Yesterday I attended the third annual Boston GameLoop, a self-organizing conference held by and for local game developers. The day began with little more than a large blank whiteboard; we spent the first hour proposing session topics, voting on each others’ proposals, and filling out a schedule with the most popular ideas. The rest of the day was devoted to the sessions themselves, which ranged from game demos to introductory lectures to lively roundtable discussions.
This structure worked fantastically. Virtually all of the talks were top-notch, and the signal-to-noise ratio was so high that it I was mentally exhausted by the end of the conference.
These are the sessions I attended:
- “Dialog As Gameplay” by Chris Barney (Family Education Network)
- “Game Journalism and Criticism” by Chris Dahlen (Kill Screen)
- “Narrative Design” by Clara Fernández-Vara (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
- “Drawing the Player In: Agency In Game Worlds” by Seth Rosen (Maximum Extreme Games)
- “Interactive Metaphor” by Ben Cummings (Mythic Entertainment)
Even if I wanted to I don’t think I could give a play-by-play of each session; there was far too much going on to take notes. Instead, I thought I would outline my three biggest takeaways:
BioWare is king of the narrative space. Almost every discussion I had (or heard) about narrative circled back to BioWare at some point, and the comments were almost universally positive. Even ostensibly unrelated conversations would suddenly, inexplicably, veer towards a BioWare game. The only other company that came close to that level of mindshare was Irrational Games — people still love their BioShock ruminations, especially when the developers are present — but in my perception there was really no contest. I’m glad I got to the Mass Effect games earlier this summer!
Lots of our problems can be traced back to limited resources. I’ve thought about this topic before, but the discussions at GameLoop helped to drive the point home. The issue has never been that developers prefer to implement “meaningless” choices, or to rely on a stilted binary between good and evil; it is that, given finite time and money for a narrative-driven game, there is an inverse relationship between the number of choices that can be offered and the impact of those choices. Similarly, there is no shortage of gamers capable of intelligent criticism, and no one honestly believes that regurgitating PR is great journalism — but there is a shortage of professional opportunities, and of developers willing to grant writers access. We make do with what we have.
Things are getting better. The inevitable kvetching aside, people generally seemed to think we were headed in the right direction in every session I attended. Dialog systems are more engaging, quality games writing is more common (though some have trouble finding it), and the importance of narrative design is more widely acknowledged than ever before. Even the rarefied discussion in the “Interactive Metaphor” session allowed that art games are taken somewhat more seriously than in the past. Perhaps all this was due to the infectious enthusiasm of the indie scene, but I left GameLoop feeling more optimistic about the industry than I have in some time.
A year and a half ago I wrote a post highlighting some favorite bass parts from Sonic games. One of the pieces, the Spring Yard Zone theme, had a bizarre harmonic quirk that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Since I just wanted to write about cool bass lines, though, I didn’t try to figure it out; I made some handwave about “harmonic ambiguity” and moved on without so much as determining the key.
Well, it’s time I tried to give the Spring Yard Zone theme its due.
Here’s a transcription, pieced together one voice at a time using Audio Overload (click for a larger image):
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Ignoring the intro for the moment, our form is a repeating AB with two eight-bar sections: bars 2-9 are in D minor, and bars 10-17 are in F, its relative major. (As with all Sonic songs, the intro does not recur.)
There is nothing harmonically unusual about the B section; it begins after an unresolved dominant chord in measure 9 and remains staunchly diatonic until it cadences back to D minor in measure 16. Piece of cake!
Let’s look closer at the A section. The lack of coincident, easily analyzed chords in measures 2-3 forces us to collapse the arpeggios to suss out the harmony. Doing so gives us the pitches D, F, A, C, and E, which spells out Dm9. It’s slightly messy, but not a huge theoretical stretch.
Measure 4 is where things get interesting. The melody here is a sequence of measure 2, but it is a real sequence: it maintains the same intervallic relationships and therefore does not respect the key signature. Since the sequence brings up all of the pitches by a major second, we get a raised third (F♯) and a raised sixth (B♮).
Wait, what?
The sixth and seventh scale degrees in a minor key are flexible thanks to the variations between natural, harmonic, and melodic minor, but the third is usually sacrosanct; it is the scale degree which makes the key identifiably minor. How do we justify an F♯ in the key of D minor?
I have an idea. Collapsing measure 4′s arpeggios gives us the pitches E, B, D, and F♯, which is a ninth chord minus the third; I’m going to assume it’s Em9, since the alternative forces us to infer a tritone (G♯) as well. Measure 5 is unmistakably a dominant chord, with a bit of augmented flavor thanks to an F — enharmonically E♯ — in the melody.
That “analysis,” if you’ll buy it, yields the progression im9 | iim9 V7, which looks far less unfamiliar. It’s unusual for minor keys to borrow from their parallel majors (outside of Picardy endings), but I think that’s exactly what’s happening here — the turnaround is borrowed wholesale from the key of D.
