• 29Nov 08

  What happens when you play Left 4 Dead too much

   

  After a rather lengthy session with my best friend, on the drive home at night, I realise that in the darkess I look for the shadowy shapes of zombies.

  Awesome.

  • Posted Nov 29, 2008 9:22 am PT
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
  • Tweet
• 31Oct 08

  Why I don't play games any-more - Part 2, conclusion

  Because there are only eight games on that list.
  I've been gaming since the C64 and I have eight games that have emotionally moved me. Does every game have to emotionally move me? Not at all. Have I thoroughly enjoyed tons of games that haven't emotionally moved me? Absolutely. I love Halo, I love Rainbow Six, I played Doom, Unreal, Baldur's Gate, Warcraft, Quake and Quake 2 back in my PC days. I've dabbled in No-one Lives Forever, Final Fantasy and Ace Combat. I love rhythm games, I love Burnout and Amped 3, Warioware is a blast on Wii as are Elebits and Rayman Raving Rabbids. Crackdown is great just for leaping across rooftops to custom soundtracks, and Eternal Sonata is beautiful. The Katamari and Timesplitter games are outstanding, Rez and Space Channel 5 are brilliant and I've always been a fan of Soul Calibur. Just to name a few. I will still dig these up once in a while, sometimes to play with friends, sometimes just to play on my own.
  But why am I looking more for emotional engagement than anything else?
  Several reasons;
  
  - The time I have available to play games is significantly less than what it has been in the past.
  - What I ultimately want from a gaming experience is emotional engagement of some kind, mostly in expressions of human intimacy.
  - I can get expressions of human intimacy more readily and expressed with much more effectiveness in other mediums.
  - Because of the three things mentioned above, I have dramatically less tolerance for game-breaking mechanics, almost zero tolerance.
  - I have never been motivated to master gameplay mechanics, hence I have never been motivated to master difficult games.
  
  Difficulty is an interesting one.
  I fully respect people who develop and play difficult games. If you've never seen someone finish Ikaruga on hard, you need to head over to YouTube and check it out. Also people who play through Halo on Legendary, which I've only ever done in co-op, are also great. Survival horrors start hard and get harder as you up the difficulty level, and some games just have a good sense of challenge when they set the bar very high from the outset.
  I respect that.
  But I absolutely have no interest in mastering a game simply for the purpose of conquering its difficulty. I don't get anything out of it. I'm not saying that no-one should, so please don't think I'm having a go at people who do boss-rushes in Gradius, I'm saying from a personal perspective, I just don't enjoy it. It doesn't mean anything to me, it never has. I would much rather play co-op Halo than deathmatch or its endless variants, not only because I got sick to death of deathmatch back in the Quake days, but because I don't derive any pleasure from killing the same people over and over again. Or worse, having the same two or three people always at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the round, and everyone else struggling. I am one of the least competitive people in the world, I do not gain any pleasure from being better than anyone else at anything. When we used to play Quake at school, after the good guys had won a few times, we'd purposefully handicap ourselves and only use terrible weapons. What do we can from winning all of the time? The newer guys got to feel like they weren't so ineffective, and enjoyed some victories, plus they got a chance to improve rather than just being killed ten seconds after they'd spawned. Everyone enjoyed themselves then, we had laughs, we saw some cool and stupid things. This spirit just isn't in gaming any-more. It's rare that I play Halo competitively with my friends online any-more, but when I do, if I win a round, that's it, I don't try to win after that. Usually I just try to hunt down whoever is on top of the leaderboard, and if someone else shoots at me who isn't in the lead, I don't return fire.
  I
  just
  don't
  care.
  If I hit the lead, I immediately start running around without attacking anyone and wait for someone to kill me.
  This way not only do I help balance the game, but I ensure that no-one else gets as bored with the game as I would were the same people winning all the time.
  OK that was a long exposition on competitive gameplay...
  But by the same token, I just simply have no desire to play Resident Evil 4 and successfully get through a yard full of zombies using as little ammo and health-herbs as I can. I have no interest in trying to preserve my character for 40 minutes only to have them die and have to do it again. I understand that people love doing this, Chibi-R is one of them and it's great, I enjoy watching him do it.
  But I don't want to do it.
  And ultimately, if you want my dollar, you won't get it with Resident Evil 4.
  ...
  Oh wait, I bought it as a collectible... em, maybe you will get it because I used to be a hapless collector XD
  But that's not the point!
  
