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In-app purchase on iOS too often reminds me of the worst 1980s arcade games

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In-app purchase on iOS too often reminds me of the worst 1980s arcade games

•July 31, 2012. Apple, Gaming, iOS gaming

Tap! magazine deputy editor Matthew Bolton has written about IAP in iOS gaming, complaining about its increased dominance and the way that many developers don’t know where to draw the line. He talks about two different approaches: ‘complete’ and ‘endless’. The former is where you have a finite amount of game, chop it into bits, with some of said bits being premium upgrades. Hero Academy is a good example on iOS—a game where you can happily play for free, but where you must pay to unlock alternative teams and cosmetic upgrades. The endless approach is the one I’ve complained about before, where you require an in-game resource that either demands constant payment or that possibly recharges in a glacial manner, sapping enjoyment and increasing frustration. Bolton cites the bafflingly highly regarded CSR Racing as an example of this kind of freemium title; depressingly, it also manages to kill the satire in my piece that I linked to, in actually demanding payment for petrol. In a racing game. I think the phrase rhymes with ‘clucking bell’.

Bolton says greed is the problem (and that’s certainly the case in games that would otherwise be pretty good, such as EA’s latest Tetris for iOS, ruined by the freemium system), and he wonders if freemium will cause iOS gaming to be held back in terms of creativity:

If it looks like invasive IAPs are the only way to be successful, will brilliant games that don’t fit that model end up going elsewhere? When games are being created with the Endless model in mind, do traditional game mechanics, such as progression, fall by the wayside? I played No Zombies Allowed for a while, but gave up after a few days, because all I was earning was more of what I already had. I was accumulating, but for what? The game didn’t escalate. I was just building and building. What if all devs interested in offering a game with an actual pay-off abandon iOS for Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft platforms? That would be a huge regression for iOS gamers.

Those of you with long memories will argue we’ve been here before. In the early 1980s, arcade games were designed with a fixed chunk of time in mind for your 10p or your quarter, but if you got good—really good—you could sit on an arcade cab for hours. Those were the finite games of their day, and they were about challenging gamers to beat them. After the gaming crash in 1984, and with the realisation that almost every arcade game was selling fewer cabs than its predecessor, cynical business models took over. Games no longer gave you three lives and a stern challenge: instead, they eventually got to the point where they were totally impossible to beat, but they’d give you that wonderful option of the continue. “Feed me more money,” they’d say, a glint in their eye, “and you can carry on from where you just left off. Your time won’t have been wasted! Go on! You know you want to.”

To my mind, far too many iOS freemium games are now the ‘continue’ of modern gaming. They are designed around keeping you hooked through the time investment you’ve put into them, rather than around addictive, exciting, engaging game design. The problem is, money talks, and with top-grossing titles typically being the most exploitative money-gouging games on the App Store, why wouldn’t more developers head in that direction? My hope is that something—anything—will make them change course, or at least leave enough of the really great developers playing a fairer game, because otherwise the greatest platform since the dawn of home gaming will end up bloated and dying on the floor, surrounded by mouldy piles of pointless Smurf berries and tarnished ‘coins’, which are only accepted currency for a stupid pixelated hat or a hateful paid-for fuel top-up for a virtual car.

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Is The Secret of Monkey Island … Thinginess?

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Is The Secret of Monkey Island … Thinginess?

By PastPlayer

Aug 01, 12

This is a guest article by Namir Ahmed, a Masters Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Western University, London ON. He’s also the Project Coordinator for the Sustainable Archaeolgy Animation Unit, where he does really fun stuff related to the digitization and visualization of cultural heritage. He doesn’t have a blog but has a twitter: @namir

In the past the idea of thinginess has made me guffaw, scoff and deride in an endless circle of contempt. I study archaeology, I would think, hard physical facts, not this wishy-washy cultural anthropological construct. What does thinginess have to do with anything? Turns out, it has to do with everything.

It wasn’t Heidegger’s jug example, in which he defines the jug not as the spout or the handle, but the void inside. It wasn’t Tim Ingold’s kite, defined as a kite not by its construction but by the forces acting on it; the wind that keeps it aloft, the hand that plays out the string. It wasn’t either example, though both are well thought out and applied. It was “The Secret of Monkey Island”. Play the game, or play it again as I did, and you’ll see that thinginess abounds.

At its heart Monkey Island is about discovery, following and kin to Sierra’s ‘Quest’ series of games: Space Quest, King’s Quest etc. and of course The Secret of Monkey Island’s spiritual predecessors, Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle. This genre of game blends humour and intelligent puzzle design in a way few games have seen since.

More importantly and beyond stylistic similarities these games are driven by the interaction of everyday (more or less) objects. Employed is a mechanism where the narrative of the game is propelled forward as the purpose and real meaning of objects is discovered. In other words, when thinginess is defined.

Here’s an early example. Guybrush Threepwood, intrepid wannabe pirate, finds himself at a circus tent, the two owners convince him to test their cannon by being shot out of it. Simple enough. Guybrush needs the money and the brothers are willing to pay.

Problem: Guybrush needs a helmet and clearly has nothing that fits the bill … or maybe he does … the player does a quick scan of her inventory, pot, fish, grog … wait a minute … pot. With a click the pot is selected, another click on Guybrush and he smoothly places the pot on his head and slides into the cannon. BOOM! He smacks head first into a pole. Good thing he had that pot.

Only now it’s not a pot. It’s a helmet. We’ll come back to this.

Trevor Owens a Play the Past contributor discusses the idea of a born digital object versus a  transcribed digital object: http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/05/all-digital-objects-are-born-digital-objects/   Born digital objects he argues are objects of worth in themselves rather then straight copies. In the world of Monkey Island objects exist within this reality and are defined as such. There is a term for this in physics: Frame of Reference, and there痴 a term for this in everything else: Context.

As I write this, context seems to me an obvious idea but I’m consistently surprised at how often it’s glossed over or completely ignored. Archaeologists have a tendency to look at artifact assemblages based solely on morphological characteristics rather then trying to place them within a frame of reference. Is a pot recovered from a farm the same as a pot recovered from a palace? They may be the same make and brand, but the meaning that’s infused is completely different. Our intrepid hero Guybrush can take his ‘chicken with a pulley in the middle’ (play the game, trust me) and use it to traverse a chasm but give that same ‘chicken with a pulley in the middle’ to Halo’s Master Chief and suddenly the rules of that particular game world are broken. The player is at minimum left confused and at worst pulled completely out.

I’ll be the first to admit this glossing over likely happens because defining context based solely on cultural material is extremely difficult … to put it lightly. In fact if the purpose of Archaeology is to create context then we’re moving into Catch-22 territory; archaeologists need to create context but can’t until context is created! Phew, give me the world of  Monkey Island anyday. At least there objects within have programmed thinginess operating perfectly in line with the goals of the narrative. But this might be the inkling of an answer, perhaps from this perfect alignment a strategy for dealing with the unwieldy idea of thinginess can be derived. If thinginess is tied to goals and context then defining two variables may inform the last. At the least this seems to be how puzzles within Monkey Island operate and are solved.

Let’s revisit the helmet / cannon scenario. The player knows within the context (rules of the world) established by The Secret of Monkey Island needing a helmet doesn’t mean having to find an actual helmet. The player also knows in order to move the narrative forward a helmet needs to be found, therefore a helmet has to exist. The player naturally looks at her surroundings and inventory to find an object that fits the bill: Fish. No. Meat. No. Pint of Grog. Tasty but no. Pot … hard surface, empty internal space, an opening. Yes. Is this simply defining commonality? Maybe. But I think there’s value in the internal process that leads the player to conclude a pot might work as a helmet. In fact I think this is the process of discovering what thinginess or the actual essence(s) of an object is.  Thinginess then may have a real direct connection to the one (or more ) aspects of an object that allow it to operate in different scenarios.

Interestingly video games more and more have moved away from objects that have meaning beyond just appearance and action. This may have to do with the limitations of programming or the shifting scope of games today or even the changing wants and needs of audiences. Objects in contemporary games tend to wear its intentions on its sleeve, so to speak. To view them is to derive function but not meaning.

