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Black Mesa

superlevel.de

Black Mesa

Es folgt ein Gastartikel von Rainer Sigl. Er spielt seit den Tagen des C64 und schreibt seit 2006 für unterschiedliche Medien (nicht nur) über Computerspiele, seit Anfang dieses Jahres für sein eigenes Blog VideoGameTourism.
Für Superlevel nahm Rainer Black Mesa unter die Lupe.

14 Jahre sind eine lange Zeit — das gilt umso mehr für die Games-Branche. 1998 erschien Half-Life, das Debütspiel des bis dahin unbekannten Entwicklerstudios Valve, und es war ein revolutionärer Meilenstein: Kein Spiel zuvor hatte es derart geschafft, ohne Bruch der Immersion eine Geschichte so unmittelbar, packend und intelligent im zuvor eher brachialen Genre des First-Person-Shooters zu erzählen.

Aber auch acht Jahre sind eine lange Zeit: So lange haben Freiwillige daran gearbeitet, dem Klassiker Half-Life von Grund auf neu in Valves aktueller Source-Engine ein frisch strahlendes Denkmal zu setzen. Letzten Freitag ist Black Mesa Source (fast) fertiggestellt der Öffentlichkeit präsentiert worden. Und Black Mesa ist, so viel vorweg, einer der besten First-Person-Shooter der letzten Jahre — und das ist eigentlich deprimierend.

(Link zum Video)

Es fällt schwer, Black Mesa als Triumph der Indie-Szene zu bezeichnen: Einerseits ist es natürlich beachtlich, was mit der Unterstützung freiwilliger und ganz ohne Entlohnung arbeitender Amateure aus dem globalen Netz hier auf die Beine gestellt wurde. Andererseits, und das spricht laut gegen die Reklamierung des Spiels für die Indie-Szene, zeigt Black Mesa überdeutlich, dass seine Größe und die auch nach 14 Jahren ungebrochene Frische des Originals einem professionellen Entwickler zu verdanken sind: Black Mesa erinnert uns in seiner Originaltreue daran, warum Valve eine derartige Ausnahmestellung einnimmt.

Black Mesa schafft es, den heiß verehrten Klassiker optisch rundumerneuert wieder vor den Vorhang zu holen, denn natürlich hat auch an Valves Erstling vor allem in Hinblick auf die Grafik der Zahn der Zeit genagt. Valves eigener, nicht einmal ernsthaft als halbherzig zu bezeichnender Versuch, mit Half-Life: Source den Titel oberflächlich zu behübschen, gilt nicht ohne Grund als einziger Schandfleck auf der ansonsten makellos weißen Release-Weste.

Was Valve selbst nicht schaffte — wegen, wie man als ewig Gläubiger ganz fest hofft, emsiger Arbeit am dritten Teil der Reihe –, haben nun Weisheit und Selbstausbeutung der digitalen Massen mit Verspätung, aber Bravour erledigt: Black Mesa Source ist die ultimative, aktualisierte Version von Half-Life geworden. Die wenigen Abweichungen vom Original sind durchwegs sinnvoll und behutsam. Sie erhalten den Geist des großen Vorbilds, während die Grafik dank Source-Engine nun auch aktuellen Standards genügt.

Bei aller Begeisterung: Auch die wenigen Mängel des Originals haben den Weg ins Remake gefunden. Der etwas zähe zweite Akt verirrt sich einen Hauch zu oft in riesigen, leeren Industriehallen, und auch die Rückkehr des berüchtigten Crouch-Jumps wird in Verbindung mit der zum Glück inzwischen fast vergessenen Tradition des Millimetersprungrätsels zwischen Sprengladungen wohl nur die allerhärtesten Fans in Begeisterung versetzen können. Der überwältigend riesige Rest des Spiels zeigt aber, dass die Formel, die Valve in Half-Life das erste Mal gefunden und anschließend konsequent weiterentwickelt hat, zeitlos und immer noch packend ist: Die Mischung aus Story, Action, Erforschung, Rätseln und einer bis ins Detail ausgearbeiteten Spielwelt haben nur die wenigsten Anwärter auf den Thron des Story-basierten First-Person-Shooter so hinbekommen.

Valve, und das macht das Geheimnis des außergewöhnlichen Erfolges des Entwicklers aus, ist großzügig und verschwenderisch. Schon die legendäre Eingangssequenz, die Fahrt mit der Schwebebahn ins Herz des Wissenschaftskomplexes Black Mesa, zeigt dem Spieler, dass hier nur für ihn eine ganze Welt für die eigene, egal wie kurze Erfahrung zur Schau gestellt wird. Was für ein Kontrast zu den 1998, aber auch heute noch gängigen Render-Intros, das doch ist. Welch kühne Lässigkeit, mit der hier wortlos und ohne viel Aufhebens beeindruckende Industrieroboter präsentiert werden, die danach im ganzen Spiel nie mehr zu sehen sein werden! Das Geheimnis des Erfolgs von Half-Life, aber auch von Valves anderen Spielen liegt in der harten Arbeit am Detail, auch — und besonders im Wissen –, dass die Spieler diese Details nicht unbedingt bewusst, aber immer emotional aus dem Augenwinkel heraus zu würdigen wissen.

Diese üppige Welt, mit ihren unzähligen kleinen Script-Ereignissen, ihren witzigen Dialogen und kleinen, liebevoll platzierten Gags, ist nicht nur Hintergrund, sondern Hauptdarsteller und wohl auch ein Grund für den großen Erfolg der Reihe. Die Story selbst, inspiriert von einer Stephen-King-Kurzgeschichte, die 2007 auch verfilmt wurde, tritt zurück hinter die grandiose Inszenierung und das umfassend gelungene Design — eine Mischung, wie sie dem Medium perfekt angemessen ist.

Half-Life zeigte uns schon 1998, wie es gehen könnte, eine Geschichte in einem interaktiven Medium mit dessen Mitteln zu erzählen. Es war kein “Interaktiver Film”, sondern etwas Eigenständiges, in dem Spiel und Narration scheinbar mühelos ineinandergreifen. Es war eine Revolution, die noch dazu vom Publikum mit Begeisterung willkommen geheißen wurde.

Heute, 14 Jahre später, erkennt man Vorahnungen von Portal und auch Left4Dead in den gigantischen Hallen von Black Mesa wieder; doch irgendwann, zwischen der Begeisterung über das gelungene Fan-Remake und dem Erstaunen darüber, dass einem die Szenen des Originals noch so gut im Gedächtnis geblieben sind, drängt sich eine Frage auf: Was ist mit dieser Revolution seitdem passiert?

Was, zur Hölle, ist in den 14 Jahren seit 1998 geschehen? Warum ist Half-Life, das wir uns mit Black Mesa so detailgetreu wieder ins Gedächtnis holen können, abseits von Valves eigenen Fortsetzungen nicht viel umfassender als Vorlage für das seitdem explodierende Genre des First-Person-Shooters genutzt worden? Viel ist seit 1998 geschehen: Die Multiplayer-Revolution, die Aufsplittung des Genres in unterschiedliche Sub-Gruppen mitsamt Einflüssen anderer Genres, grafische Fortschritte und die Übernahme von Strategien des Überwältigungskinos à la Michael Bay, nicht zuletzt ist der Aufstieg des Genres zum globalen Bestseller-König bedeutsam. Was auf der Strecke geblieben ist, ist die so einfach aussehende, aber anscheinend so schwierig zu erreichende perfekte Mixtur, wie sie uns Valve schon 1998 in seinem Erstling gezeigt hat.

Klar, es gab in der Zwischenzeit auch andere Vertreter, die sich an der Verbindung von Action und Narration nach vorne wagten: Thief, BioShock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Deus Ex, F.E.A.R., Halo, Crysis und Call of Duty (jedenfalls bevor es zur seelenlosen Schießbude degenerierte) und ungezählte andere; doch Nachfolger, die mit Erfolg versucht hätten, die Rezeptur von Valves Debüt ernsthaft nachzuahmen, finden sich erstaunlich wenige: Red Faction, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, Singularity womöglich, oder Metro 2033 haben es probiert, das Erzählen einer Geschichte im Shooter in den Vordergrund zu rücken, doch nur Valve selbst ist mit den Fortsetzungen von Half-Life und Portal in seinem eigenen Revier um Längen voraus geblieben. Black Mesa zeigt uns in seiner Werktreue auch auf deprimierende Art und Weise auf, dass in den letzten 14 Jahren keine revolutionär neuen Schritte hin zur Vision von Half-Life unternommen wurden, Narration und Spiel so elegant zu vereinen.

Alles nur Nostalgie und Polemik? Eigentlich nicht. Die 1998 als Gewissheit erscheinende Hoffnung, im Gefolge von Half-Life von der angestachelten Konkurrenz noch bessere, packendere und ambitioniertere Spiele zu sehen, die das Genre derart erweitern wie der vor langen Jahren erschienene Urvater, ist enttäuscht worden. Ironie des Schicksals: Der abseits der offiziellen Nachfolger haushoch erfolgreichste Versuch der letzten 14 Jahre, den von Half-Life vorgezeichneten Weg einer Verschmelzung von Story und Interaktion zu begehen, ist ausgerechnet ein 1:1-Remake des Klassikers im grafisch neuen Gewand.

Fans von Half-Life sollten Black Mesa ebenso unbedingt besuchen wie all jene, die wissen wollen, was denn nun an diesem Spiel aus der Games-Vorzeit so fantastisch war — und immer noch ist. Man muss es sich auf der Zunge zergehen lassen: Black Mesa Source, das Fan-Remake eines 14 Jahre alten Klassikers, ist einer der besten First-Person-Shooter der letzten Jahre. Und das ist eigentlich deprimierend.

