would find it.

You’d find a story that matters and — like that of the Royal House in Japan or the house on Arbor Hill — a story that deserves to be remembered.

Images: The Fullbright Company
Editing: Matt Leone, Russ Pitts
Design / Layout: Warren Schultheis, Matthew Sullivan

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One Tom Francis Is All You Need

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“I will probably never write another news story again.”

That’s either a quote from yours truly on his inevitable death bed, or a comment from Gunpoint designer Tom Francis. His joke comes weeks after announcing the success of his (excellent!) debut game has allowed him to quit his day job at PC Gamer and make games full-time.

Francis provided regular updates on the game’s progress from the very beginning of Gunpoint, then called Private Dick.

Yes, Francis is one of those dastardly video game writers who has gone on to make them. He’s on the other side, one of those people. We are lucky for it, and it was inevitable. Gunpoint’s creator has been thinking about games for a very long time, but arriving at this point took many years.

Gunpoint is a side-scrolling action puzzler, wherein players zip a spy wearing magical pants around the world at lightning fast speeds, and manipulate electronics to your own, nefarious ends. The door in front of you will not open? Don’t worry, just flip into crosslink mode, wire a light switch to the door, and when you flip the light switch on or off, the door will open and close, too. It’s one of 2013’s best, smartest games yet.

In high school, Francis would flip through game magazines and dream about a life where he spent all day playing and writing about games. (I wish that were true.) He even found himself chatting back and forth with developers, including Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson, designing the cult classic shooter Blood at the time.

“I would email the lead designer of whatever game I was playing and just suggest things to them,” he said. “ […] I would email him just every day to tell him ‘oh, you should add this weapon! And you should have a weapon that does this! And you should do this and this and this!’”

To Francis’ surprise, Wilson would email back, and let him know how those ideas jived with what the team was building. Back then, Wilson was working on the much less thrilling sequel, Blood II: The Chosen.

The gaming dream adjusted itself during college university, where his aims shifted to game development. When he graduated, there was some downtime, so he tried to put it to good use. Design was on his mind, even if it wasn’t clear what the path forward was. Francis wrote a pilot for a sci-fi TV series. Naturally, Futurama and Firefly were soon cancelled. But he also spent time writing a design document for a game.

“Obviously, any indie developer today will tell you that you don’t write a design document,” he said. “That’s not game design. Game design is [when] you actually try making the game.”

This was around 2003, though, and the idea of striking it out on your own has come a long way since then. This is before Braid, Super Meat Boy, or other trailblazers that proved it was possible to make games without a publisher support system. These games helped prove small teams could produce games as meaningful as what the biggest studios were creating. So Francis quietly tucked away his dream of making a game.

“It was just totally ingrained in me that I could never do this,” he said. “There was never a job opportunity. It was like wanting to be the CEO of a company. You can’t just start as that, you have to do the other things in-between beforehand. […] In the back of my head, I thought ‘this is probably what I’m supposed to do. I enjoy this so much. I’m excited to get up in the morning to do it, and I work on it late on night, and I get up the next morning even earlier to get a head start on it.’ I just never tire of thinking about it, but, also, it’s completely impossible. There’s no way anyone can actually ever do this, unless you happen to get the right career path through a developer.”

Francis started living with a friend in Bath in the United Kingdom, which also happened to be where PC Gamer UK was located. When an opening at the publication appeared, his high school persona emerged. Not only did he land a job, he’d landed the job, the one he’d dreamt about. But for Francis, inspiration soon came from nearby with Introversion Software’s strategy game, Darwinia. Released in 2005, Darwinia was a genuine indie darling, one of the earliest of its kind.

But despite Darwinia’s success story, Francis still hadn’t accepted this could also be him.

“That’s when I realized a game essentially by one guy is now one of my favorite games of all-time, so that’s a thing that a person can actually do,” he said. “I still didn’t feel like I could do it, it was still way beyond [me]. Chris Delay, the designer and programmer and level designer and almost all of the creative roles on Darwinia, he’s a complete prodigy and a genius in every possible way. I never had the sense that I could be anything like that, but it started that seed of ‘hmm, hang on, games made by small teams can actually be as good as games made by huge teams.’ The number of people you have working for you is not really the limit on how good your game could be.”

Everything changed when Derek Yu’s Spelunky was released in 2009, a game that quickly, alongside Darwinia, entered into Francis’ all-time favorite video games. (Yeah, 2009. The most recent Xbox Live Arcade and PC editions of Spelunky are updated versions of the game.) With Spelunky, a light bulb went off in Francis’ head. Spelunky is a game with an unbelievable amount of depth, but the rules were simple and the artwork wasn’t complicated. To Francis, this seemed like a game he could make.

In the back of my head, I thought ‘this is probably what I’m supposed to do. I enjoy this so much. I’m excited to get up in the morning to do it, and I work on it late on night, and I get up the next morning even earlier to get a head start on it.’ I just never tire of thinking about it, but, also, it’s completely impossible. There’s no way anyone can actually ever do this.

“I couldn’t do any programming at the time but I kind of felt like it wasn’t so complex that I could never even approach a project of that size,” he said.

Perhaps the most important detail was that Spelunky was made in GameMaker, a development suite for newcomers. GameMaker allows users to get very simple games running with drag-and-drop tools without programming experience. Yu was also posting GameMaker tutorials., and after Francis followed two of them, he was off to the races.

