Thank you to everyone I met over the last three days, who have made this my most incredible GDC yet (you know who you are.) It was wonderful meeting you all in person for the first time, and having that opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences, if only briefly. In the past, my most exciting memories from GDC were events; this year it was the people. I'm sincerely looking forward to seeing you all again soon.
2.23.2008
2.14.2008
Work
A long time ago, I promised to share the specific elements of Perseus Mandate that I was responsible for.
I came into the project more than halfway through its life cycle. The entire single-player campaign was set in stone. My duties were primarily to A) bring various campaign levels from alpha or beta quality up to final state, and B) to create original maps for the Instant Action gametype.
First I'll share the original levels I built.
Instant Action
The Instant Action gametype made its first appearance in the 360 port of the original FEAR. These are standalone maps unrelated to the single-player campaign, which allow you to simply blast through a bunch of FEAR's combat without narrative elements to slow down the pacing. I was assigned to create three Instant Action maps (or "Bonus Maps" as they were called in the PC version.) One was based heavily off of an original design by Ian Shephard, so I don't consider it "my map" any more than the levels that I worked on from the single-player campaign.
But I created two other Instant Action maps from the ground up, handling all stages of development from original concept to final visuals and bugfixing. They were sort of "concept maps:" 'Sprint' and 'Arena.'
Sprint
This map eliminates all elements of exploration and equipment scavenging. Instead it focuses on an extremely focused linear path with checkpoints along the way at which the player can refill without slowing down. The challenge is to complete the "track" as quickly as possible, dropping each enemy as efficiently as possible so that you can cross the finish line without breaking stride.
Upon playing the demo of The Club, I felt that their game structure was a much more involved version of my concept for Sprint. Obviously the two productions were each developed completely independently of one another, but it felt validating to see another studio executing on the concept fully.
Click for bigAmanda Stewart performed an environment art pass on this map. The setting for Sprint is a bright, clean office complex, lit throughout by skylights. This environment was chosen to emphasize the focus on precise execution of your run, and to avoid enemies getting lost in the shadows. One battle does take place in the basement/generator room underneath the building.
Click for big
ArenaThis map is the opposite of Sprint: it's a large, enclosed courtyard-- basically a single, open-plan room-- that gets invaded by wave after wave of enemies. The player must survive until the final enemy is killed. The checkpoint system reappears, by way of supply crates that are periodically dropped by planes flying overhead in a very arcadey fashion. The player kills waves of enemies, restocks at the supply drop points in the corners of the map, then continues the cycle.
Click for bigAgain, the player's goal is to clear the map in the fastest possible time. My focus was to create exciting, open-ended combat in a dynamic space; challenge the player to maintain awareness of his surroundings at all times; and include some excellent destructible elements in the final battle, once the arena had served its purpose. So at the end of the level, the huge "Power Armor XP" mecha is dropped from a helicopter and crashes through the sculpture in the center of the map, then can smash through the surrounding concrete arches to chase the player.
Amanda Stewart provided the standing lamp and destroyed arch art assets.My favorite detail of the map is the large clock on the north wall, which runs in real time. I was actually surprised at how nicely the visuals turned out, since I was responsible for all the geometry and texture placement on the buildings surrounding the courtyard (I am a level designer, not a world artist.) The modernist sculpture in the center was also fun to build, and to blow up.
Single-player
I was responsible for adjusting gameplay elements, event scripting, tuning, performance, and visuals in a handful of the single-player campaign maps, but I don't feel like I "owned" any of that content. If my fellow LDs laid the foundation and built the frame, I just put up the drywall and gave it a couple coats of paint. These levels included the abandoned Underground, the sewers/subway following the Underground, and the mining facility, as well as a good deal of work on the final level of the game.
One area of the single-player campaign that I did feel some ownership over was the freight tunnel that preceded the mines. The player rides an elevator down into the large subterranean freight tunnel, and accompanies an NPC through it. I was handed the shell geometry, and built the visual look of the area:
Click for bigTom Hanrahan (late of TimeGate, now of Monolith) provided the layout and shell geometry. Art assets come from the original FEAR, as well as the TimeGate art department. I placed the textures and art prefabs, provided final detail geometry, built the large pipes along the ceiling, and lit the space. The dusty fog of the volumetric lights really sells the scene, but unfortunately it only appears on the PC version; we cut volumetrics altogether from the 360 version for performance reasons.
Moments
Throughout the campaign, I was asked to go in and add some unique moments-- scares, scripted events or enemy encounters. While I only felt like a guest in the other guys' levels, the events that I added were themselves entirely of my own conception and execution. Spoilers ahead; here are some unique moments I snuck into the game proper:
Data Core Vision
During the first act, the player works his way through the ATC's Data Core facility. The main shaft runs many stories vertically through the center of the building; as the player criss-crosses through the level, he passes through the main shaft a number of times. The first couple times you pass through, it looks like this:
After becoming familiar with the environment, you pass through a final time, and are confronted with this scene:
The Data Core environment was built by Jim Kneuper, and the cloning pod assets were provided by TimeGate art department. The scene did what I wanted-- you feel frantic and distressed as you try to escape from the horrible machine, then disoriented as everything is suddenly back to normal. Jim said it's his favorite part of the level, which tends to make one feel good.
Foreshadowing of Chen's Fate
As the player presses through the sewers under the city, he suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar place: a strange industrial facility. He's greeted by his squadmate, Chen... but the vision ends with an image that implies things might not end well for the good lieutenant.