Black Mesa Source ist gratis von der Homepage der Entwickler beziehbar und umfasst derzeit etwa 80 % des Inhalts von Half-Life – das Finale wird nachgereicht. Der Soundtrack ist separat erhältlich.

Um Black Mesa installieren zu können, wird Source SDK Base 2007 (Steam, kostenlos) benötigt. Mac-Benutzer? Hier entlang, bitte.

superlevel.de

GamesMarkt - News - Sechs Monate PlayStation Vita - eine Bilanz

mediabiz.de

München, 17.09.2012, 12:35  GamesMarkt | Produkt

Sechs Monate PlayStation Vita - eine Bilanz

Ende August feierte die Vita ihr sechsmonatiges Jubiläum. Obwohl technisch über jeden Zweifel erhaben, tut sich der Sony-Handheld im Handel noch immer schwer. GamesMarkt begibt sich auf Ursachenforschung.

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Man kann es PR-technisch drehen und wenden, wie man will, aber Sony kann mit den Verkäufen der PlayStation Vita nicht zufrieden sein. Zehn Millionen wollen die Japaner laut Geschäftsplan bis zum 31. März 2013 ausliefern. Freilich sind das keine Verkäufe, trotzdem schwingt in der kommunizierten Zahl die Hoffnung mit, die entsprechenden Einheiten auch durchzuverkaufen. Davon ist Sony weit entfernt: Ein halbes Jahr nach dem Europa- und Nordamerikalaunch am 22.Februar 2012 (Japan: 17.02.) wurden nach Kalkulationen des Portals VGChartz weltweit 2,6 Millionen Vitas verkauft. Auch wenn das nicht vollkommen akkurat sein mag, die Tendenz stimmt, wenn man die Ländermarktdaten anschaut. Laut media control GfK wurden in den ersten sechs Wochen in Deutschland rund 53.000 Exemplare verkauft. Im Heimatland Japan ist die Vita mit zirka 10.000 Stück in Wochenverkäufen sogar hinter die PlayStation Portable (ca. 13.000) zurückgefallen.

Technisch konkurrenzlos Warum? Technisch ist die Vita über jeden Zweifel erhaben. Leistung, Verarbeitung und Ausstattung machen sie zu einem der besten tragbaren Elektronikgeräte. Der Preis von 250 Euro ist angesichts der verbauten Technik angemessen; unsubventionierte Smartphones kosten gerne mal das Dreifache. Trotzdem halten sich viele Kunden zurück. Der Trend zum Spielen auf “iOS” und “Android” und das überschaubare Spieleangebot allein können das Absatzproblem nicht erklären. Es muss weitere, tieferliegende Gründe haben. Wurden gar Fehler im Marketing gemacht? Um diese Frage zu klären, muss man dort hingehen, wo schlussendlich verkauft werden soll: im Handel. Allerdings zeigen sich Einzel- und Versandhändler äußerst unwillig, das Produkt zu kommentieren. Unklar, ob aus Unzufriedenheit mit dem Vita-Absatz oder aus Furcht vor Sanktionen seitens Sony. Ein ranghoher Mitarbeiter eines relevanten Händlers ist aber doch bereit, sich anonym zu äußern.

Absatzproblem

Der erste deutsche Vita-Käufer in Berlin

Der erste deutsche Vita-Käufer in Berlin  

Er betont, dass die Situation von der Presse schlechtergeredet werde, als sie tatsächlich sei. Gleichwohl bestätigt er: “Natürlich haben wir bessere Absatzzahlen erwartet.” Aus seiner Sicht hat Sony zum Start der Konsole den Fehler gemacht, den Handel vor den Kopf zu stoßen. Statt ihn aktiv mit einzubeziehen, war man offenbar der Meinung, einen Launch auch ohne dessen Hilfe stemmen zu können. Die Ankündigung, alle Spiele zeitgleich und günstiger als Download zu offerieren, kam beim Einzelhandel ebenfalls nicht gut an.
Ergebnis: eine Trotzreaktion. “Ich würde nicht von einem Machtkampf sprechen, aber wir lassen auch nicht alles mit uns machen”, betont der Händler. Anstatt öffentlichkeitswirksame Mitternachtsverkäufe und Promotionaktionen zu veranstalten, räumte der Handel die Vita-Packungen einfach beiläufig ins Regal. Zusätzliche Mitarbeiter, die an Point-of- Sale-Anspielstationen beratend zur Seite standen, waren in den seltensten Fällen vorgesehen. Dazu kommt, dass die Vitas dort in einen Metallrahmen eingespannt waren; der rückseitige Touchscreen, ein wichtiges Alleinstellungsmerkmal, nur schwer zugänglich. Weniger informierte Laufkundschaft musste zur Annahme gelangen, es handle sich lediglich um eine neue Version der PSP.

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FarmVille 2 Ain't No Game, It's the Ultimate Perpetual-Motion Money Machine - Game

wired.com

Or how about I just buy some and keep my friends?
Image courtesy Zynga

As a gamer, I’m constantly juggling statistics. My best time in Super Hexagon is 65.49 seconds. I had two bullets left in my magazine when I got the final kill in a match of Halo Reach.

But when I play FarmVille 2, I’m constantly keeping a different number in mind: the one attached to my bank account.

The original FarmVille, which Zynga released in 2009, doesn’t have much in the way of gameplay. What it had in spades — and acquired more and more of as Zynga constantly updated and tweaked the software — were schemes that skillfully and relentlessly tapped the reward centers in players’ brains. As a result, the newly released FarmVille 2 is even more brilliantly designed to function as a self-sustaining social system — and a perpetual-motion money-collecting machine.

Zynga needs FarmVille 2 to be a hit. The company’s market value has plummeted since its initial IPO, and its top executives are leaving in droves. People are beginning to wonder if the social-game phenomenon was just a fad. If FarmVille 2 can manage to draw huge numbers of users and reap big profits, it could be the kick in the pants that Zynga so desperately needs.

Zynga calls FarmVille 2 a “next-generation social game.” Witnessing the game’s early-2000s graphics and minimal meaningful interaction between players, it’s clear that “next-generation” isn’t being used here in any previously employed sense of the phrase.

What I think Zynga means is that in FarmVille 2 almost every element in the game is carefully designed to either keep players addicted, encourage them to spend real-world money or get them to invite their Facebook friends to install the app, too. The game works tirelessly to either monetize its users or expand its player base, which then feeds the game more players who can be further monetized.

From a financial standpoint, it’s awe-inspiring. As a videogame, it’s troubling.

Any play session of FarmVille 2 will generate numerous moments when you’ll run into some sort of limitation that keeps you from playing. Perhaps you’ve run out of water, or you don’t have a milk bottle to feed your baby goat, or you need more wood planks to build that water trough.

There are a million things that can stop a player from gettin’ their farm on in FarmVille 2, but these pesky obstacles can always be overcome by either spending money or trading with friends.

The game unceasingly begs you to share the wonderful news of your in-game accomplishments with your Facebook friends. Whenever you run out of animal feed or water for your crops, a giant dialogue box pops up and suggests that you ask for more from any of the hundreds of people on your friends list, even if they’ve never played a game on Facebook in their life.

But what if you don’t have any friends playing FarmVille 2 and you don’t want to spend cash? No worries! That “trade with friends” button turns into a gigantic “invite your friends to play FarmVille 2” button.

A big box pops up showing a list of all of your Facebook friends, and there’s a very prominently displayed “select all” button that no decent human being should ever click.

FarmVille didn’t capture its peak audience of 83 million monthly active users by appealing to a traditional audience. Zynga went after your aging aunt and the guy she went to high school with. They went after that lady from your office who always has 10 non-work-related tabs open on her computer.

In FarmVille 2, those people have far more incentive to try to drag all of their Facebook friends kicking and screaming into the game with them.

FarmVille 2 does even more to keep players addicted by adding more time-sensitive elements to the game. Cute farm animals now join the regular cast of rapidly growing crops and trees as money-generating tools in FarmVille 2. The animals get hungry every few minutes. Feeding them produce will cause them to spray eggs, milk and even pre-packaged fertilizer from their adorable little cartoon behinds.

Another new element is water, which is used to keep plants growing and slowly regenerates over time. Generally, running out of water means it’s time to exit out of the game for at least 30 minutes. Otherwise you’ll find yourself staring blankly at a fake farm on your computer screen, watching a timer go down so you can harvest a single droplet of fake water. That’s just not healthy.

Or you could pay for some more water. Or, have you considered asking one of your Facebook friends?

FarmVille 2 isn’t shy about reminding you that you could be ponying up real-world cash to get ahead.

Quests funnel your actions in specific directions by rewarding you for doing things like producing some number of blueberries or buying a sheep. You can skip the work and go straight to the reward by paying money. Remember when doing optional sidequests in a videogame was fun? Why would you pay money to skip them?

Then again, there’s probably a good reason for just paying up.

Asking your entire Facebook social graph to give you free manure in a game they have zero interest in is not “being social.” If you really need that bottle of milk for your goat so badly, it’s probably worth it to just pay for it instead of spamming your friends’ Facebook walls.

Related Links by Contextly

Prettified FarmVille 2 Is Ready To Monetize You

Zynga’s Horn Has a Big 3-D Problem

Industry Vet John Schappert Bails Out of Zynga - Game|Life

CourtVille: Why Unclear Laws Put EA v. Zynga Up for Grabs

Farm Wars: How Facebook Games Harvest Big Bucks

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King of Hexagon: A Game Creator’s Furious Fight to Keep His Own High Score

Game|Life Podcast: PlayStation Price Grows as Tokyo Game Show Shrinks

wired.com

King of Hexagon: A Game Creator's Furious Fight to Keep His Own High Score - Game

wired.com

Jason Killingsworth goes for another high score in the iOS game Super Hexagon.
Photo courtesy Jason Killingsworth

Terry Cavanagh pulls out his iPhone and loads up a game. A female voice greets him with a robotically intoned phrase: “Super Hexagon.”