Here’s an example, my current game of obsession is Battlefield 3, a fantastic visceral first person shooter. If an object is left on the field of battle, there are three distinct possibilities for that object, If it’s a weapon or a crate: I can use it to fullfill very specific functions such as supplying ammo or health. If it’s a cracked wall: I can bring it down. If it’s debris: I can go around. These three possibilities hold true in the context of BF3 and are defined in seconds. The game and the objects within expect nothing else nor should they. Meaning is given not discovered and thinginess is ignored. Let’s push this example a little farther, if thinginess as employed in The Secret of Monkey Island were incorporated into  BF3, what would that look like? First let’s ground ourselves in the same context so the world rules of BF3 still apply here. Thinginess might mean the ability to pick up debris, pile it to use as cover or it might mean simple use as a hand to hand weapon. Both scenarios play on the essential nature of that particular object and each scenario is tied together by discovered thinginess.

Perhaps the closest spiritual successor to old school adventure games like Monkey Island is the world building game, Minecraft. Specifically its recipe object creation system. It’s such a clear example of materials versus meaning that I think every archaeologist should be forced to give it a go. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Minecraft operates on a unique object creation principle. Materials are ‘mined’, the resulting resource is represented as a cube. Cubes are then placed on a crafting table, different configurations create different objects.  For example  three planks placed over two sticks (themselves made of planks) in a T configuration creates a pick-axe. Despite being made of 3 planks and 2 sticks, the object isn’t defined as that. In the case of minecraft the thinginess of an object is the result of how it operates in the world and not simple composition. Minecraft unfortunately in my mind missed an opportunity by not allowing these recipes to be discovered, rather they were given over on the web.

In The Secret of Monkey Island, revealing the true meaning of an object was an act of discovery, in some ways like Minecraft an act of creation. One had to think outside of preconceived notions of object. The player had to push from their minds set ideas of what a pot is generally identified as: a tool used in cooking, or that a mug of Grog could only be used to drink. The player begins to explore other avenues of use.

Chris Gosden, in his 2005 paper “What Do Objects Want?” explains that objects operate under the same principles as organisms … they want to reproduce. He goes on to explain this reproduction happens as a result of tactile and subconscious imprinting on makers and users. The act of thinginess discovery may create a bond between the user and the object, to discover meaning is to know and perhaps feel for. For most archaeologists this is antithetical to the idea of science. I argue this is necessary for archaeologists to near the truth of an object.

But really what’s the point? Beyond finally being able to work The Secret of Monkey Island into a piece? Thinginess and the discovery of thinginess has value in Archaeology if used to define a connection between context and use. It heightens soft data and places the quantitative and qualitative on equal footing, numbers here work in tandem with relations and connections of meaning, morphometrics works hand in hand with Latour’s Actor Network Theory. Guybrush Threepwood clicks through The Secret of Monkey Island linearly one puzzle at a time but player and avatar experience the creative and joyful process of object discovery together.

There’s tension between the quantitative and qualitative to be sure but allow me to sum it up with the following exchange:

You fight like a dairy farmer.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Play the game. Trust me.

Image: Copyright Lucasarts. Art by Steve Purcell

A modest proposal for viewing literary texts as rulesets, and for making game studies beneficial to the publick (rules of the text 1)

By Roger Travis

Feb 09, 12

In this post, I want to try to open a new direction in my own thinking about play and art. As you may have gathered from previous posts here at Play the Past, I see games and other works of art as part of a continuum of μίμησις–or, in my own terminology, of practomime: that is, literally, the doing of playing pretend. I want to see if I can open a conversation about a radical hypothesis that actually occurred to me a couple of years ago, and about which I’ve nearly gotten into fights, but which I’ve never yet found time and opportunity to put on a firm theoretical footing (not that I’ll be able to do that in this post!–but you have to start somewhere).

I’ve been engulfed (not to say “immersed”) in the audiobook versions of GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire for what seems like forever and is in fact at least six months. It may well be a consequence of listening to them rather than materially, textually reading them that I’ve become fascinated by the way Martin plays with medieval history on the one hand and high fantasy on the other.

What I’m listening to when I listen to these books is a performance of the wonderful Roy Dotrice of a performance by GRR Martin of materials afforded by historical and literary tradition. (There’s the tedious business of A Feast for Crows having originally been voiced by the vastly-inferior-to-Dotrice but probably fine-on-his-own-merits John Lee, and then it seems re-voiced by Dotrice, and I suppose the implications for differential performance are interesting, but though I feel bound to record it to show that I’m not unaware of these matters, it’s not germane to my point.)

The relationship between Martin’s performance, Dotrice’s performance, and my own receptive performance seems to me to be made much clearer when we think less in terms of literature and more in terms of play, especially when there are also such things as HBO series to work into a growing transmedia tapestry (tapestries, as you’ll see below, being good to think with).

I want to suggest that it can be interpretatively helpful to see Martin as the designer and first player of a mod of a game called “fantasy fiction,” and Roy Dotrice as the player of that game designed by Martin. The text of the novels is the ruleset of Martin’s game; the nearly infinite texts of medieval history and fantasy literature are the rulesets of the undesigned one Martin modded and then played to create it. As Martin’s scope for creativity was vast, a literary sandbox of almost unlimited dimensions, Dotrice’s scope for creativity and virtuosity was by comparison very narrow–yet at the same time infinite, in the same way that the performance-scope of a 2D sidescroller–or of a level of HALO, or of a given book of the Iliad–is both limited and infinite.

Call it the great chain of practomime: from Tolkien and the Bayeux Tapestry to Martin to Dotrice to me, just as we might draw it from Beowulf to Tolkien to Turbine to my students now playing The Lord of the Rings Online in my Homer course. Socrates proposes something very similar in Plato’s Ion: the rhapsode is the final link in a chain of magnetic rings that begins with “Homer.”Rulesets and game-mechanics are perhaps not exactly what we think they are: perhaps, like more traditional forms of metaphor, they both constrain and release our creativity, and give us in that double-motion the opportunity for immersive, transformative virtuosity that can enliven us and connect us to our communities.

If this idea has merit, not only may it be possible to read transmedia artifacts both as discourse and as game, and to read them across their various media while preserving both their totalizing pretensions and the individuality of their component practices (that is, we could for example read graphic Batman, the film The Dark Knight, and the game Arkham Asylum isomorphically both separately and together), but it may be possible to find the essential complementarity we have been searching for between player-experience and game-design in a corresponding complementarity between literary criticism and game-design criticism. Among other things, this complementarity would put behind us the distinction between content and rules forever, since we would at last be able to see that content is a form of rule, as the Bayeux Tapestry is a part of the ruleset of A Song of Ice and Fire, given that it controlled the relation between Martin’s input and the text he produced; as the text of A Song Ice and Fire is a part of the ruleset of A Song of Ice and Fire, given that it controlled the relation between Roy Dotrice’s input and the audiobook he produced; as the sound of the audiobook is a part of the ruleset of the audiobook I listen to, given that it controls the relation between the state of mind I bring to it and that state of mind in which I leave it.

It would in short mean that we could on the one hand read rulesets as literature and on the other critique the design of discursive artifacts like texts. It would mean that we could find new ways to appreciate and to critique the playfulness of novels like Ulysses and epics like the Iliad, and new ways to appreciate and to critique the lapidary literary qualities of games like Skyrim. Next time, I’ll try do just that in the specific case of Martin’s unfinished-as-yet transmedia juggernaut: what are the rules of this game he plays with history and horror, chronicle and fantasy, and how can an analysis of them help us locate and evaluate its contribution to our culture?

The great chain of practomime: peace in our time between GDC and MLA.

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Bedecker's Dilemma and the Thrill of Danger

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Call for Feature Essays About Any Aspect of Popular Culture, Present or Past

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Thursday, Jul 26, 2012

by Scott Juster

I’m immortal, and I’m bored.

In the Twilight Zone episode “Escape Clause,” a hypochondriac named Walter Bedecker strikes a deal with the devil.  Bedecker is granted invulnerability and immortality with the understanding that, should he ever wish to stop living, his soul will become property of Satan.  Confident that he’ll never tire of an infinite life of perfect health, Bedecker happily signs on the dotted line.  Of course, this being the Twilight Zone, things don’t turn out too well for him.  Bedecker’s newfound immortality ushers in a profound sense of boredom.  Without the fear of death, life gets dull.  Bedecker begins committing increasingly dangerous crimes in the hopes of finding some excitement and is ultimately sentenced to life in prison.  Facing an eternity behind bars, he exercises his escape clause and cedes his soul to the devil.

I bring this up both because I love the Twilight Zone and as a way to explain my obsession with consequences in video games.

Games have gotten safer over the years.  Failure (metaphorical death) is less common and its effects increasingly temporary.  Regenerating health abounds.  Most games conveniently save your progress and many allow you to revert to a specific save state of your choosing.  New Super Mario Bros. Wii will even play the game for you.  The point is that it’s rare to be faced with a seemingly insurmountable situation (unless it’s a scripted event).  In some ways this makes games more accessible and enables them to tell linear, authored stories.  In exchange for trading away unexpectedly (and sometimes unfair) danger, we can play games without having to worry about death.

