But why? If a screenwriter decides to take all the quiet bits out of a movie, you get  Transformers 2. What power do games have if they refuse to acknowledge any emotions beyond those that go along with fun  (Joy, victory, etc.)? Perhaps a better rule to follow would be, ‘if it isn’t interesting, take it out.’ Mature player’s don’t need to shoot someone every 30 seconds to stave off boredom. If we’re exploring interesting worlds or interactions we won’t be bored.

Obviously a big issue is the risk of investing in a  market that wants guns, wands or swords and not much else. But we’re never going to expand it by only selling toys for teenage boys. We  see examples of reaching out with games like Red Dead Redemption (of which I shall write more once I’ve actually finished it). In RDR, much of the pleasure comes from the exploration of such a vast, hostile landscape and time period. Obviously it can be played as a shooter, but by spending a bit of time with the world, we start to pick up on the intended themes of the narrative, without being told in a cutscene.

Basically, game makers aren’t idiots, so stop treating me like one!

I somehow have made a mod of an almost usable state, and although public showing is still a while away, I can show you this delightful mess:

What I can say concretely (in back-0f-box bullet form)

• It is a Source SDK mod and requires Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• It is short, probably < 1 hr
• It has no guns
• It has no ragdoll effects
• It has plenty of pretension

I fancy it an ‘art’ game, although ultimately that definition is up to the player (This statement conveniently states how pointless I think Ebert’s rant is). It breaks a couple of well worn rules found in game design, not for any rebellious need to ‘re-evaluate game design theory”, but because in the act of ignoring expected rules, authors can coax out some powerful realisations.

Or so I hope!

While not perfect, the series acts as a proof-of-concept for a different style of game design. First, a short (1-2 hour) story style narrative, one that works well not only by providing a tighter experience for the player, but also more reasonable goals for the creator. Importantly, they exhibit a favourite trait of mine, providing meaning not only through dialogue or cutscenes, but through the gameplay itself. As an example, Handle With Care uses crates as a metaphor for repressed memories, the challenge is to store crates without breaking them thus ‘releasing’ the memories. Although I disagree with relying on NPCs too much to carry the story, those in Radiator are used just enough to evoke sympathy.

A strange half downside for me was a kind of conflict in meaning of Handle With Care. Storing boxes and thus repressing memories was far harder than breaking them, while for me at least, that is usually the easy way out. I say half downside because perhaps that says more about the way I deal with bad experiences, and in any case, the fact that a game is making me think like that should be applauded. Play it please, play it now.

[I thought I posted this a couple of months ago, it seems it got lost in WordPress...]

While at first I disagreed completely, on reflection and on reading Danc’s rebuttal to the most common defences, I have been somewhat converted. However, I don’t believe these constraints must be over come to make culturally relevant games, i.e. games don’t have to be of the Facebook ilk to have meaningful insights on the human condition. I agree that current single player games are fruitlessly attempting to mimic passive media, most derivatively cinema, when the interactive nature of games means we have to invent new ways to convey meaning. Uncharted 2 stands as the current pinnacle gaming cinema, and although I love it, it delivers no emotional meaning outside of scripted cutscenes and dialogue. This is fine, but games can only compete with cinema by getting enormous art budgets, which we can’t sustain without a much larger audience. We deny it, and desperately hold up examples, like Uncharted, to show we can be as meaningful as cinema. But when even the most brain dead action movie has more emotional impact then our most prized cinematic games, something needs to change.