Cavanagh has heard that voice more than anyone. He put it there.

Super Hexagon, released in August, is the latest iOS obsession among those seeking a killer challenge. It’s a hyper-speed, techno-soaked action game in which players dodge an endless succession of collapsing walls in a vertiginous never-ending tunnel. It’s extremely difficult, like Cavanagh’s last game VVVVVV. But that hasn’t kept it out of the top paid apps charts.

Cavanagh isn’t only the creator of Super Hexagon; he’s also its best player. His scores are at the top of the leaderboards in most every game mode.

“I guess I should hope I’m good at it, considering I made it,” he said in a phone interview with Wired.

In the middle of that interview, something changes. “Excuse me,” Cavanagh says with his soft Irish accent, and pulls out his iPhone. He scans the leaderboards and lets out a gasp.

There, on the game’s third-hardest mode, it still reads: Terry Cavanagh, 105.12 seconds.

But above him is another name: Jason Killingsworth. 117.20 seconds.

These are both master-level scores. (My top score, by way of comparison, is 11.45 seconds.)

“I should sort that out later tonight,” Cavanagh says — with a chuckle, but I know that he’s dead serious.

Jason Killingsworth can’t just beat videogames. He has to dominate them.

“I have near-crippling levels of perfectionism,” Killingsworth says, and a penchant for exquisite challenges. “Most games these days feel like cow-tipping — the only requirement to succeed is to possess at least one working arm,” he says. “I want to spend my gaming hours breaking crazy-eyed, bucking stallions.”

Most players never dream of conquering every challenge that the insanely difficult indie platform game Super Meat Boy has to offer, but Killingsworth has done it. Finishing every single track in the hair-pullingly hard Trials: Evolution without a single fault took Killingsworth over 100 hours, but he plowed through. He’s even gotten every achievement in Spelunky, which for most players is borderline impossible.

And he’s dumped at least 40 hours into Super Hexagon. Killingsworth, an editor for the U.K. gaming magazine Edge, is one of only two people in the world to best Cavanagh on the Super Hexagon leaderboards. Other than Cavanagh himself, he’s the only player to take a spot in the top five on every difficulty. The video footage that he records of his gameplay videos often elicits incredulous reactions from other players.

Super Hexagon is about recognizing and reacting to patterns. There are a limited number of wall formations that can come at you, but the order in which they’re thrown at players is random, and the speed is relentless.

“You don’t really use your conscious mind when you’re playing Super Hexagon at an expert level,” he says. You don’t have time to think. You just have to shut off your mind and react. For this reason, I find the game’s hardest stages incredibly relaxing, almost meditative. Your conscious mind just goes into standby and your deep second-nature memorization of each level’s recurring patterns takes over.”

It’s like speed-reading, he says: “You can assemble the author’s meaning without stopping to parse each and every letter.”

One night, after a failed attempt to crack some of Cavanagh’s high scores, Killingsworth emailed me in the funk of defeat, characterizing it as a beatdown of Biblical proportions.

“It’s kind of like in the Old Testament, when God takes the form of an angel and spends a whole night wrestling with Jacob, only to pull a miracle cheap shot at the end to dislocate Jacob’s hip,” Killingsworth said. “Poor Jacob was never really a contender.”

But before he went to bed, he had his breakthrough run of 117.20, topping Cavanagh’s best by 12 seconds — an eternity in Hexagon time.

Cavanagh insists that his desire to dominate the high scores on his own game isn’t about proving his superiority, but about raising awareness of Super Hexagon.

“It’s about proving to people that the game has a quality that can be mastered,” he says. “It’s not arbitrary, and it’s not a slot machine.”

But Cavanagh isn’t just a player, he’s the game master. He holds all the cards. If he’s upset with the leaderboards, he could just tweak the game. Wouldn’t that be the easy way out?

No, he says. He promises that he won’t ever update the game at all — not to make it easier, not even to add new content. If he regains his top spot in all the leaderboards, it’ll be fair and square, he says.

Cavanagh congratulated Killingsworth over Twitter when he posted proof of his new high score. Even if he’s not the best at everything, Cavanagh still delights in having created a brutally difficult game. Only 19 of its roughly 50,000 owners, he says, have seen the game’s ending screens by lasting longer than a minute during its breakneck final level — on which Cavanagh still holds the high score.

“Terry is the god of this game. He just released it so he could have the pleasure of ruling us and sponging up our worship,” Killingsworth says.

“A video of the end of Super Hexagon now exists,” Cavanagh told his fans on Twitter Friday. “Don’t watch it. You haven’t earned it.”

Related Links by Contextly

Hookshot Inc. Presents ‘Super Hexagon’ Fan Fanction

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Zynga’s Horn Has a Big 3-D Problem

Why Big Game Publishers Make Sucky Apps (Hint: It’s You)

Air Force Video Compares Facebook, iPhone to Atom Bombs

New HTML Tricks for Web Developers in Apple’s iOS 6

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JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Fist of the North Star Show Right, Wrong Ways To Make a Manga Game

wired.com

Jim Gregory interview - AKIRA - SNES

hardcoregaming101.net

Articles | Features | Blog | Forums | Writers Wanted

By John Szczepaniak, September 2012

Author’s note: since announcing this article another gentleman at Hand Made Software had been contacted, in addition to THQ in an official capacity. With regards to THQ, I’m still waiting for their approval on a statement - but I can categorically confirm that: thorough checks were made and they do not have any builds of Akira.

Akira was initially a cyberpunk / sci-fi / dystopian manga series by Katsuhiro Otomo, subsequently adapted into an animated film, from which several videogames were meant to be made. Taking place in Neo Tokyo in the year 2030, after the Third World War, the story revolves around several biker gangs, government experiments on psychic children, and anti-government rebels. A biker named Tetsuo has a run-in with one such psychic child, and is then captured by the government and experimented on himself. Except his powers grow too strong, threatening to destroy Neo Tokyo. Through all this, his childhood friend Kaneda attempts to save him. It’s thrilling stuff.

For a few years now I’ve been searching for information on the videogame adaptations for the Akira film. I tracked down almost every member of the Amiga development team, from ICE Software, though none wanted to talk about it. I searched and eventually found scans of the Game Zone issue which featured it on the cover and gave me several leads - Larry Siegel was the man from THQ who spearheaded the project, while Jim Gregory was in charge of the SNES version. I even asked on our blog if anyone knew Larry Siegel and Jim Gregory. Later I provided scans of Game Zone, in the hope that others would join my search. Hours were spent trawling LinkedIn, Facebook, DeviantArt, Twitter, YouTube, anything which may have had profiles for other developers who I knew had been involved. Some developers I managed to contact, such as Tom Meigs of Black Pearl Software who confirmed that the Game Gear version had been cancelled after about 30% had been done. Others, such as Genesis artist Darin Klatt, I got hold of, but he didn’t respond to my questions. I also tracked down at least half a dozen old acquaintances of those who had been connected to Akira, but none had been in contact for years. Along the way I also read various forum topics, with detailed descriptions of the Genesis version shown at CES, and rumours about review copies of the SNES release. A breakthrough had to be at hand, surely? I spoke with journalist Dennis Murphy of The Gaming Liberty, and he joined the cause, tracking down other members.

The more answers I uncovered though, the more questions it raised. What was the connection between Black Pearl, Hand Made, ICE and THQ? Had the rumoured Game Boy version even been in development? What about the Sega CD release? Why had no one been able to find Larry? The research slowly burned me out, and at one point I decided to hand over all my research notes to Frank Cifaldi of Lost Levels, who likely had more energy and the needed contacts to facilitate such research. Then, suddenly, last week Hardcore Gaming 101 received an anonymous email giving the physical address of Jim Gregory, claiming to be from a friend of his. It could have been a hoax - but the address pointed to Swinton, England, where Jim’s company, Hand Made Software, had been based. Email addresses can be faked, but if someone is having us on, they’d have to go to a lot of trouble to fake a postal address.

I sent the letter. Two days later I got this email reply from Jim Gregory.

“Your snail mail letter arrived today and I am happy to confirm I am alive and well and living at this address. You tracked me down and I am now wondering who will play me in the movie. I am not sure how I can help you with your quest, but if you want to send me some questions I will be happy to cast my mind back and see if I can answer them. Probably best to use email rather than use the post though.”

At last, a result! Jim of course has a rich history, working on several well known games, including several for Atari, such as Kasumi Ninja. The first thing I wanted to know was what he’d been up to since Akira, and what he was doing now.

“The story of my life after the Akira time is far too long and involved to cover here. I am still involved in game development. I am working with my sons - our current focus is on an amazing new game set for simultaneous worldwide release at the end of next year, after five years of development.”

Had he been contacted before about Akira though, I wondered? I know that besides myself and Dennis Murphy, there has been at least one other person tracking down the Akira developers. When I’d contacted Tom Meigs, he’d mentioned there were others before me - and when Dennis spoke to Tom after I did, he again said there had been a few. As Jim explained, I was the first to speak with him.

“I have been contacted several times over the years regarding the games that I designed or produced or did art for. No one has enquired about Akira.”

With confirmation of this, it was time for juicy, glorious details! How had Jim come to be involved with Larry Siegel and Akira?

“Larry Siegel was a great character and we got on well. I first met him when I was MD of Hand Made Software and he headed up the Atari Lynx development from Chicago. I travelled to Chicago and pitched to do a new game design for them, but he offered us a golf game project. That became Awesome Golf on the Lynx. Later he left Atari to set up Black Pearl. He travelled on spec to Japan to get the rights to Akira and amazingly they did a deal with him, because they admired his energy and enthusiasm. He was a big fan of the illustrated series and wanted to capture the excitement of the animated film in a video game. He asked us to do the SNES version, and we agreed.”