However, in accepting this deal, we face Bedecker’s dilemma.  Without the morbid thrill of danger, things get dull.  I haven’t been close to failing in any of the last three Zelda games.  I “died” a bunch in Uncharted 3, but the ability to simply load up the same scene a dozen times until I wasn’t killed by a random grenade sucked away any tension in the experience.  Thatgamecompany’s masterful games evoke a wide array of emotions, but none of them make me feel the thrill of real, irreparable danger.  I’m immortal, and I’m bored.

It’s hard to say when this risk-averse philosophy arose, but G. Christopher Williams makes a good point about the impact of the “GAME OVER” and “Continue?” screens:

Indeed, early continue screens in console games frequently read something like this: “GAME OVER. Continue?  Yes or No?”  Now , continue screens very often simply state, “GAME OVER. Click X to continue,” as if being told you had lost means nothing. The expectation is that being “beaten” isn’t really a true state. Of course, the player intends to continue. The only reason people quit is because they lose interest, not because of a failure on their part.  (“I Admire Your Ability to Lose”, PopMatters, 18 July 2012)

Of course, there were also numerous games that didn’t even offer that.  In those games, dying meant the game was truly over, and if you wanted to start again, you’d have to begin a new game.  Because of this, the stakes transcended any in-game achievements.  In traditional arcade games, sloppy play might cost you a high score, but you’d also pay with your time and your quarters.  Death meant more than simply having to sit through a “Continue?” screen; it was swift, brutal, and permanent, which made it exciting. 

Bombastic aesthetics have become a fetish that games rely on to excite players that need to be distracted from the fact that there is very little riding on their decisions.  Every year we get more realistic graphics, more garish explosions, more cinematic situations that make things look more intense.  However, if we peel off the many layers of polish, we find that the danger is a facade and that, even in the middle of a virtual war zone, our avatars are as safe as poor Walter Bedecker.

Games like Spelunky, Demon’s Souls, and Dark Souls gain dedicated followings because they offer an escape clause.  Playing them allows you to trade in your immortality and rediscover the excitement of danger.  You quickly rediscover the anger and frustration of unexpected loss, but that’s part of the experience.  Knowing that the next boss in Demon’s Souls could easily kill me is a thrill that Zelda hasn’t given me for years.  Seeing that cartoonish spider bounding towards me in Spelunky is more terrifying than any number of photorealistic explosions because that spider has the power to end my entire run rather than send me back a few screens.

It’s something we’ve known since the original Rogue.  An “@” symbol bumping into a “D” can be one of the most intense situations in video games because the outcome will have immediate, permanent consequences.  Certainly, not every game has to be crushingly difficult and completely unforgiving of failure, but consequences are something that we should hold onto as we chase ever-more realistic graphics and increasingly elaborate set pieces.  Novel aesthetics can offer short term adrenaline fixes, but they will ultimately be overwhelmed by the complacency engendered by constant safety.  As Walter Bedecker realized, without the existence of death, it’s hard to feel alive.

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Bashing your head against the difficulty wall

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Bashing your head against the difficulty wall

•August 2, 2012. Gaming

Tap! magazine editor Christopher Phin has written about difficulty walls, and his frustration at being rubbish at games, thereby making his progress often resemble: Oh, this is quite nice. I’m having fun here, and I think th—SMACK. (We’ll ignore for a minute the super-secret that I’m about to reveal, in that Phin completed World of Goo HD in relatively little time and with no walkthrough assistance whatsoever, rather scuppering the ‘entirely rubbish at games’ thing, but anyway.)

Difficulty walls have long been a problem in gaming, and difficulty is extremely tricky to judge. Indies in particular have a hard time of it,  because they’ll regularly play their game and, naturally, get very good at it, and may ramp up the difficulty level accordingly. No worries, you might say, because good developers have chums and pals they can rope in for playtesting. Well, sure, but they regularly play the game and, naturally, get very good at it, and the developer may ramp up the difficulty level accordingly… Also, the opposite is sometimes true—devs get paranoid and the default (or, in bad cases, the only) difficulty level is set so low that you feel you could complete a level with your eyes shut and one hand tied behind your back, while being attacked by a mad person throwing inflatable geese at your head. Neither option is particularly fun for anyone. Apart from the geese.

In his article, Phin then argues Where’s My Water? has a kind of sawtooth curve, where each set of levels gets tougher until it’s complete; on starting a new set, the game eases off a bit. Long-time gamers will note that ebb-and-flow used to be quite common in gaming, especially in the arcades. Even those games that appeared relentless on the surface sometimes weren’t actually relentless at all if you were paying attention—instead, as a game hotted up, the odd easier level would be dropped in, enabling recovery. Eugene Jarvis once told me this was one of the main aspects of his game design, and it was why planet refreshes occurred in Defender after you’d carelessly allowed all the little guys under your protection to be horribly mutated by evil aliens:

It’s redemption, where if you can just survive a couple more waves, everything will be OK. Providing a difficulty curve, rather than a straight linear projection of progressive difficulty… instead, [Defender] has waves where it’s more and more difficult, and then—aah!—it’s easy for a little bit. You have this roller-coaster of emotions. “If I can just get through the next wave, I’ll be in paradise!”

It’s strange how few developers utilise this idea today, which can be beneficial for casual fare like Where’s My Water but also hardcore arcade gaming like Defender. I know Llamasoft‘s titles frequently use this technique, but so often developers think a straight line—easy to ‘really not very easy at all’—is the way to go, when variety in terms of difficulty can add spice and breathing space to games that often sorely need it.

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Photorealism And The Confusing Myths Of Innovation

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Graphicsability

By Jim Rossignol on August 2nd, 2012 at 1:00 pm.

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In an excerpt from a forthcoming Games Industry International interview, we find this statement from 2K boss Christoph Hartmann:

“Recreating a Mission Impossible experience in gaming is easy; recreating emotions in Brokeback Mountain is going to be tough, or at least very sensitive in this country… it will be very hard to create very deep emotions like sadness or love, things that drive the movies,” he said. “Until games are photorealistic, it’ll be very hard to open up to new genres. We can really only focus on action and shooter titles; those are suitable for consoles now.” He continued, “To dramatically change the industry to where we can insert a whole range of emotions, I feel it will only happen when we reach the point that games are photorealistic; then we will have reached an endpoint and that might be the final console.”

Let’s examine that.

I can’t remember the first time I heard the idea that games could one day be “photorealistic”, but I suspect it was in an early issue of Edge, with a columnist or interviewee from the early Nineties making hand-wavey statements about the future of graphics, and therefore the future of games.

Concluding that innovation in videogames is tied to technological progression is an easy mistake to make, of course, because the entire history of the form has been framed by a racing acceleration of both hardware and software. That connection to rapid technological change makes the nature of games quite confusing, and if there were to seem to be a goal or an “end” for it, then it should surely be for games to have the same (or somehow better) fidelity as the real world. This is a mistake has been pervasive, and I can see precisely why it has come about.

Denying that graphics have been important to gaming would be like denying that printing had been important to literature. Graphics aren’t incidental to the medium, they *are* the medium. It was one of the reasons the old “graphics vs gameplay” dichotomy never really made sense. It’s hard to extract one from the other. Wolfenstein wouldn’t have been Wolfenstein if Id hadn’t figured out how to make the graphics to protray first-person Nazi-killing. Of course you can white-box anything, and boil it to down to its most primitive elements, but the truth is that it does not remain the same game. It’s the combination of visuals, audio, and mechanics that make the experience of a game what it is, and none of these can be fully extracted from the other without changing the nature of the game.

With this in mind, the mistake that Mr Hartmann seems to be making in that GII article is almost understandable: “Until games are photorealistic, it’ll be very hard to open up to new genres.”

Let’s not be unfair here: New technologies have always been tied to new types of games. Hartmann is trying to say that conveying emotion will be easier, somehow, when game characters can look like real people. He’s saying that the technology will open up the emotive space. He’s spectacularly wrong, of course – blinkered like a man whose only exposure to human culture is HD Hollywood movies – because there’s nothing photorealistic about half the animated movies that can readily make you cry, and a long history of highly emotive written words have no “graphics” at all. Fidelity has nothing to do with emotional affect.

