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Game Theory: History Alive

Thomas McDonald — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:45:15 -0600

It’s wonderful that even after 30-odd years as a gamer, there are still gaming moments that can surprise and delight me. Assassin’s Creed II (finally available for PC this month) absolutely knocked me cold within the first few minutes of the Florentine sequences.

It wasn’t the gameplay. Although the movement and combat are certainly strong (and a clear improvement over the original), we should expect that. It’s 2010: We’ve had so many quality exemplars of stealth and fighting systems that a developer has no excuse not to do it right.

It wasn’t the premise, which is dumber than a contestant on Conveyer Belt of Love. All the memories of all my ancestors are encoded in my DNA? Really? Right there between eye color and height is a base pair of nucleotides recording my 24th great-granduncle’s encounter with a hooker on January 24, 1472? And Veronica Mars is capable of extracting that memory and feeding it back into my brain as a simulation? That’s your premise?

No, the real treasure of Assassin’s Creed II, the real magic that takes the breath away, is Florence itself, and later, Venice. This is why I still game, and why the art of simulation is so utterly unique to gaming. Film and prose are, frankly, better media for narrative storytelling. “Gameplay” can be found in sports, puzzles, and conventional games.

But only interactive entertainment can truly simulate an environment, and then draw the narrative and gameplay elements into that simulation. The Florence and Venice of AC2 are masterpieces of design. It’s not just the architecture and open-city design, but also the living environment down on the ground, as people go about their lives. Merchants sweep the street in front of their stores, courtesans beckon from corners, pickpockets work the crowd, and threaded throughout all of it is the tension, plotting, and power-politics of Renaissance Italy.

I spent a semester in college (and a great deal of time since) studying many of these places and the history surrounding them, and Ubisoft Montreal nails it. Viewing 15th century Florence from atop Brunelleschi’s gravity-defying dome, and then being able to drop down to ground level to explore the city is one of the most thrilling things I’ve experienced in a lifetime of gaming. Thanks, Ubisoft.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

Game Theory: Leaver-Outers

Thomas McDonald — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:30:28 -0600

The older I get, the more I appreciate elegance, simplicity, and concision in game design. Sure, there are still times I want a game that piles on the detail like a rococo basilica. It’s possible to just fall into a giant hunk of gaming like Hearts of Iron III or Fallout 3 and roll around like a pig in… well, you know.

But a game that takes the most appealing bits and distills them to their essence has a powerful draw. This is what’s so wonderful about Torchlight, which boils the Diablo experience down to its essentials and skims off all the fat. This is a brisk and entertaining bit of action RPG, with a light touch and a set of simple game mechanics that conceal hidden depths.

For a $20 title, the skill of the design is almost shocking, at least until you check the credits. Designer Travis Baldee gave us the strikingly similar Fate series, and codesigners Max and Erich Schaefer gave us… Diablo.

These are designers who have thought deeply about what gamers want and what they can live without. The overblown cinematics and expensive production of Diablo II are replaced with text descriptions and appealingly simple visuals that are so efficient they can run on a netbook.

Last year’s Hinterland accomplished a similar bit of alchemy by creating a mashup of Diablo and Caesar, stripping down both experiences to their most appealing elements, then building them into a remarkable, easy-to-grasp, fast-playing game.

The things left out of Torchlight and Hinterland are hardly missed, partly because there is an art to simplicity that has its own charms. Thomas Wolfe, in defending his sprawling novels to F. Scott Fitzgerald, described great writers as “leaver-outers” or “putter-inners.” Some artists suggest something larger by saying less, while others put in every detail they can. Both are legitimate approaches, and offer unique delights, but it’s hard to deny F. Scott’s basic point: It takes greater craft to create something small that suggests unstated depths.

Or, as Elmore Leonard said, “I like to leave out the parts people skip.” It’s something designers should keep in mind.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

Game Theory: Monkeying with the Classics

Thomas McDonald — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:36:18 -0600

Do you want to know how long I’ve been doing this? So damn long that I covered the original Monkey Island games. Friends, back in my day, we had only two colors (black and not-black—and black’s not even a color!), and we liked it!

Actually, it kind of sucked, and one of the pleasures of covering games throughout the 1990s was watching sound and image improve to the point that spectacular graphics barely warrant a mention. If you can’t make a game look and sound good in 2009, you really should be making something other than games. Burgers, perhaps.

It’s illuminating to be able to play something you remember fondly from ye olde days, only with the ability to hotkey back and forth between the old game and a shiny new version. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a gorgeous hand-painted version of the original game, with a slightly “improved” interface. This has been laid right on top of the old game, and the most fascinating thing is the ability to hotkey 19 years into the past with each new screen.

There’s always a danger when revisiting something you remember fondly, that it might not hold up. The Secret of Monkey Island doesn’t quite hold up, and its place in the canon of classic games has a lot to do with its charm, characters, and novelty, and less with great puzzles or riotous dialog. Compared to the SCUMM games that came in its wake (Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and two great Monkey Island sequels), it’s not quite as funny or clever.