Of course as everyone knows, the SNES version was never released, and this is why someone was needed to fill in the blanks. As Jim explained though, the fact a game is cancelled isn’t as surprising as some might think.

“I think it worth reminding you that game development is a lot tougher and convoluted than many people realise. There are many factors that need to work out well before a game sees the light of day. I would estimate that less than 70% of games started get finished and something like 25% of completed games are never released. I could tell you stories of superb top class games that were focus group tested, fully completed and never released because the kids did not like them or the publisher had another game like that!”

Jim then went on to explain some of the challenges of working with consoles, where you need to appease both the demands of the film licensee, whose work you are adapting, and the console manufacturer, which has its own requirements.

“One of the greatest challenges of game design, when it is for a license, is meeting the demands of the licensee. They often do not understand the trade offs that are needed to accommodate the capacity and limitations of the target device, and they expect it to look like an animated feature film. Those days [around 1993 - ed] were very much on the cusp between the old 8-bit systems with limited graphics, and the 16-bit systems with limited graphics. Many of the emerging consoles were ‘walled garden’ development systems and the manufacturers all wanted exclusive titles rather than me-too ones. It was hard or impossible even to get the data to develop on their machines unless they approved you.”

Like several other UK-based console developers at the time, Hand Made Software had to use some unorthodox methods to get a handle on the SNES architecture, which had its own unique shortcomings.

“For the SNES we had to use a bootleg ‘amateur’ system that severely limited what we could do. We had hired in a new guy that had worked on top selling titles including a motorcycle road race game. He was adapting that using the SNES Mode 7 trick to give a pseudo 3D effect. We had Akira and gang speeding along on the roads of Tokyo quite well. The fundamental issue was trying to get the old SNES to look and play like a bigger, better system.”

So parts of the game had definitely been completed, to a degree at least. With the game being unreleased, any information that Jim could share on the subject would be invaluable. As he explained, their plans for the game would have been respectful not only to the original film, but to the manga comics the film was based on.

“Broadly speaking I designed a series of 6 game sections based upon the comic strip rather than just the film. The map of the city plus outskirts was accessed to determine destination and select missions or objectives. The road scene then had Kaneda driving to that selected destination and fighting/dodging stuff along the way. Once at the location we had created a unique massive mapping system that could display huge play areas with very few tiles used.”

Jim’s description of the driving sections to reach specific stages sounds reminiscent of David Crane’s Ghostbusters game, and therefore had the potential to be excellent. With his description of the map there’s also perhaps a hint of Spiderman VS Kingpin on the Sega CD, another excellent title. It certainly sounded good as a concept - what Jim described next makes it seem even more so, since the game would incorporate adventure elements. Having an overworld combined with huge side-scrolling maps, could it have played similarly to Ys III or possibly Popful Mail? Jim explained the side-scrolling stages…

“This was a walk-run-jump-crawl-swing-shoot section, to obtain vital game elements that unlocked other missions and objectives. Kaneda had access to several vehicles including his super motorcycle and the hover-bikes featured in the comics. The style was side on action adventure. Each section had an animated (boss) completion scene that aimed to match the graphics of the film. We produced a billowing smoke effect that looked great and fitted in well with the style and the game. The end scene was the Tetsuo boss monster scene.”

The significant thing about this description is that it reveals the SNES and Genesis version were entirely different. As described by those who played it at CES, the Sega Genesis version was a collection of disparate styles and genres. A mixture of bike riding, first-person wandering, platforming, one-on-one fighting, and isometric shooting. A real mish-mash of ideas taken chronologically and exclusively from the film, whereas the SNES release would have been a much more coherent adventure platformer, which used additional material exclusive to the manga. This is a revelation, and one which Jim details further when explaining how Black Pearl was working on its own unique Sega versions.

“Black Pearl was a temporary operation and effectively merged into THQ when Larry went to work for them. There was no co-ordination of Akira development versions even though we had suggested a cross platform design.”

Fascinated by his descriptions of a game which had the potential to impress but never made it, I asked if the development was stressful. His answers reveals how dedicated the team at Hand Made Software had been to the project.

“Not stressful as such, but it had its own challenges and issues. We must have spent at least 6 weeks initially dissecting the comic books and still-frame-grabbing from the laser disc version we had - remember laser discs? We specially hired a new, SNES-experienced lead programmer for the game dev. He was backed up by a couple of programmers and artists. The sounds we had were PERFECT and our musician had produced a perfect version of the film’s wonderful music… which sadly could not be used due to separate licensing issues.”

With this level of attention, and things looking on track, why was the game cancelled?

“It was not so much cancelled or scrapped as it fell into neglect. Larry transferred rights to THQ and we couldn’t get clear agreement on the game elements with the project manager. They didn’t understand the limitations of the SNES. The project was then victim to a number of disasters including the lead programmer leaving, and other work being more pressing.”

Hearing this, another critical point was raised. On the Digital Press forums a user by the name of JDL emphatically stated the following: “I know that an ex-journalist for the French magazine ‘Consoles Plus’ owned a lot of EEPROMs, including the unreleased Akira. I’ll try to recover his name if anyone is interested in contacting him.” The user only had 15 posts, never gave the name of the journalist, and never provided any evidence for such claims. Could it be true? Jim was quick to put an end to such a fabrication.

“Parts were indeed completed and looked good. They were never put on any cartridge or disk by us for any outside journo. Only work-in-progress versions were sent, by modem, to THQ.”

Well, that’s one rumour that’s been quelled. It’s unlikely THQ would have sent out a review copy given the incomplete state of the game. While on the subject of rumours, I also asked about the Game Boy version of Akira, mentioned in Game Zone magazine but nowhere else. According to the article, it was being developed by ICE. Jim wasn’t sure on the details, but the ramifications prove fascinating.

“I knew ICE and they did a few things with Larry. If I recall correctly, the GB version was an adaptation of another game they already had… but modified to call it Akira.”

If this is true, then it’s possible this game was released, albeit with a different name to Akira. Plenty of GB games were re-skinned for licensing purposes. One good example is Baby T-Rex on the GB, which was adapted into an Edd the Duck game for the UK market, sent out for review, but then never released. Even though you won’t find Edd the Duck, its doppelganger Baby T-Rex is easily found and plays identically. Could it be, that out there right now, there’s a GB game which at one point had been Akira? Unfortunately information on ICE’s back-catalogue is scarce. In fact there appears to be two game developers with the same name, ICE Software, and International Computer Entertainment. One was based in Glasgow, Scotland, the other in Slough, England. One definitely worked on the Amiga release, but we don’t know if they’re the same ICE involved with the GB game. Searching THQ’s back-catalogue of published GB games doesn’t yield anything which make a good fit for Akira either…

So, let’s look at the facts. The Famicom version was a direct tie-in to the film, a text heavy adventure game released only in Japan, and had nothing to do with the dealings of THQ. The Amiga version was released, though we know nothing of how it came about. We have plenty of screenshots of the Genesis version, developed by Black Pearl, and apparently completed. The Game Gear version was destroyed. We know nothing about the Sega CD release, apart from a couple of screens - which we can’t even guarantee are from the Sega CD version. We have no evidence of the Game Boy version, though it may have been a GB reskin. The SNES version was in development by Hand Made Software, but never completed. Can Jim shed any light on this web of intrigue and the deals that Larry Siegel made?

“I do not know any more about rights but I do know that he was disappointed with the outcome of all the Akira developments. It was a very ambitious project and too much was expected from the older 16-bit machines. I think it was a project before its time. These days we could do a fantastic job on the modern Xbox or PC system. Even the iPhone has better graphics, more memory and a faster processor.”

It seemed the odds were just stacked against it. Even so, everyone is keen to see something of these games. All we have are grainy scans of magazines, which recycled the same PR shots over and over. By any chance did he save any of the game’s development assets?

“Sorry, but all has slipped into the vortex of time. We do have lots of the animations on an old disk, but we cannot read it!”

And that, folks, is all he wrote. Since interviewing Jim, though, I did pass on his details to Frank Cifaldi, the internet’s leading expert on unreleased games and the person most likely to know how to salvage SNES animation files. So maybe, just maybe, we might get to see some of those animation frames one day.

Did you work on a version of Akira? Contact and let us know!

Most screenshots taken from magazine scans found on Unseen64, most of which were sourced from the ASSEMbler forums.

BONUS INTERVIEW - TOM MEIGS

Email interview with Tom Meigs of Black Pearl.

I sent a few emails back and forth with Tom Meigs, who was surprised to find that screenshots of the Game Gear version made it out there. After emailing him a magazine scan, he confirmed that yes, that was the Game Gear version pictured. He also confirmed that all assets relating to the GG version were destroyed.

—-

Thanks for sharing. I’m sorry that no one can find Larry. I’d love to find him too, and haven’t seen him since the mid-1990s. I remember working on the Game Gear port which we were doing in house. The programmer took another job early into the project and I don’t remember his name at this point.

All of a sudden I’ve gotten several emails about this game, which is really funny for a game that didn’t really make it. We were making an original Genesis and Game Gear version. I don’t think we had hired a team yet for a SNES version, although we wanted to do one. The Genesis version was being built in our Chicago office. We were building the Game Gear in the California office. The design for each was custom for the hardware. It was an original design based on the license. The GG version was a side scroller with levels connected together by Tetsuo on his bike (we tried to do 3rd person on the GG!) and a basic storyline. Our programmer left to take another job and the project wilted. We were at about 30% complete when we stopped on it.

Wow - you found blurry GG shots? Would love to see that. We worked with Hand Made on several titles - so that’s probably correct that they got set up to do a SNES version. Yes the GG version was destroyed. We were trying to make a level tool so we could start stitching levels together better, but it all ended when our programmer left.