Art assets provided by TimeGate art department. I built the industrial facility environment and scripted the sequence, as well as the transition out of and back into the sewers. The sewers were built by Jim Kneuper. The idea was for an attentive player to suddenly remember this scene far down the road when Chen finally meets his end, and to foster that spark of realization when the two scenes click.
The Abandoned Hobo Camp
Before exiting the sewers, the player encounters a makeshift barricade of sheetmetal and cast-off home furnishings. Enemies burst through with breaching charges, sending debris flying. Upon further inspection you find mattresses and a flaming barrel; apparently vagrants had set up a small shanty here.
I placed all the set dec and scripted the enemy encounter. This event was originally created for the Perseus Mandate demo, and was integrated into the campaign proper. The level was built built by Jim Kneuper.
Chen Disappears
After a large explosion rocks the city, the player takes refuge in the abandoned Underground. He and Chen are separated from the rest of the squad. They must hurry to get back topside. The player follows Chen, until the inexplicable happens.
Shane Paluski (late of TimeGate, now of Remedy) is responsible for the scripting in the initial monologue, as well as the overall visual look of the Underground. My role was to make the player follow Chen for a bit, as this segment has originally been solo. I wanted to show off as much of the partner AI's range of motion as possible, so I had Chen ducking under obstructions, tumbling through windows, and sliding over tables. I had the player's vision distort and Chen dissolve into ash, leaving the player to wonder if he'd even really been there in the first place.
Window Surprise
While working your way back up from the Underground, the player comes across a small ammo cache in a side room.
Bruce Locke built this level. This little event I stuck in is a cheap scare, but one that's apparently effective. It's especially satisfying putting these kinds of shocks into the game late in development. A tester in QA has become completely familiar with the map, having played through it dozens of times; then one day you hear him literally scream as a scare sequence suddenly pops up somewhere it hadn't been before. Priceless.
Interrupted Firing Squad
When Paxton Fettel is killed, his platoon of Replica soldiers goes dormant, instantly falling into hibernation where they stood. As evidenced by scenes throughout the FEAR games, Replica forces tend to purge their surroundings of any civilian life. This gave me an idea for a grimly humorous little tableau:
Bruce Locke built the level. At this spot, I placed a squad of Replicas that was in the midst of executing a group of civilians, firing squad-style, when Fettel's death pulled the plug on their consciousness. The guy on the far left was seconds from meeting his maker like his two unfortunate friends, when out of nowhere the Replicas just dropped what they were doing and went to sleep. As you can see, the mental stress left the survivor trembling in a quite a state.
Wicked Witch
Finally, a little flourish I added to a scene I'd become way too familiar with while working on the game. After the player goes through enormous amounts of trouble to apprehend one Gavin Morrison, the guy is up and crushed to death in one of Alma's psychic freak-outs. I wasn't responsible for this scene, except for one small bit at the end.
Shane Paluski scripted the scene. It's messed up, but also kind of funny: I mean it's only one step away from a piano falling on the dude. So I added the skid motion to the truck after it lands, and left poor Morrison's feet sticking out from underneath. More than a couple people suggested his toes should curl up when you look at them. I'm glad this little touch made it into the final product.
So, those are my personal contributions to the game, along with the less tangible finishing work I did throughout. My time spent working on it was incredibly fun, rewarding, and challenging. Less than a year ago I was a tester; now I can point to stuff in a retail video game and say "I made that." Which is nice.
Anyway, enough about my day job! Thanks for bearing with me.
Oh, and happy Valentine's Day.
Moments
Throughout the campaign, I was asked to go in and add some unique moments-- scares, scripted events or enemy encounters. While I only felt like a guest in the other guys' levels, the events that I added were themselves entirely of my own conception and execution. Spoilers ahead; here are some unique moments I snuck into the game proper:
Data Core Vision
During the first act, the player works his way through the ATC's Data Core facility. The main shaft runs many stories vertically through the center of the building; as the player criss-crosses through the level, he passes through the main shaft a number of times. The first couple times you pass through, it looks like this:
After becoming familiar with the environment, you pass through a final time, and are confronted with this scene:
The Data Core environment was built by Jim Kneuper, and the cloning pod assets were provided by TimeGate art department. The scene did what I wanted-- you feel frantic and distressed as you try to escape from the horrible machine, then disoriented as everything is suddenly back to normal. Jim said it's his favorite part of the level, which tends to make one feel good.
Foreshadowing of Chen's Fate
As the player presses through the sewers under the city, he suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar place: a strange industrial facility. He's greeted by his squadmate, Chen... but the vision ends with an image that implies things might not end well for the good lieutenant.
Art assets provided by TimeGate art department. I built the industrial facility environment and scripted the sequence, as well as the transition out of and back into the sewers. The sewers were built by Jim Kneuper. The idea was for an attentive player to suddenly remember this scene far down the road when Chen finally meets his end, and to foster that spark of realization when the two scenes click.
The Abandoned Hobo Camp
Before exiting the sewers, the player encounters a makeshift barricade of sheetmetal and cast-off home furnishings. Enemies burst through with breaching charges, sending debris flying. Upon further inspection you find mattresses and a flaming barrel; apparently vagrants had set up a small shanty here.
I placed all the set dec and scripted the enemy encounter. This event was originally created for the Perseus Mandate demo, and was integrated into the campaign proper. The level was built built by Jim Kneuper.
