Category: Rants

Silence.

Posted on by Matthew VanDevander

So, I haven’t been playing games recently.

After finishing Catherine, I haven’t really found myself in a financial affordance to purchase anything new, although I’ve been thinking of purchasing something old. Quite old, in fact. The game I’ve been considering is a PC game called Planescape: Torment.

Planescape has a reputation for being one of the most well-written RPGs ever. It is often brought up anytime a new RPG is about to be released, as some sort of evidence of a by-gone era of good game writing. Unfortunately, I never played this game and find myself somewhat intolerant of my ignorance. It is uncomfortable for me to proclaim the utter failure of games as a narrative medium when compared to film and books when I have not experienced what many consider to be such a great story.

Discussion of narrative in games is always a bit challenging, because the terms are so poorly defined in most cases. By which, I mean, most people do not understand any clear difference between the terms “narrative”, “plot”, and “story.” Plot being a unchanging linear sequence of events; narrative being an all-encompassing term for a collection of characters, plot, setting, dialogue, and themes; story being the cohesive experience created by the narrative as it’s parts come together in the mind.

Most of the time, people think of these as basically the same thing. But if narrative were just plot, there would be no room for the story to exist separately in the mind of the person experiencing it, and thusly there would be no need or room for discussion of a narrative. We would all be in agreement about the plot, and there would be really nothing else to say.

I think that games can be privy to many of the elements of narrative. But plot is something that they just do not excel at to the same extent as other mediums. However, they can effectively communicate themes, characters, and dialogue. And in the case of setting, I would argue they do better than any other medium.

So if I do choose to buy the game, ( which is conveniently available for download on Good Old Games, along with a bunch of other older PC titles ) I will be interested to see the way in which the game communicates it’s narrative. Especially if it is not as plot-driven as most modern games are.

On an entirely different note, I have just purchased two great books on games. I read the sample previews and just knew that I wanted to spend a little more time with them. The first book is “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Raph Koster. The second is “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” by Tom Bissell. I will hopefully have more to say about those books very soon.

The importance of critical thought on games…

Posted on by Matthew VanDevander

Case in point:

I find it funny that people can catch flack for actually critically reviewing a game. Readers spout back nonsense like, “This review didn’t tell me if it was a good GAME or not, though.” Worshipping “gameplay” is like looking at the cost of the pigments in a painting to decide if the painting is good or not. Gameplay is just a piece of a puzzle, and critical thought about games is not about gameplay. It’s about the experience as a whole. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that gameplay is a factor. It’s just that critical evaluation must look at how gameplay jives with the artistic purpose of the entire work. Building games around mechanics is fine, but as a designer, you have failed if you haven’t look at what the mechanic is saying. If mechanics were all that video games were about, then I would be done with Duet already. Gameplay is just half the story. You need to do the extra work to make a complete game. And judgement of a game definitely involves looking at the gameplay, but a half-rotten banana is not saved by the half that’s still good.

The FPS is dead, if your game is not going to do something about it. Then I don’t give a damn. I don’t want to play it.

I’m currently in the middle of L.A. Noire. And although it’s certainly not the crowning achievement of what video games could be. I must commend it for being a step in the right direction. Even though some would criticize me for supporting something that is only a small step, that seems to be the best that I can do. I try to vote with my wallet, and currently my vote is “no” to more thoughtlessness.

A brilliant game is not afraid to bore me. Games are slices of subjective experience, and all the possibilites of experience in life definitely over-shadow the “fun” section. Games like GTA and Gears are great, but mindless fun is overrunning the mainstream industry. Why can’t game with a budget actually deal with something besides how cool explosions, space marines and goblins are.

Culling

Posted on by Matthew VanDevander

I suppose it is unrealistic to suggest that performance is never an issue when creating a video game. Since the better a game performs, the more graphical tricks you can cram up your games proverbial sleeves. But with the speed of modern computers, 2D games tend to not require much optimization. And as they primarily use tile-based graphics, it is relatively trivial to determine which tiles in the level are on screen (and therefore should be drawn), and which are not.