Memory is a deceptive thing. Over the years, a lot of gamers (myself included) have attached a lot of retroactive quality to the early days of PC gaming, which makes opportunities like the Special Edition instructive. I had a similar response when I revisited some Infocom text adventures in a fit of nostalgia and lasted about 10 minutes before wanting to put a fist through my screen. Next time some old gamer says, “They don’t make ‘em like that any more,” hand him a copy of Arkham Asylum and say, “Thank God for that.”

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

Game Theory: Offer I Can Refuse

Thomas McDonald — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:15:15 -0600

Facebook is the answer to a question no one asked: “How can I waste more of my time?” Compared to social network gaming, however, Facebook itself is as useful an invention as the cell phone.

Actually, I do like Facebook. I’ve used it to reconnect with dozens of people I used to know. Two of them are even people I like. A year after I first joined Facebook for the sole purpose of sharing pictures of a new puppy, I find myself updating my status, making comments, and listing things like the “Five TV Characters I Wish Were Real So We Could Hang.” (Dr. McCoy, Emma Peel, Hurley Reyes, Simon Templar, and Gomez Addams: another answer to a question no one ever asked sober or outside of a college dorm.)

I used Facebook for a year before I caved in and tried any social gaming. It held no appeal at all. I ignored the messages from friends asking me to join their Mafia, become part of their vampire clan, move in next door to their rutabaga farm, or contribute to efforts to elect Ron Paul president. (Oh, you mean they were serious about the Ron Paul thing?)

Since I’m Jersey born and bred, Mafia Wars seemed like the right fit. It’s actually an elegant little piece of work: a role-playing game stripped down to pure stats and wrapped in a simple graphical interface. It has a balanced risk/reward system and a satisfying initial arc driven by leveling, establishing and expanding an income stream, and accumulating bits of stuff.

But it loses steam rather quickly. The leveling cycle becomes rote, and the game reaches a point where risk vanishes, rendering the rewards hollow. It’s also an oddly unsocial social game, with minimal personal interaction.

Yet it retains one important appeal: It’s undemanding. You can perform all of your duties for the day with a few clicks over the morning coffee, making it one of the most coldly efficient games I’ve ever seen. It’s like we’re even outsourcing our gameplay. That’s really not what I’m looking for.

And, no, I don’t want to join your mafia, but thanks for asking.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

Byte Rights: Et Tu, Reporters?

Quinn Norton — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:30:14 -0600

Like the other media industries, newspapers are having a hard time finding people that still want to give them money. Unlike music and film, newspapers aren’t selling to the customer so much as selling the consumer to the advertiser. But with circulations dropping and basically infinite new ad space becoming available on the Internet, advertisers aren’t signing up in droves. This being the news biz, there’s no lack of people to talk about why or what to do.

Some media pundits think readers who might pay are defecting to blogs. Others think Google News is being evil. Still others blame Craigslist.org for the death of classifieds.

Whatever the cause, my colleagues are running to the government for a bailout. Unlike car makers and banks, they aren’t asking for huge piles of money. They want a legislative bailout.

The newspapers are asking for (among other things) changes to copyright law. Some, like The Washington Post, want to restrict linking to or summarizing stories for some period of time. Now, the point of news is to get your story out fast and accurately to make the biggest impact you can. Copyright-reforming newspaper folks are looking to change the law to give them a special right to stop their stories spreading.

When you’re asking for a law to be rewritten to make your ultimate goal harder, something has gone terribly wrong.

Worst of all, there’s scant evidence that rewriting the law would save the papers’ dying business model. Many of their readers have left for good, and online advertising has lowered ad prices across the board.

Just like the RIAA isn’t saving music, and the MPAA isn’t saving cinema, newspapers aren’t going to save journalism. Journalism turns out to be doing just fine in the age of the Internet, where people read blogs and Twitter and watch video clips and even sometimes go to newspapers’ websites to get their news. Newspapers have conflated their industry with their field of endeavor, and their business model with the only way of doing it.

Quinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired News and other publications. Her work has ranged from legal journalism to the inner life of pirate organizations.

Game Theory: Path to Pretention

Thomas McDonald — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:00:00 -0500

One thing I learned while attending art school was that anyone who thinks he or she is an Artist-with-a-capital-A, isn’t. Anyone who tries to produce Art—complete with layers of meaning and a message and prepackaged interpretations that they are just dying for some sensitive soul to uncover, is inevitably going to produce self-conscious garbage. It will probably be boring, almost certainly ugly, and without question, philosophically tendentious.

In any art, pure technique (honed by hard work and diligent practice) and pure instinct (some mystical combination of observation, perception, and interpretation, most of it subconscious) mingle to create something that speaks as “art.” You can’t fake it.

