Some thoughts on Mass Effect from Someone Who’s Never Played it

I haven’t played any of the games in the Mass Effect series (though I do own the first and second entries for PC now) but that doesn’t mean I haven’t felt the effect of the hype for the series (as well as some of the recent hate for the third entry.)  The universe of Mass Effect is enormous, so it’s been very difficult to stop myself from spoiling some of the series key highlights and plot twists.  I’ve even gone ahead and watched each of the endings to Mass Effect 3 since there’s been so much controversy.  The way I’m looking at it, it’s going to take me a good long time before I can legitimately complete these games and that if simply viewing the game’s story spoils the experience of playing it then I’ll be glad I didn’t invest myself in it too heavily.

In any case, my initial reaction to the game’s endings were “What’s the big deal?”  It’s hard to understand why there would be so much outrage at what seems to be a very thoughtful conclusion to the series.  But then again, I didn’t invest hundreds of hours and make dozens of decisions to try and shape the game’s outcome.  The game’s director makes no apology for it, and explicitly states that it was supposed to be memorable (implicitly saying that it’s irrelevant whether you feel good about it or not.)  It’s been roundly agreed upon that it satisfies this goal, and I concur with the sentiment.  It is a memorable story, but is that beside the point?  Stories can be told any number of ways, most of which don’t require hours and hours of work on the audience’s part to consume.  No matter how satisfying the story may be, if I can enjoy it just as well by watching it on Youtube and the work to complete the trilogy does nothing more that a book or movie could do better then it hasn’t met its potential as a game.

So now when I think about the ending to Mass Effect 3, I wonder “Why should I play that when I could watch Star Trek instead?” and I start to understand why people are upset with it.  They are still games that I want to play but I’ve adjusted my expectations.

Comment: Risk Taking

In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, Brink Developer Splash Damage was asked the following question:

What do you think is the biggest problem current games suffer from?

1% of the games make 99% of the profit, leaving everything else to wither on the vine. This can be bad for innovation. We’ve got to find ways to get people interested in some of the other stuff out there, because a lot of it is REALLY good and deserves to succeed, otherwise risk-taking will become rarer and rarer.

Developers aren’t the only ones assuming risk in this equation.  I am probably driving this point into the ground, but supporting a video game means sinking $60 into it, many times without even having a chance to demo it first.  Most gamers can’t afford to buy multiple games each month, and many times that’s facilitated by turning around and selling the game to people who want to play it, but don’t value it at it’s full price.  The cost of gaming makes us risk-averse.  The cost of game consoles compounds that further by encouraging gamers to seek out safe game purchases to return the investment in the console.   So if Splash Damage is asking gamers to be more open with our wallets then I say it’s about as likely as Mario and Master Chief teaming up to stop Metal Gear.

If you’re a developer taking a risk with a project, then you need to make sure that your game’s marketing highlights what makes it different with bold letters.  You can’t go halfway and build a game that’s innovative and market it as like it’s any other game out there then be surprised when gamers don’t acknowledge what makes it unique.  I’ve watched the trailers for Brink and all I can tell about the game is that if I bought it I’d be shooting guns and killing dudes and should be feeling cool while I do it.  Naturally, I’m going to ask myself, should I be spending money on this game that I could be otherwise spending on Call of Duty content, which I already know I enjoy when it comes to shooting guns/killing dudes.  The internet says “not quite“.  I understand that there’s more to Brink that makes it unique, but still don’t understand what exactly that is (nor do I have the confidence it will even work.)

I’m willing to share the risk of a project if I understand what I’m risking my money for.  In particular, I risked my money on Drakengard and Drakengard 2.  Neither of which were well received, but based on the marketing for these games I felt that I’d enjoy them for their consistently dark and twisted themes.  They stood out from other action-fantasy games with its morose atmosphere, bizarre monsters, tragic plot, and game play that looked fun enough for me to decide to purchase them when released.  They weren’t fantastic games, but because I understood what was going to make them different, I knew I would enjoy them in spite of their shortcomings.