What’s most intriguing about Hartmann’s statement is the idea of “the final console”. Perhaps, in some way, he’s right. Perhaps when there’s a machine which can render all potential visual styles in real time – from the crudest 8-bit imagery to photorealistic intricacies – that will be the “final” console. But ultimately the ideal of a final machine misses the point: we already have formidable technology. If we’d stopped having new technology in 2003 we could still expect years and years of exploration in the space provided by that technology. Simply creating more technology, and systems that will allow us to be “photorealistic”, is actually not the challenge at all. In fact, it’s almost inevitable. That’s the easy part of progress. It will do nothing to open up new genres, nor to give gaming sudden access to a greater breadth of emotions. The inexorable march of tech does not expand creative frontiers, even as it enables them. Only design can do that.

A couple of years ago I sat on a panel with Viktor “City 17″ Antonov and asked him whether he thought increasing fidelity in gaming was important. For someone interested in fantastical architecture and complex visions of fantasy cities, you might have thought he’d say yes. But he said no. The challenge – I paraphrase here – was to work out how to use less detail. The challenge, he said, is to use style and abstraction to convey meaning and emotional gravity. Art, not technical photography or documentary, is the thing to look for when exploring new frontiers. To use the most trivial example, just look at the humour we derive from the cartoonish antics of Team Fortress 2. Would that be possible with photorealistic men? Possibly, but I suspect our laughter would take on quite a different tone. Comedy, certainly, is something that does not require improved graphics for us to have access to. The same is true of fear, wonder, loss, catharsis… Games already have quite a repertoire.

No, Mr Hartmann. No. The challenge, the way to open up new genres, does not depend on photorealism. It is not hard because the technology hasn’t been created, it’s hard because creativity is hard. It’s hard because accessing people’s emotions is hard. It’s hard because games are not a passive form of storytelling that has been honed over centuries, but instead a new, complex interactive form with near infinite variables, which no one person has truly mastered.

It’s hard because making something new is always hard.

But even with the tools we have right now, it’s nonetheless possible.

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News - Four ways to make better horror games

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Amid new opportunities for horror games, Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander looks at four frightening concepts that go beyond hacking, slashing and shooting. In recent years, the horror genre seems among the largest casualties of the rise of action games and first-person shooters in the home console space. It’s challenging to create fear in games that are all about head-on confrontation and quick reflexes. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but the aesthetic of the gruesome prevails above most other approaches. The contraction of Japan’s game industry has affected the breadth and tone of the horror genre too, thanks to some clear differences between the ways Eastern and Western cultures each generally approach fear. It’s safe to say that Western approaches to horror in media usually involve the direct and the seen: There is often a clear enemy known to audiences if not to the story’s characters (it’s why we like to yell futile instructions to oblivious film protagonists — don’t open that door!). We always learn why the axe murderer became crazed, or what the source of the demonic evil is. Most of the time, scares come from strong visual imagery or the threat of physical harm to the characters.

On the other hand, the horror media to come out of Japan and Korea tends to create dread from the unknown and the unexplained, and themes of family, ghosts and folklore are more popular than violence and gore. In the previous console generation, the most frightening games, like Resident Evil, Silent Hill or Fatal Frame, among others, all hailed from Japanese creators.

The franchises that thrive today seem to have lost a certain something in their pursuit of Westernization — Resident Evil remains as popular as ever, but what began as an eerie experience exploring haunted mansions and clinging to precious resources is now a spry action title where we watch over characters’ brawny shoulders as they mow down hordes of zombies.

Each new Silent Hill game is received more poorly than the last, even when developers try earnestly to imitate whatever certain something made Konami’s early titles so seminal.

Another factor in the diminishment of the horror genre is the way PC gaming culture has changed: The point-and-click puzzle and exploration games of the late ’90s and early millennium used to be the primary kind of experience on offer, and now the adventure game as we once knew it is all but gone. The adventure game space had just begun trying to explore darker, scarier themes (to debatable degrees of success) in games like 7th Guest or Phantasmagoria, when things seemed to take a left turn. Fortunately for horror game fans, today’s changing business models on PC mean adventure and storytelling games have an opportunity for resurgence. Downloadable and independent games are serious forces in the industry, quality ratchets up ever more quickly and creatives are hungry to explore new kinds of experiences — or to revisit and reappropriate bits and pieces of design from game forms that we might have once been overly-eager to throw out whole.

The result is a thriving indie horror game scene that’s going less and less under the radar; recently Home, a creepy little homage to what we used to love about story-based horror, got praise and attention from a broad array of consumer outlets. The terrifying Slender emerged from internet “creepypasta” lore and is free to play (that one in particular is fascinating, because it suggests new figures of fear can emerge not from history or old film monsters, but from modern digital folklore).

And there’ve been more obvious commercial examples of game successes that prove people still want to be terrified by things other than aliens and guns: Everybody loves Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and it was Limbo’s spooky, ruthless aesthetic that made it popular. Examples are everywhere.

Four ways to horrify

It’s interesting to think about what makes games like these truly scary, especially since the formula for horror seems precarious and easy to get wrong, if you look at the rate at which fans feel worried about the genre. Since it seems horror games have an opportunity to thrive again, let’s look at techniques for creating fear in players. We know that environmental audio is essential, and it’s also fairly well-understood how scarcity of resources or weaponry makes players feel more vulnerable. But take note of four ideas you may not have considered:

Ambiguity. Clear goals and methods for measuring performance toward goals are key to giving your player a satisfying experience, and vagueness has rightly never been a particularly popular quality for games. But in horror, it’s the things left unsaid that engage the player’s imagination; you can direct the player clearly through visual and sound cues, or key bits of information. But think of what keeps folks hooked on scary movies: They’re hoping to find out who’s responsible for a terrible event and why. They’re watching to see whether the hero survives. When a player can’t see further than what their flashlight illuminates, it’s scary. If a player isn’t sure whether he or she can trust a narrator, it’s scary. When you’re able to make it so the player can’t trust that some things are what they seem, it creates that sense of psychic unsettlement that’s key to fear.

And withholding some information from the player can help set up thrilling revelations later. Silent Hill 2 is an excellent example of the ambiguity principle working well — won’t spoil anything for you here, but the game is engaging because of the player’s persistent, accurate hunch that there’s something darker afoot than what the protagonist can acknowledge.

Strong sense of place. There are a wide range of locales frequently used in horror; somewhere along the line someone found something scary about it, and it became sort of standard. The cool thing about horror is that tropes can actually be used well; even though the “creepy hospital” has been done countless times across media for as long as anyone can remember, it still works, because when players sees certain “creepy hospital” visual cues, they understand immediately they’re in a dangerous place. Hotels, prisons, schools and mansions frequently appear in scary media too, because of the fact they carry long legacies inside their walls. Knowing why each of these environments work and being able to use culturally-universal “scary places” to strong effect is important, but the games that have unnerved me the most are ones that use place to subvert expectations. For example, if the player is led to believe early on in a game that her home, bedroom or other regularly-visited place is safe, it’s more terrifying later when something about it changes.

The Silent Hill games regularly use the same kinds of locations — dilapidated apartments, hospitals and foggy streets — and somehow that seems to empower those places rather than create fatigue. But Silent Hill 4 gave the player a home to depart from and return to. As the game progresses, the player’s safe place grows increasingly vulnerable to invasion and unpredictable. Creating strongly-individual spaces for players and then manipulating expectations is a great way to unsettle them.

Relationship with protagonist. It’s especially essential in horror games that the player has some emotion toward the character he or she plays, and it’s easy to assume that the relationship you want to forge with the player involves empathy. If players feel for the hero, then they’ll fear for the character’s safety, and therefore they’ll get scared when anything might happen to that character. Or they’ll be able to project themselves into the situation, thereby feeling closer to it through the hero.

But sometimes other kinds of relationships can create more opportunities to surprise and unsettle the player. 2005’s Haunting Ground cast the player as a powerless young girl who could really only run from her aggressors, and who was prone to entering an ungovernable, heart-pounding panic if her circumstances became too demanding.

Trapped in a castle with some creepy alchemical types that wanted to use her body, she wasn’t the kind of character anyone would want to be, and the way the game treated her was incredibly uncomfortable. Yet in Haunting Ground’s case it made the game more frightening and gross, as the player often experienced profound distress, discomfort and unsettlement at the protagonist’s circumstances. It felt considered and intentional on the part of the designers, too, versus the oblivious way games often treat vulnerable women.

Subtle changes in atmosphere. There are other ways to play with players’ expectations than subverting sense of place or creating unexpected dynamics between player and protagonist. Traditional horror game fans love exploration, and seem to enjoy games that reward their attention to detail. When something routine they expect to find changes locations, or when the environment around them appears tampered-with, it both excites their curiosity and amplifies the fear.

