Softcore Gamer

Yesterday was the first day of the ACM Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, and the first of several keynote talks that will be given this week. Ed Catmull, President of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar, talked about managing creative environments. One of the key points he made early in his talk had to do with the wisdom he came upon early in his career: "The story is the most important part of a movie." This seemed like an important truth to have discovered, until he gave it a little more thought. Movies ARE stories, he realized. Saying that the story is the most important part of a movie isn't wisdom, it's a tautology.

Immediately after Catmull's keynote, I attended another very interesting session, a panel presentation about the production of the movie Kung-Fu Panda. One of the panelists who spoke about his experience on the film was the director, John Stevenson. While talking about production schedules and character design, he prefaced himself by saying that story is king. He said it in an offhand manner, as though it was so obvious that it barely rated mentioning. Story was the first thing and the last thing that they worried about, the most important consideration governing all aspects of the production from beginning to end.

Listening to these two men talk about their medium and share a perspective that relates moviemaking to storytelling in such a profoundly fundamental way, I couldn't help but think about the video game industry, where story is so often treated as an afterthought. Of course, games are not movies, as we well know. But, as a proponent of games as a storytelling medium, I have to ask myself: is story in games the same kind of tautology as story in movies? Or are the differences between the media such that story will always be something extra that must be added to a game in a fundamentally different way than to a movie?

Hearing Stevenson talk about the process of developing the movie's story at the same time as the character models, environments, and technologies was something of an eye-opening experience for me. When I think of movies, I usually think about a traditional live-action development pipeline where the script is written and pretty much set before filming begins. Modern CG animated movies, clearly, are a different beast. More than anything, this reminded me of a talk I saw given by Ken Levine last spring at GDC. At the time, I was shocked at the way he talked about the story in Bioshock evolving and changing in significant ways until very late in the production cycle, even within a couple months of the ship date. Bioshock, at the moment, is one of the industry's most important examples of story in games, so the fact that the game was not built around an already-fully-developed story was somewhat disconcerting to me. Thinking about it in relation to Kung-Fu Panda, however, makes it seem more reasonable. In both of these media, this sort of process occurs because it can: unlike actors and live-action footage, digital models, environments, and technologies can be re-scripted and reimplemented as the scene evolves and changes. In the blockbuster environment in which Dreamworks and 2K operate, overlapping the writing and production is cheaper than having a distinct writing stage. It also allows the writing to be integrated into the iterative design process, which is something I hadn't considered before, but could be an important point in developing interactive media.

Don't look for any real in-depth analysis of these ideas here; I'm still in conference mode and my brain is stuck in an intake-cycle. But I'm eager to hear any thoughts you have to contribute to this conversation, if anyone is interested in taking these ideas further.

Gosh, it's been a while since I wrote anything here, hasn't it?

I haven't been writing because I've been busy working on other projects, including a number of interesting games that are now in various stages of the development process. Hopefully I will be talking about some of them in greater detail soon, although I'm well aware of my track record when it comes to making promises about future posts.

I do plan to pick up on the writing schedule here on Softcore Gamer, though. Among other things, I am beginning classes at USC in a couple weeks and I have been given a new blog over at the Interactive Media Division. For the time being, I plan on cross-posting relevant content on both blogs, but regardless of how things shape up I will continue to post here on an extremely irregular schedule, just as you're used to.

In sadly related news, I've heard nothing out of HardCasual in quite a while. Hopefully those guys are going through a similar period of productive non-writing and will eventually return, because I really enjoyed their take on game culture and the industry.

I've got a couple good posts planned to follow up on Photopia, but in the meantime, I just want to point out a couple of things that you may or may not have seen floating around the Internet.