“The two tutorials were enough to just get me to that point where you make a character that can move around a level,” he said. “As soon as you do that, the spark has happened, right? I made that! That happened because of the stuff that I did in this editor! From then on, it was very easy to stay motivated.”

What Francis built with those two tutorials formed the basis for Gunpoint, which went by the working title Private Dick. Many developers throw away aborted prototypes or work through a number of ideas before settling, but from day one, Gunpoint was the game Francis started to make, and he never stopped.

That was May 2010, at which point Francis started blogging about his experience on his website.

“I’m making a game!” he said in his first blog post. “I will probably never finish it! But I thought I’d start talking about it anyway, to keep my goals straight and get feedback on my ideas as I go.”

Fortunately for everyone, Private Dick became Gunpoint and did come out.

Even though Francis was able to get the basics of his game realized pretty quickly, it was several years before Gunpoint was finally released this past June. In that time, Francis experienced the traditional ups and downs of game development, which was all the more pointed due to his relative inexperience.

Building collision detection, for example, turned out to be a huge headache.

“I looked up loads of stuff, took advice from other programmers,” he said, “but they all basically just say it’s a nightmare. [laughs] No one’s out there saying ‘collision’s really easy! You don’t need to worry about that!’”

Francis rewrote the collision engine roughly seven different times—from scratch. Each time, Francis would bang his head against the wall. Then, he’d start over. Then, it’d break. Then, it got good enough that Francis gave up and moved on. Even in the final game, there are some glitches he couldn’t stamp out.

“But it’s as good as it’s gonna get,” he said. “It’s gotten to the point where every time I redo it now, I make it worse, so I’m just leaving it as it is.”

Other parts of building the game were surprisingly simple. As mentioned earlier, one of Gunpoint’s big bullet points is the manipulative crosslink feature. It’s easy to setup incredibly elaborate traps in the game’s seemingly simple scenarios, as doors flip open and close, lights flicker on and off, and several objects in the environment are reacting to one another at once. Building this proved one of Francis’ biggest surprises.

Spelunky was built in GameMaker, convincing Francis it would be possible for him to create a meaningful game by himself.

“From what I’d known of developers as a journalist,” he said, “I always thought that if you give the player a power, a lot of freedom, a lot of flexibility, that’s a nightmare and your game will be a testing nightmare and will be really difficult to debug and all that stuff. But I didn’t find that to be true at all. If you make systems that work in every context, those are very reliable and very simple to code. That’s how computers want to work. They want rules to apply in every situation. They don’t like special cases and they don’t like scripting and they don’t like anything that’s pre-ordained by the designer. They like simple rules that apply in every situation, and in a certain context, so does design and levels.”

About a year into development, Francis realized the game was starting to come together, and while he was able to clear the hurdles of programming and design, decent art wasn’t going to happen by sheer force of will. He released a video of the game, and asked for help from the gaming community. More than 35 people submitted samples, and offered to become part of what was, at the time, meant to be a game released for free. Francis later repeated this process for the game’s music. Everyone who signed onto Gunpoint did so figuring the game would not make a dime, but when it became clear Gunpoint might be something special, everyone was offered a profit-sharing deal. But much of that original work was done merely for the love of it.

One of the bigger challenges for up and coming game developers is getting your game in the hands of enough people ahead of its release. Francis noticed an opportunity when he was having a birthday celebration at his house while the game was still in development. Sitting in his room and watching people play his unfinished game wouldn’t be much way to spend a party, though, so he set the game up on a PC in his room. There was one catch: he’d also set a camera up in there. Of course, you were not obligated to turn the camera on, but watching people respond to the game is invaluable for developers. Everyone obliged.

“Watching it back,” he said, “I started to feel like the world’s biggest creep. [laughs] I’m spying on my friends playing my own game, this is really strange. [laughs] But it was really useful!”

As development progressed, Francis would bounce ideas off his editor at PC Gamer, Graham Smith, and ask his game-playing friends for advice on how to handle price, downloadable content, and other ideas he was thinking about for the game. It’s cheaper than focus testing, and can happen over a couple of beers.

Based on the way Francis talked about Gunpoint, though, I’m not sure I would go about expecting a huge expansion of levels anytime soon. He sounded exhausted.

“As an indie, creating content kills you,” he said. “It’s just massively time consuming, it’s really arduous, and no matter how much of it you make, your primary complaint will always be that you haven’t made enough of it. He [Chris Delay, designer on Darwinia] told me that all those years ago, and I just kind of forgot. I ended up making a game with handcrafted levels that, yes, they took me ages, and, yes, the main complaint about Gunpoint is that it’s too short. So I should have taken that advice much more wholeheartedly.”

In retrospect, he wishes the game had included a random level generator.

“It’s not that everyone should make a game and it’s not that everyone can make a game and it’s certainly not that it’s easy. But with the improvement in tools that have been made and the indie revolution, it’s really easy to find out whether you can make a game.”

But the game is out, it’s been hugely successful, and he’s quit his day job. While Gunpoint has done well enough to let Francis quit his job, he’s hoping to keep writing about games in the future. No more news stories, though.

And what if Gunpoint’s success has inspired you? What if you want to make game? Francis had one piece of advice.