Sierra’s Phantasmagoria is a bizarre 1990s experiment in creating a mature, adult horror game with the best technology of the time. It’s known as the first game to use a live actor as an on-screen player character. Incredibly ambitious, it frightened and entertained many in its day — now it holds up so poorly it’s silly, very much a relic from a weird left-turn for adventure games. Still, the way the game world evolves as the story progresses is an interesting example of how atmosphere changes can evoke fear. The player has to explore a massive house that once belonged to a sinister magician, and much of his property remains behind. Yet each chapter things change; a whimsical fortune-telling machine the player can check becomes more forbidding, its merry tune a little darker each chapter. The late magician’s cigarettes and alcohol seem to be inexplicably disappearing bit by bit. The player’s computer shows increasingly garbled warnings. Even the music changes, its apprehensive tone gradually evolving into a heavier tune — later on, it even sounds like whoever is ‘playing’ it is making mistakes.

This infuses the key act of exploration with a sense of dread, especially important in a game that all takes place in the same house. It’s because the player is never allowed to feel like he or she has mastered the environment, which would certainly lessen the fear.

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How "Mass Effect 2" made me into a gamer

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How “Mass Effect 2” made me into a gamer

As a nerdy girl surrounded by fellow nerds, one constant of my childhood and adolescence was this: Watching boys play video games. From my little brother shouting at “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” on NES, to the guys on the high school newspaper staff fragging each other in “Goldeneye,” to epic late-night “Mario Kart” parties in college, I was constantly surrounded by video game culture, and enjoyed it — but rarely, if ever, put my hands on a controller.

The excuse I gave at the time was an embarrassing lack of coordination; my ability to handle the vast number of buttons and joysticks that make up the current-gen game controller is still pretty shaky. But the thing was, I didn’t mind watching. For over two decades, I was never bored playing the spectator to the action on screen — I enjoyed seeing the gameplay in action, and felt personally invested in every victory and defeat.

I could see that there was potential for interesting storytelling within this medium; I wanted to engage with it. But after a few early frustrations, I gave up on personally driving it.

However, my brother Eric, now living the gamer’s dream and working in the industry, didn’t give up on me. Ever since I bought myself a PS3 in 2009 (entirely for the Netflix and Blu-ray capabilities), he’s used birthdays and Christmases as an opportunity to try and get me excited about modern video game culture. Every game I own, save “Portal 2,” was given to me by him — and each game I attempted, but eventually lost interest in. Except, that is, for “Mass Effect 2.”

It’s taken me a while to figure out why.

The easy answer is that I am a gal raised on “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and other space operas; in theory, a narrative that involves travelling to distant planets, meeting alien races and trying to save the galaxy isn’t a hard sell for me.

But what the easy answer ignores is the fact that conceptually, I don’t enjoy shooter games. I don’t like having people shoot guns at me, I don’t enjoy the ever-present threat of oblivion — it’s generally the exact opposite of entertainment for me. With most games, if I died more than once trying to complete an obstacle, I’d give up and watch TV.

So, the opening scenes of “Mass Effect 2,” in which you are forced to fight your way to freedom through an army of robots, was hella frustrating. I walked into walls, ran out of bullets, died multiple times because of stupid mistakes — the fact I made it past that level is, truly, an achievement for the ages.

But once I did, I was customizing the exact appearance of Commander Shepard, giving her a name (“Badass Lady”) and an eyeshadow color (grey-ish)… And then she wasn’t Commander Shepard anymore. She was “My Shepard.” And that’s when I began to get hooked.

I’ve been watching movies and TV my entire life — I have managed to make the act of consuming media into a genuine job skill. But for the first time, I experienced the core joy of gaming: The knowledge that the adventure unfolding was MINE.

The fact that I could make decisions for better or worse, and have it add up to a larger story — and an INTERESTING story, a tale of feuds and friendship and aliens and space battles and conspiracies — became incredibly gratifying. I’d talk with friends at work about what I’d done the night before, how my choices differed from theirs, and I’d take pride in commanding my Shepard’s fate, in her serving as my avatar in this exciting new world.

And as I connected with the story, I also connected with the physical charm of the gameplay. I am the reason for Easy mode — I am why you are asked to set difficulty levels when you start playing a game. Because I have no natural talent, less experience, but I want to get in on the action — and the more I practiced, the better I got.

With “Mass Effect,” I was engaged enough by the story to keep pressing forward, and thus I became very good at cowering behind barriers and shooting fireballs and attack drones at duders — my preferred battle strategy. I died less, took more satisfaction in pushing past battle after battle towards some necessary goal. Eventually, the basic act of manipulating the controller became so synonymous with space adventure — became synonymous with fun — that I’d be using my PS3 controller to navigate through a Blu-ray disc’s menu screen, and regret that I was watching something, and not playing it.

The deeper I got into “Mass Effect 2,” the less I’d dread the shift in music cues, always signifying the imminent arrival of some swarm of zombies or robots or mercenaries. Because I had my fireballs, and my combat drones, and my very large laser gun. I had all the tools I needed, to win.

Win I did one evening, with my brother watching in approval, complimenting my use of combos, my skill in getting past obstacles — even while he mocked the decisions that lead to half of my crew dying tragically in the final battle.

I was sad about those deaths, but even then I couldn’t help but be a little proud of the fact that they were my fault. While the game’s writers were the true narrative force behind the game, I still felt accomplished. It was like marathoning six seasons of a TV show in a day — a TV show that you had a hand in writing.

And now, I don’t enjoy watching boys play video games anymore — at least, not as much as I used to. Instead, I want to hold the controller myself. Thanks to “Mass Effect,” I’m no longer nervous about loading up a new adventure. I don’t worry about my skills being up to the challenge — I just look forward to playing. Because “Mass Effect” taught me to like trouble.

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blueandbluer said: Oooh, that sounds good. I’ve been thinking about getting a new game…

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love - love - the world…they have created,…still kinda…

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transition. I’m still…combos mystify me. #n00b

ladimcbeth said: Change “Mass Effect” to “Dragon Age” and my story becomes very similar to yours :)

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The Story Mechanic Part Three: A Conversation with Edmund McMillen

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“For me, it’s less of a message and more of a conversation”.

Edmund McMillen hits on it easily and succinctly; stories in games are difficult. What makes them different from other media, what makes us demand so much of them, is that fundamentally they demand something from us in return. It is rare in TV, film or books that a story is so hidden from us that we have to actively engage in finding it. Characters and plots usually wash over us, pouring out of screens and pages like fast flowing water. In games, we have to succeed at something to be rewarded with story; kill a boss, master a technique, grasp a hidden meaning. We have to dig with our fingers for the tiniest drop.

However, it is precisely this interaction, in the mind of Edmund McMillen, that gives games a unique ability to not only tell stories but talk with the player and open them up creatively. When I asked him about the message he was trying to communicate with The Binding of Isaac, a game famous for its difficulty and commentary on childhood and Catholicism, McMillen was quick to explain that what was important to him was to get the player thinking; not to impart a literal message. “When you approach a video game and you are playing it, you mostly kind of approach it with the idea you are trying to solve a puzzle” he explained, “I think that if you approach what is perceived as this story in a similar manner then I think it gets that going in their heads”. Encouraging creativity is certainly a motivating factor for McMillen. One aspect of his growing mainstream fame and popularity is the scene in Indie Game: The Movie, where he is crying at the idea he has inspired younger generations creatively. It is exciting to think that he sees story as an avenue to inspire this creativity. What is interesting though, is that McMillen doesn’t consider himself a storyteller. He concedes, “I don’t think of myself as a storyteller because, I guess, it’s a non-traditional way of telling a story”.

So is Edmund McMillen just a game designer? Or is his non-traditional approach actually laying the foundations for future generations of game stories, as different as films are from plays and plays are from books?

McMillen believes that game narrative is at a “foetal stage”, with many in the industry experimenting hard with narrative delivery. His approach to crafting a game story is very open, attacking subjects which have inspired him or that he obsesses over with an open mind. “When I go in to tell a story, I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to say all the time” he admits. McMillen, who confesses that things don’t hold his interest for long, explores topics that he doesn’t completely understand because he finds them more interesting. “I’m not the sort of person who likes retelling the same stories, I want answers, and I want to know why”, he says. Short projects like Aether, which he worked on for “fourteen days” and is “really proud of”, allow him to explore many different topics and to collaborate with many different people. When asked if he feels any responsibility to the narrative ideas of these partners, he explains that it is different in every case, though he always loves the social interaction of making a game. He likens working with Tommy Refenes (his compatriot on Super Meat Boy) to a “marriage of ideas”, the two’s shared frame of reference allowing for a game design shorthand that makes it easy to implement the vision.