• An animated (in Yahtzee-esque fashion) video about sexual content in games, or rather, the lack thereof. The argument, which is basically the same one I would make, is that the seeming inability of game developers to incorporate sexual themes in a mature and artistic manner is detrimental to the medium. Honestly, there's nothing here that I found groundbreaking, but Daniel Floyd does a great job of summing up the issues in a clear and entertaining way.
• A fantastic post by Emily Short about the structure and process of writing IF by breaking a story down into scenes of distinct types and intents. If you have any interest in interactive fiction, as I increasingly do, this is definitely worth a read.
• A very funny post by Leigh Alexander that lays out what Hillary Clinton needs to do if she still wants to win the nomination. (Hint: Agents are go.)

Hope you enjoy those links; sorry there's not more by way of analysis here. I just needed to break back into writing a little bit, because it's been so long. Hopefully the first Photopia post will be coming shortly.

I was skimming through Kotaku this weekend and this post on the top ten video game emotions jumped out at me. It's over at Only a Game, and it's based on a survey of around a thousand gamers. The results are interesting, plus I learned a couple great new words: fiero, the sense of triumph over adversity, and naches, the feeling of pride in the accomplishments of a student. A cursory analysis of the survey data seems to suggest that casual gaming is big; a feeling of triumph is great, but softer emotions like curiosity and amusement are even bigger.

I'm also pleased to have seen this because I was unfamiliar with Only a Game. But scanning through their archives, it seems they've worked on some very interesting things.

I'll give you the basic run-down here; for an actual analysis of these results, check out the original article.

10. Bliss
09. Relief
08. Naches
07. Surprise
06. Fiero
05. Curiosity
04. Excitement
03. Wonderment
02. Contentment
01. Amusement

And the emotions at the bottom of the list were

20. Sadness
21. Guilt
22. Embarrassment

I have a couple problems with this study, although I'm thrilled so see research being done in this area. My major concern is that the survey's scale seems to conflate two distinct ideas: the effectiveness of emotions in games and the desireability of emotions in games. There is no room on the scale to describe, for example, an emotion that I would like to feel, and which I actively seek out in games, but which is not effectively presented. I'd also like to see a better breakdown of what emotions players recognize as being present in the games they play, independent of their effectiveness. Do the respondents mean to say that they don't like feeling sad, or that games are bad at making them feel sad?

The author notes that this is only a preliminary study. There's an enormous amount of potential here; quite honestly, this article leaves me with more questions than answers. I'd love to see a follow-up that addresses trends within demographics and even within individuals - do the same people who seek out fiero also seek out curiosity, or do these emotions represent two different types of gamer, the acheiver and the explorer? How does a person's reaction to negative emotions in games relate to their reaction to similar emotions in other media - do people who enjoy tearjerker movies also seek out sadness in games? I'm also curious about how these players go about seeking out their emotions of choice, and where they find them. Which genres, and which games specifically, give them the emotional high they're looking for?

Very promising research. I'm hoping to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future.

I've been having some serious trouble formulating a response to this post over at HardCasual. A couple days ago they called out me and the rest of the blogosphere for the way we've handled You Have to Burn the Rope. HardCasual's point is that YHTBTR is a "smart" game, like Passage, and that games journalists are making it out to be merely "clever," by which they seem to mean "good only for a cheap laugh." I've been reading HardCasual for a couple weeks now, and I like it a lot, but something about this rubbed me the wrong way. I do agree, though, that YHTBTR is worth a bit of deeper analysis.

Aside from being funny, what, exactly, is YHTBTR saying? It's an almost perfect example of a classic action-adventure puzzle of the sort you might find in a Zelda game. It's simple, but its simplicity shouldn't be overestimated. Under normal circumstances, a player would naturally spend a couple minutes jumping around bullets and throwing axes before he or she figured out how to beat the Grinning Colossus. The point, of course, is that these aren't normal circumstances, and the game takes every available opportunity to point out the solution to the puzzle ahead of time. Knowing the solution removes all - well, almost all; there's still some platforming that requires twitch-play - the challenge from the game.