This isn’t the best way for unique games to go from the drawing board to the living room, yet games are beginning to find other ways to get to their audiences.  New and interesting games don’t have to cost millions of dollars to produce, and we’re starting to move past an era where gaming required expensive consoles or strong computer knowledge.  Game related purchases are becoming more impulsive in markets such as Apple’s app store.  You don’t buy an iPod for gaming, so there isn’t the same need to purchase games that justify having one.  The same goes for consumer computers: you don’t need to purchase a high-powered computer for gaming anymore.  Independent developers can quickly, easily, and cheaply deliver games of all different stripes online to anyone that can use a web browser.  It’s certainly sad to see deserving console titles go under the radar, never to be seen or heard from again, but I can’t blame gamers for passing them up.  Console games that take risks may become more rare if they aren’t marketed effectively, but there’s always going to be a place for these games elsewhere online.

Guess who owns your games?

Spoiler Alert: The answer is probably not you.

The news that THQ’s upcoming game, Homefront, will require an “online pass” to unlock all of the game’s multi-player features has led to broader discussions of who exactly owns the games that you purchase.  I’m not entirely averse to the trend where publishers technically license games to you.  With games purchased through Steam,  in exchange for omitting a physical copy of the game the consumer will be given virtually indefinite access to games they have purchased.  No matter where they are.  It’s not as easy for digital games to be stolen, and it’s impossible for them to be broken or destroyed in say a house fire.  And when Steam puts on one of their notoriously awesome sales, it’s a deal that’s almost too good to pass up.  For whatever consumer “right” is given up it would appear that others are emerging in their place.  If I tried to go to Gamestop and ask for a replacement copy of a game I’d only get a blank stare and then be asked if I want to pre-order $300 of new games.

What I’m not entirely thrilled about with the trend are the instances where these changes aren’t being made known upfront.  With Steam, at least I’m immediately aware that games I purchase there can’t be shared in the conventional sense with other people.  Homefront on the other hand is presenting itself as a game that is entirely contained within its physical format, and its price tag reflects that.  In reality you’re buying a discounted game with the online multi-player pass in one package.  And for the time being, that’s somewhat misleading for someone who believes that they are buying a full priced game and will be able to do everything that they’ve been able do with games in the past.  Homefront is not a game you can loan to your friends (in its entirety), and if you lose the code for your pass and have to play the game on a new console then you’re going to need a new pass.  And unless the game is discounted for used purchases (on top of the discount from the new purchase price), I can only imagine being annoyed and disappointed when I find that I need to purchase something else in order to unlock the full game.

This would be easier to swallow if either it was made clear at the point of purchase (e.g. on the game’s cover) that you’re buying the game and a pass.  Or if you were given the option to buy the game sans multi-player pass, then purchase it online later if you really want to. I don’t imagine that would go over so well with gamers who already pay a monthly fee to Microsoft for access to multi-player.  The online pass, or game license approach isn’t unreasonable so long as the process and product are transparent to the consumer.  It will probably be more accurate in the future to think of game purchases as being analogous to the admission fee to movies, a carnival, or a show that you can keep coming back to whenever you want.  Or they can be thought of as one-time fees to rent digital real estate to house your games.  In any case, it’s as important as ever to understand what exactly you are getting when you hand over your money.

Comment: Is It Wrong To Hate Shadow Of The Colossus?

Kotaku chose to highlight a comment from earlier on this month.  The thrust of it being:

So yeah, my buddy is all annoyed that I didn’t like his precious Team Ico game. And I tried it again this morning and felt the same feeling. The game is really cool but the controls just ruin it for me and I don’t want to play, nor do I feel compelled to finish.

Firstly, I don’t think it’s uncommon for people to ruin games for their friends by pushing them really hard to play them.  They claim to be encouraging you to play a game, but they may be more likely pushing you to experience a game their way.  Having set your expectations, you are now playing that game through their eyes.  It’s easily “ruined” since you can’t dissociate that person from the game, and no two people play a game the same way.  You will be expecting to be knocked off your feet, while your friend was knocked off his feet precisely because s/he wasn’t expecting anything.