Chen Disappears
After a large explosion rocks the city, the player takes refuge in the abandoned Underground. He and Chen are separated from the rest of the squad. They must hurry to get back topside. The player follows Chen, until the inexplicable happens.
Shane Paluski (late of TimeGate, now of Remedy) is responsible for the scripting in the initial monologue, as well as the overall visual look of the Underground. My role was to make the player follow Chen for a bit, as this segment has originally been solo. I wanted to show off as much of the partner AI's range of motion as possible, so I had Chen ducking under obstructions, tumbling through windows, and sliding over tables. I had the player's vision distort and Chen dissolve into ash, leaving the player to wonder if he'd even really been there in the first place.
Window Surprise
While working your way back up from the Underground, the player comes across a small ammo cache in a side room.
Bruce Locke built this level. This little event I stuck in is a cheap scare, but one that's apparently effective. It's especially satisfying putting these kinds of shocks into the game late in development. A tester in QA has become completely familiar with the map, having played through it dozens of times; then one day you hear him literally scream as a scare sequence suddenly pops up somewhere it hadn't been before. Priceless.
Interrupted Firing Squad
When Paxton Fettel is killed, his platoon of Replica soldiers goes dormant, instantly falling into hibernation where they stood. As evidenced by scenes throughout the FEAR games, Replica forces tend to purge their surroundings of any civilian life. This gave me an idea for a grimly humorous little tableau:
Bruce Locke built the level. At this spot, I placed a squad of Replicas that was in the midst of executing a group of civilians, firing squad-style, when Fettel's death pulled the plug on their consciousness. The guy on the far left was seconds from meeting his maker like his two unfortunate friends, when out of nowhere the Replicas just dropped what they were doing and went to sleep. As you can see, the mental stress left the survivor trembling in a quite a state.
Wicked Witch
Finally, a little flourish I added to a scene I'd become way too familiar with while working on the game. After the player goes through enormous amounts of trouble to apprehend one Gavin Morrison, the guy is up and crushed to death in one of Alma's psychic freak-outs. I wasn't responsible for this scene, except for one small bit at the end.
Shane Paluski scripted the scene. It's messed up, but also kind of funny: I mean it's only one step away from a piano falling on the dude. So I added the skid motion to the truck after it lands, and left poor Morrison's feet sticking out from underneath. More than a couple people suggested his toes should curl up when you look at them. I'm glad this little touch made it into the final product.
So, those are my personal contributions to the game, along with the less tangible finishing work I did throughout. My time spent working on it was incredibly fun, rewarding, and challenging. Less than a year ago I was a tester; now I can point to stuff in a retail video game and say "I made that." Which is nice.
Anyway, enough about my day job! Thanks for bearing with me.
Oh, and happy Valentine's Day.
2.09.2008
Wager
[Thank you to everyone who has added thoughtful response to this post:
Borut Pfeifer took my bet, as did my friend Marek Bronstring. Michael Samyn contributed an important distinction to the argument. N'Gai Croal was kind enough to lend his considerable insight to the issue in a pair of posts, working from a wide base of media criticism. John Walker lent his thoughts to my, Borut, and N'gai's pieces in an entry on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It is heartening to see so much knowledge and passion enter into this debate.]
I'm not normally a gambling man, but I'm in a betting mood. Maybe a bit pessimistic, too. And I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today.
I feel this way due partly to the inherent formal obstacles to video games' wide acceptance, and partly because of the uninspiring mindset prevalent among the developers and players of games. I make the comics comparison because I believe the two media have much in common at a high level.
Video games are hard for people to get into. The barrier for entry is higher than perhaps any other popular entertainment medium. To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.) At the advent of popular film, you only needed to walk to a movie theatre and pay your nickel (or nowadays, ten bucks) to see the latest release. Processing the experience isn't an issue: sit, watch, and you've received an experience equal to anyone else in the audience.
Television brought moving pictures into the home, and presented a more significant obstacle: the large sum required to purchase a television set. But this was a one-time fee, and once installed, the viewer needed only tune in, sit down, and enjoy. Cable television, VHS, DVD, satellite, all required a nominal entry or recurring fee and specialized hardware, but the media received was passive and accessible. It required no physical investment or learned skill to enjoy.
Then came the internet; the fee for entry was highest of all, requiring a home computer, and the physical and skill investments were equally taxing: one had to frequently interact with a mouse and keyboard, know how to type, and understand the interface of their chosen operating system and the conventions of the internet well enough to get online and navigate effectively. But the received media itself was familiar-- static words, images and video-- and the required skills could be picked up from a suburban gradeschool or common office job. As the relative price of a home computer dropped and usability of the web increased, the internet became the new millennium's shared media experience of choice.
How do video games fit into this scheme? Their popular debut fell between television and home video, and was highly accessible: Pong, Pac Man and Centipede arrived in bars, movie theatres, bowling alleys and arcades, and one needed only drop in their quarter and try their hand. Sure, they were more like electronic carnival games than any sort of meaningful media experience, but they touched lots of people and indoctrinated them into the conventions of video games. Home games such as the Atari and NES came next, gradually overtaking the popularity of arcade games and putting standup cabinets out of business. These home consoles had major barriers to entry: the high financial cost of the unit itself as well as each game cartridge, the physical requirement that one constantly be manipulating a control pad or joystick while taking in the experience, and the skill investment of learning how to excel at them without failing. Home PC games became popular at this time as well, and only rebalanced the same barriers: PCs were significantly more expensive than home consoles but had less general usefulness than they do now, while still requiring constant input and mental investment in deciphering play mechanics to avoid failure.