What's interesting to me is what that leaves you with: this super-simple, ultra-short, minimally challenging game is a perfect test case for an experiment about the relationship between difficulty, accomplishment, and fun. I've played YHTBTR a dozen times now, despite the fact that there is very little reason to do so. One play-through is almost exactly like another; it's impossible to lose, and no significant way to win with style. There's no emotional build, and likewise no significant narrative arc. The credits song is catchy, but I've already got it as an MP3, so that isn't a great motivator. The only good incentive, as far as I can make it out, is an emotional burst associated with winning, even in the absence of a challenge.

Possibly I'm reading my own reaction all wrong. It's conceivable that the real attractor to this game is the relatively high production value. Certainly, YHTBTR is well polished. Its graphics are solid, its interface is very well designed, and its self-aware sense of irony is downright charming. But it seems to me that there is something about burning that rope; maybe not a feeling of accomplishment, exactly, but a sense of satisfaction, or at least completion, that provides some sort of positive reinforcement. Something which indicates that - or rather, reinforces my belief that - at least for some gamers, myself included, a game can impart a sense of joy that is unrelated to its difficulty.

Is this what Kian Bashiri was trying to way with his game? I don't know; maybe not. It's what I got out of the game. If you're interested in the author's intentions, there's an interview with him over at IndieGames that's worth checking out.

The problem I have with HardCasual on this issue, aside from the pretentious tone that they adopted and the fact that they seemed to spend more energy complaining about the blogosphere's reaction to the game than on their own analysis of it, is that the production of FAQ files and video walkthroughs is not counterproductive to the message of YHTBTR. In fact, from my perspective, it's an excellent demonstration of the game's lesson. Creating elaborate guides for this game simply reinforces the central point that the puzzle is not a significant challenge, and doing it with the evident joy expressed on blogs like Rock, Paper, Shotgun or my own supports the thesis that a game without a significant challenge can still be fun. I think the fact that these fan-creations were so quickly aggregated on the YHTBTR homepage is further evidence that, far from detracting from the game, these artifacts are very much in keeping with what the game is trying to accomplish.

I woke up this morning and checked Rock, Paper, Shotgun to find this gem of a flash game. It's pretty short, although the difficulty is not what you would expect for this kind of thing. In fact, it's so extreme that you can't help but feel that the designer is making a larger comment on the difficulty of games in general, or perhaps the role of difficulty as an element of a game's design. Regardless, the game is enough of a conceptual treat that I'd recommend you give it a try so that you can see what it's about, even if you don't finish it. And for those of you who stick it out to the end, the credits song is the best thing since Still Alive.

(If you want to get to the end but are having trouble, there are several resources available. Check out the official game manual first, and then IndieFAQs has a walkthrough and RPS has a puzzle guide. There's also a video walkthrough on YouTube.)

Alright, usually I have no compunctions about spoiling a game when I attempt to dissect, analyze, or even just comment on it. Especially if the game, like Photopia, is ten years old. But this situation is different, because I know there are people out there who don't get as much vitamin IF as they should, and because the game in question is so overwhelmingly about narrative experience that spoilers would ruin it completely. That said, Adam Cadre's Photopia does touch on a number of themes that I'd like to talk about in greater depth. Which makes for a dilemma.

So here's what I'm going to do: today, I'm going to recommend that you go play Photopia. If that's not enough to make you actually do it, then let me mention that the game comes well recommended. It won the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition and has recently been favorably reviewed by both Play This Thing! and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Go ahead and read those reviews if you need convincing, they won't spoil anything either.

Photopia is interactive fiction, light on the interactive. The story is extremely linear, and although it does contain a couple puzzles, they're simple and pretty straightforward. There should be little of the adventure-game-style frustration that often accompanies this kind of game, although it is text-based so you will have to work with a parser. The other thing I'll say about it is that it's only about forty-five minutes long, and it's worthwhile to find yourself a little block of time to play through the whole thing. I played it over the course of two days, and I wish now that the experience had been uninterrupted. Oh, and also, I want to repeat RPS's advice: when the time comes, for God's sake, talk to Alley about astrophysics.