Whilst McMillen appreciates the contributions of those he works with, he is less thrilled by big business’ contribution to story in games. When discussing the similarities of big Triple A releases, McMillen laments that “sadly video games got swept up by business really, really, really early on”. The down economy, the risks associated with massive investment and the perception that successful games require huge investment to succeed, all contribute to an environment where too often companies play it safe and “playing safe means copying what works”. McMillen highlights Castle Crashers and Minecraft as games that prove small budgets and creativity can make for a financial success, but particularly singles out thechineseroom’s Dear Esther as a game that appeared out of the indie scene, was a huge financial success, and provided a successful interactive story experience. Here again, McMillen returns to the idea of player involvement – the conversation – as a key aspect of in game story; “there is a kind of definitive answer to the story [in Dear Esther], but really the way the story is told and experienced is pretty unique in the way it is left up to the player’s interpretation to figure it out as they go. The dialogue is basically like poems and you’re attaching the poems to things that you experience or read on the walls and they’re all kind of tied together with the music. You are drawing your own conclusions about what’s happening and why, and I think that’s really cool; and really special too.” It is high praise, of course, but it shows the consistency of McMillen’s design approach, placing high value on the player really contributing to their own experience, seeking out the game’s secrets and pro-actively attributing their own thoughts and conclusions to the patchwork of story information the game provides.

With this sort of experimentation and advancement there are inevitable success stories and failures. So where does McMillen see the real story development coming from? “Small Teams” is the key, in his view. Small teams from the indie scene have the advantage of not worrying about budgets and profits, with small teams in general having a “very tight and focussed vision”, able to attack specific problems and innovate with design. It isn’t a criticism of mainstream development, more an objective observation. With teams on triple-A titles often numbering hundreds of people, McMillen believes it is largely “impossible” to have the razor focus that is required to truly experiment in the burgeoning field of narrative development. He points at successful games like Braid as examples of a small team working on a title that wonderfully blends story and gameplay. In the case of the Braid, it is the rewind mechanic, as a metaphor for trying to correct mistakes in ones own life, that blurred the line between story and gameplay so effectively. Not as famous, but equally as affecting to McMillen, was dys4ia by Anna Anthropy (available here), a game about the designer’s transition from male to female. McMillen describes the game as “more literal” but still an “answer to the question that she was asked a lot”. With small teams, McMillen is adamant that “if you just kind of open yourself up and you are really honest with what you are doing, it is impossible to not have this really personal underlying theme happening in your work, even if you don’t intend there to be a story, even if you don’t intend there to be any kind of message or anything, I think it is kind of impossible to avoid the fact that you are still going to be kind of inside it; it is impossible for an artist to stop that”.

For all the artistic endeavour, it is not lost on McMillen that this industry, even when thinking about story, is driven by technology. His current interest, shown by The Binding of Isaac, is random generation. He compares random generation to a job he once had, which was largely menial but featured different challenges everyday. “There is something to re-rolling the day and not knowing what is going to happen, and how important it is in life to just enjoy life, the magic of improvisation and just not knowing and going in and playing it out”. McMillen believes in this idea strongly, thinking that it goes beyond games and that “random generation is the future of video games”. It feels like a strong statement, but McMillen sees this as a natural progression; “you could put it into most games, it would make things instantly replayable and just better overall”. McMillen’s description is exciting, and it is easy for the imagination to jump to a world where there is a Grand Theft Auto X, with a full city that generates random missions and random character arcs, the player the central character in a world that randomly formulates around their actions. McMillen’s current focus is more personal, trying to implement random generation into the games he develops even if “it is just to a small degree”.

Speaking to Edmund McMillen is an important reminder that story is just one part of a game, and not even a necessary part. However, his desire to have a conversation with players and to make games that engage them beyond what their thumbs are doing, illustrates the power that he believes story has. Game stories might not be traditional, they might still be embryonic, experimental and unformed, but they are an important way for game designers to express themselves and a growing part of games in general. What we can certainly deduce is that, even if Edmund McMillen still doesn’t see himself as a storyteller, he is certainly part of the conversation.

Mark Bridle

I’ve been writing for GodisaGeek since September 2010 but my commitment to short passing, blistering-counter-attacking, sexy videogame football goes back all the way to Sensible Soccer on the Amiga 500+.

Nowadays I ply my trade on FIFA whilst I write news and reviews for the GiaG team.

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Home / Features / Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture - Dear Esther’s successor

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – Dear Esther’s successor

Posted July 30, 2012 by Lewis Denby.

Feature: Following the extraordinary success of artsy experiment Dear Esther, thechineseroom are hard at work on its spiritual successor, EVERYBODY’S GONE TO THE RAPTURE. We sit down with creative director Dan Pinchbeck for a first look at “the absent apocalypse”.

“If the world ended in a little village in Shropshire, it’d be inconvenient.”

As far as CryEngine 3-powered open-world videogames go, it doesn’t sound like the most obvious elevator pitch. But that’s the idea behind Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which could be one of 2013′s more interesting PC releases.

It’s the spiritual successor to Dear Esther, the experimental hit that took the indie scene by storm earlier this year. Dear Esther eschewed traditional game mechanics and instead invited players to amble gently around a remote Hebridean island, soaking up the atmosphere and piecing together snippets of audio and visual cues into something resembling a coherent story.

Esther’s generally excellent reviews and extraordinary sales figures showed there’s a market for experiments in first-person gaming. For developer thechineseroom - an indie studio partnered with the University of Portsmouth, and who are also heading up development on Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs – the logical next step is to add bits of game back into the template, and see how people respond.

Like its predecessor, it’s being dubbed a “pure story game”. But unlike in Dear Esther, you’ll be able to do more than simply walk around. Rapture’s world is all about interactions, and the way these interactions can shape the environment and the story it tells.

“The concept of it is this almost ’60s-’70s Brit science fiction – this John Wyndham, John Christopher kind of thing – of how the end of the world would be responded to in a rural English location,” explains creative director Dan Pinchbeck. “It’s kind of like that film that was made after the Second World War about what would have happened if the Nazis had invaded – and actually, the film was so controversial because not a lot would actually change for the vast majority of people, or they’d just accept it really, really easily.”

These ideas got Pinchbeck thinking about the apocalypse, and how ordinary people would respond to its coming. “So we had this idea of going, ‘Actually, if the world ended in a little village in Shropshire, it’d be inconvenient’.”

Six people, 60 minutes

So, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a first-person open-world game that tells the story of an environment and those who dwell within it. The world is big: “If you wanted to go diagonally from one corner to the other, it’d probably take you around 20 minutes,” says Pinchbeck. But each time you play, your time is locked to just one hour. Whatever you’ve managed to experience and achieve at the end of that time is your story. You can then go back to the start, to see some of the stuff you missed.

It’s a game designed to be played again and again. The time limitation means you’ll only see a fraction of the world on each playthrough, and your presence in the world – and the ways you interact with it – shape the events that take place.

But those events are also shaped by the game’s cast. In sharp contrast to Esther’s desolation, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture tells the story of six characters. In their sleepy village, they’ll go about their lives regardless of your presence, but you can interact with them, influencing their actions and the effects they’ll have on the world.

What “characters” actually means is quite the mystery at this stage. ”They’re almost kind of memory traces of people that were there,” explains Pinchbeck, “and how we represent them, and whether we do full-on character builds or whether we do something more symbolic, we’re still kind of chewing around with.”

Whatever the team’s decision, though, the key is that they have to feel responsive. In some ways, Rapture is almost the antithesis of Dear Esther: where that was about removing your influence over the game, Rapture is exactly about influencing the events that take place.

Whether you choose to or not is a different matter. It’s perfectly feasible, says Pinchbeck, to play Rapture by standing still in the middle of the world. The game’s characters will continue to follow their own path, and their actions will still change the world, so you’ll still get to experience a story even if you decide not to participate in it.

You could find a quiet spot and simply watch a certain character. “Do you become like a voyeur, just watching them live out the last day of their life, effectively? They’ll get on with that anyway, and what they do will make changes in the world,” explains Pinchbeck. “And if you’re there when that change happens, that’s kind of realised and presented in a different way than if you’re not there.”