Over time, the technical and systemic complexity of video games have increased, while the barriers to entry have largely remained undamaged. Taking inflation into account, the cost of a home console unit has stayed largely constant since the mid-80's (and the price of a competent gaming PC has similarly kept pace;) controllers have sprouted more buttons, gyroscopes, and analogue sticks than ever; and it's still extremely common for games of high quality to be too difficult for a non-gamer to play effectively.
In other words, the very nature of interactive games bars them from ever truly gaining mass acceptance, and therefore mass cultural relevance. The strength of video games, what makes them unique, interesting, and affecting, is that they engage in a dialogue with each individual player. They ask you to invest yourself in the experience, to explore and understand the logic of their gameworld, and to activate the experience by doing. Video games require you to be involved, to take responsibility for your actions onscreen. They expect more out of you than film, television, the internet or a book does. You get from video games what you're willing to put in. The audience at large only wants to take.
People don't want to enter into an agreement that requires them to be constantly fiddling with a complex input device. They don't want to expend effort understanding an interactive space. They don't want to face failure while trying to be entertained. They simply want to sit back and enjoy. They want media that will go on without them. They want received experience. Passiveness. They want to relax in front of the television set, doing not much of anything.
That is one aspect of why video games will never be a relevant cultural medium.
The second is the form of expression itself used by video games, and the pervasive attitude of the people who create and consume them.
The mode of expression in a video game is the interactive system. The simplest game would contain one system. Pong, for instance, is born out of the interplay of three systems: player input moves the paddles up and down; the ball bounces back and forth according to a simple physics simulation; a score increments based on the ball leaving one or the other side of the screen. So, you move your paddles to affect the ball, which affects the score. Fast forward to a popular contemporary game like Grand Theft Auto 3, Halo, or The Sims. The number of systems in constant interplay is countless. One must be systems-literate enough to process the outputs and required inputs of these webs of interactivity to gain any benefit from the experience. Compared to film, television and books, which all use plain talk and linear plot to express their meaning, video games speak to the audience in a completely different language. They are not an extension of normal everyday experience the way that popular, passive media is; the interactive system wields its own unique semiotic vocabulary and grammar. It is alien, unfamiliar, other. This isn't to say that film doesn't have its own grammar; but it's a grammar used for viewing the familiar and dramatic through a specific lens. Receiving meaning through personal dialogue with an interactive system is an altogether different beast.
This is one way in which comics are similar to video games. Comics speak to the viewer through their own complex set of symbols and conventions, born of a marriage between graphic design, illustration, and prose. At their best, comics exploit this mode of communication to its fullest, best demonstrated probably in the work of Chris Ware. He uses his incredibly deep understanding of the language of comics to express human experience in a way that no other medium could, instead of fighting against the constraints of the page. One could similarly say that games are at their best when they demonstrate a deep understanding of how interactive systems communicate with the player, and convey human experience in ways that no other medium could. Also like video games, Wares' comics require physical and mental investment by the reader: one often has to turn the entire book round in circles to view images or text that are oriented at 90 degree angles to one another, track panels that wind around and underneath one another, or lean into a page to decipher minuscule drawings and text.
But comics and video games are alike in another way: they both remain marginalized, infantilized media, where the Wares are the rarest exception and the medium in general holds little to no value outside of very specific circles. The highest ideal of the vast majority of creators is to force the medium into being something it's not, and the largest segment of the audience consists of juveniles, in age or mindset, who haven't "graduated" to more respected forms of entertainment.
Browse the racks of a standard comic shop, and the books on the mainstream shelves will be filled with flashy illustrations depicting laughable actions stories, absurdly-proportioned women, and superheroes. Likewise, browse the racks of an Electronics Boutique and you're bound to find mostly sports stars, Japanese children's cartoons, burly men with guns, and women in shameless, implausible dress. The medium infantalizes itself through its chosen subject matter. Based on surface alone, I can't blame the outside viewer for thinking little of the medium at large.
But content aside, the majority of both comics and games aim squarely at being something they're not-- movies-- and become less compelling experiences for the effort. Mainstream comics feature vaguely lifelike renderings of idealized humans in action-packed situations (sound familiar?); they are drawings of movies, instead of being comics for comics' sake. Clearly the same applies to mainstream games, aiming for "realism" in visuals and juvenile coolness in character and story, trying to be "cinematic" without understanding that the real value of a video game comes from being uncinematic, unrealistic; from embracing the otherness of the form and expressing human experience in ways that a movie never could.
Film and novels never had to overcome the stigma of starting out as children's distractions. They may not always have been respected artforms, but they were at least always seen as entertainment, if low-brow, aimed at adults. But like comics, video games are never going to grow up. Some sixty years after the wartime comic book boom, the vast majority of comics are still male wish fulfillment trash sold to children, poor drawings of stills from movies that no one would want to fund or film. A small subset, represented by the catalogues of publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, is mature and thoughtful, looking to express relateable human experience in a way unique to the medium, aimed at readers who have an appreciation for the form. And an even tinier sliver, zines and underground publications, embraces the experimental and avant garde, attempting to push the boundaries of the medium and catering only to those most passionate and inquisitive as to what the future of comics might be.