I suppose this sounds very harsh, but I’m not dismissing these games, in fact the opposite. Half Life showed we can have stories without resorting to cutscenes, then in Episode Two showed us we can feel basic emotion towards on screen characters (and yes, I know they weren’t necessarily  the first, but they are the first mainstream games to do so.) The problem is, we have to use new methods to convey meaning. Bioshock used the basic game action of exploration to show a point, the decay of Rapture was experienced directly through its exploration. Jason Rohrer’s games such as Passage and Gravitation, convey insights on the human condition through play mechanics. These, admittedly simple examples, show what can be achieved. Bioshock shows how high-quality art assets can be used beyond ‘looking nice’, while Rohrer’s games show how single player games can still have meaningful insights. Danc argues that in “…very limited situations, in the hands of extraordinarily talented people, (see Gravitation or Passage) a single player game can evoke a glimmer [of emotional insight] from a core group of players who desperately want to believe.” But these games prove what can be done in the future. As Kevin Glover, a commenter on the Lost Garden blog states, “…in one paragraph you’re arguing that although Facebook games are shallow they can grow into something more sophisticated, and in the next paragraph you’re arguing that games like Passage are limited, but that they can’t grow past that.”

Now where I do agree, is that branching out of the single-player mould will allow games to access a deeper well of human emotion, although I’ll elaborate on this perhaps later. Suffice to say that while multiplayer games have not reached beyond the elations and frustrations of competition, we can’t give these as examples as to why multi-player gaming can ‘never’ work. Games like Eve Online, with its politics, or Love, with its communal creation tools, show glimmers of hope that should be experimented with.

Essentially I think Danc’s article is a rather pessimistic look at the future of single-player gaming. I agree that these constraints should be ignored; for games that involve human interactions, go multi-player rather than faking it. But single player games can still be used as tools of expression, perhaps in a different form to multi-player games. What we can be sure of, however, is that we have a long way to go before games can really start making an artistic impact.

This game continues to intrigue me. There’s a number ofreasons for it, however, as with most games I am entranced by, it’s the atmosphere that gets me. Although the term is growing cliched, Love has a very painterly look, largely from the smudgy coloured grass and trees, or the often glowing ‘fog’ that muffles the landscape to soften it.

It’s so easy to be sucked into the game while drifting around the world, you see a strange, almost artificial landscape, and on closer inspection, see it as a settlement you helped create a week ago. You see a bizarre creation on a plateau high above, but with no way to reach it, it remains a mystery.

As a statement about architecture, the game succeeds by questioning how design could move into the Wiki style ‘user-creates’ field. With players able to modify the settlements at will, they grow organically, and interestingly, almost act as a caricature of the post-modern movement. As a settlement begins, purely functional elements are the first to appear, simply to keep the village from being overrun. Settlements almost exclusively become four high walls, with ‘tokens’ (the game’s resources) arranged in neat blocks within these walls. Once survival is no longer the main goal, players start the aesthetic improvements, which to many means adding ornamentation, or retrofitting ‘trends’ into parts of the village. Since players generally work on one section individually, the settlement becomes an eclectic mix of ideas, sometimes remaining unfinished.

Perhaps more soon…

A game that explores architecture like no other, in the purest most organic sense. The form of a settlement begins as the bare minimum defense structure(usually a wall), but as it becomes safer, modifications begin to reflect the aesthetics of the players. This personal influence is helped by the fact that servers are limited to a few hundred players, rather than the thousands in most persistent worlds, giving a better sense of community.

As it’s still in alpha, the game is rather unstable and has more than a few gameplay niggles, but the overall theme really shows through. Unlike any other game, Love can really suck you in and link you to its world. I’ll put some more thoughts on it as it evolves further.

In the post, Morin talks about the subconscious decisions we make while playing a game, and the fact that most games ignore them. It’s a rare game where a player’s decisions even slightly relate to the theme portrayed. An example Morin used was Prototype, but it’s a similar problem for many action games, the theme of the game is inner conflict, but players are simply trained in how to take out enemies faster, and inner conflict has no bearing on subconscious decisions.

Of course, since so many games released have tacked on stories, or barely worked out themes, this lack of relevant decision making doesn’t really affect them. For example, RTS player decisions generally involve how to best use your little men to destroy the other little men, with more subconscious decisions based on how to most efficiently convey instructions to your characters. Occasionally a story may pop up in intervening cutscenes, but I have not yet played an RTS with a theme beyond ‘Domination’ (but I’d be happy to be given one!)