BONUS DESCRIPTION - NEOGAF

Description of the Sega Genesis by Whimsical Phil from the NeoGAF forums. Also known as journalist Phil Theobald, thereby making his testimony rather reliable, and also corroborated by various CES screenshots shown in magazines at the time. It makes for enjoyable reading and, in truth, is the only credible source for the gameplay of the Genesis version. What’s especially interesting, is that he describes the FPS level, a screenshot of which sometimes accompanied previews of the SNES release in Nintendo magazines, despite Jim already clarifying that this wouldn’t have been the case. What this points to is that THQ’s PR department were releasing screenshot material without clarifying which system it related to.

—-

And I was actually able to play THQ’s Genesis Akira game back at a CES show ages ago (this, of course, pre-dated E3). Somewhere at my parent’s house, I still have a sales flyer for the game with info and screens on it. I’ll have to try to dig it up next time I’m there and get that puppy scanned.

If I remember correctly, it was announced for Genesis, SNES, Sega CD, Game Boy, and Game Gear, although I believe that the Genesis version was the only one on display on the show floor. The main gimmick of the game was that each stage played differently. Lemme see how many I can recall…

- A motorcycle racing stage that was a lot like Super Hang-On. As you would imagine, you were Kaneda racing against the Clowns.

- A FPS stage where you were Tetsuo wandering though the lab where he was being experimented on. Instead of a gun at the bottom of the screen, you just saw Tetsuo’s hand, and when you fired at guards, he shot out a blast of psychic energy. This stage was about as impressive looking as a FPS could look on the Genesis.

- A side scrolling stage where you were Kaneda and Kei piloting that hover vehicle through the sewers. These stages weren’t strictly side scrolling, though, as they were quite large and maze-like. You could fly quite a ways up and down as well as left and right. You used the gun on the vehicle to shoot down the guards’ crafts.

- An isometric stage (think Viewpoint) where you were Tetsuo walking across the bridge (the one he would eventually destroy). Pressing the attack button caused him to swing his arm out in front of him, sending a wave of psychic energy out in front on him. The main enemy that I recall in this stage were rows of soldiers armed with the laser cannons from the movie. I remember being really impressed with the look of the Tetsuo sprite on this stage (complete with his tattered red cape).

- The last stage that I remember was a 2D beat-em-up (or was it a one-on-one fight?). Either way, you were a surprisingly large mutated Tetsuo attacking, well, whoever it was attacking you (Kaneda? Soldiers? I don’t remember).

Seeing as how I was a big fan of the movie at the time, I talked to one of the head PR people at length about the game. She even gave me an animation cel from the movie (of the giant teddy bear and rabbit that attacked Tetsuo), which they were probably giving out to the press. Even though I was just a scrub working at Babbage’s at the time (yes, I was one of those retail kids who snuck into the show), she gave me her business card and I kept in contact with her for a while getting updates on the game. Until, of course, she gave me the sad news one day that they had cancelled it.

Man, I really gotta find that sales sheet now.

All captions are speculative

Game Zone magazine feature, without which we would never have even known about Jim Gregory or Larry’s existence

AMIGA GALLERY

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The Videogame Criticism You Don’t See

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When I was 16, the first guy I ever dated died of a shotgun wound. Among other things, he was a gamer.

I’m not a gamer. I’m an educator; I grade papers on Renaissance and science fiction literature at U.C. Berkeley and review essays on a wide variety of topics at Smarthinking, an online tutoring company. In the past couple of years, my current partner has become a professional videogame critic and I have reviewed over 60 essays on videogames. I haven’t played that many videogames in my life.

I have trouble with being represented as a gun onscreen

Even if I had played 60 videogames, I wouldn’t feel comfortable identifying as a gamer. I remain gamer-adjacent. My students’ essays have helped me understand why.

I’ve worked with a couple of students who are studying videogames; one says he is pursuing a career in the industry because gaming has turned him into a “master problem solver.” Another submitted a code of ethics for a gaming company. However, most of my students are gamer-adjacent, like me.

My distaste for violence is echoed in these gamer-adjacent essays. (I also have to note that the tutoring handbook chapter I most frequently consult – the one on APA citations – has samples from an essay titled “Effects of Violent Video Games.”) Some papers don’t mention specific titles and categorize all videogames, or all “mature” videogames, as excessively violent. Other papers focus on Call of Duty or the Grand Theft Auto games.

Many students compare sports and videogames, but I don’t find the arguments that favor sports convincing. I’ve adhered to a strict no-jock rule in my dating because I believe physically knocking people over in football is more violent than pretending to shoot aliens with a joystick.

However, a button is no longer such an innocent thing. Bombs can level cities and nukes can destroy our world, all with a controller not too dissimilar from a videogame console.

On the other hand, some students believe in more immediate impact, that people will mimic the violence they see in videogames. After all, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s violent attack on Columbine High School was inspired by what one of my students referred to as an “in-game battle” from Doom.

I knew a few students at Columbine. As part of the band and choir at a high school in Ft. Collins, Colorado, I traveled to Columbine for music contests and performances. The attack happened after I had moved to Ohio, around the time that the boy who took me to see City of Angels and to the Olive Garden died of a shotgun wound.

Mimicry has come up in many pedagogy essays, but I believe that media – including videogames – can teach people critical analysis, to think before they emulate. In fact, I’ve used a game called Conversacolor, developed by my pedagogy professor, to help my students learn analytical skills.

My gamer-adjacent students could love games – even become gamers – if videogames taught them how to think critically about violence.

And there are some students who argue that violent videogames can also be educational. One student wrote an essay on how God of War taught her about Greek mythology and challenged her with puzzles. Many papers (and my current partner) praise games for teaching them problem-solving skills and increasing their visual perception. But among the gamer-adjacent, there is usually a divide between violent and “educational” games, if a distinction is even made.

My students argue that excessive, realistic death and torture will desensitize gamers. While the link between desensitization and mimicry is tenuous at best, I do believe that media affects people. Well-crafted books, films and television shows change how people think and feel. The thoughts and feelings elicited by media alter how people treat one another.

For instance, one student compared the sexism in Super Mario Brothers and Grand Theft Auto. I’ve played a good deal of Super Mario Brothers, and can see elements of chivalry – saving the helpless princess by defeating enemies. Courtly love requires men prove their love by fighting, making violence an important part of wooing, and implies that women cannot save themselves.

My student contrasted this with more direct acts of violence against women in the controversial Grand Theft Auto series, such as attacking “random female victims” on the street. While the sexism here is blatant, it draws from the ethos of chivalry that permeates most media today: women are helpless. Women are objects – to be won or to be assaulted.

I remain gamer-adjacent because I see only a few gamers make this connection. Men are taught that women need to be saved – that they want to be saved – and romance should include violence. Even seemingly innocuous games reinforce this gender stereotype.

Violent videogames don’t make me want to mimic violence or win love with violence; they trigger my anxiety. Gunshot noises in games can remind me of the people I’ve lost to bullets. I have trouble with being represented as a gun onscreen, as you are in most first-person shooters – I can’t be a thing that killed people I cared about. Resurfaced memories of gun-related traumas cause me to treat my friends and my gamer-lover differently. I have trouble connecting through resurfaced pain.

A few of my students have PTSD from military service or other violent experiences and remain gamer-adjacent because of this. Others are single mothers who fear their gamer children will become violent (or treat other people poorly because they are desensitized to violence). A number of my students are minorities and most are economically underprivileged.

I have heard that the videogame community needs more diversity. And while it may be best that I (a bibliophile who writes poetry with pen and paper) remain gamer-adjacent, I would like to advocate for my students. So I want to ask the gaming community: how can these college students learn about games that are educational and beautiful? How can they learn that “videogame” is not synonymous with violence?

———

Marjorie Jensen occasionally tweets @metaphorjunkie and maintains a blog at DoorQ.

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Persnickety Perspective: A Beautiful Death?

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By Miodrag Kovachevic on September 11, 2012 at 4:35 am

Though death is an inevitable part of life, most of us take it for granted until it is knocking on our door. From the Epic of Gilgamesh, to the Seventh Seal and the latest episode of Dexter, it has been a major theme for many creative works. Games are far from being an exception, but the portrayal of one’s demise carries much more weight when an interactive medium is in question. It doesn’t matter whether we are playing checkers or Quake, losing one of “ours” feels painful, taking one of theirs feels great. Not only that, the latter is encouraged.

Many things, both good and bad, have been said due to this aspect of gaming. Thankfully, we’re not going to repeat them yet again, but rather focus on something slightly different: the aesthetic of death.

Phrasing it like that does seem odd, maybe with a possible hint of a disturbing fascination; however, the way a game presents the end of a virtual existence also inevitably sets its tone. Probably the first thing that comes to one’s mind is the goreporn of modern, “realistic” titles. You could easily say that death has a far greater role in Mortal Kombat than it does in Super Mario Bros, but another perspective could argue that it is more present in the latter, while much, much louder in the former.

When we look at Super Mario, the message is clear: you dying is bad, your enemies dying is good. Aside from the obligatory loss of a life and coming closer to a Game Over screen, the player is punished by an abrupt, unpleasant sound, while the rest of the world freezes. It is in clear focus that yes, you died, and yes, it is a bad thing. But the speed of the whole process also indicates that it’s supposed to be a frequent occurrence, as the player is not left waiting long before he can play again. It’s one of many things that early Sonic games “stole” from Mario, because it simply works well with the genre on a mechanical level.

The glorification of enemies’ demise in Super Mario Bros comes from the exact opposite approach. Enemies die quickly, in groups, almost as an afterthought. The sounds they let out are even pleasant, creating a unique, happy jingle as you chain kills and become rewarded with an extra life. It is a simple indication of “My life is more worth than theirs.”