“It’s not that everyone should make a game and it’s not that everyone can make a game and it’s certainly not that it’s easy,” he said. “But with the improvement in tools that have been made and the indie revolution, it’s really easy to find out whether you can make a game. So just get in GameMaker and just try it. You will find out fairly quickly whether it’s for you or not. My first weekend with GameMaker, I certainly didn’t make a game. I followed a couple of tutorials and I had a bunch of garbage that didn’t work, but I already knew at that point ‘okay, this is for me, I can do this. This is really exciting. Even though I’ve only made very small progress, I’m enjoying the progress I’ve made.’ The magic was there. The translation between my effort and the reward was easily good enough right off the bat. It’s not easy to make a game, but it’s really easy to find out whether you should make a game. Just give it a go, basically. I put that off for years and years and years. I should have done it at least four or five years sooner than I did.”

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PlayStation Vita is ready for a renaissance

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There’s no doubt that PS Vita has struggled to assert itself since its launch 18 months ago. But Sony has been working hard to give the handheld more luster for hardcore gamers, and to widen its general appeal.

At its Gamescom conference yesterday, Sony introduced a significant price cut to both its models of PS Vita and showed off the machine’s Remote Play feature with a PlayStation 4 demo of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.

Perhaps just as significant was the shotgun blast of indie games announced for the handheld, as well as the appearance of a series of respected independent developers who were willing to wax effusive about the machine, despite its difficult first 18 months on the market.

Tellingly, Sony won’t release sales numbers of PS Vita, though there’s no doubt that it falls into the “niche” category, a long way away from its maker’s mass-market aspirations. But the machine is adding to its list of benefits, seeking to emulate the success of its predecessor, the PSP.

Despite strong competition from Nintendo’s 3DS, and from all those smartphones and tablets on which millions indulge their handheld gaming habit, Sony isn’t giving up on PS Vita. As well as that price-cut, a Walking Dead bundle which arrives today, and the promise of deep PlayStation 4 integration, PS Vita’s salvation is likely to come from the company’s efforts to cozy up to hip indies, and to bring the best of indie gaming to Vita.

The list of impressive indie games shown at Gamescom as coming to PS Vita includes Samurai Gunn (pictured below), Joe Danger 2, Fez, Starbound Velocity 2X, Minecraft, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Helldivers, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number and Rogue Legacy.

Sony says that developers who want to embrace mobile gaming enjoy PS Vita’s status as a core gamer’s handheld, one that is being heavily supported by the company’s much improved in-house developer-relations team.

“Developing for Vita’s been really smooth,” said Brian Provinciano of VBlank Entertainment, best known for Retro City Rampage. “As someone who’s worked on just about every platform, nothing compares. The compile-to-debug iteration time is about as quick as PC, which was unheard of for dev-kits before the Vita.

“I had the game’s initial port up and running on the Vita faster than it took to simply set-up and install the SDK for a competitor’s platform. They also provide fantastic sample projects and excellent documentation to help you get the game out the door.”

That screen pops out, you’ve got proper controls

During its PlayStation 2 heyday, Sony acquired something of a reputation for being a haughty, impenetrable corporation that was slow to the needs of developers. But under the leadership of Shuhei Yoshida, and the pressure of a competitive environment utterly transformed from a decade ago, Sony’s third party relations team have amended their culture in order to bring talented creators on board.

Transforming PS Vita from an anachronism to a viable platform is something that will take aggressive marketing like the price-cut, but also great games. And although Sony has lined up Batman Arkham Origins Blackgate from Warner as well as Killzone Mercenaries and Tearaway from its own studios, AAA publishers are not exactly lining up to support the machine.

Indies, the kinds of guys who have made Steam such a vibrant creative environment for PC users, are being wooed in an attempt to give Vita a sheen of hardcore respectability as well as a broad range of good games.

“The whole indie scene is really dominant on PC, which is very much a lean forward, intimate experience,” said Shahid Ahmad, senior business development manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. “The only experience we can think of that’s more intimate is a Vita with headphones on. That screen pops out, you’ve got proper controls.”

“I have a very intimate relationship with my Vita,” said Adam Boyes, VP of publisher and developer relations at SCEA, “When I put my headphones on and I get lost in whatever I’m playing, Dragon’s Crown, Hotline Miami or Super Crate Box, it’s visceral.”

Ahmad and Boyes are pounding the pavement, signing up developers to PS Vita. Aid comes from Sony’s Pub Fund that has helped get projects off the ground like the well-regarded Guacemalee and Divekick.

Releasing your game on iOS is like playing the lottery

“About a year ago, I had this idea that titles that came across to Vita would be at their best on Vita,” said Ahmad. “Now other people are saying these games are best experienced on Vita. Games like Stealth Inc., Spelunky, Thomas Was Alone, Velocity Ultra.

“You’re talking about a certain type of developer. They have certain sensibility and a certain creativity. Vita is a device that helps them express themselves really well.”

Developers are finding that, despite its low installed base of consumers, PS Vita buyers tend to be loyal, high spenders. Also, the lack of a crowded, competitive environment, such as on iOS, is another attraction.

“Our Pure Chess title has sold more units on PS Vita than on PS3,” said Phil Gaskell, co-founder and creative director of Ripstone. “Our line drawing game Men’s Room Mayhem sold more units on PS Vita in its first month than on iOS and Android combined. It seems like a perfectly good platform to us, and we’re continuing to support it in the future.”

“More developers make more money on average on Vita than they do on mobile,” said Ahmad. “When people buy a Vita, they want to purchase games. I tell developers, if you’re trying to build a business, then building your game and bringing it to Vita is a great investment.