However, games, as with any storytelling medium, should have themes. And as the biggest advantage game shave over more traditional media is the interactivity, which can be used so powerfully to engage players with the themes directly. Without more games engaging players subconscious with their narrative contexts, we lose that advantage, and continue to be taken less seriously than other media.

One thing I’ve never agreed on, is that these choices shouldn’t have to be so explicit. If someone in the real world is given two choices, and is then told which are the good and evil choices, they will take the good(mostly). Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen, and we have to judge the consequences ourselves. Not only do we decide which results are evil, but often we have no good action, and we have to decide the ‘lesser of two evils, ‘ a common occurrence in reality but missing in games.

Games also have a compulsion to keep themselves the same for everybody, no matter the player choices. This was most evident in Bioshock. When the player has to make their first choice, killing or saving a little sister, the helpful Dr Tenenbaum informs us that saving the little sister will give us some Adam and the possibility of a reward later, while killing her will give us more Adam and no later reward. This nearly equalises the choices from a gameplay(and player) point of view, and players no longer have the need to make any real decisions, no weighing up costs or benefits. They simply choose whatever story they want to see, good or evil. What Bioshock does what so many previous games didn’t, in regards to morality, is make it at least a hard choice to kill these girls.

But a decision in a game cannot simply be boiled down to a ‘choose your own adventure’ narrative split. Players have to be involved in the decisions, and be rewarded or punished themselves, not just the characters. Infamous did this very well for the most part. At many points in the story are explicit choices the the player must make, one example would be stopping poisonous tar flowing through a pipe. The player is offered the choice of turning the pump off themselves, but then getting hit with the harmful tar, or getting an innocent bystander to do it, but staying free of the tar. This decision is both with the narrative, but also gives the player the chance to weigh it up. The ‘good’ choice puts a temporary handicap on the player as Cole is disorientated, while the ‘evil’ choice does not harm the player.

Decision making has always been a core part of game playing, and now that we are finally able to make convincing enough narratives, we seem stuck to them. Decisions must have two parts, the narrative(most explicitly good or evil choices), and the gameplay. Interactivity is what separates games from traditional narrative, and by rewarding or punishing the player over ‘story’ decisions more powerfully effects them than other media ever can.

When starting a new game, your first realisation is this change’s downside. Rather than putting a whole lot of families in a town that you can choose to play whenever you please, you can now only play one family in a town at once. As a compromise, you can switch between families in the same town, but your previous family will go on free-will, and could die off, give birth, split up, or quit their jobs before you play them again. But, is that really so bad? The Sims has always been a storytelling game, and this new version, more than ever, helps these stories evolve to something more than just short events. This, together with less brain dead sims, means that you can now focus entirely on creating a story, without all the fuss of babysitting other family members or long loading times between locations.

There’s a whole bunch of little improvements, a ‘perks’ system helps in some ways to remove the abstract ‘needs’ bars, with a little icon popping up when they are needing to pee or eat, or just feeling good after a bath. In the construction side of the game, everything is far more customisable, with most objects’ (including clothing) textures able to be swapped/recoloured at will. And, finally, the grid on which objects are placed in-game is now smaller, and even can be ignored(although this can cause path finding issues with sims at times)

It’s a nice step forward, definitely some good progress made on the gameplay side, and a shift in focus from giving your sims a good life, to giving them a good story. Unfortunately, on it’s own it can’t compete against the full battalion of expansion packs for the Sims 2, which may dissuade the biggest fans who don’t want to give up the extensive objects and features gained from the set. Most will enjoy the changes, it may not win over those who ‘never got into it’, but I don’t think EA needs to worry when they have such a huge fanbase already.

However, I’m only human, and although fascinating, I can’t read about .net forever. I still squeeze in some gaming for release, and am still looking forward to one particular game coming out next week. The Sims 3. I say it’s because I think both the original concept and great execution provide a good example, which is true, but the real reason is that I’m a control freak. But aren’t we all? Every game is about control, The Sims just extends this to entire families, and now, an entire town. I’ll put up a few more words about it when it finally arrives.