On the other hand, coming back to Mortal Kombat, death is much louder as a theme, but actually taking part in it is less frequent. Partially due to the player versus player nature of the game, dying is balanced out. Your opponent is as difficult to kill as you are, and a fatality is as gruesome to behold whether you are on the receiving end or not. Of course, certain characters revel in the act of killing more than others, but when context is ignored and we filter only the actual event of taking or losing a life, we are left with a far more balanced outlook than in many much more innocent games.

These are, of course, only two examples of many. Old Sierra adventure games tried to make fun of the player dying, to brighten up the frequent game over screens. Roguelike titles like Dungeons of Dredmor even celebrate death, embracing it as an integral part of gameplay. However, how many games try to display death in a beautiful way? Both King’s Quest and Dungeons of Dredmor show death as it is: your character dying (usually) in pain, but the reaction to it is what’s positive.

What there is a possible lack of in gaming is death being aesthetically pleasing. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I am quite certain there are people who think that Sub-Zero ripping out someone’s spine is the equivalent of virtual sculpting, how many games put an effort in making death “beautiful”?

Obviously, this is something that a game with realistic aesthetics would have a far harder time of achieving than a stylized game. It is also something that is extremely difficult to execute. Many cultures don’t have as negative of an approach to the event of dying, but the act of taking a life is far less tolerated (with good reason). So, what would the goal of portraying killing in such a way that it is pleasing be?

Possibly to add weight to it, but then we have two issues. The first is that if we are dealing with a game in which you take down many foes, adding weight to each death will obviously lead to them all having the same impact. If it is a game where every single death is carefully and sparsely set, the actual narrative context will add the weight necessary. So from this perspective, it makes very little difference.

What we could achieve with this kind of tool is alter the perception in a game. If you recall, I mentioned that the way a game handles death sets the tone. A game like, for example, Destroy All Humans! does an inversion from a solely narrative perspective. It is not the usual “Good ol’ Humans versus Bad Aliens”, but the other way around. However, the actual visuals are still the same way we still perceive the world as humans. In essence, it is just changing the camera angle.

Going one step beyond and actually changing what a life fading away looks like would be a far greater, and possibly more effective change of perspective. Not in the sense of extreme examples, like Valve’s Meet the Pyro video which displays the world through the eyes of a mad person, but maybe through the eyes of something like a ghost, or maybe even a psychopomp?

We thankfully live in an amazing time for gaming, where indie developers can take creative risks which weren’t all that common before. Not exactly tied to the focus of this article, but games like the upcoming Proteus show how aesthetics can affect how we perceive something we would otherwise take for granted. Undoubtedly, given time, we’ll see a title that will make us say “Death is beautiful.”

Persnickety Perspective is a weekly column that deals with nitpicky and overparticular thoughts on the gaming industry, culture and games in general.

Miodrag hails from the land of Serbia. He is currently a college student trying to learn Japanese and speaks English, German and Serbian (as well as all the jabber similar enough to Serbian). He is primarily a PC gamer, but knows his way around various consoles, old and new.

Miodrag Kovachevic

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Radiator Blog: "Do you think shooters take themselves too seriously?"

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If you’re actually serious about war, then . The US fights wars with unmanned drones, viruses, trade embargoes, and giant bases they airlift to the middle of Afghanistan. More significantly, these games argue war is something inherently winnable, to some degree, through personal agency. The video game depiction of war is so misleading that we have to consume it as fantasy. So, instead, I think modern military shooters are best understood as Hollywood blockbuster action movies. If we think about it like that, Die Hard takes the (the mechanics of action) VERY seriously — in the beginning, Bruce Willis’ character takes his shoes off to relax his feet on carpet because he’s a stressed-out NYPD cop, but then later he has to walk on broken glass with his bare feet, which has consequences. The movie spends a lot of time on this, and makes sure the line of causality and punchline for the bare feet are all consistent and feel earned… but it spends all of 2 minutes dwelling on the thematic backdrop of terrorism and Japanese-American corporate culture. Bruce Willis is charismatic and human enough for Die Hard to work like this. Modern military manshooters are dead serious about shooting mechanics and making things feel “authentic” but to me, it doesn’t feel as important and earned as action in Die Hard. They don’t have Bruce Willis, they have a military guy with a mohawk shouting obscenities at foreign people. Any emotional beats always come off as American propaganda masquerading as armchair political theory because it’s so deep in the military stuff. I went to go see the Bourne Legacy the other day. It was alright. A lot of these movies feel much more timely than manshooter games because they’re about military veterans coming home, but damaged in some way. Bourne movies argue it’s because big government tries to play God through science (all the worst things in the world!) and it ruins families, which is a more complicated argument than any Modern Warfare makes. But here, the politics take a back seat because they’re embodied through a more apolitical, personal story — a romance — which is why I can laugh off the politics. All action movies need moments where the action hero proves he’s human despite the mass murder he’s committing, and in Hollywood that’s usually through comedy and a romantic foil, but AAA games are notoriously bad at romance and only Valve and Double Fine have a grip on comedy. So then how do you get those human moments? Manshooter narratives seem to work the other way, starting from politics then extrapolating down to human costs, which doesn’t work. The most recent shooters shout “Iraq was a good idea but hampered by some arbitrary human cost that we can’t mechanically represent in-game because your controller is shaped like a trigger” or in Spec Ops it’s “War is hell” — the latter is supposed to be an “evolution” but I liked it better when I watched Full Metal Jacket decades ago — Iraq / Afghanistan was a Vietnam, yes, but then you just end up making a game about Vietnam except it’s a desert. I think the most logical next step for shooters is to ditch the military pretense and depoliticize their narratives. Splinter Cell went for Bourne, Uncharted went for Indiana Jones. The next great AAA shooter might be a free-roaming Die Hard game set in a single skyscraper — or at least that’s the shooter that I’d make. In fact, maybe I’ll start making it right now… TLDR; Seriousness of stakes or “gravity”, in the sense of a narrative drama, is a human concept that must be earned or else it’s dismissed as inauthentic. A propagandistic military shooter with a generic xenophobic 20-something muscle guy, then, often fails to earn that humanity, while most action movies use romance and comedy to get it. Because romance and comedy are two of the most difficult concepts to get right in a shooter, I propose an alternate solution — to abandon the military context, because there’s just way too much baggage there.

Die Hard is pretty apolitical and easy-going. Your game about American soldiers in the Middle East, however, is NOT apolitical. Get rid of the politics because you’re not saying anything interesting with it anyway.

blog.radiator.debacle.us

Features - Will HTML5 Change the Way Games are Made?

gamasutra.com

By Will Eastcott

Will Eastcott is a video game technologist that has worked for EA, Sony, and Activision on triple-A titles and is co-founder of PlayCanvas, a technology company that provides a cloud-hosted development and publishing platform for HTML5 games. In this article, he shares his opinions on how the emerging technology will really affect game developers and makes a case for the language as a great next step in game development.

You have probably seen the headlines. “Consoles are dead!” “HTML5 is the future!”

The talk around HTML5 is often quite sensationalized and, dare I say, biased. Let’s put all of that aside and introduce a little calm objectivity. Here is my measured proposition: HTML5 will fundamentally change the way we make video games. Before I explain why, let me summarize the state of play with HTML5 today.

Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed a general trend of increasingly powerful hardware platforms coupled with ever better strategies for exploiting that hardware through an evolving ecosystem of tools and languages. The drive towards hyperreal gaming environments has been relentless, with console manufacturers delivering ever more powerful technology into the hands of developers.

However, with the rise of mobile gaming, we have witnessed a new phenomenon. Gamers have responded exceptionally well to playing simpler games in any location, on any device, with any of their friends. These are the key demands of the user now. Technology is still important, and beautifully crafted pixels still matter, but what matters more is that a game is accessible and connected. What is more accessible and connected than a web browser?

So what are the options for building such a game? You could write it from scratch, but targeting more than one platform can be a tall order for a small dev team. There’s Flash, although with every passing month Flash seems less appealing. A retreat from the mobile space and confusing messages about Stage3D licensing costs have generated considerable negative feeling amongst developers.

There are engines like Havok Vision Engine and Unity, for example. These engines generally target the desktop browser via proprietary plugins and mobile devices via a native build. And then there’s HTML5. Before you finally plump for HTML5, it is vital to understand its strengths and know how to mitigate its weaknesses. Let’s take a closer look.

An Evolving Standard

HTML5 is not done. It is still being developed by the standards groups W3C and WHATWG, so browser vendors are tracking a moving target. Therefore, the level of support for HTML5 is different across every browser. This is illustrated in painstaking detail by the site caniuse.com.

An oft-cited example of cross browser inconsistency is audio. There are currently three distinct APIs: Mozilla’s Audio Data API, Google’s Web Audio API, and the Audio element JavaScript API. In recent days, Mozilla has announced that it has deprecated its own API and will soon begin work on implementing Web Audio. So it is clear that browser vendors are working hard to simultaneously innovate and converge the HTML5 platform to make life easier for the developer.

There has been a concerted drive from browser vendors to deliver new HTML5 APIs specifically for game developers. The three main examples are the GamePad API (which can read input from all natively supported pad devices), the Pointer Lock API (which hides the mouse cursor and reads raw mouse movement), and the Fullscreen API (which can make any HTML element go fullscreen).

These APIs have all been specced and implemented into multiple browsers in a consistent fashion in a short space of time. With their arrival, games like first person shooters are suddenly far easier to implement in HTML5.

JavaScript

Coders harbor remarkably strong sentiments about programming languages. Those coming from a console background are likely to view JavaScript with suspicion. It is yet another new language to learn, JavaScript will be slower than the equivalent C++ code, and optimization strategies such as vectorization are not possible with JS. Plus there’s the fact that a game’s code is available for all to see in the browser’s developer tools.