After you've had a chance to play the game, I'll talk some more about the specific things it sparked for me. So here's your warning: sometime in the future, subsequent entries on this blog will contain Photopia spoilers. And you will be much better off, as a reader of this blog and as a human being, if you've played the game before that time comes. You have been warned!

ETA: PTT! has links to the game and relevant interpreters, so go there for the download.

Happy April Fools' Day, everyone. A funny thing happened to me today: I got a letter informing me of my acceptance into the Interactive Media grad school program at USC's School for Cinematic Arts. I was introduced to the program by Jamie last summer and worked hard to put together what I felt was a strong application at the end of last year, so I'm both relieved and excited to get this news. I think this program is an excellent fit for me and exactly what I want to spend the next three years doing. I'm also nervous as hell because going back to school will mean completely changing my life around. This is not a bad thing in itself - from the right perspective, it's a very good thing - but change is always scary.

I do want to point out the comedically bad timing on the part of the Cinematic Arts Admissions Committee. Sending out acceptance letters on April Fools' Day? That's a good way to cause a lot of nervous breakdowns. Er, did that come off as unappreciative? Sorry. Please don't send me another letter on April 2nd taking it all back. Thanks!

Seriously, though, we've been conditioned not to believe anything we read on April Fools' Day - especially those of us who are connected to the tech industry and get our news from the Internet. Most of our trusted news sources and the iconic companies they report on have a history of prankishness that comes out this time of year. I like the way John Murrell put in today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: "...maybe we need a day like this each year. Thanksgiving reminds us to be grateful; April Fools’ reminds us to be skeptical. Both qualities are helpful year-round." In case you missed them, there were a couple great April Fools' Day gags today. My favorites included IGN's exclusive trailer for a live-action Legend of Zelda movie (which clearly represents a great deal of effort for a joke and, frankly, makes me wish it wasn't April first; this movie would be terrible but I would probably go totally crazy and I would definitely stand in line for it on opening night); the trailer for Blizzard's new cutting-edge version of WoW, Molten Core; and ThinkGeek's revolutionary Betamax to HD-DVD converter.

Have a happy April and stay skeptical!

Since GDC, Joystiq has been running a feature wherein they "target[ed] various industry folks with a typically contrived adventure game puzzle" in order to, I don't really know, give them a taste of their own medicine? Honestly, it was a half-baked idea. In theory it sounds sorta clever, but when people are asked to respond to a nonsensical hypothetical without context or a common understanding to the rules or purpose, well, mostly what you get is confusion.

Unless you're talking to Tim Schafer, in which case what you get is brain candy.

To be fair, the reason that Schafer's article takes off where the others in the series fall flat has less to do with Schafer than Ludwig Kietzmann, the author of the feature. What makes Schafer's response so much fun is that he actually tries to engage with the question as though it were a game. Ron Gilbert did exactly the same thing, albeit in not quite so playful a way, in the first part of the series, but Kietzmann refused to give him any traction. Essentially, when Gilbert played, the "GDC Quest Quiz" challenge wasn't a game, because it wasn't interactive in any sort of meaningful way. When Schafer played, it was. And it turns out, games are fun.

This post started out as a review of The Baron and I had enormous difficulty writing it, for two reasons. First, because The Baron is a deeply complex game with many interesting features and powerful thematic elements that I did not want to spoil. And second, because reviewing games is not really what I'm interested in doing here. So instead of reviewing The Baron I will simply say, "The Baron is a deeply complex game with many interesting features and powerful thematic elements; you should play it," and then address a couple interesting points about interactive fiction.

I am not an expert on interactive fiction. Honestly, although I'm a fan, I have pretty limited experience. I only played a few pieces of IF last year, and of those the only one that provoked the same sort of contemplation as The Baron is Floatpoint. In these two pieces, however, I'm impressed at how well an in medias res approach to storytelling works. In each piece, the player is dropped unceremoniously into a complex and unfamiliar situation. In each, the first order of business is an exploration of the narrative space to answer some fundamental questions: Who am I? Where am I? What is my relationship to this place and to these people? What is my role in the world, and what is my goal? These elements of the story are authored, not left up to the player, but they have to be discovered or inferred by investigation of the game world. Certainly, this is not an approach common to all IF games; nor is it something that is likely to appeal to all players, although I love it when it is done as well as it is in these games. It seems a technique that is much less common in mainstream games, however, and although that may have something to do with the fact that IF is already a niche genre and therefore attracts more niche styles-of-play, I think that text-based games lend themselves more to this sort of technique.

