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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.

Game Theory: MicroBucks

Thomas McDonald — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:00:42 -0500

Some gamers treat the mere idea of microtransactions with contempt.

“Pshaw!” they snort, “like I’d pay real money to buy horse armor in Oblivion….” And then they usually trail off into a semi-coherent rant about their rights as gamers and greedy corporate pigs.

But microtransactions—which allow you to spend a few dollars on things to enhance a game, such as extra weapons or spells—are here to stay, and gamers just need to come to terms with that.

My little epiphany came when I took my son to the local Games Workshop store for some Warhammer love. There, spread out before me on shelves crammed with figures, books, paints, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the hobby, was the world of microtransactions writ large.

Back in the day (as I say when I want to clear a room), if you wanted to play as Eldar, you bought the Eldar books and figures separately (and spent at least $100). If you wanted to play as the Chinese in Advanced Squad Leader, you bought Gung Ho! (about $50). Collectable card games? Booster packs.

It’s only in PC and video gaming that we expect to get everything in one neat little package, and then bitch if it isn’t all there. How many times have we read, “$20 is too much to pay for 10 levels and a new race”? I’ve written it myself. We’ve gotten spoiled.

BattleForge, a nifty collectible card game/RTS game mashup, drove that point home for me. For the base price, you get the game and 3,000 points to spend on booster packs or other enhancements. If you burn through that, you can buy $5 worth of points, which will get you a couple of booster packs to expand your deck. We’re likely to see more of this.

I’m not defending RPGs where entire classes are nerfed unless you pay extra money, or designs that punish people who don’t spend extra. But the future of PC gaming will likely be driven by the “Korean model,” in which hardcore gamers spend extra to support a game and expand their experience, while more casual gamers pay less or nothing at all for a simpler experience. The question will be: Which kind of gamer are you?

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

Game Theory: Designing Down

Thomas McDonald — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:44:11 -0500

Empire: Total War and Stormrise are two radically different games with a common core. Developed by Creative Assembly, they give us a rare opportunity to see the stark contrast between what PC and console strategy games can and cannot do.

Empire is a refinement of a revered brand, featuring new elements set within a familiar context. Despite the bugs, it’s still a deep, detailed, and beautiful strategy game with a different texture from any other Total War game.

Stormrise severs the 3D tactical element from the Total War series and reconfigures it as a third person real-time strategy game. The ground-level FPS/RTS hybrid is not the huge innovation trumpeted by Sega. Pandemic’s Battlezone II: Combat Commander attempted a similar RTS/FPS mélange 10 years ago, with pretty solid results. But memories are short and hype is powerful in the game world, allowing Stormrise to position itself as “The First Truly 3D RTS Game.”

There is indeed innovation on display in Stormrise. I haven’t seen a game which forced such a reorientation of my approach to strategy gaming since Homeworld. It offers a large battlefield that has tactically significant verticality—with levels in the air, in and on structures of varying heights, on the ground, and underground—and is controlled from the perspective of individual units.

Unfortunately, this attempt to bring a scaled-down version of the Total War battlefield experience to console systems is ultimately undone by the limitations of console controllers, which make managing the multiple units very tricky.

The PC version of Stormrise (which was clearly an afterthought) is even more unsatisfying. The mouse/keyboard controls that would have been a perfect fit for Stormrise are instead filtered through the confining lens of the console controller, rendering the PC controls extremely cumbersome.

A PC concept has been bounced to the console and back to the PC, and as with any game of “telephone,” something is lost in the process. If Stormrise was designed from the ground up for PC control, instead of designed down to the console level, it might have been a classic. In attempting to bring its complex ideas to consoles, Creative Assembly has instead proved why its only true home can be the PC.

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

Game Theory: Grassroots Gaming

Thomas McDonald — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:33:01 -0500

PC gaming began on mainframes and research computers. It moved to personal computers when independent developers put their games on floppy disks, sealed them in Ziploc bags with Xeroxed art, and sold them in hobby stores. If it is going to have a future that is not yoked to console design paradigms, we are going to have to recapture those roots and start paying closer attention to the small developers who are designing with us, and not 14-year-old console gamers, as their primary market.

PC games like those we used to play are still being made, but amidst all the white noise of endless junkware and Java games, it’s becoming extremely difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. I completely missed Hinterland when it first came out last year, and played it only after its addition to the Greenhouse lineup (http://playgreenhouse.com). It’s a little gem of RPG/strat play: Diablo with village building and all the boring bits cut out. Tilted Mill, the company responsible, is filled with old PC hands like Chris Beatrice (from Impressions, of beloved memory) and Jeff Fiske (who demoed Civil War General for me at the first E3).