Next, Shadow of the Colossus is not a perfect game.  I echo the commenter’s sentiment about the game’s controls: “The amount of frustration I felt because the guy on screen wasn’t doing what I needed him to do was ridiculous.”  When I had originally rated the game, I put it at 3/4 (actually, a 4/5 at the time) precisely because of the controls.  I even rated the game’s time attack mode separately in order to vent frustration with the controls.  I eventually revised my rating for the game up to 4/4 for the strength of its high level ideas and how they shined through a less than optimal control scheme, but I can’t really blame anyone for getting fed up with it.  For the time, I’m not sure how else the game could have been designed, it’s just a matter of how much you are willing to put up with while playing.

This brings me to another Kotaku comment, highlighted this time by Critical Distance.  In defending Roger Ebert’s right to “not give a shit about video games” as art, the commenter makes this point about games (like Shadow of the Colossus) that are used as “proof” that games are art (emphasis mine):

In almost every game suggested (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Flower, Katamari Damacy, even Braid), part of what makes them so special is how they interact with our existing vocabulary as gamers. Not in the way of language, but in the way of interaction. Games such as Shadow of the Colossus are so interesting to us because they transcend our expectations.

The complexity of the controls in SotC is a real deal breaker in appreciating it as being artistic.  And while it’s still artistic, even if only appealing to a limited audience, I think the gaming community is interested in games (as an idea at least) receiving wider acceptance as part of the larger zeitgeist.  So giving criticism to a game like Shadow of the Colossus can be very valuable, especially when it comes to controls.  These are things than can be improved about the game without compromising its spirit.

So yes: it is more than OK to hate Shadow of the Colossus if done so critically.  It could possibly help to make the game more accessible to more people should the game be revised and re-released (as the console game industry is so fond of doing.)

Doom Watch: The Demise of Single Player Games?

Over at Develop, Frank Gibeau of EA offers his thoughts on the future of the console games industry.

I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads; they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out. I think that model is finished.

Online is where the innovation, and the action, is at.

I’m inclined to say he’s right.  Console video games are expensive, and when pitting a 10 hour single player campaign against a 100 hour+ multi-player mode, multi-player is the better value for $60.  I would modify one part of that quote though: “I think that model, in the console gaming industry, is finished.”  And when I say, console gaming industry, I don’t mean to include mobile gaming on i-devices and android.  Nor does it include DLC games.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if people at the top of the console gaming industry really thought that games begin and end with them.  There is plenty of “action” to be had with single player games, it’s just that their model for publishing games has failed.

Which may very well be a good thing.  Alec Meer had a chance to interview Notch, of Minecraft fame, and one subject to come up was the flagging PC games industry.  Notch’s opinion was that the void left by the lack of big name PC games allowed for indie games to get more attention.  There is more breathing space for new ideas, and that’s been a very good thing for gaming on the whole.  I would suspect that the same would be true with console game publishers.  Frank Gibeau might make it sound like single player games as we knew them are done for, but we could actually see many more, much better single-player games.  We already see this to an extent at Xbox Live Arcade, the mobile market, and as already noted, the PC market.  These games have been inexpensive and accessible across the board.

If big console publishers think that they are best suited to provide the service and technology required for multi-player games, then that’s awesome if they can focus more on doing that even better.  So I take this as rather optimistic news.  It will be interesting to see how new ideas can fill the void that publishers like EA leave behind.

Cinematic Game Play and Signal Scrambling

My eye! Belmont! You dick!

During the previous two generations of games, cut-scenes and full-motion video were greeted with groans and disdain.  Criticized for wresting control away from the player and forcing them to watch sub-par movies; they could become a tedious experience.  It’s a design practice that lingers in only the most firmly established franchises such as Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy.  But even then, their relevance is waning.  Have designers seen the light and steered their games towards more interactive experiences?  Kind of.