“If you want to play the lottery, then putting a game on iOS is more like that. You’re scratching that and hoping you get discovered, hoping that a lot of people talk about you. Whereas Vita, every week when there’s content coming out, people buzz about it and it spreads like wildfire, because everyone’s firing that console up every day to look at the content and talk about it.”

It’s going to be the greatest peripheral ever made for a console

Of course, lacking the support of AAA publishers who are reluctant to commit large budgets to a low-selling platform, this focus on indies looks like a strategy of convenience. Sony is wedded to the notion of a second-screen explosion, and sees Vita as a major card in its overall PlayStation 4 gambit. Indies represent a cost-effective way to keep the platform alive until the PS4 effect kicks in.

“The huge value proposition that we’ve talked about lately, but people don’t thoroughly understand, is Remote Play,” said Ahmad. “You’re going to be able to play remotely via your Vita through your wi-fi connection at home. It’s a huge boon. On top of that, we’ve got all this great content that continues to be delivered. It’s compelling.”

Remote Play’s demo at Gamescom on Tuesday will certainly help many gamers understand the service, the idea that, with PS Vita, PlayStation 4 is no longer tied to a TV screen.

“We’ve said internally that it’s going to be the greatest peripheral ever made for a console,” said Boyes. “I can’t wait to have my PS4 in my living room and being able to play Watch Dogs in my bedroom while my PS4 is downstairs. That’s going to generate more interest in the platform in general. As that happens, I think indies will see more success and more people will continue to make great content for the platform.”

A far more reasonable price of $199, and the elimination of two-tiered pricing structures should also help to buoy sales.

“For the holidays the price cut is a great-lead in and demonstrated the value that we can bring,” said Don Mesa, director of product planning and platform software innovation at SCEA. “But it really comes down to us telling the story of the developers and talking about their games and making people understand why these games are so awesome. It’s our duty to help spread the word, why these games play so much better on PlayStation Vita.”

I had Baked Lays at the airport

One of these efforts in spreading the word is establishing an ‘Indie’ category on PS Vita’s download store. “We’re working to drive as much traffic to the indie store as possible,” said Boyes. “We’ve seen an impressive improvement on sales and discoverability. Once people discover one game and find out that this is the genre that it’s in, it’s easy for them to discover other similar types of content that they start to fall in love with.”

In the short-term, PS Vita’s main hope for a renaissance is via a library of great games that show how a slick $200 gadget is a cut above other mobile devices.

“It’s kind of the same way that I think people eat potato chips,” said Boyes. “You grab a bag of Doritos, you wolf it down, you don’t tell anybody you did that. It’s not like you’re bragging about eating those potato chips today. But what we do with Vita is it’s more curated. It’s more aimed towards gamers. With Vita, we’re focused on getting the best, most gourmet content for them, and they end up talking about it and spreading it around. I’m not proud of being at level 106 on Candy Crush at all. I don’t tell anyone that, just like I don’t want to tell them I had Baked Lays at the airport today. But Vita is special, and so are its games.”

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In The Games Of Madness: 5 Core Elements Of Interactive Storytelling

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Introduction
Over the past few years I have had a growing feeling that videogame storytelling is not what it could be. And the core issue is not in the writing, themes, characters or anything like that; instead, the main problem is with the overall delivery. There is always something that hinders me from truly feeling like I am playing a story. After pondering this on and off for quite some time I have come up with a list of five elements that I think are crucial to get the best kind of interactive narrative.

The following is my personal view on the subject, and is much more of a manifesto than an attempt at a rigorous scientific theory. That said, I do not think these are just some flimsy rules or the summary of a niche aesthetic. I truly believe that this is the best foundational framework to progress videogame storytelling and a summary of what most people would like out of an interactive narrative.

Also, it's important to note that all of the elements below are needed. Drop one and the narrative experience will suffer.

With that out of the way, here goes:

1) Focus on Storytelling
This is a really simple point: the game must be, from the ground up, designed to tell a story. It must not be a game about puzzles, stacking gems or shooting moving targets. The game can contain all of these features, but they cannot be the core focus of the experience. The reason for the game to exist must be the wish to immerse the player inside a narrative; no other feature must take precedence over this.

The reason for this is pretty self-evident. A game that intends to deliver the best possible storytelling must of course focus on this. Several of the problems outlined below directly stem from this element not being taken seriously enough.

A key aspect to this element is that the story must be somewhat tangible. It must contain characters and settings that can be identified with and there must be some sort of drama. The game's narrative cannot be extremely abstract, too simplistic or lack any interesting, story-related, happenings.

2) Most of the time is spent playing
Videogames are an interactive medium and therefore the bulk of the experience must involve some form of interaction. The core of the game should not be about reading or watching cutscenes, it should be about playing. This does not mean that there needs to be continual interaction; there is still room for downtime and it might even be crucial to not be playing constantly.

The above sounds pretty basic, almost a fundamental part of game design, but it is not that obvious. A common "wisdom" in game design is that choice is king, which Sid Meier's quote "a game is a series of interesting choices" neatly encapsulate. However, I do not think this holds true at all for interactive storytelling. If choices were all that mattered, choose your own adventure books should be the ultimate interaction fiction - they are not. Most celebrated and narrative-focused videogames does not even have any story-related choices at all (The Last of Us is a recent example). Given this, is interaction really that important?