Likewise, the overwhelming majority of video games, the big 99 percent, are adolescent male fantasy or cheap cash-ins: army men, sports cars, cartoons and zombies and superheroes, trying (and failing) to reproduce the realistic rendering of film, trying (and failing) to be "cinematic" by inserting frail little fake movies throughout the experience; a small subset tries to exploit the medium in thoughtful ways and express something unique or meaningful through interactive systems-- maybe the The Sims systemically mirroring everyday life, or Ico expressing a tender relationship without words. And there's that tiny, marginalized sliver of experimentalism represented by The Marriage, Passage, or any number of other no-budget independent projects that toil in obscurity, trying to expand what games can be. And at this rate, that's all there will ever be.
As they are now, games will remain marginalized and juvenile like comics. I believe that only the rarest developers will be able to exploit what makes games unique and powerful, and the rest will remain flashy male power fantasies, selling but lacking significance. The development and publishing community at large are not trying to change this, and the audience does not seem to want it. Without addressing serious barriers to entry and core design philosophy issues, I do not believe that games will be accepted and respected as a valid medium of expression, ever. Video games have the potential to say great things, but they currently do not have the means to say them to very many.
The odds are stacked. I say games are never going to grow up. Care to make a wager?
[ADDENDUM: After receiving some comments, I expanded my point a bit. Below, I clarify a few issues.]
I'd like to clarify that I'm not talking about the ratio of good vs. crap product, or the ratio of "art" versus "non-art." I'm not talking about quality or artfulness at all. I'm talking about broad cultural relevance to the lives of the general population.
90% of all creative endeavor is crap, but at least with film, television or books it's culturally relevant crap. And the good stuff is rightly respected, because it can speak to anyone who might take it in.
The good 10% of comics and games are lost because the medium itself isn't relevant to the viewership at large. Even the games that are great, the ones that I can read as being valuable, are almost always hidden under the juvenile veneer of big guns, tanks, zombies, robots and so forth. Much like The Watchmen is a legitimately great comic, it's inaccessible to people outside the limited group that understand how it reworks the popular superhero context. To anyone outside the fanship, it's just a comic about guys in tights, just like Half-Life 2 is simply another game about shooting monsters.
Games could lower their barrier to entry: we've seen it in The Sims, where the only required input is clicking and then choosing an action. No memorization of keybinds, no reflex-based gameplay or required facility with a gamepad. Accessibility of interface doesn't translate to simplification of the range of expressable interactions. Why has no one taken the lessons from the Sims-- the ones that have made it one of the most successful and enduring franchises in video game history-- and applied them to other types of games? Direct input-- having a "jump button" and "shoot button," etc.-- limits accessibility.
Filling a game with explicit failure states requiring replay of level segments upon death limits accessibility. Why are the games we focus on so concerned with life-or-death situations? Why is violence the only kind of conflict we've refined to such a level of fidelity? It's easy and it sells to the established market. The situations and conflicts expressed in games don't relate to most people's lives. Games don't pursue the kinds of headings you see in a video rental store-- romance, drama, comedy. Our designs still hinge on simple actions-- "shoot gun," "drive car," "solve puzzle."
Suits and investors need to be concerned with this shit. Who do you want to be backing further down the line: an insular, stunted medium like comics, or a full-grown, culturally-relevant, and hey, PROFITABLE, medium like film? We aren't going to reach that point by catering to the current hardcore. And we're not doing ourselves any good by assaulting the casual gamer with the deluge of crap that's been thrown at the Wii audience so far. We're going to expand our customer base by trying to give them new, subtle, interesting approaches to interactive experiences that are universal and human. We need to give them access to this form that we already know is so great, and fill it with content that they can identify with, get something enriching out of.
I don't know if that's going to happen. My bet still stands.
[NOTE: On manga: After receiving a number of comments, I feel I should address this aspect.]
I am familiar with the cultural relevance of manga in Japan. It's a wonderful medium that grew up with Japan's baby boom following WW2, and has blossomed into an element of everyday life there. The variety of art styles and subject matter is unprecedented, depicting everything from young boys' adventure stories to soap opera-style dramas for housewives and niche volumes on playing the flute or cooking pasta, and everything in between. Manga is available at any newsstand in a wide variety of forms, and read by millions on trains, at cafes, and at home.
Which is why I don't say that video games are heading down the path of manga. I could make a post about how games should be more like manga, and in fact I think we're seeing some of that positive influence now, especially coming from, unsurprisingly, Japan: Cooking Mama, Phoenix Wright, Trauma Center, and more tackle interactions that games in the past have hardly touched. It's good.
Overall, the Japanese video game market is receding, and game development at large seems to be driven by the west. Manga is lovely, but this post is not about how games are or aren't like manga.
[NOTE: On box office: Many people have brought up sales numbers for games, and film adaptations]
I'm not arguing that games are going to "die" or that they don't make money; clearly games now make a lot of money. My note about fostering an industry that will be "profitable" is meant in the longterm-- I don't think that games in their current state have created an effective framework for a sustainable industry. If we only cater to the hardcore and the very casual, we create a revolving door when those groups start to lose interest, either by "growing out" of hardcore games or finding nothing interesting past Tetris and Zuma. We would do well to create a lifetime market.