Thus, when I boot a pretentious art-house game like The Path, I know I’m in for instant seating at the crap buffet, complete with a tepid chaser of trite, high-school-level philosophy about MEANINGFUL THINGS. The Path is… words fail me.

It’s a Little Red Riding Hood game, where you play as six girls, who I guess represent Feminine Archetypes in Our Modern World. (Or something.) I stopped caring when I realized that the designers hate me, which they made clear by firmly instructing me to stay on the path and go to grandma’s house, which is how you lose the game.

You see, you’re not supposed to follow rules! Stupid rules! They’re all arbitrary! Make up your own rules! Grandma is a tool of the establishment! Let her save herself! You have a Voyage of Self-Discovery to embark upon! (Or something.) Wander in the dark and scary forest, complete with fuzzy visuals, sluggish controls, ghastly bits of free verse, and a creepy pedophilic vibe! Get eaten by wolves!

But maybe the wolves are a metaphor for….

And then I realized I don’t like games with metaphors. And I could use about 50 percent fewer similes while we’re at it.

But co-designer Michael Samyn doesn’t think much of your new-fangled games: “Videogames today are simplistic, deal with stale subjects, treat the players like morons, and offer no emotional or intellectual depth, in favor of attempting to please your ego on some caveman level.”

Or something.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

Game Theory: Project Natal

Thomas McDonald — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:45:31 -0500

Two years after dismissing, and even mocking, the Wii Remote, Microsoft has had a change of heart about motion control. Project Natal is an attempt to get rid of the controller altogether, replacing it with a tool that combines an “RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software.”

All of this provides full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition, then converts that information into real-time game control. The figures onscreen respond to your movements and even react to emotions based on facial expressions.

You know Microsoft is serious when it wheels out the big guns to deliver the overstatement. Such as when Steven Spielberg was asked for his thoughts on Project Natal at this year’s E3: “This is a pivotal moment that will carry with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games.”

Although the E3 demos focused on Xbox 360, Bill Gates has revealed that he sees Natal coming to PCs, with motion control not only for gaming, but for apps and media management.

The demos are impressive, with people fighting martial arts opponents by flailing their limbs; driving a car by miming drivey kinds of hand positions; kicking soccer balls; etc.

If Microsoft didn’t want people to immediately file Project Natal under “yeah, right,” it probably shouldn’t have relied on self-promoting, semi-automated broken-promise dispenser Peter Molyneaux to hype the technology with his demo of Milo, a creepy virtual boy who reacted to and interacted with a woman in response to her gestures, movements, and facial expressions.

There are a lot of potential pitfalls with Project Natal, which still lacks a release date, price, and other important details. Anyone with experience in voice recognition, face recognition, and motion capture will be familiar with the vast challenges of making it all work, consistently, with a diverse array of users and environmental variables.

At one end, we have the slick interfaces from the movie Minority Report, which would be cool.

At the other, we have the PlayStation Eye, which would not.

Which do you think we’ll get?

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

Game Theory: Summa Contra Sims

Thomas McDonald — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:45:44 -0500

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that The Sims was designed for Someone Else. I don’t know who. Hottentots, perhaps.

I played through The Sims 3 with awe, respect…and profound boredom. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and if God is kind I’ll never have to play it again this side of Purgatory.

Meanwhile, I’ve been returning to Prototype. I like Prototype. I also liked it when it was called Spider-Man 2 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. If a game is worth playing once, it’s worth playing two more times with different character models.

Games are all about wish-fulfillment and power fantasies. Some people are content to wield their mighty power to get three gems in a row. Others would prefer to jump 10 stories in the air and punch a helicopter out of the sky. If you have the opportunity to do the latter, I have no idea why you’d choose to do the former, but people are strange.

Adult male gamers tend to follow the groove of their childhood fantasies into adulthood. As a kid, my daydreams tended toward Conan, Professor Challenger, the Six Million Dollar Man, and G.I. Joe. (Also: I wanted a pet werewolf.) If someone makes a game in which a muscular Cimmerian gets fitted for a cybernetic arm with kung-fu grip and leads his Adventure Team into a jungle swarming with dinosaurs that time forgot, I’d never leave the house. Until then, Prototype will do fine.

My childhood fantasies never ran toward being, say, an interior decorator or a guy who humps his way to a crummy job and then home to a barely furnished tract house every day. That’s actually the polar opposite of “fantasy.” Some people call it “reality,” or perhaps just “life.” Others call it The Sims 3.

I’m baffled when people deride a certain piece of art or entertainment as “mere escapism.” What the hell else is it supposed to be? You may escape into high-minded flights of the intellect or emotional insight, or into a place where a man in a loincloth chokes a T-Rex with his mighty pneumatic hand, but you are escaping. I’d rather not spend those precious moments of escape redecorating someone else’s make-believe house.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.