It sure is, but not for making choices. My view is that the main point of interaction in storytelling is to create a sense of presence, the feeling of being inside the game's world. In order to achieve this, there needs to be a steady flow of  active play. If the player remains inactive for longer periods, they will distance themselves from the experience. This is especially true during sections when players feel they ought to be in control. The game must always strive to maintain and strengthen experience of "being there".

3) Interactions must make narrative sense
In order to claim that the player is immersed in a narrative, their actions must be somehow connected to the important happenings. The gameplay must not be of irrelevant, or even marginal, value to the story. There are two major reasons for this.

First, players must feel as though they are an active part of the story and not just an observer. If none of the important story moments include agency from the player, they become passive participants. If the gameplay is all about matching gems then it does not matter if players spends 99% of their time interacting; they are not part of any important happenings and their actions are thus irrelevant. Gameplay must be foundational to the narrative, not just a side activity while waiting for the next cutscene.

Second, players must be able to understand their role from their actions. If the player is supposed to be a detective, then this must be evident from the gameplay. A game that requires cutscenes or similar to explain the player's part has failed to tell its story properly.

4) No repetitive actions
The core engagement from many games come from mastering a system. The longer time players spend with the game, the better they become at it. In order for this process to work, the player's actions must be repeated over and over. But repetition is not something we want in a well formed story. Instead we want activities to only last as long as the pacing requires. The players are not playing to become good at some mechanics, they are playing to be part of an engrossing story. When an activity has played out its role, a game that wants to do proper storytelling must move on.

Another problem with repetition is that it breaks down the player's imagination. Other media rely on the audience's mind to fill out the blanks for a lot of the story's occurrences. Movies and novels are vague enough to support these kinds of personal interpretations. But if the same actions are repeated over and over, the room for imagination becomes a lot slimmer. Players lose much of the ability to fill gaps and instead get a mechanical view of the narrative.

This does not mean that the core mechanics must constantly change, it just means that there must be variation on how they are used. Both Limbo and Braid are great examples of this. The basic gameplay can be learned in a minute, but the games still provide constant variation throughout the experience.

5) No major progression blocks
In order to keep players inside a narrative, their focus must constantly be on the story happenings. This does not rule out challenges, but it needs to be made sure that an obstacle never consumes all focus. It must be remembered that the players are playing in order to experience a story. If they get stuck at some point, focus fade away from the story, and is instead put on simply progressing. In turn, this leads to the unraveling of the game's underlying mechanics and for players to try and optimize systems. Both of these are problems that can seriously degrade the narrative experience.

There are three common culprits for this: complex or obscure puzzles, mastery-demanding sections and maze-like environments. All of these are common in games and make it really easy for players to get stuck. Either by not being sure what to do next, or by not having the skills required to continue. Puzzles, mazes and skill-based challenges are not banned, but it is imperative to make sure that they do not hamper the experience. If some section is pulling players away from the story, it needs to go.

Games that do this
These five elements all sound pretty obvious. When writing the above I often felt I was pointing out things that were already widespread knowledge. But despite this, very few games incorporate all of the above. This quite astonishing when you think about it. The elements by themselves are quite common, but the combination of all is incredibly rare.

The best case for games of pure storytelling seems to be visual novels. But these all fail at element 2; they simply are not very interactive in nature and the player is mostly just a reader. They often also fails at element 3 as they do not give the player much actions related to the story (most are simply played out in a passive manner).

Action games like Last of Us and Bioshock infinite all fail on elements 4 and 5 (repetition and progression blocks). For larger portions of the game they often do not meet the requirements of element 3 (story related actions) either. It is also frequently the case that much of the story content is delivered in long cutscenes, which means that some do not even manage to fulfill element 2 (that most of the game is played). RPG:s do not fare much better as they often contain very repetitive elements. They often also have way too much downtime because of lengthy cutscenes and dialogue.

Games like Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead comes close to feeling like an interactive narrative, but fall flat at element 2. These games are basically just films with interactions slapped on to them. While interaction plays an integral part in the experience it cannot be said to be a driving force. Also, apart from a few instances the gameplay is all about reacting, it does have have the sort of deliberate planning that other games do. This removes  a lot of the engagement that otherwise come naturally from videogames.

So what games do fulfill all of these elements? As the requirements of each element are not super specific, fulfillment depends on how one choose to evaluate. The one that I find comes closest is Thirty Flights of Loving, but it is slightly problematic because the narrative is so strange and fragmentary. Still, it is by far the game that comes closest to incorporating all elements. Another close one is To The Moon, but it relies way too much on dialog and cutscenes to meet the requirements. Gone Home is also pretty close to fulfilling the elements. However, your actions have little relevance to the core narrative and much of the game is spent reading rather than playing.

Whether one choose to see these games are fulfilling the requirements or not, I think they show the path forward. If we want to improve interactive storytelling, these are the sort of places to draw inspiration from. Also, I think it is quite telling that all of these games have gotten both critical and (as far as I know) commercial success. There is clearly a demand and appreciation for these sort of experiences.

Final Thoughts
It should be obvious, but I might as well say it: these elements say nothing of the quality of a game. One that meets none of the requirements can still be excellent, but it cannot claim to have fully playable, interactive storytelling as its main concern. Likewise, a game that fulfills all can still be crap. These elements just outline the foundation of a certain kind of experience. An experience that I think is almost non-existent in videogames today.

I hope that these five simple rules will be helpful for people to evaluate and structure their projects. The sort of videogames that can come out of this thinking is an open question as there is very little done so far. But the games that are close to having all these elements hint at a very wide range of experiences indeed. I have no doubts that this path will be very fruitful to explore.