The HD era of video games has allowed developers to meld the cinematic with the interactive.  It’s a better idea than inundating the player with cut-scenes, but it’s still a practice that manages to drag down a good number of games.  In my own recent experience, I’d say that it has spoiled Dante’s Inferno, Lords of Shadow, and Vanquish.  How exactly?  Well, cinematic sequences are meant to be watched; meaning they will distract the player from what’s important to game play, by design.

Only in the case of Modern Warfare 2, mostly because Infinity Ward seemed to successfully take into mind that they don’t want to punish players for taking in the sights.  Critical, cinematic game play moments were exciting, but not really challenging.  You were only fooled into believing it is a challenging scene.  In contrast, the other examples I listed make some of the most challenging moments cinematic ones as well.

In Vanquish, the frenzy of action on the screen at any given time only serves to distract me from the fact that an instant death lay only a moment away.  With Lords of Shadow, I was expected to perform dramatic QTEs to finish off bosses.  If I failed, then I would be punished not only with having to try the sequence again, but also by the fact that the boss would have some of its health restored.  And finally, with Dante’s Inferno, I would  completely forget about poor Dante when the camera zoomed out to reveal incredible landscapes.  Other times camera angle prevented me from being able to judge depth at all, leading to many pitfall deaths.

It certainly looks nice, but it’s only trivially more interactive than cut scenes and FMVs since the player’s ability to gauge what to do ends up being severely hampered.  Nothing gets me to be frustrated with a game more quickly then poor signalling, and I’m certain that it’s a major contributing factor to the times when a game feels like it’s being “cheap.”  ”Cinematic” games are this generation’s FMV.

Exposure to Violent Video Games

Speaking from my own experience of playing violent video games when I was a minor, I believe that video games are only capable of causing the player to exhibit tendencies that they are already predisposed to.  In other words, if little Billy plays 10 hours of Mortal Kombat and then pounds a kid’s face in with a rock, then Billy plays violent video games because he has a violent disposition that Mortal Kombat appeals to.  Or at least I find that far more plausible than video games acting as some sort of virtual Skinner box for children.  Penn & Teller have already tested that theory out on Bullshit! Here was the result.  The only thing that a video game can condition a kid to do is think violence looks cool, not that actually doing something violent would be cool.  On Bullshit!, Harrison clearly wasn’t prepared to handle the reality of a rifle in any way.  If any kid thinks that they are with only experience firing them in a video game is an idiot.  But last time I checked that’s what most kids excelled at, and are allowed to be.

In California though, Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, have taken it upon themselves to protect children from being idiots.  There’s no evidence to suggest that video games condition children to be able to do anything aside from have slightly better hand eye coordination.  I don’t see any difference in the impact between video games and any other medium of entertainment.  These aren’t cigarettes, they aren’t alcohol, and they aren’t weapons themselves.  They can’t harm the kid him or herself, nor can they harm anyone else.  A law that punishes a store for selling a violent game to a minor can only hope to stop that child from having a violent thought.  And if that’s the goal then what should be done about free, digitally distributed violent games?  And while we’re at it, violent movies, books, comic books, etc.  Never the less, the Supreme Court case has been very entertaining.

Dear Game Designers: Do This

I posted about Inception back in July, but it was really about how games are designed to trick you into certain behaviors, without you understanding that you’re being tricked.  You react to the game in some ways like it were real, or at least your responses are genuine.  Well, along that same train of though, say hello to Suzette (who is not actually pictured above.)  Suzette (or more appropriately, her creator) won in a contest that’s a variation of the Turing test.  She fooled a judge into believing that that she was actually human.

Suzette was programmed to be able to deal with a number of topics, each with associated rules and responses. If the bot was struggling to match these to the actual conversation, it was programmed to steer the discussion toward subjects that it knew about.

I don’t think we will ever see a game that offers true freedom to the player, but he or she doesn’t have to know that.  I think games that can gracefully handle player behavior that it wasn’t designed for have a much greater likelihood of coaxing its audience into cooperating with it than the most polished game of any particular genre.  And games that can make you believe that you’re in control, that your actions have consequences, then you will be much more likely to invest in those actions.  It’s easy to take elements of game design for granted based on the fact that it’s being marketed to the gaming community, who will accept goofy ideas (turkey legs behind trash cans will save your life) without a second thought, but they can accomplish much more by trying to get inside your head.