Another company, Brighter Minds, filed for Chapter 11 protection in January, despite the success of its World of Goo, a brilliant piece of gaming design for the ridiculous price of $20. Goo, which went out DRM-free, was subject to a 90 percent piracy rate. Designer Ron Carmel told Joystiq that he saw torrents of the game with “500 seeders and 300 leechers.” If you’re reading this, and you played Goo on a stolen copy, you’re a world-class jackoff, and probably would have stolen this magazine if you weren’t afraid the dude at Borders would have caught you. I’d pay $20 just to kick you in the nuts.

EA and Activision don’t need your money, and they don’t care too much about you. Unless you’re coughing up $15 a month for an MMO, get used to sloppy console seconds. The small guys need you, now, to lay off the BitTorrent, pay your $20, and keep the seedbed of PC gaming thriving by searching out worthy games from indie developers.

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

Game Theory: Why Scary Isn't Scary Anymore

Thomas McDonald — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:00:09 -0500

Ringu, the movie that kicked off the Japanese horror craze, scared me as much the third time I saw it as it did the first. It’s a moody, unsettling movie that still packs a punch and its signal image of Sadako, a creepy little girl with long dark hair and ashen skin, quickly entered the visual vernacular.

Monolith did a fair job of exploiting elements of J-Horror to create a genuinely creepy FPS experience with FEAR (2005). The developer understood that Ringu was successful because a) it used atmospheric, psychological horror to produce unease, and b) relied on fleeting images of horror, glimpsed as if in passing. This, coupled with the relative freshness of J-Horror and its stock images, made FEAR one of the few truly frightening PC games in recent memory.

That FEAR managed to do this in the context of a fast-moving shooter was a well-nigh miraculous bit of design juju. That it ultimately ran aground on its piddling level design (the same rocky shoal that always manages to hull Monolith games) was disappointing, but not fatally so.

Four years later, Monolith is attempting to recapture the magic with FEAR 2: Project Origin. Its failures tell us something interesting about games and movies as creative art forms, namely this: They don’t play by the same rules. The best horror movies are scary even when you know all the tricks, even when you know what’s going to happen. Because you are an objective, passive viewer of an artist’s vision, you can be more readily drawn into the inner life of the film.

Games, however, put you inside the nightmare, subjectively, actively, and they don’t hold up as well. I’m not sure just why, but FEAR 2 drives the point home with a vengeance. It is a perfectly fine shooter, but the frightening effects that worked in the first game simply fail to scare anymore.

Perhaps this failure has something to do with subjective/objective differences. But part of me fears it has more to do with the gamer brain being hardwired to demand constant change and new experiences. If that’s the case, then we will, eventually, reach the bottom of the bag of tricks, when there’s nothing left to scare or thrill.

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

Game Theory: Tomb's Edge

Thomas McDonald — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:00:00 -0500

My first thought was, “Aw, not this crap again!”

I was somewhere in the second location of Tomb Raider: Underworld. There was a jump that needed to be made—there’s always a jump that needs to be made—and every time I tried to get the right angle, the camera disappeared into Lara Croft’s gigantic backside like a twitchy colonoscope. If I turned a little bit, Lara herself vanished into the rocks.

Twelve years on, and with Tomb Raider creator Core now little more than a stack of devalued assets, the problems that plagued the series are still haunting Lara Croft like the Ghosts of Polys Past. Underworld is a creaking old hulk of a game, building very slightly on Legend’s meager innovations but still delivering most of what fans expect: running and jumping, some combat, puzzles, and Dr. Lara.

Then I turned to Mirror’s Edge and could not imagine two more sublime contrasts. It is the anti-Tomb Raider. Faith is Bizarro Lara: a wispy, mopey Asian goth with the body of an anorexic 12-year-old boy. Everything about Mirror’s Edge is fresh and new, from the bright whitewashed concrete and dazzling sky of the setting to the groundbreaking running and jumping controls. The sensation of motion and the feeling of control is something actually innovative. Not innovative in the sense of “really good and a little bit new,” but a by-gum fresh way of interacting with a game world.

And I hated it. Oh, how I hated it, with a hatred that burned hot and radioactive like the Springfield reactor. Put aside the insipid story, characters, and social critiques, and you have a maddening kind of Stockholm-syndrome gameplay that tries to convince you that repeatedly plummeting to your death when you fail to pull off improbable moves is actual entertainment.

Just for laughs, I returned to Underworld after I escaped from Mirror’s Edge, and you know what? I found myself enjoying my time with the old girl. Gamers are like middle-aged men (and I’m both): They may look at the skinny, quirky new girl, but they always stick with the solid, reliable woman in the end.

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