Notes

- Another important aspects of interaction that I left out is the ability to plan. I mention it a bit when discussing Walking Dead and Heavy Rain, but it is a worth digging into a little bit deeper. What we want from good gameplay interaction is not just that the player presses a lot of buttons. We want these actions to have some meaning for the future state of the game. When making an input players should be simulating in their minds how they see it turning out. Even if it just happens on a very short time span (eg "need to turn now to get a shot at the incoming asteroid") it makes all the difference as now the player has adapted the input in way that never happens in a purely reactionary game.

- The question of what is deemed repetitive is quite interesting to discuss. For instance, a game like Dear Esther only has the player walking or looking, which does not offer much variety. But since the scenery is constantly changing, few would call the game repetitive. Some games can also offer really complex and varied range of actions, but if the player is tasked to perform these constantly in similar situations, they quickly gets repetitive. I think is fair to say that repetition is mostly an asset problem. Making a non-repetitive game using limited asset counts is probably not possible. This also means that a proper storytelling game is bound to be asset heavy.

- Here are some other games that I feel are close to fulfilling all elements: The Path, Journey, Everyday the Same Dream, Dinner Date, Imortall and Kentucky Route Zero. Whether they succeed or not is a bit up to interpretation, as all are a bit borderline. Still all of these are well worth one's attention. This also concludes the list of all games I can think of that have, or at least are closing to having,  all five of these elements.

Links:
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2012/08/the-self-presence-and-storytelling.html
Here is some more information on how repetition and challenge destroy the imaginative parts of games and make them seem more mechanical.

http://blog.ihobo.com/2013/08/the-interactivity-of-non-interactive-media.html

This is a nice overview on how many storytelling games give the player no meaningful choices at all.

http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2013/07/thoughts-on-last-of-us.html
The Last of Us is the big storytelling game of 2013. Here is a collection of thoughts on what can be learned from it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel
Visual Novels are not to be confused with Interactive Fiction, which is another name for text adventure games.

Thirty Flights of Loving
This game is played from start to finish and has a very interesting usages of scenes and cuts.

To The Moon
This is basically an rpg but with all of the fighting taken out. It is interesting how much emotion that can be gotten from simple pixel graphics.

Gone Home
This game is actually a bit similar to To The Moon in that it takes an established genre and cuts away anything not to do with telling a story. A narrative emerge by simply exploring an environment.

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It's Not So Bad: Cognitive Dissonance and Cheap Games

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All else being equal, do you enjoy the games you pay full price for as much as the ones you buy on sale for cheap? While it of course first depends on the game, a certain well known theory in psychology suggests that paying $60 for the new Tomb Raider game when it came out last March, for example, might lead to your enjoying it more than waiting to buy it for $15 for it a few months later.

Back around 1959, Leon Festinger and one of his ambitious undergraduate students, Merrill Carlsmith, conducted an experiment at Stanford University.1 For an hour straight, the subjects carefully removed and replaced a bunch wooden spools from a tray over and over again and meticulously twisted rows and rows of wooden dowels on a rack. It was, in other words, a stupefyingly boring series of tasks.2

“Now, match three spools of the same kind and they’ll disappear in a delightful little burst of color and sound.” said no experimenter ever.

For an hour they had to do this. But at the end of the experiment, the researcher pretended to be in a bind, saying that he needed someone to describe the task to the next subject waiting to take his turn at the boring tasks. But the thing is that the subject had to really sell the tasks and make them sound super fun and interesting –a service for which the researcher offered to pay. Depending on which experimental condition the subject was in, he was offered either $20 or $1.
Subjects then went and met with the person who they thought was the next subject, but who was really another experimenter who prompted the subject to explain what was so great about what they were going to be doing. The subjects then dutifully lied through smiling teeth about how much fun the tasks were going to be. Boy howdy! Twisting knobs! SO MUCH FUN, MAC!3 Then, some time later, the subjects were asked to fill out a form and rate how enjoyable the boring spool moving and knob twisting tasks really were.

The results? Those who had been paid $1 to lie about the tasks rated them as more fun than those who had been paid $20. Festinger and Carlsmith theorized that this was because of what they called cognitive dissonance –a state of mental tension brought on by holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time. People are motivated, the researchers said, to eliminate this tension by abandoning or changing one of the thoughts.

In the case of the experimental subjects who were paid a paltry $1 to slump their shoulders and lie, the two incompatible thoughts were:

1. Man, those tasks were f’ing boring.

2. I was willing to lie to a fellow student for next to nothing.

Subjects were unable to do anything about #2, but Festinger argued that they were able to remove the cognitive dissonance by deluding themselves that #1 wasn’t true. Thus, they really did think that the tasks were enjoyable.

What about those in the $20 condition, you ask? Good question. Festinger argued that $20 was quite a bit of money –in the 1950s, $20 could buy as much as $150 can buy today, and these were college students. Those subjects were able to convince themselves that this bribe was sufficient reason for them to lie. “Those tasks were boring” and “I was paid a huge wad of cash to tell a lie” did not necessarily create much cognitive dissonance.Perhaps, at most, it would get them to insert “harmless” before “lie.”

So with this in mind, let’s get back to video games. Earlier this year I bought the new Simcity game. Unfortunately it was so wrought with bugs, server problems, and broken promises that publisher Electronic Arts offered customers a free game on which to gnash their teeth. With my credit, I chose Dead Space 3. I thought this was a pretty awesome deal, since the game had been selling for a full $60 just a few weeks earlier. I was getting it for free.