I think it is important to reference Douglas Crockford’s assertion that JS is the “The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language”. For C++ programmers, JavaScript is actually a breeze to learn. It is syntactically closely related to C++, although concepts such as closures and the “this” keyword can take some getting used to.

For those of us who don’t like the rigidity and verbosity of a language like C++, JavaScript is a fantastic, dynamic language. Powerful features like first-class functions will drastically reduce the amount of code you have to write and the time it takes to write it. It’s likely that a lot of people who convert to JavaScript won’t be going back.

Performance is better than you might think. Firstly, the Web Workers API enables multi-threaded programming in JavaScript. Secondly, and more importantly, JavaScript engines have come a long way in the last few years. To illustrate, there is already a JS port of the open source physics engine Bullet, and although performance is not stellar, it demonstrates you can run some very CPU intensive algorithms at acceptable speeds using JS.

Let’s face it — cloning exists on all platforms, but when it comes to HTML5 games, it is important to keep a couple of things in mind. Tools such as Google’s Closure Compiler do an impressive job of optimizing the source, and poring over the obfuscated source code is not the same as access to the original code. As a codebase increases in size, the more impractical it becomes to attempt to reverse engineer it. Secondly, if a game is to have an online component, much of the code can be run on the server, and the client is really just a thin visualizer. Much of the “value” resides hidden on the server.

2D vs. 3D

One of the most fundamental choices when designing a game is whether the graphics are to be 2D or 3D. 2D HTML5 games generally use a 2D context queried from a canvas element on the page. Every major browser now has good support for the 2D canvas context, so if your game is sprite based, there are no worries.

Things are more involved if you are looking to develop a 3D game. The only way to get high quality, hardware accelerated 3D graphics in an HTML5 game is to use WebGL, a JavaScript interface almost identical to OpenGL ES 2.0. Support for WebGL on the desktop is strong in Chrome and Firefox, and only Internet Explorer is holding out. Fortunately, Google Chrome Frame provides an elegant mitigation for Microsoft’s resistance to WebGL, and although Apple has yet to enable WebGL in Safari by default, it is available to developers now.

WebGL has come a long way since the 1.0 spec was announced in March 2011. With OpenGL ES 3.0 freshly unveiled at SIGGRAPH, you can bet it won’t be long until the corresponding spec for WebGL 2.0 is released. Exciting times for 3D browser gaming, to be sure.

Mobile Support

HTML5 games work very well on the desktop, but transitioning them to mobile is not trivial. Claims that HTML5 games built for the desktop will transition with minimal effort to mobile platforms are generally exaggerations. You need to be prepared for a weaker class of CPU (meaning slower JavaScript execution) and GPU (meaning reduced vertex and fragment throughput if you are targeting 3D).

Screen resolutions can vary wildly, and developing your game in HTML5 will not magically enable controls that work well on both the desktop and mobile. WebGL support on mobile platforms is fairly embryonic at the moment, although the landscape should look very different six months from now.

In the meantime, there are some options worth investigating. Technologies such as PhoneGap, AppMobi, and CocoonJS can wrap up HTML5 games in a native wrapper that yields better performance. A limitation at this time is that none of these technologies include workable WebGL support, but it is likely that some middleware developers are already building a solution.

Ease of Development

In the scheme of things, developing HTML5 games is very easy. The browser makes for an incredibly solid development platform, particularly when compared to the tools provided by some hardware vendors.

The tools themselves are free and largely integrated into the browser itself and there is no compilation step when coding. The dynamic nature of JavaScript allows for a powerful edit-and-continue type development, and an ever-present console is very handy. Everything about web development is geared towards fast iteration times and simplicity.

APIs are clean and straightforward, and because of the huge community of web developers there is plenty of sample code and live tutorials.

Accessibility

If there is one pretty much universally understood paradigm in computing, it is navigating to a web address in a browser and consuming the content located there. Be that as it may, gamers are an impatient bunch (apologies for the sweeping generalization). Make them download or install something, and you will definitely lose a significant chunk of your clientele at the first hurdle. And not all of them will be inclined or able to install a proprietary browser plugin in order to run a game.

HTML5 games require no install or permissions to run, and contrary to what some believe, they can be permanently cached to a device after an initial download of resources. Obviously, this can facilitate offline play if your game does not require an internet connection.

So if your game is delivered as a reasonably fast, seamless page load, you will have happy users that actually make it into Level 1.

Finding an Audience

As of Google I/O 2012, Google Chrome has accumulated 310M active users all by itself, a number significantly larger than the total number of current gen game consoles out in the wild today. When you then go on to consider other HTML5 capable browsers, we are looking at a potentially vast audience.

Just because your game sits on a URL and is visible to the world does not mean people are going to find it. Discovery plays an important role too. App Stores have a notoriously narrow “shop window” and it’s easy for games to be lost in the crowd. HTML5 games are no different, but have some key advantages over native applications.

As web pages, they are indexable by search engines for organic discovery. Also, there are multiple game portals and stores, including the Chrome Web Store, where you can make your game known. But you are not restricted to web distribution alone. As an example, you can sell your HTML5 game on the Mac App Store by packaging it as native application with an embedded WebView component.

It is important to reach as many users as possible, and HTML5 allows you to combine many distribution channels, rather than any single one.

Getting Noticed

Like it or not, building a game atop a bleeding edge, “hot” technology will only result in better coverage. If you code two identical games, one with C++ and one with HTML5, it is fairly obvious which one is more likely to be picked up on by the media. It is not necessarily fair, but that is simply how things are with HTML5 right now — people are excited to see what developers can do with it and there a lots of opportunities to be a pioneer.

Rethinking Game Development with HTML5

Hopefully you are now in a better position to determine whether HTML5 can work for the games that you want to make. But here’s where I think the debate has fallen short. HTML5 is not merely a set of standards to power the innards of video games and should not be judged solely on that basis.

It is powering a new generation of productivity apps that is stoking a trend for moving our digital lives into the cloud. The potential that this trend has to shake up the tools and workflows that we use in order to make video games is astonishing and we have not yet begun to scratch the surface.

A Window To The Cloud

Today, we think nothing of using cloud apps. Web mail is by far the most popular example, and where we might have once been wary about storing our personal correspondence on a remote server, we have now become very relaxed about it. There are now productivity apps of just about every type that exist in cloud app form: word processors, image editors, code editors and so on.

The cloud brings a lot of benefits in the context of games. There is nothing to install since the web app is delivered to the browser from the server (or the browser’s cache). The tools always stay seamlessly up to date, which ensures that users remain in sync with each other and are always using the latest and greatest release. User data is always safely backed up and trivially restorable. A user’s OS or browser can even crash and work will have already been saved to the server.

These are all really useful features when it comes to development, and to give users a view onto a cloud-based system, you are going to need a browser. And the best way to build the interface in the browser? In my opinion, it’s HTML5. Although it is possible to use Flash, Java, or write a custom plugin to implement a game tool, when it comes to writing a complex web app, HTML5 is the most scalable solution. The case for this is only becoming stronger with the ongoing evolution of easy-to-use web app frameworks such as ExtJS, Google Closure, and SproutCore to name but a few.

A New Way to Collaborate

Having worked on a number of different game editors over the years, I recognize that most of them have supported collaboration via an integration with some form of version control. A game is usually made up of a number of documents that we may as well call “levels”. A level might persist as XML or some other format. If two or more people edit this data file simultaneously, there are a couple of things to note. Firstly, user A may not be aware of what user B is changing and vice versa. Second of all, when user A has committed changes, user B will have to merge her changes with user A’s.

It is possible to limit the tool to exclusive checkouts, but this just means one user can block others and hold up development. Performing merges is fine when they can be automated, but this is not always possible. Merging code visually is something a coder is used to, but how do you have a designer intuitively perform a manual merge on two sets of level data? Although not impossible, it is a very hard problem to solve well.

So let us take a different approach. If our dev tools are running in the cloud, with all clients connected to one server, why not allow seamless editing from all users? Again, HTML5 gives us everything we need.

Using WebSockets (bi-directional comms over TCP), we can stream edits between clients so that real-time collaboration is possible. Once you have worked in this way and experienced the benefits first hand, there is no going back to the old “exclusive checkout”, single-user environment.

Social Game Development

If you are a coder, it is a fair bet that you have a GitHub or BitBucket account. Just a few short years ago, most of us were content to install a local instance of Subversion or Perforce, to name a couple of popular version control solutions. And why not? They are marvelous pieces of software that backup and manage your code very well indeed.

So why the rise of version control as a service? There are many reasons, but the key driver is community. Coders can now network like never before, following other developers or interesting projects, and receiving immediate notifications as soon as updates are made. Bugs are fixed and features are added by a committed follower-base. And projects stand a far greater chance of getting exposure than if they were sitting on someone’s hard drive or personal website as a ZIP archive.

So why let coders have all the fun? The same principles are perhaps even more relevant to game development, with the whole process provided as web service. This includes code development, but also covers other functions such as asset management, level editing, localization, QA, and publishing.

Let’s face it: making games is hard, and making a (good) game alone is not an option for most developers. The spectrum of skills required is often just too great. Developers need to be able to find each other and get involved in the game projects that excite them the most. Want to allow the community to build extra levels for you? Not a problem. Need your game translated into Spanish? Perhaps your followers can help.

The Cross Platform Holy Grail

Making a game cross platform matters. It broadens the potential audience and can therefore make a game more commercially successful. It is now many years since Sun Microsystems coined the phrase ‘Write once, run anywhere’ in reference to the Java programming language and most contemporary games middleware is designed with this in mind. In a similar vein, HTML5 certainly has the ability to deliver game content to a wide variety of device types.