So game designers, your job is to trick us into taking advantage of your game’s strengths.  Your game will suck if we know we are doing arbitrary tasks to win a hypothetical prize.  We have to actually want to win.

Thanks to @Raisins for the link.

Minecraft and Genre

Minecraft’s popularity just seems compound itself at a baffling rate.   Especially when few people (if anyone) can really put their finger on what makes it so much fun.  There are plenty of videos of star ships, computers, pig canons, super highways, and castles.  They are super cool to look at, but the compelling nature of Minecraft isn’t observed in the final product.  Going from a terrified little block man, to builder of amazing things is where the magic happens.

Margaret Robertson spends “five minutes” with the game to try and explore what makes that magic happen.  Her description of the first night is right on target, if a bit lengthy for describing how she made a box to sit in and accidentally dug herself into into a cave.  But that’s why Minecraft is a game and not literature.  It’s exciting, but awkward to put into words.  The confusion she conveys is also spot on.  There is no real indication of how the fundamentals of the game work, or what you should expect.

I can’t think of any way where having an in-game tutorial would be would be appropriate, but having a reference to the Minecraft Wiki ahead of time makes all of the difference.   I could see where having a game manual that comes along it would make a world of difference.  Just a bit of primer, like you would see with the 8, and 16-bit era games that couldn’t technically include in-game tutorials. (Dear Notch: Please make a Minecraft box/manual, even just a digital copy.  I would pay money for it, in addition to the game’s price.)

The most interesting point in the Gamasutra piece would have to be Robertson’s thought that “despite often being referred to as an open-ended sandbox, [Minecraft] is actually a mission-based RPG.”

It could be overwhelming, but the dependency structure within the game assures that it’s not. I need wood to make a crafting table, I need a table to make a pick, I need a pick to get stone, I need stone to get coal. The tech tree becomes the mission structure, as I seek out each thing to get the next, each a manageable, discrete task.

And each task I complete levels me up, not by adding a number to my profile, but by changing what I have in my pockets.

It makes enough sense based on the definitions we’ve given for video game genres.  But it feels so counter-intuitive that the concept of genre in Minecraft loses its meaning.  And while I’d agree that the mechanics which have been implemented in the game are mature and well planned, I don’t know if Notch was thinking about how Minecraft would be a clever twist on RPGs.  Minecraft is just Minecraft.  Which is to say it is great, regardless of what genres it might resemble.

If you’re still trying to understand what the deal is with Minecraft, then Robertson’s post will take you a long way in understanding it.  But the best way to figure it out is to just play it.

You were there … what was it like?

Joshua Casteel’s piece, Call of Duty: Gaming and Reality in Modern Warfare, is worth spending some time with if you’ve played the Modern Warfare games.  Here are a couple of interesting excerpts:

You were there … what was it like? they’d ask.

“The next time you get killed playing Call of Duty,” I tell one of them, “take the game out back, back behind your dorm. And bury it. Along with a picture of your best friend. That’d be a good start.”

“Why a picture of someone else? I thought you said the next time I get killed.”

“Your own death is too abstract.”

. . .

Corporal Dunn tells you how to navigate The Pit. How to change from your rifle to your sidearm, a Desert Eagle .50-cal. You’re new to the game, but maybe you’re not new to the content. Maybe you’re like me, a vet. The Pit is just another timed qualification course, just like back on base, back stateside. You’ve done this countless times. And the kinesthetics are freaky real. The controller vibrates every time you shoot. And somewhere in the background is that instructor, like a drill instructor, yelling all the right shit at you. Hurry up! Look down your sights! Switch to your sidearm, it’s faster than reloading! Holy shit, you say out loud. This isn’t a flashback. It’s an interactive re-creation. This is fucking scary.