Now, I really liked the first two Dead Space games, but after just a few hours of tromping through another space station fighting more necromorphs, I felt completely bored. I didn’t like it. I stopped playing.

This made me think about the subjects in Festinger’s experiment, and whether or not I might be feeling the LACK of cognitive dissonance. Or more to the point, if I had paid $60 for Dead Space 3, would I have convinced myself that I was enjoying it, rather than face the fact that I had decided to spend all that money on a full priced game? Even worse, would I have gone online to tell people who didn’t like the game that they were wrong and that all their arguments were invalid?

Probably. A little, at least. Research on cognitive dissonance theory and consumer choice exploded4 in the 1970s and researchers found that shoppers were generally willing to change their attitudes towards purchases in order to confirm their belief that they were worth the price.5 Researchers have also found that cognitive dissonance after purchases (a.k.a., “buyer’s remorse”) can be reduced by getting directly involved with the purchasing decision (as opposed to just following the advice of marketing material or salespeople) and taking more time to make the decision.6 Probably because shoppers can more easily convince themselves that they were well informed and not duped.

In the case of full priced video games, “I thought this was worth spending $60 on” and “I’m not liking it” are bound to cause some mental tension. Absent generous return policies, you can’t do much about having paid full price for a game. But it’s comparatively easy to convince yourself that you’re enjoying it more.

C’mon, admit it. I’m not the only one. You’ve done this before, haven’t you?
[Want to see more stuff like this article? Follow me on Twitter: @JamieMadigan]

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Confessions of a Videogame Tourist | Video Game Tourism

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Anthemios: Fallout New VegasWhy play? There are many reasons. This is mine.
Our ancestors are within us. For roughly 200,000 years Homo sapiens sapiens has roamed the planet, and it's easy to forget that we, as our even more remote relatives, are nomads by nature - hunter-gatherers, wanderers, vagrants. It has only been a puny 8,000 years since our style of life has become sedentary, since the concept of 'city' or even 'village' appeared, since both the blessing and curse of 'civilization' were realized. Man is - both physically and mentally - nomadic.

Vagrancy is in

our genes, a heritage from our nomadic ancestors.

So: Vagrancy is in our genes. It's easy to deny that fact, trapped as we are in a present of cubicle office spaces, of pension plans and real estate bubbles. But sometimes, rarely, it still surfaces: in seasonal migrations to holiday spots; in gap-year travelling; in Sunday afternoon walks; in RVs complete with satellite dishes. Here's another fact: Humans like to seek out the new, the spectacular, the awe-inspiring; the romantic ruins and the surge of adrenaline. Our bookstores are filled with travel guides, coffee-table books and reports from the most remote places. All food for our wanderlust - this itchy heritage from our nomadic ancestors.

Our bodies and minds have not changed as much as our circumstances in the past 8,000 years. And while we have grudgingly accepted that even today's cubicle-dweller has to sate his unruly body's need for exercise, for being used and kept 'in shape', our inner nomad still hungers. We may pacify our vagrant body while staying in one place, as our civilization demands; but what about our nomad souls?
Josh Taylor: Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Games are many things: competition, entertainment, social spaces, meditation. But games are more than that: they are virtual spaces behind our screens, tailor-made to our mental need to wander; and without incurring any of real travel's dangers and annoyances. Games' virtual spaces allow us to roam farther than reality does - especially now, that the tools made to free us from fixed office spaces and the need to be physically present also, paradoxically, take away the necessity to leave our screens. There is, after all, a reduction in our daily lives' radius; we're living in the age of the "Great Indoors".

Games let us decamp and set forth.

It shouldn't surprise us that, in exchange, the virtual spaces around us are growing. Games let us decamp and set forth. And they take us to places that are as outlandish as our wildest fantasies: Great underwater cities, showcasing madness and art deco; twisted death zones exhibiting the ruins of once proud civilizations; megalomaniac architectures between Heaven and Hell.

Games give us places, spaces, whole continents to explore and wander. And all of them are here for us to sate our curiosity, to satisfy that ancient human need to see what's behind that hill, that mountain, that horizon. Why? For no other reason than the one the worlds's highest peak was conquered: "Because it's there."
Josh Taylor: EVE onlineO
f course, some games facilitate this kind of video game tourism more than others. In some games - Tetris, Counterstrike, Gran Turismo - our actions are the be-all and end-all of the matter. Other games could be said to embrace the idea of virtual travel with all their heart: Uncharted, Skyrim, Bioshock, Dear Esther, Limbo, Minecraft, Assassin's Creed, to name but a few, lure us ever deeper, promising whole worlds to be discovered only by us.

It's these moments of exploration, of discovery, of being a nomad between the cities of Dunwall and Rapture, of wandering the plains of Skyrim and Pripyat, of exploring Liberty City's back alleys and Far Cry's Rook Island, that make games worthwhile.

It's easy to overlook this accomplishment of the medium; after all, not all games deliver equally in this regard. Experiments like Journey and Dear Esther have elevated the metaphor of wandering in virtual worlds to be their defining, even slightly esoteric moments. But of course even more traditional games offer lots of room for virtual tourism. It has become almost a hollow phrase in games writing to state that sense of place, not gameplay or narration, is king in this or that game, but it's still true for a wide variety of today's titles.