  Look, I'm not saying that developers should make games for me, I'm just saying that they don't, and I won't play what's out there. I'm not saying that what's out there are shallow or meaningless games, or that they are all too hard and are without reward. They're great games, as I've said numerous times. I even admire games that I hate to play, I can see where they are chock-full of great game design.
  
  But ultimately, at the end of the day, I personally don't want to feel empowered by weaponry, feel important by heroic acts, or feel a sense of achievement for mastering complex controls, actions or game-mechanics.
  Where do I go for recreational enjoyment?
  Other than real human interaction with my family and friends, I watch films and anime.
  What kind of films and anime?
  For films, abstracts like David Lynch, minimalists like Hiroshi Ishikawa, symbolists like Mamoru Oshii to name a few. For anime, social dramas like Honey & Clover and Paradise Kiss, comedy/everyday life shows like Lucky Star and Azumanga Daioh, socio-political and philosophical shows like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Texhnolyze which is one of the better abstracts along with my all-time favourite Haibane Renmei. Plus there's the ever-growing gentle slice-of-life shows like Aria and Windy Tales. There are plenty more, but these are probably among the most emotional in my viewing history.
  How on earth can games compete with the emotional reward I receive for empathising and identifying with these characters, their emotions, their actions and their stories?
  At this point all of the senior journalists and developers quickly raise their hands and say 'but the power of gaming is in interaction, so we excuse the weaker elements', and you're right, because your customers keep purchasing your products regardless of your weaker elements. Once again I don't want to sound like I'm having a crack at the industry, not at all, I'm merely discussing some of the reasons why I'm leaving it as a game-player.
  You see, there are things we invest time and effort into that aren't immediately rewarding; these can be jobs, sometimes they're even friendships and relationships where we take on a supporting role, often without the expectation that they will ever return anything to us in gratitude. Of-course we don't want to be mercenary with out emotional engagements, but that's an essay for a different day. Nevertheless, playing games is something we're supposed to do for fun, or rather that's what your marketing departments are paid to make us believe. Overlooking the issues of glitching and poor coding, a game can run well in regards to mechanics, and still be dull and not engaging, or simply irrelevant. Gaming is something that requires more effort from me than watching a film, at least more effort from the hallowed perspective of interaction, and if we're going to invest effort into it, we expect reward. I'm not trying to dictate to you what kind of reward you should supply me, though as an industry you seem to be doing a fine job of merely delivering to people what the want and expect, rather than something unique... but again, another essay for another day.
  I guess this isn't a last cry out to developers to cater to my wants - take note, I didn't say needs. It's not a cry out because I'm actually happy not gaming. I don't miss it. What I want is emotional engagement and I get it elsewhere, primarily from my interactions with real people in real life, and secondarily in film and animation as an artistic expression I can appreciate. Of-course I would jump at the chance to have a gaming experience that combined some of my favourite elements like beautiful environments, great voice-acting featuring Jennifer Hale, and great emotional context without an overbearing theme of saving the world or battling evil, but that's not really going to happen any time soon. I'm not angry about it, I acknowledge that it's not worth money because people play games for different reasons, and if the pinnacle of 'I like games with great stories' is a Metal Gear Solid game or Final Fantasy VII, then really, I'll just stick to my films and the books I've read and re-read specifically because they have superior stories and characterisations.
  