I would argue that it is very important for game development tools to be cross platform as well. Perhaps 15 years ago, a tools programmer would have built an app with a technology like MFC. With the passing of time, better technologies have arrived, to the point where .NET application development is generally acknowledged as being fairly painless — but with it, you are still limited to Windows. In our multi-device lives, it seems overly restrictive that we have to be sitting at a desktop PC to access our projects. You should be able to access, edit, and publish your work from any device via tools that have a consistent interface and suitable controls.

Interface building with HTML5 is fast, straightforward, and designing web applications to work across multiple browsers is a well-trodden route.

Just a Link Away

One of the key strengths of HTML5 as a technology for tools is that all content sits on a URL. Each of the resources that make up a game can be accessed at a specific web address: a script file, a texture, a sound, a level or even the game itself. If a new asset is added to a project, the developer can tweet, IM or mail the link immediately. Nothing for other people to sync; it is there for viewing straight away.

This also simplifies publishing a game. If the game is already on a server and playable, publishing it to the wider web is really just a matter of access rights. A developer should be able to make a game live quickly and easily — nothing to upload and no HTML to write. Publishing should just be a matter of pulling some simple levers in a web front-end.

In Summary

When it comes to writing video games, no technology is perfect. Depending on the game you are looking to build and the commercial objectives that you have for it, it is important to fully appreciate the implications of selecting one technology over another. HTML5 constitutes a truly awesome platform, not just for powering games, but also for powering the tools that are used to build them. If you can live within its limitations and work with an evolving standard, it does have the potential to make you more productive and help your games reach more people.

As we look to the future, the process of making games will continue to become ever more accessible. Development tools will run on more platforms, be easier to use, and make collaboration far simpler. The global community of game developers will strengthen and knowledge will flow more readily. The ultimate result will be that more people will be making better games and we will all be better off in terms of what is available for us to play as consumers. All of this would not be possible without the web, HTML5, and the Open Web Platform to which it belongs.

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Copyright © 2012 UBM Techweb

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Morality and Unclear Goals

keithburgun.net

It’s always nice when two seemingly unrelated interests in your life tend to line up and become useful together.  Obviously, I’m interested in game design, and have been since a young age.  But in the past five years or so, I’ve been very interested in some of the writing and talks from many in the skeptic / rationalist movement.  Because these people are frequently at odds with religion, and religion is traditionally thought of as a “source” of human civilized morality, they end up doing a lot of talking on the topic of morality itself.  Essentially, their argument is that we don’t need religion to be moral.  While this is not at all the topic of my article, the fact that these very intelligent people break down the concept of “morality” for me made it very helpful in analyzing how they may or may not work in videogames.

So what is “morality”?  It comes from the Greek root moralitas, which means “manner, character, or proper behavior”.  A lay definition that most are brought up to understand is something like, “morality tells us the difference between right and wrong”.  Of course, it’s not a descriptive set of natural laws;  plenty of people break the laws of commonly accepted morality all the time.

And while there’s certainly a good deal of evidence in biological morality (human beings have a natural ability to feel empathy for one another, which has certainly aided our survival throughout our history), people’s sense of morality is not the same from nation to nation, from year to year.  So morality is something we apply to our civilization – it is prescriptive.  We use it as a tool to create the kind of society that we would like to live in.

How does it do this?  It essentially is a motivation system.  It attempts to motivate us towards doing “good” actions and away from doing “bad” actions.  It’s generally agreed upon that you’ll be accepted into society and possibly even publicly acknowledged for doing “good” deeds, and you will be rejected, imprisoned or possibly even killed for doing “bad” deeds.  So it is a system of motivation which we use to achieve a certain goal – both for ourselves, and for society as a whole.

The Problem

It’s sort of natural to expect that morality systems would find a great home in a videogame system.  We already have a character moving around throughout a world;  we’re already giving him decisions to make, so perhaps we can motivate him with morality.  Particularly in large, open sandbox-type RPGs, it seems like a great idea to put the player in a position where they’ve got to make a decision on moral grounds.

The problem is:  videogames already have mechanical motivation systems.  In fact, that’s all they are.  Look at a classic American style CRPG:  Kill monsters to get money and loot.  Complete quests to get experience, and either complete quests or reach new parts of the world to advance the greater plot.  Kill the final boss to complete the plot.  These are all already very strong motivators.  Some RPGs, such as roguelikes, have nothing but these mechanical motivators and still work perfectly well in terms of motivating player behavior.

There are essentially two kinds of “moral decision” systems in games.  The first one is the Black and White morality system, most prominently featured in something like Fable.  In this game, you get more “good points” for doing good deeds, and more “bad points” for doing bad deeds.  These good and bad points have mechanical effects, giving you access to new spells or special abilities.  Further, the farther you go in one direction, the better off you are from a mechanical perspective.  So, in this system, you basically are just choosing a “character class”, and then you simply have to figure out what all the “good” answers are, and do them.  If you instead play “as intended”, and make each choice on your own moral decision, it’s quite likely that your character will be somewhat grey by the end.

If you collect 3600 evil points, you can have this hat.

This “Grey” state is mechanically less-than-optimal, in a system otherwise totally all about gameplay mechanisms.  In other words, the point of something like Fable is to ostensibly “beat it”, reach the end, defeat some final boss and get some final cutscene.  Doing this requires mechanical resources – equipment, experience, spells, etc.  The goal of most videogames is a mechanical one by its nature, and so it makes little sense to expect a player to just forget about that and make some choice on moral grounds with no consideration for the effect it has on his mechanical game-state.

And regardless, it’s very confusing for players to have two motivation systems – essentially, two totally unrelated goals staring them down all the sudden.  Is my goal to get the end cutscene?  Or is my goal to be some kind of moral person?  I’ll get back into this in a second.

The second type of morality system is the type where it doesn’t keep track of your Good Points & Bad Points, but instead simply takes the plot in different directions based on what you do.  Unfortunately, especially when coupled with save-scumming, this basically just has the effect of players re-doing a choice to find out, again, which is mechanically optimal.  At the end of the day, these two brands of morality system aren’t terribly different, although I’ll revisit this one at the end of this article.

Unclear Goals

A lot of people believe strongly in the doctrine that videogames should have loose goals.  That if I want to play this for the little morality system, that’s fine.  If I want to play it just to “min-max” (focus on mechanical goals), that’s equally valid.  And if I just want to mess around and not pursue any goal at all, or if I want to create some unique goal, that’s fine too.

This has a similar problem to the problem of the one-size-fits-all glove.  It sort of fits everyone, but doesn’t fit anyone well.  Allowing players to choose their goals on the fly can also be called “unclear goals”, and the problem with this is that the weights in a decision can never be balanced.  Balancing weights in a purely mechanical, single-goal game is already extremely difficult.  But trying to balance weights in a system where you can’t even know what the goals will be is literally impossible.

You know how most single player videogames have pretty clear and obvious optimal moves?  This is because of this impossibility.  You’ll never create a system where the optimal move is ambiguous without extremely clear goals as a starting point.

Now, if you’re going to respond with, “well, I’ve played a lot of games like that, and they were fun”, don’t bother.  Anything can be fun.  I’m interested in pursuing guidelines for creating truly great things, and morality systems as we know them are a problem.  Similarly, unclear goals are a problem.

My Recommendation

I’m not going so far as to say that morality has absolutely no place in interactive entertainment, but I am going so far as to say that morality has no place in things that we usually think of as videogames.  There is one kind of system that I could imagine, however, that would allow for morality to function.

My first thought was, “well, perhaps there can be a sandbox situation, and you’re just asked to make moral decisions and then sort of graded on that”.  But this is totally broken.  Firstly, a morality system needs a counter-weight goal in order for it to be interesting.  Whether or not people do the right thing in real life is only interesting because sometimes it benefits you more to do the wrong thing, and equally, sometimes you’ll do things that are not in your own self-interest for the sake of morality.  This means there has to be some other resource/goal that isn’t related to morality directly.

So what you could have is some kind of game where there is a mechanical goal, and reaching that mechanical goal is difficult and requires lots of resources and strategic play.  However, there are also many other “people” (computer-controlled) who have some amount of control over a large amount of the resources.  You have to interact with people to get resources.

By doing some actions, you would make some people reject you and not want to deal with you, or possibly even try to hunt you down.  And some actions would have the opposite effect. These effects could based on what town the person lives in, and even an individual preference.

Now, this already exists in many American CRPGs such as Fallout.  However, the big differences would be the following:

Saving/Loading not possible.  You must not be allowed to know the exact repercussions of your actions, and you must be forced to accept those repercussions, or else asking the player to make choices is simply giving them a chore to do.

For this reason, the game should be randomized as well, so that replaying it is possible.  Locations, NPC moral reactions (and probably character names and appearances) and resources should all be randomized.

Due to RPG snow-balling effect, in Fallout, it’s actually feasible to, especially after a certain point, simply kill every human you come into contact with, totally nullifying the morality system.  This proposed game MUST end well before any point like this occurs.  You should never get so powerful that you can easily take on several opponents at once.  And when you die, you’re dead for good, so even attempting this should be a major decision.

In this kind of a setting, I can see morality actually working.  In general, you’ll have to try to toe the line in terms of morality, although with a tough enough mechanical goal, and some limit on time resources, you’ll be tempted at some points to make morally grey or even immoral actions.  This will cause some level of rift between you and NPCs.  Perhaps you can do some investigation with NPCs beforehand to try and suss out what you’ll be able to get away with, but your power in this regard should be limited.  You shouldn’t get infinite time to talk to all NPCs and exhaust every freaking dialogue tree like you can in most RPGs.

Perhaps some people will call it a “Morality Roguelike”.  I think we need to not call everything that has “permadeath” (another term I hate because all it means is that there are actually decisions to be made) and random content (absolutely essential for a single-player game to have any ambiguous decisions after the first play, which again will be even more important with the aforementioned permadeath) “roguelikes”, because as I just explained in the two parentheticals, these are two fundamentally important properties for all single-player games to have.

keithburgun.net

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