You’ll be encouraged to explore the range of ways you can shape these apocalyptic events. “We’re looking at making it much more physially interactive [than Dear Esther], so you can manipulate objects, you can open and close doors,” Pinchbeck says. “[And] without it being too much like easter egg rewards, the game will reward you for exploring and interacting. So there are places which are not obvious to get to, and you have to do things in order to get to them.”

Does everyone have to go to the rapture?

When thechineseroom were collaborating with Robert Briscoe on Dear Esther, the former DICE artist initially toyed with introducing interactive elements to the framework set out by the original Half-Life 2 mod. But it became clear to the team that it simply wasn’t going to work.

That didn’t stop Pinchbeck wondering what a game such as Esther would be like if you could more tangibly interact with it, though – and thus the concept of Rapture was born.

“It really made me want to do stuff like that more and more,” Pinchbeck recalls, “and go, ‘You know, I want to be able to allow the player to manipulate the world. I want the player to feel like, actually, this is a space that’s evolving and changing’. I think with Esther you generated most of that sense of foreboding prety much by yourself, and I really wanted a world where you actively feel like something is going on, becuase it actively is going on.”

But in a world that’s considerably more responsive than Dear Esther’s misty island, there appears a new million-dollar question: if the game takes place during the final day of the world, and your actions change that world, is it possible to avert the apocalypse entirely?

That, it seems, is still to be decided. “The nice thing about it is that there’s quite a lot of concept vision, but a lot of the story will come quite late, because it always does,” says Pinchbeck. It’s certainly something the team has been mulling over, he reveals. “I kind of like the inevitability of not being able to, but it’s still quite an intriguing idea of: how do you give that journey some kind of meaning, and make those interactions worthwhile?”

For now at least, Pinchbeck is more interested in the small pay-offs of individual interactions, and generating a sense of being able to tangibly shape things. “But how do you go somewhere between binary goal reward systems, and something more like The Path, which for me was too obtuse?” he ponders. “There’s somewhere in the middle that feels rewarding, that feels like what you’re doing has an impact, but you can’t always put your finger on the chain of causality. There’s a really interesting design space in there.”

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is due out for PC in Summer 2013. Full disclosure: BeefJack’s editor did some freelance PR work for Dear Esther, but he’s in no way involved with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and is no longer associated with thechineseroom.

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Second Thoughts About Gaming’s Most Hated Company

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Jul 30, 2012 9:30 AM

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Second Thoughts About Gaming’s Most Hated Company

Stephen Totilo

The bubble bursts. The blood is in the water. The knives sharpen.

Pick your favorite cliché to commemorate the beating that Zynga took last week after posting some numbers that Wall Street hated and lowering their forecasts for the rest of the year. Their stock plummeted 40% and some people are rooting for the creators of FarmVille and CityVille and owners of Words With Friends to never recover.

If you’re into video games, companies are what you hate. There are no idiot actors to love to detest, no prima donna musicians, no bloviating directors, no plagiarizing authors and no overpaid, over-drugged jocks. And so, when there is hate to be had in gaming, it’s directed at money-making, faceless behemoths whose logos appear when you’re about to play a video game. Pick your target: arrogant EA, exploitative Activision, stupid Sega, meddling Microsoft, no-clue Nintendo… any of those work for you?

Some people in gaming pick a company to love, maybe one of the aforementioned corporate giants—well, any of them except Zynga. Zynga is the company just about everyone roots failure upon. But maybe that’s wrong.

***

Four months ago, in March, I take a taxi to Zynga headquarters in San Francisco, walk through an illuminated cylindrical hallway that could have been in disco in a sci-fi movie, meet a PR lady who is a couple of days away from leaving the company, head upstairs and sit down with John Schappert, a man who used to make Madden games and worked in senior positions at both EA and Microsoft before jumping to Zynga. His current company isn’t a web company, he tells me. “It’s not a game company,” he adds. “It’s a web-game company.” Yeah, these are the kind of semantics that make Zynga easy to mock, even if chief operating officers of just about any major company might issue similar brochure-ready statements. (Schappert will be one of the top Zynga people who sells Zynga stock—$3.9 million worth, for him—in April, a month after we speak, a move that is now attracting law firms that specialize in class-action lawsuits. This is a move Zynga has yet to comment on.)

Back in March, Schappert gets to the McDonalds-scale mission statement of the company. “Our goal is: Can we have a billion people play together? We want to connect the world through games. How can we get a billion people to play together?”

Zynga’s John Schappert: “Our goal is: Can we have a billion people play together?”

This sounds preposterous to anyone who is familiar with the massive success of Nintendo’s Wii, which has managed to sell… oh, just 100 million units in nearly six years. Maybe 1012 million people have played World of Warcraft.

“I don’t need to have a billion people playing one game,” Schappert clarifies. “I’m fine with just a billion people playing Zynga games. So don’t hold me back on one.”

At the time he is saying this, the number of monthly active users across all Zynga games on Facebook is around 250,000,000, maybe even as high as 290,000,000, as the company will report to Wall Street for the end of March. It’s 250,000,000 in the most recent July count.

They are (were?) a quarter of the way to that billion.

***

Zynga is best known for its ‘Ville games, which are strategy games played on Facebook. A FarmVile or CityVille or CasteVille player gets a plot of land and then can click on it to sow crops, build a city or explore a fantasy land. Much of what the player can do is metered, limited by the amount of turn-taking energy units the player has or how long it will take for an office building to be made or for a pumpkin patch to bear its fruit. Players get ahead by waiting or by paying to avoid the wait or by enlisting the help of other friends.

A dedicated Zynga ‘Ville gamer will create a vast and complex world of interlocking systems, one that was made possible, most likely, with the help of many friends who consented to send gifts, swap items and help improve the game board all through simple mouse-clicks.

The less-well-publicized Zynga games involve adventures and wars, but those are only played by 1-7 million people a day. That’s small-fry among Zynga’s mighty free games. The ‘Ville games attract 15-30 million people on Facebook a day.

***

I don’t call my mother as much as I should. But we trade turns in Words with Friends every few days. It’s more or less a game of Scrabble but with more chances for big points. I’ve never played a multiplayer video game with my mother before. Zynga didn’t make Words with Friends. They bought the people who made it for $53.3 million.

***

Zynga is a new company, so most of its top employees—the ones it makes available for interviews—are from other gaming companies. They’re veterans. Tim LeTourneau, who helps oversee internal studios at Zynga, is one of them. He worked on tons of Sims games at EA, starting with the first one and seeing through a decade’s worth. Back in March, he gave me an analogy about Zynga and its relationship to the rest of the gaming world (i.e. the world of Xboxes and Wiis and PlayStations and games on Steam):

“If you look back at the history of games and computer gaming and you think back to when I first started—so let’s go back 22 years— the biggest games at that point and time, the market leaders, were military sims. It’s 688 Attack Sub. It’s F-15. Think about the offering: you buy this box and you’ve got a 200-page manual that you’re supposed to read so you can figure out what the payloads are on this particular… that was gaming. And there were 100,000-200,000 people that would buy those games religiously and there was an entire industry based on the success of those games. And then all of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh, wait, I made this game that’s sort of out of the ordinary and I’m able to get to 500,000 players’… [People would say:] ‘that’s not a real game.’ You can draw those parallels over and over again.”

That’s a history of video games right there. Something is popular for a crowd of a certain size. Something else comes along and becomes more popular. That new, more popular game is discredited by fans of the original games as not being a real game.

***

I ask Schappert if a Zynga game can ever win Game of the Year. It’s a loaded question. We both know that more millions of people have played FarmVille than have ever played the kind of games that people who vote on GOTY awards give GOTY awards to. No one, not even anyone at Zynga, has ever said FarmVille was as good as Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto III or BioShock. I don’t give Schappert that context. I just ask the basic question.

Can a Zynga game ever win Game of the Year?

“I would hope,” he says. “We have some of the best game designers in the industry at it, designing and working on our games. Brian Reynolds developed FrontierVille. Mark Skaggs designed FarmVille. These games are great.”

He acknowledges his games would have a hard going with the critics: “I think the traditional gaming industry has been driven by a certain level of tech and fidelity that reviewers are looking for.”

***

Until recently, my most-played game every day was a game on my iPhone. It’s called Drop 7. I was obsessed with it for about two years. It’s Tetris with math, but is about 1000 times more fun than that description makes it sound. It was created by a company called AreaCode that was purchased in 2011 and renamed Zynga New York.

***

The worst way of describing FarmVille or CityVille, I say to LeTourneau when I sit down with him, is as glorified chain letters that compel people to keep clicking because they feel they have to. He tells me his wife never played games until she played FarmVille and that she would call it a game.