  Lastly Danc over at Lost Garden where he lives, at least I think it was him, linked to a site a while ago about a study on why we love to learn. It has to do with us engaging a problem, being driven to work at it and when we understand or solve it, the moment we have that 'click', the brain releases a chemical that gives us a tiny feeling of euphoria. You'll have to pardon me if I've got that completely wrong, it was a while ago that I read it so those who study in the field or know what Dan's tagged it under over at Lost Garden, please feel free to correct me.
  This is a great motivator for developers to create complex game-mechanics and puzzles. At last, scientific facts that support us creating a level where if we don't proceed from cover to cover and eliminate targets methodically, instead running out yelling 'hoo-rah!' at the top of our lungs, we will be promptly shot to bits along with our entire squad. Good. Fantastic. But make sure that there is cover around, that your cover mechanic works, first time, every time, and that the enemies can be seen and disposed of without some mysterious game-mechanic that was introduced in chapter 2 and hasn't been spoken of since. This has people fumbling for manuals and pause-menus in the middle of what should be an immersive fire-fight to look-up how to do that long-forgotten action that has been useless until now.
  There is no euphoric 'click' when people have to jump on forums to find out how to circumvent your lazy game-design. If you want to take cues, I'm sorry to say it, but Portal does a great job of introducing to you the basics of the mechanics. It actually does a great job of hand-holding you with some of the more complicated solutions that are possible. Towards the end, you can fairly say that a player who has progressed that far in Portal has been fairly equipped with all of the tools they need to complete the most difficult of puzzles. Easy for Portal, you essentially only have two actions; create a portal and pick up a cube. Again, a perfect example of only including those mechanics necessary to achieve your overall goals in game-design without unnecessarily convoluting it. Don't set your sights too high if you can't achieve them seamlessly in the game-world. Now more than ever, gamers look for these flaws, and will crucify you for them.
  OK that was even longer than before.
  The whole part about interaction and the euphoric 'click', from a personal perspective, is that I don't get it. Not I don't understand, as in, I don't receive pleasure from conquering games, mostly because game-mechanics, even when they do work flawlessly, simply don't translate to my experience as an emotional being. Perhaps if the way I was trying to achieve something were different, and what I was trying to achieve was also different, then I might enjoy mastering those mechanics. At its basest level, Tetris and Lumines are deceptively simple until you grok the mechanics, at which point the game is at your mercy... until song-speed (for Lumines) and drop-speed change to increase difficulty, at which point the game demands that you hone your skills rather than discard them and learn new ones. As far as achieving something different, what I mean by that is I don't want to save anyone, at least not with a gun. At least in Mass Effect there are opportunities where you can do with your speech, which is actually a very powerful element to have. You feel like you're skating on thin-ice trying to convince someone not to engage in combat with either yourself of someone else. This is a great step in a great direction I feel.
  
  I would love to experience a game that focusses primarily on human interaction and emotion, rather than have it buried in subtext as I've mentioned in pieces I've written before, but that's not really going to happen. I respect traditional gaming, I don't ever want it to die. Like I've said before, we need Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Halo and the rest, we should keep creating games like that and new companies should also aspire to create games just as good.
  
  But I won't be playing them. I simply don't enjoy them any-more. I once did and I don't count one second of the many hours I spent playing those games as wasted. So much of what I played back then is still evident in game design now, and so much of it really is fantastic. There are elements that get more and more refined every time a AAA title is created.
  I've moved on now, and while I'll probably still dabble in games now and then, I will likely never have the same commitment to them that I had in the past.
  
  -
  
  Here's one for the market researchers though; when I was in my late teens, I had less money than I do now, bought more games and spent more time gaming. Now I have significantly more money than I ever had then, but am more discerning with how I spend my time, and my money. I'm only one voice, but perhaps it might be worth someone's while to see just how many others there are out there with similar thoughts.
  Keep that one to yourself, maybe not for today, but maybe for tomorrow. Remember Nintendo looked to move outside the relatively closed market of established gamers and found the markets of 25+ yuppies and women. Regardless of what the hardcore market loves to spout out on the forums, Nintendo are now making piles and piles of money.
  Just a thought.
  • Posted Oct 31, 2008 2:48 pm PT
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
  • Tweet
• 31Oct 08

  Why I don't play games any-more - Part 1

  So in the previous entry I discussed a handful of my favourite games and why I enjoyed them. I'm not too sure I did very well with Eternal Darkness, bizarre considering it's one of my all-time favourites, but strangely enough it'll probably be exempt from this closing piece.
  
  Why I don't play games any-more...
  