Graphical systems, by their nature, are capable of conveying much more information at a glance than text-based systems. In games, this functionality is largely devoted to representation of space. In the typical 2D or 3D game, at any given time the majority of the player's screen will be filled with some sort of view of the world. Because of the visual nature of this representation, almost all information about the player character's environment is conveyed implicitly. In a 3D game, the player may have to swing the camera around to see things from a different angle, but he or she doesn't have to make an express effort to get an understanding (at least, a basic or superficial understanding) of the composition of the space surrounding the character. In contrast, the explicit exploration of space is one of the common processes by which a player interacts with a text-based system. In order to come to an understanding of environment, the player does have to make this sort of express effort to investigate elements of the scene. At the beginning of The Baron, for example, a basic look command will inform the player that the room contains a table. It's necessary to examine the table to discover that a framed photograph rests on it; it's further necessary to examine the photograph to find out what it depicts. This sort of interaction is not at all unreasonable in a text-based system, but no analogue occurs in a graphical system where the table and photograph are apparent in a cursory inspection.

It seems to me that this sort of spacial exploration runs nicely parallel to the narrative exploration that in medias res storytelling demands. In fact, in many cases the character and general backstory can be folded into the description of space and significant objects (including non-player characters) in the environment. In the case of the photograph on the table, examining the picture could trigger a memory or some other description that relates the character to the world. (This technique is used in The Baron, although not at this particular moment; I believe this sort of "folded-in" discovery is also employed in Floatpoint, along with more explicit exposition.) This makes the process of narrative exploration much more natural - or, at least, piggy-backs it onto a more natural process - to mitigate player confusion and frustration. In our graphical analogue, the player has no reason to explicitly examine the picture, since it is already visible, and therefore there is no place for secondary information to be accessed intuitively.

This idea of exploration is particularly interesting in The Baron because of the cyclical nature of the game. On the first pass, the player is exploring the physical space and the narrative space, trying to come to an understanding of the environment and the character. Subsequent passes are devoted to exploring the possibility space of user interaction, trying different actions and seeing what the consequences are; because of the cyclical set-up and the thematic focus on motivated action, this sort of exploration of possible actions becomes a central game mechanic over the course of multiple plays-through of the game. Using the process of choosing an action as a game mechanic in this way is another area where I believe the text-based interaction of IF has an advantage over graphical games.

The set of valid options may be just as limited as with a graphical interface, but the set of potentially valid options is larger. Usually, in a graphical interface, there will be a limited number of points of interaction (places to click, for example) and a limited number of types of interaction (items to use, for example). The set of potentially valid options is a combination of interaction types and points. This set may be very large, which could make finding a valid option non-trivial, but it is clearly finite and, moreover, can be easily enumerated. The set of potentially valid options in a text-input interface includes any imperative phrase the player can think of. Even if, depending on the sophistication of the game's text-processing system, this set is severely restricted by practical considerations, it is still usually much harder to enumerate than its graphical counterpart. (Technically, it is just as enumerable, but for the player - who usually doesn't know the extent of the set of valid commands - it is harder to process.) This can makes the player feel like he or she has unlimited options - at least until it becomes apparent the fact that a subset of the potentially valid options will not be understood by the system. This, unfortunately, is another inherent quality of text-based interaction, and I would say it is the major drawback and the reason that text-based games has fallen so far out of favor. And perhaps minimizing that particular player frustration is a reason to avoid text as an interface mechanism, but games like The Baron both prove that great experiences can come out of a text interface and remind us of some of the things we sacrifice when we make graphical games.