Many have directly equated games' financial success with cultural relevance; someone even went to far as to say that Halo 3's retail release was "covered by every major news outlet," as if that seals the deal: video games must be just as important to people's lives as TV or movies are, right? I seem to remember 'every major news outlet' covering the death of Superman in the early 90's as well. It's a silly leap of logic to make.
The idea that film adaptations of comics being successful means that comics themselves are a "significant form of cultural discourse" is completely misguided. Films are co-opting comics to bolster their own success; movies are the significant form here, not comics. Do all those millions of people who watched Spider-Man the movie also read the comics they're based on, much less consider the broader comic form as something relevant to their everday life?
I'd wager not.
2.06.2008
Concepts
A former colleague sent me this link which, as a fan of Monolith's games, I found really excellent. It's the flickr photo album of Monolith's art director, which includes concept pieces for the NOLF series and FEAR as well as sketches and studies from life. The drawings themselves are quite nice, and I always love seeing original concept work from great games. It's interesting seeing early sketches from FEAR that line up with comments I remember Craig Hubbard making about revisions that occurred over the course of that game's development: for instance, Jin was originally to be sniper support for the FEAR squad, which is why they gave her the red trigger finger on her glove; in the sketch here we see an early Jin with her rifle (which, by the way, appears to simply be the G2A2 with a large silencer attached. Not ideal for sniping considering how it handles in FEAR.) Similarly, it would seem that the ghoulish Assassins originally carried submachine guns. Lots of interesting behind-the-scenes insight to be found.
Oh, here's a funny connection I discovered while researching FEAR during my time in Texas: one of the main factions in FEAR is the ATC, Armacham Technology Corporation. Around midgame you raid their offices and mow down wave after wave of their private security force, including opponents in hulking powered combat armor, trying to discover the secrets behind Paxton Fettel and all the strange goings-on in and around the city's Auburn district. Displayed throughout their facilities are graphics and replicas of orbital satellites.
Funny thing is, the ATC first appeared in the backstory of Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, the first game that Hubbard was the writer and project leader for. According to an article on shogomad.com, Armacham is "one of the dominant megacorporations" in the Shogo universe:
Armacham Technology Corporation got its start with the manufacture of commercial satellites and ground-based communication systems. Eventually, they would expand to encompass civilian and military vehicle manufacture, musical equipment, security systems, and, predictably enough, MEV and MCA ["mobile combat armor"] technologies. Their MCAs (they discontinued their MEV lines after some early experiments) immediately caught the attention of the private sector and various military organizations alike.So, in both FEAR and Shogo, ATC manufactured communication satellites as well as powered combat armor for private and military use. Is the implication that FEAR and Shogo take place in the same universe, with the events of Shogo simply occurring many centuries further down the line? Going a step further, do the events of NOLF also take place in this same universe, some 40 or 50 years before the events of FEAR? I haven't seen any evidence of this last connection, but it's interesting to consider all three of these stories occurring within one strange little off-kilter alternate reality.
Well, enough geeking out for me! To get back to the point: I do wish more game concept art like the above were available, anywhere, in art books or online. It's nice seeing all the concept pieces in No More Heroes' New Game + mode, but why aren't all those concept works up online somewhere in high resolution (aside from a few nice images I found scattered throughout IGN's NMH screenshots?) IGN also houses a handful of gorgeous character concepts from Monolith's Condemned: Criminal Origins, but I unlocked all the concept art in that game and I know there's more to be found. Where's the rest of the great foundation sketches that led to the visual look of all my other favorite games? Granted I probably just haven't searched hard enough to find more of this kind of material, but it seems only the most wildly successful franchises make their concept art easily accessible, usually in the form of an expensive art book like the one for Half-Life 2 or World of Warcraft. Either that, or you get something like the anemic little "art book" that shipped with the Persona 3 special edition, which Atlus practically might as well not even have bothered with.
Have you got any good links to more video game concept art available online? Leave a comment, I'll appreciate it.
[Update: After a bit of googling, I found Creative Uncut's game art galleries. Much of it is devoted to concept art from fairly minor fighting games and JRPGS, but some interesting properties are represented including Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Chrono Trigger, Okami, and Zelda. More resources to come, hopefully!]
[Update2: RPGamer has an extensive collection of concept art for nearly every RPG they list, both Western and Japanese. Click an upcoming, series, or other game title, then click "art." Their set of Mass Effect concepts is rather nice, for instance. Too bad the site is genre-specific.]
1.31.2008
Plush
Today a friend gave me a small plush Mario head. Somewhat distressingly it has a cavity carved out of the top of its skull, to function as a cell phone holder apparently. It's cute though.
The disembodied head reminded me of the profile select menu from Super Mario Galaxy, wherein the 3D-rendered heads of your Miis float and spin in space. And then I thought of the custom action figures you can order of your character in WoW. And the plush Weighted Companion Cube from Valve.
How cool would it be if you could upload your Mii to Nintendo, and they'd create a little plush version of its head as a keychain/cell phone dangly/cell phone holder/general purpose plush ball? Seems possible, considering the limited number of variables that can make up a Mii. What a funny gift to give to your friends: a little plush version of your own cartoon head. I'd buy one probably.
1.26.2008
Grasshopper
Thanks to the gracious editors of Gamasutra.com for republishing this essay in slightly altered form, and again on their blog GameSetWatch.