  Myst, Syberia and Eternal Darkness I played mainly because they made almost flawless sense from a gameplay perspective. There were other reasons which were covered in the previous article, but logical and glitchless gameplay was a strong-point of all three. The gameplay worked. It just worked. It worked well. I admire developers and creative designers wanting to add great ideas like slowing down time, complex ability and spell sets or detailed combat move-lists, but the more complicated the gameplay is made, the more chance there is that you won't be able to create perfect conditions for these elements in every encounter, without fail. To prevent this you may inevitably limit when and/or how these features can be used, and they become less useful. If you don't limit them, they become glitched or illogical. I never was fond of the term 'game-breaking' before, but I believe that I'll use it in this context. Usually people refer to game-breaking as horrible screen-tearing, getting stuck on level-geometry too often, poor A.I. pathfinding or crashes. To me, these are things that simply should not exist in a game, and it's simply disgusting that they do. So let's take a trip to the gaming utopia that doesn't exist where we can assume a game won't crash. To me, if you give me a game-mechanic and tell me I can use it in a certain context, you better make sure that every encounter that fits the criteria of that context will be one where I can successfully utilise that mechanic. If execution of the mechanic fails too often because of sloppy coding, I call it as game-breaking. As gamers we've just learnt to deal with is... 'Oh yeah man, you're supposed to be able to grab all the ledges but you actually can't grab the ones with this texture, only the ones with that texture'. I've had this kind of conversation with countless other gamers, where we're jolted out of what is often a well-crafted and luscious game-world because we have to figure out what the actual rules are for a given mechanic, or figure out the actual correct trigger for game logic because what we were instructed in-game to do, has simply failed.
  Game-breaking.
  A hardcore gamer overlooks these things several times a minute, I just can't any-more. I don't have the time or patience, and if I want to play a game to achieve something emotionally, I don't ever once have to figure out what shortcut has been made in development to achieve what was originally intended.
  As a developer you may say 'But Myst and ED are totally different to our game. You can't compare a simple point-and-click game to a complex and immersive game', true to a certain extent, but the lesson of Myst and ED is to have a focussed goal for gameplay and perfect it. If you can't have it work every time, don't put it in the game. Myst and ED contain only the gameplay elements that are firstly executable from a coding perspective, and secondly important to the overall ideologies of the game. Crierion's ideologies behind Burnout is a fast, accessible arcade racer, clearly set out by their presentation and immediately obvious game-mechanics. Is anyone ever going to call them up on poor physics? Not at all.
  The reason for my change in attitude is coming.
  
  Ultimately Anachronox and Twilight Princess were greatly entertaining enough to lead me on to their stellar moments. Isn't it great in life when we set out to do something and then have that amazing moment when we realise that something we were heretofore unaware of is evident, and it effects us emotionally? Anachronox was clever in that part of Fatima's story is shown in the opening moments of the game, though at that point we are unaware that the context is more important to her than to the main character. The change in context after we experience her own flashback is startling and effective. At that point we really do love Sly a little less, and love Fatima a whole lot more. I couldn't play any more that night after that scene, I wasn't sure Sly deserved any more of my time. Of-course, tread carefully when offering the player a possible motivation to stop playing your game, but a game that can have something that meaningful in it is valuable and emotionally relevant.
  Similarly Twilight Princess seems to capture all that we've loved about Zelda games for years, yet offers something greater. I'm sure that many people let the moment pass without notice, or at the very least didn't think much of it. Nothing wrong with these people at all, but for those of us for whom it does strike a chord, it's extremely powerful. The one thing that kept me driving on to that final reward was the growing relationship Link has with Midna. Perhaps it's because Chibi-R and I have watched a lot of anime that we immediately picked up on Midna's behaviour towards Link and the meaning behind their final scene, but I'm sure that plenty of non-anime watching players picked up on it too.
  Games need to have these moments. Again, I'm not having a go at Gears of War, I appreciate that sometimes it's fun to run around and shoot stuff. That's OK, I don't expect deeply emotional themes in a shooter, but it's not impossible. Life is full of such moments - they don't have to be terribly contrived or involve much back-story or dialogue, they just have to be done with the right element of subtlety.
  
  For The Longest Journey, ICO, Silent Hill 2 and Twilight Princess on account of Midna, what predominantly drove my motivation was the immersion in the characters. Each in their own way offered rich, creative and emotional expressions of human emotion, sometimes with the qualities of heroism and valour, sometimes affection, often doubt, fear and trepidation. These games I played more for the characters than their stories. I've often joked that I would love to create a game where my favourite characters simply did things like visit art galleries and commented on their thoughts, or had coffee with a friend at a cafe and talked about life. This is because the characters have come alive so much that I see them grow beyond the context of the game-world, truly a rare thing. The Longest Journey in particular feels like the game has been crafted around the character rather than the reverse; I have no idea whether this is indeed true, but regardless, that is the impression that I get. Usually game-characters aren't fleshed out enough to become truly human, which of-course will depend on the context of the game, I wouldn't expect to feel too attached to the cast of Mario Smash Tennis, but I think there's a lot of value in having deeply developed characters. Does it always require establishment through dialogue as in The Longest Journey? Perhaps not, although the context of that game helps, but people can become real in many different ways. I might not want to take Yorda to a cafe, but I may want to introduce her to my baby niece of 15 months old and let them play together. This might sound like some strange fetish that only the most tragic of otaku and fanboys could dream up, but they're just simple examples. I might not actually think about doing these things, but I might acknowledge the genuine characteristics to the same extent.
  
  So why don't I play games any-more?
  • Posted Oct 31, 2008 2:33 pm PT
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
  • Tweet

See Previous Blog Posts »