However, there are some newer 2D games, such as Braid, or Aquaria which use a entirely different method for their graphics which is not tile-based, but instead uses images which can be repeated positioned, rotated, and scaled arbitrarily to build a level. These images are rendered to the screen using modern 3D graphics hardware, which—being designed for 3D games—is rather fast for this application. Even still, there can be quite a large number of these images building up a level, so it is useful to devise an accurate and speedy method for determining which objects are on screen, and which are not. Continue reading “Culling” →

Games and Puzzles

Posted on by Matthew VanDevander

Work continues to crawl along on Duet, however I have been banging my head against a few things recently. Notably I have this question of “How do I know if a game is worth a person’s time to play?” I have been reading some literature on the subject of games and puzzles, so I felt it would be pertinent to share some of my thoughts:

On games, versus Puzzles…

Duet is a puzzle platformer. But that really just describes the mechanics of the game, without really delving very deep into the definitions of such mechanics.

So, in the worst style of writing, let’s define these terms with help from the internet.

A Platformer is a type of video game “mostly presented in 2D” which features “jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles” Requiring the character to start from point A and get to point B by jumping and traversing various obstacles.”

A Puzzle is a type of problem that “tests the ingenuity of the solver”, and according to puzzle collector Stan Isaacs, it is “fun, and has a right answer.”

So, these definitions seem about right to describe Duet. But my research seems to suggest a divide between games and puzzles. So the question that I’m proposing, is where do I draw that line? Is Duet a puzzle or a game?

There are many definitions of what a game is, but my favorite is:

“A Game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” – The Game, The Player, The World: Looking for Heart of Game-ness

Games typically are designed to be as replay-able as possible, the idea being to explore the nebulous space afforded by the game’s mechanics. Once that exploration is completed to the satisfaction of the player, Playing the game is no longer necessary or interesting. Therefore all games must be inherently educational and interesting, but one must remember that a person’s prior experiences in and outside of games can reduce the novelty of an previously unplayed game to a point where she may find it not worth her time.

Puzzles–as defined earlier–however are intrinsically free of replay value. Once a puzzle has been solved–deliberately and with understanding–it is no longer valuable to the solver. This is to say that puzzles are only replayable if the solver does not understand why he solved the puzzle in the first place. Puzzles are similar to games in that prior experience with similar problems can nullify the intrinsic value of a puzzle to the point where the intellectual gain from solving it becomes trivial. However, the primary difference between puzzles and games is the goal.

The goal of puzzles to find the solution, the goal of games is to win against an opponent. However, there are still contradictions within these definitions. What exactly is an opponent in a single player computer game, what exactly is a solution?

Duet, as well as other games (Braid, Portal) are (perhaps uncomfortably) straddling the line between games and puzzles. On one hand, they quickly fit into the earlier definition of a game, they are based on formal systems and rules, they do have quantifiable outcomes with different values assigned to them, the player does exert effort to influence the outcome, she feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences are negotiable. However, the games also fit the definition of a puzzle, they have a solution–solvable only once– having limited replay value.

So where do these games lie exactly, are they really games at all? Is a game a type of puzzle? Is a puzzle a type of game? Are puzzles, by their very nature, inferior to games?

Sorry, I just had to…

Posted on by Matthew VanDevander

As an game designer, I look at games a little bit differently than most people. I try to be critical of video games as a medium, and not just games in particular. I also try to avoid playing games that I think will waste my time. I know that looking at scores for video games online is not an objective way to decide what games to play. However I’m baffled at the how positive the reviews were for Bioshock.

No offence if you’ve played Bioshock and loved it, but I just don’t understand why people would score the game better than Half-Life 2. And I don’t want to seem stuck in the past, I just feel that Bioshock was a flawed game.

Also, if you haven’t played Bioshock, I warn you that there are spoilers below:

Continue reading “Sorry, I just had to…” →

Grey, The new Black and White.

Posted on by Matthew VanDevander

Bear with me, because this is a bit of a long rant, but it’s hopefully worth the read…

Alright, so lets talk about morality and moral choices in games. There’s obviously a lot of games out there that provide moral choices as a core game concept: the Fable series, Bioshock, almost all of Bioware’s games… So all of these games are supposed to be centered around this idea of moral choices between good and evil.

And the basic way in which these games implement morality is with what basically accounts to a slider with good on one end and evil on the other. So in order to become an evil character you have to have a lot of evil points, or if you’re wanting to play a good character you’ve got to have a lot of those points. But the problem is that in order for this to work, and for the game be able to determine where you are on this slider, every decision in the game has be reduced into a simple black and white decision; one choice will yield good points and the other choice yields evil points. Unfortunately, this also makes the most of the game’s choices uninteresting and defeats the initial draw the whole moral choice idea had in the first place, because all of the choices are so easy to make. Continue reading “Grey, The new Black and White.” →