At this moment I am experiencing the post-game rush. The one that comes immediately after you complete a really great game and you're vibrating with excitement over it. I just finished my playthrough of No More Heroes, and I'm feeling a serious love buzz for Grasshopper Manufacture: for the game itself, the ethic that brought it about, and everything it does that is unique and joyful and uninhibited.
Above all, No More Heroes is gleefully absurd and self-referential. It lampoons the standard pretenses of video games as well as its own audience. It revels in all the ridiculous elements of standard 'bad-ass, gritty' action games. It refuses to take anything about itself seriously, while being fully aware of the culture and conventions it's playing off of. It speaks to an audience familiar with action video games as well as the ephemera that surround them, and can take pleasure in all of No More Heroes' knowing jabs and perversions.
No More Heroes throws the player into the role of Travis Touchdown, a broke, idiotic otaku living in a cheap motel room filled with his anime posters and poseable figurines. Uncharacteristically, Travis is a good-looking, well built dude who shares fashion sense with Tyler Durden.
One day, Travis wins a lightsaber "beam sword" off of eBay an "internet auction site" and somehow ends up killing the United Assassins Association's (UAA) number 11 ranked member. A mysterious woman approaches him and suggests he climb the UAA ladder by eliminating each of the top ten ranked assassins one by one. So, the player leaves his anime pad to go on massive killing sprees with his lightsaber, driving to his assignments on his enormously tricked-out motor scooter and then suplexing and hacking up tons of goons like a cross between a Mexican luchador and the Star Wars Kid on meth.
The premise essentially takes a rabid anime nerd's ultimate fantasy life and turns it into a video game, showing how completely ridiculous and laughable it is in the process. Beside the premise and the protagonist, the gameplay itself pushes every element of action games over the top into the absurd. The combat is outrageously gory to the point of being a cartoon, and the bosses are so contrived and implausible as to put Metal Gear Solid villains to shame.
As the game boots up, The Grasshopper Manufacture crest is emblazoned with the credo "Punk's Not Dead," and declares GhM a "Video Game Band."
Just seeing that logo as a splash screen is incredibly heartening, and the implied ethic really does show through in the product. No More Heroes takes the standards of the genre and throws them back in its face. It's loud, abrasive, concerned as much with image as substance, and completely exhilarating. Maybe it really is punk.
There's been some writing lately about the schism between the hardcore reviewership and the casual game market. Some bloggers dismissively condescend toward players engaged with the lineage of games that require high investment in and dedication to the act of play. The anti-hardcore "like being treated gently" while playing a video game-- they "don’t want to be knocked unconscious" by their entertainment; they "just want to relax in front of the television set, doing not much of anything."
No More Heroes is not the game for them. No More Heroes grabs your collar and screams in your face. It revels in the sensory overload normally provided by a game like God of War or Devil May Cry and amps it up to an unprecedented, speaker-popping assault. It's just what Grasshopper set out for it to be: it's the Sex Pistols or The Stooges freaking out and pissing off your parents. At its best, a good fight in No More Heroes is as unrelenting and destructive as a track off of Raw Power. And those leveling criticism are right, Pitchfork shouldn't be reviewing Enya. People who just want to relax in front of the televison, doing not much of anything while they play a video game need not apply.
There's just too much to love about this game.
I love that it's a Japanese title that blatantly draws inspiration from Grand Theft Auto.
I love that it has character customization, including over 100 different shirts to collect and try on. I love that the majority of these shirts seem to have been designed by Suda 51 himself (under the transparent pseudonym "Mask de Uh," pointing to his ongoing infatuation with luchadors.)
I love that it's a hardcore, gamer-focused, direct character inhabitation game that relies on the lo-fi graphics and technology of the Wii. It's pragmatic, and uses superfluous design sense to make up for technical shortcomings. It eschews HD. I love it for that.
I love that, in a strangely affecting twist, the game takes moments to acknowledge the aftermath of violence much more directly than its contemporaries: the mangled corpse of each boss character that you kill remains on the scene as you walk around collecting your reward, forcing you to face the evidence after the act is done. It's somewhat grotesque, and refreshingly so when death is otherwise so meaningless in the vast majority of action games.
I love that the game is legitimately challenging, and requires the player to pay great attention to the bosses' behaviors and precisely time his inputs. And I love that when you do die to a boss, an extremely player-friendly retry option lets you immediately jump back in and give it another shot. I love that it's not easy; I love that it expects more out of me.
I love how much actual gameplay lies outside the core mechanics in the form of side jobs and miniature distractions. You don't just run, jump, fight and kill. You exterminate poisonous scorpions, defuse land mines, gather up trash off the street, collect coconuts, whitewash graffiti, mow lawns, and rescue stray cats. It appeals to me for the same reason that Raw Danger!'s variety of non-standard interactions did: it's something new, a range of experience I'm not used to receiving through a video game.
I love how "gamey" the final product is-- it relies as much on the old-school pixelated tropes of the earliest arcade games as it does on the conventions of titles like GTA3. The UI is decidely 8-bit, with the UAA leaderboard being depicted as a Galaxian-alike arcade game high score board. There are segments of play that include side-scrolling, and even a mini shmup used for one of the lead-up levels. The game isn't trying to be something it's not-- there are cutscenes, but the overall presentation isn't anywhere near "cinematic." That would be too serious, too pedestrian, too commercial. No More Heroes is not of a piece; it's fragmented, eclectic, and in love with being a video game. Maybe that's why I love it so damn much myself.
In the end, I often judge the worth of a game on how much it makes me laugh. I love how much I laughed while playing No More Heroes.