It should come as no surprise that the desire to explore and wander these virtual spaces inevitable shows itself in another manifestation of modern tourism: We yearn to take something with us from the places we experience, and so we take pictures. A growing number of accomplished in-game photographers document their wanderings in artful screenshots and show us details most often overlooked by busy players who are just visiting for a game's thrills. In games, at least, virtual tourists leave nothing but digital footprints - and take nothing but pictures.
Midhras: SkyrimB
Games offer an escape for our nomadic souls trapped in a sedentary civilization.

ut wait: Games as substitute for real travels? That would be absurd. Reality, as frail as its edges are becoming, is still the great adventure of our lives. Anyone who has ever shivered in a tent in the Sottish highlands' summer, has seen the madness and glory of an Indian city or the sunrise over the Grand Canyon knows that reality and the virtual world are impossible to mistake for one another.

Our yearning for movement, for our ancestors' vagrant existence can not be fully sated in virtual worlds, no matter how intricate. But still: Games help us ease the burden of waiting for the joyful day when we turn off the monitor, tie our laces and head out again for real.

Games offer us spaces to explore and wander. By doing that, they give us an escape so desperately needed by our vagrant, nomadic souls trapped in a sedentary civilization. And that may just be their finest achievement.

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How Videogames Taught Me to Travel

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I remember the first time I set foot in Hyrule Field in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was ridiculous. Kokiri Forest already felt big, but this offered so much more: I could walk for game-days, sun descending, skeletons rising and never run out of new discoveries. This world is massive, I thought to myself, and I can go ANYWHERE.

This was 1998. I was nine.

Fast-forward to September 2012, and I’m standing atop a decrepit rural patch of China’s Great Wall, surrounded by vacant mountains and yellowed shrubbery. This is much more real than Hyrule, and obviously way more impressive, yet the feeling is somehow the same: the sense of being overwhelmed by a world you were just starting to get a handle on, only to be shocked by the discovery of how much greater it really is.

What I couldn’t have recognized as a 9-year-old, and what only became obvious to me after living two years abroad, is that those adventure-based worlds of Zelda and Final Fantasy honed in on some primitive desire in me to move, to puzzle-solve my way from A to B. Traveling, like videogames, is a way of interacting with some brilliant design that you could never in 10 lifetimes conceive. And, crucial for an awkward 9-year-old Jewish kid who grew up into an awkward 24-year-old Jewish kid, both travel and gaming offer rebirth as a stranger in a new world.

My father would always hound me to go outside instead of playing games on perfectly sunny days, and he was probably right; I would’ve had a happier childhood. The truth is that I was an indoorsy kid. I didn’t hike, play sports, go to summer camp or take big family vacations. How else does a 9-year-old who considers going to the mall an “adventure” experience the outside world? It took a decade for that bundled-up urge to manifest itself in actual global exploration.

I hate to be one of those travel writers who fancifully quotes better travel writers, but whatever; Pico Iyer once wrote that “traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.” There’s a strong argument that videogames unleash the inner child in all of us – all the more when we’ve actually grown up with them. There aren’t many better ways to rekindle that feeling of childlike innocence.

Travel is the natural maturation of that sense of wonder. We visit other countries for many of the same reasons that we indulge in RPGs: to first be awestruck, then be humbled and finally to overcome new challenges.

Not to overstate the case, but there are practical lessons, too, that games teach us in preparation for the travel world. Puzzle-solving and resource management is essential wherever you go, not to mention the importance of looking for details and the value of talking to locals. (I realize the silliness of claiming that chatting up Tom Nook in Animal Crossing taught me how to talk to strangers, but on a base level the parallel exists.)

Sometimes I still think of travel as one giant videogame. For example, it was uncanny how game-like South Korea’s Seorak Mountain was for us, which we summited all 1,708 feet of in thick midwinter snow without any proper gear. We literally cried and hated ourselves going up, and found the most difficult part – the proverbial boss fight – at the ultimate peak, where fierce icy winds crystallized my snot and blew it sideways off the mountain in the same breath. But at the top we found a shelter selling $10 crampons (cleats for snow hiking), which made the way down unbelievably easier. It was as if we’d literally opened a treasure chest and raised the new item above our heads: You got the Hover Boots! Now you can walk on anything!

Whenever we meet a couple headed in the same direction, I try to extend my hand, because you never know a person’s value until you work together with them. If Final Fantasy VI taught us anything, it’s that even people you don’t like (Oh, Gau’s dead again? What a surprise.) can be useful. Whether it’s sharing a cab, teaming up for a hike or following a local up a mountain, a little chime goes off in my head: A new member has joined your party!

And yes, I am aware that comparing the art of limitless globetrotting to a game’s finite universe kind of simplifies the issue. That’s on purpose. The comparison, for me anyway, makes an easy summary out of the more psychologically complex feeling that we’re all just specks in the universe. But there’s something comforting there, too, which would claim just the opposite: as a traveler, you’re the hero of your journey. You choose your own path. Nobody cares as much as you should that you saw the Colosseum or Angkor Wat or captured all 650 Pokémon. These are personal projects.

On a tactile level, videogames taught me puzzle-solving and thumb-eye coordination. But also, in the long run, they proved my dad wrong: they made me want to go outside. They gave me a much cheaper outlet for the innate wanderlust that eventually drove me to hop on an airplane and fly 12 time zones away.

Above all else, videogames teach us that the world is meant to be explored. It’s important to press pause every so often and remember that.

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