Before we have this exchange, LeTorneau had already made a statement that most game developers don’t feel the need to make at the beginning of interviews:

“Contrary to what anybody might say, these are games. I feel like I’m making games every day. I don’t’ feel like I’m not making games.”

The most important thing about these games, he says, is that they’re social. For example, when I ask him if Zynga would ever making a racing game, he says, “Sure. If we do, the first thing it will be will be social. “

***

Bob Bates started writing text-adventure games for Infocom in 1986. He didn’t write Zork or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he says with a smile, when we’re chatting in Zynga HQ back in March. He wrote Sherlock and Arthur. Later, he wrote the story for the first-person shooter Unreal II. Even later, he wrote the romance plot in FrontierVille (that’s the game now known as Pioneer Trail) and now he oversees Zynga’s external development studios.

Right before he worked for Zynga he was a consultant. He knew he should smarten up about social games, so he played the hot one at the time, Zynga’s Mafia Wars. Like other Zynga games, it was free to start playing, but you could pay to progress more quickly.

“I spent several months ripping that game apart and understanding it,” he says. “The way I did it was: every time I’d be playing and was thinking ‘I just want to do this thing and maybe I will pay to do it’, [I thought] ‘But wait a minute, wait a minute! I’m not going to pay. I’m going to sit back and I’m going to say, “Why do I want to do that?” “What have they done in this game to make me want to do this thing?”’ That’s how I learned this space.”

This prompts a long question, from me: “When you’re making a Zynga game and they inherently have to be Free-to-Play but they’re going to support some sort of micro-transaction model, does the desire to entertain the player and have the player experience fun risk coming into conflict with the need of the company to compel the player to keep spending more money and find reason to almost become uncomfortable and feel, ‘Ok, I need to spend more in order to improve my experience.’? Are those two things in tension with each other?

Zynga’s Bates: “Usually, in our games, you can progress by waiting, you can progress by being viral or social or you can progress by paying.”

Kotaku: “Do any of those three things in your mind make the game more fun than if you could just have the next moment in the text adventure right away?”

Bates: “Done right, the social part would. We don’t always get that right.”

“A little bit but not as much as you’d think,” he says. “If the game is fun and engaging and you have a ton of people playing it, some portion of that group are going to want to do some of the things that cost money.” He tells me about types of players. There are the Decorators, the players who will want to pay to get some of the things that make their version of the game more distinct. “Some people do that because they can’t paint or can’t write but they can do that in this environment. And they like to do that.” There are the Show-Offs, though Bates doesn’t really like the negative connotation of the term. These people want to impress you with their game world, so they might pay to make their world look cooler. And there are competitors, people driven by the performance of their friends on the game’s leaderboards. Some of these people will pay to do better. All Zynga games, Bates and anyone else who works at Zynga will remind you, can be played for free. Paying is optional.

I mention Super Mario Brothers, a game I think we can assume is very good. I tell Bates that I can’t imagine any free-to-play version (in the Zynga sense) that wouldn’t in some way diminish the game. I wonder if the free-to-play model simply disqualifies certain game designs from working well in it.

Bates reminds me that Zynga isn’t the only company to use the free-to-play model. He also talks about how tough it is to make good games, let alone good casual games, let alone good social-casual games. And then he says this about the question of how one would make Nintendo’s famous game free-to-play: “It’s a horrible admission, but I don’t know that game, Super Mario Bros, well enough to sit down and off the top of my head say what would I do…”

Okay. What about a text adventure? How would you do that in the Zynga way?

“A text adventure would be somewhat easier,” he says. These games could be episodic, with cliffhangers. “Player would want the next chapter and you could say, ‘well, in order to get this next chapter, you need to do some interaction with your friends or you need to pay us some money or you can wait until next week when your energy has replenished or whatever.’ So usually, in our games, you can progress by waiting, you can progress by being viral or social or you can progress by paying.”

I reply: “Do any of those three things in your mind make the game more fun than if you could just have the next moment in the text adventure right away?”

“Done right, the social part would,” he says. “We don’t always get that right.”

Bates envisions a Zynga game that connects people in a more interesting way than their games mainly do now, a Zynga game that doesn’t just have people exchanging gifts and item requests over Facebook . He wants to get to “the point where we’re playing with your friends, instead of where I’m over here and you’re over there and we’re just volleying back and forth.” He wants more of Empires & Allies’ neighbor-invading interactions. Or, to put a friendlier face on it, “What would be really cool is if I knew something that you liked and I had the freedom to come into your world and say, ‘I know he’s really going to like this’” and then do that thing.

***

Sometimes, Zynga is accused of copying games. Their Dream Heights looked like someone else’s Tiny Tower. Their CityVille seems like Sim City but on Facebook. The Ville, their second-hottest game now (after their poker game), is, more or less, like The Sims.

Zynga’s LeTourneau: “Does Call of Duty have to give credit to Medal of Honor?”

Surely, there is a line between games that are clones and games that are smart iterations. Everyone draws that line in a different place, LeTourneau says. “It’s a very interesting conversation in general. Does Call of Duty have to give credit to Medal of Honor? There are very, very few true innovations in any creative space. I’ve had the great fortune of working on some of them. The Sims I would consider to be one of them. It came from nowhere.”

What’s original about Zynga, he tells me, is the company’s focus on making any game or any genre of game a social experience.

***

The creator of NBA Jam makes games for Zynga, as do the lead designers of Civilization II and IV.

***

There are three core tenets for Zynga, Schappert says. The games must be social. They must be accessible (both in terms of being accessible on lots of devices and in terms of being easy to start playing). They must be free.

Most traditional video games involve lots of barriers, he points out: “the barriers that I have to own this device to play a game; I have to go to the store to buy this game; I have to shell out more money to buy this game… the more barriers you put up, the fewer people who are going to experience your game.”

***

Since Drop 7 is for iPhone, I can say that my favorite Zynga game on Facebook is something else. It’s not any one game that Zynga makes, actually. It’s a batch of them. Any one of them that I’ve played—Adventure World, Empires & Allies, Bubble Safari, Ruby Blast—is metered by energy, which stops the game when you’ve taken about 15 minutes’ worth of turns, more or less. I don’t pay to play more. I don’t nudge friends to give me energy. I wouldn’t even call what I do waiting. I just switch from one Zynga game to another, so that the one I was just playing refills my energy while I’m playing the next.

So the game that I’m playing on Facebook? It’s not a Zynga game. It’s the how-to-not-pay-Zynga game. Succeeding at it feels like beating the system, because, well, that’s exactly what it is. It is, for me, the most interesting challenge in the Zynga Facebook games.

***

LeTourneau believes that the energy system in most popular Zynga games is key to their success. It keeps sessions with the games short. “The fact that these games are metered out is part of why people will come back to them, because they represent 10 minutes of the day, not 10 hours of a day.” He likes this. “If your comment was ‘That game was one of the best 10 minutes I spent today,’ that would be a huge win. That would be a giant win, because it was the best 10 minutes you spent today and the best 10 minutes you spend tomorrow and the best 10 minutes you spend three months from now. You’re not burning out on it. It’s something you think about. It’s a few minutes of delight that you get to have during your day. And it’s a completely different gaming experience than sitting down in front of a console.”

Zynga’s LeTourneau: “If your comment was ‘That game was one of the best 10 minutes I spent today,’ that would be a huge win…It’s a few minutes of delight that you get to have during your day.”

Of course, Zynga would like some of its players to play for more than 10 minutes. That’s why the game lets you pay to continue. That’s how Zynga makes money. This creates a weird situation, as it does with any so-called free-to-play games that depend on some people paying, even as the company behind the game acknowledges that most people won’t. The situation is that most of the players will equate the game with a free experience. They will value it as such even though they will be repeatedly asked by the game, to cross a transom and declare that, actually, the game is worth paying some money for. What is the parallel? The person at the supermarket who lets you pick up a small cube of cheese with a toothpick in the hopes you will pay for more? The software pirate who tries dozens of games for nothing but vows that, not to worry, he’ll pay for the one he likes? To really like a Zynga game—to assert while playing that the work of Zynga’s game designers is good and worth paying for—is to relent. Otherwise, you’re freeloading.

***

“Keeping the players around and having lots of them” Bates tells me, “that’s the key to the business—It’s not figuring out how to get every last nickel out of this guy. It’s about keeping a lot of people around, having a lot of people play and some percentage of them are going to want to do some kinds of things that we’ll make money from.”

(The photos in this story were taken in Zynga’s San Francisco lobby in March 2012.)

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