There are disappointments. I wish the bike controls were more intuitive. I wish that all the buyables didn't cost so much, so I didn't have to grind side-missions to buy all the clothes and upgrades I wanted. I wish that the side-missions had that nice instant retry option like the main missions do.
I wish the game had tried to play with its structure more. I love how devoted the developers were to making the lead-up to each boss fight unique: you spend levels doing everything from fighting on a moving bus to driving down a highway to running through a maze to pulling donuts on your motor scooter in the middle of a baseball field. But the overall flow of the game is cyclical and repetitive, down to the very end. Play through level, beat boss, grind for money in town, buy upgrades, then on to the next level. Repeat. A game like Portal shows how effective messing with player assumptions of game flow can be: how excellent was it to be lulled into the idea of playing through 19 chambers, only to have your expectations turned upside down at the game's midpoint? How excellent would it be for Travis to climb halfway up the UAA leader board, only for the game structure to change completely, introducing you to an entirely new view on the experience? No more of the same old routine, suddenly the course you thought you were on changes. But no, in No More Heroes you just keep stepping up one rung at a time til you hit the end you'd seen coming from the very start. It quickly becomes rote. An opportunity for subversion was missed.
I wish the fucking manual included some credits for the developers. Yeah, I know, most gamers don't even open the manual, much less read the credits. But don't the men and women who toiled long and hard to give us this game deserve to have their name on it? Somewhere physical and permanent, not just in the scroll at the end of the game? Is that too much to ask? Is this standard with Japanese games brought over to the States? I noticed that there are no Japanese credits in the Katamari Damacy manual either, though I remember there being credits in the Final Fantasy 7 manual when I flipped through it long ago. It probably depends on the publisher. But it feels like an injustice to print an accompanying pamphlet and omit the names of the product's creators. Maybe nobody else cares, but I do.
No More Heroes is brash, daring, absurd, hilarious, exhilarating, and absolutely one of a kind. It speaks directly to me. It makes me feel happy that such a difficult, impossible thing could make it to market. Congratulations to everyone at Grasshopper for pulling it off. You have my deep respect.
1.25.2008
Phrases
There are certain game titles that speak to me more than others. I'm personally tired of literal-minded, object-based titles-- a title that names a specific entity within the game itself in straightforward terms. These would be things like Halo, God Hand, Portal, Persona, The Darkness, Metal Gear Solid, Mafia, or Metroid. They serve their purpose: they're easy to remember, speak aloud, and type out; they're distinctive; they represent a core element of their product. But, I don't know, they don't really excite me. Maybe because they're the status quo.
Lately I've been digging phrase titles. They're usually a few words or even a full sentence, somewhat abstract, and don't directly name a major component of the game. The best are in the declarative or imperative. Here are some titles I can get behind, quality of the game itself notwithstanding:
The World Ends With You
No More Heroes
Beneath a Steel Sky
Calling All Cars
You Are Empty
Death to Spies
Faith and a .45
Devil May Cry
A Mind Forever Voyaging
You Don't Know Jack
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Destroy All Humans!
There are a lot of games that would have great phrase-titles if they just cut off the part before the colon and used the subtitle by itself. For instance:
Contents Under Pressure
Dark Corners of the Earth
You Are the Wheelman
No Remorse
Back to Nature
Another Wonderful Life
No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way gets double points for having a great long-form phrase both before and after the colon.
I know I must have missed a bunch of great ones that would also fit the bill. I suppose I just wish game titles didn't feel the need to be so literal. Is this marketing driven? Would "You Are the Wheelman" automatically sell X copies fewer than "Driver: You Are the Wheelman?" Is this why the team at Monolith followed up the commercially-underwhelming No One Lives Forever series with F.E.A.R. (and now, further, is dropping the acronym thing for Project Origin?) I couldn't say.
Use your game titles to speak to me.
1.19.2008
Rainy Woods
Snatcher was a completely shameless appropriation of Blade Runner, but I thought that the days of games so baldly ripping off established works on screen had passed back in the early '90s. Then I saw this:
I am simply without words.
1.15.2008
Jaunt
Went on a bit of a voyage this morning. Well, more like a short jaunt. But I dug up some interesting material that I'd missed first go-round.
- I believe I came upon Magical Wasteland via his comments on someone else's blog (lovely how that works.) This post on industry keynotes is particularly scathing and hilarious (though I gather it's old news for those more attentive than me.) I was also happy to rediscover this awful piece of writing which I myself had noticed a while back.
- Via the above, I read through a good deal of Unobscured View, a blog on the business of game development by an honest-to-god industry veteran of 20+ years. This eye-opening post in particular might make one think very bad things about the prospect of entering into a deal with a large publisher.
- Borut Pfeifer is another blogger/developer who's had an article or two published on Gamasutra/GameSetWatch. His link collections are much funnier and more exciting than mine.
- I'm a year and a half late on this piece as well, but it seems terribly right-headed and sensible. I like to think that the article comes as a challenge: for game criticism to become a relevant field, we as developers need to get up and make games that are worthy of serious criticism. Easier said than done, but I'll give it a shot if you will.
1.14.2008
School
Something I noticed while paging through the latest Game Developer magazine (January 2008, Frontline Awards/Portal cover): there are 14 ads from institutions offering coursework for aspiring game developers, versus 12 ads from dev studios looking for talent.
Just an observation.
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