Why does this work? I suspect that years of jazz and pop harmony have trained our ears to accept all kinds of modifications to ii-V-I chords: sevenths, tritone substitutions, altered chords, and so on. Given that context, using m9 in place of m7♭5 doesn’t seem like such a big deal. The Spring Yard Zone theme does push its luck, as it were, by prominently featuring the F♯ in the melody, but I found that to be a pleasant dissonance and not an ugly one.
(And if one crackpot harmonic theory isn’t enough, here’s another: though it only uses two voices in contrary motion, I hear the one-bar intro as a quick Andalusian cadence (general form i ♭VII ♭VI V; think “Hit the Road Jack” or “Anji”) that gets averted at the last moment. If we let A-A stand in for A minor, G-B for G major, and F-C for F major, we get the first three chords of the progression in the key of A minor. We would then expect to see E-D to imply E7, but instead we get E-C♯ — which acts as the dominant for the true key of D minor.)
That’s all I’ve got on this one. If anyone has a cleaner analysis, I’m all ears.
When I began reading Tom Bissell’s new book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, I wanted very badly for him to answer the question posed in his subtitle. In particular I wanted something I could recommend to non-gamers that would be accessible but literary, informed but not transparently fanboyish: an evangelical silver bullet.
And although it is largely successful, Extra Lives occasionally lapses into a fervent enthusiasm that felt at best self-indulgent and at worst alienating. Reading from the perspective of a curious non-gamer I imagined myself tossing the book aside, giving up on the medium once and for all.
Consider, for example, this protracted explanation of the “special infected” zombies in Left 4 Dead:
These special infected come in five nightmare flavors: the Hunter (a hoodied zombie who pounces upon and then tears into his prey, rendering the pouncee helpless until a friend comes along to shoot or push the Hunter off); the Smoker (a coughing, shambolic, elastically tongued zombie who operates much like a sniper, extending his tongue to pluck survivors from the pack); the Boomer (an obese and suppurating slob zombie who is as fragile and explosive as a Pinto but whose vomit and bile attract the dreaded horde, and whose vomit, on top of that, is blinding, so that during a well-coordinated attack you cannot see the Hunter tearing to pieces your screaming friend right in front of you); the Tank (as advertised, a steroidally distended zombie as tough as an armored car, but who mercifully appears only a few times a game); and, finally, the Witch (a crying lost-soul zombie who seems the very picture of helplessness, until she is startled by a flashlight or loud noise, upon which she uses her razored manicure to instantly kill the survivor who startled her, and whom you must try to sneak past, and who is as upsetting and inspired a video game character as any). (pp. 43-44)
The level of detail here was mildly cringeworthy on first reading (as it was in a couple of similar passages), but listening to Bissell read the passage aloud at a book signing event was mortifying. Nothing, I thought, could be less affirming of video games’ importance than a minutes-long dialectic — for it seemed even longer when I was forced to listen — on the particulars of zombies.
So: why include it, then? Bissell could have written something with the high-level accessibility of “Painkiller Deathstreak,” a gee-whiz look at video games from Nicholson Baker in the August 9 New Yorker, but he chose not to. If his intention was to convince people that video games matter, why draw attention to their puerile side?
The answer is that “why video games matter” is only half of Bissell’s concern in Extra Lives; the other half, which he says was cut from the subtitle, is “why video games don’t matter more.” During his appearance on the Brainy Gamer podcast, he explains how difficult it was to balance these goals: “On the one hand you want to make people who aren’t convinced [about video games mattering], convinced. And on the other hand you want to tell people who are convinced that their case isn’t as good as they think it is.”
Encouraging two separate groups to reach opposing conclusions is no mean feat, and it’s a wonder that Extra Lives succeeds at all. But I think it does — at least, it articulates the ambivalence I’ve sometimes felt while championing the medium. I can’t say how effective it’s been for the unconvinced, but closing the gap between us will be important if we’re to have meaningful discussions in the future.
The recent announcement of Dragon Age 2 has gotten some spectacularly vehement reactions from fans of the series. “Is Dragon Age 2 the End of BioWare as a Traditional RPG Creator?” asked fan site Greywardens.com. “I beleive [sic] this can easily be considered the worst thing to happen in Dragon Age history, including the Blight,” lamented one poster on the BioWare message boards.
The majority of the complaints are decrying what fans see as a Mass Effect-like restructuring of the Dragon Age model — their particular concerns being the voice-acted player character, the dialog wheel, and the protagonist’s immutable name and race.
By now I’ve developed an affinity for both franchises, so I myself am not terribly worked up. More to the point, though, the ability to play as an elf is no more central to my Dragon Age experience than the shape of the dialog presentation is to my enjoyment of Mass Effect. The key difference, without which I will be upset, is the approach to morality.
In the Mass Effect system, your words and actions earn you “Paragon” or “Renegade” points, which approximately map to “good” and “evil” respectively. Unlike previous RPGs such as Fable (or BioWare’s own Knights of the Old Republic), these are not represented as opposing ends of a spectrum with one canceling out the other; instead, each score is tracked independently, meaning that no one will think less of the virtuous hero for socking the occasional TV reporter in the face.
Because of Mass Effect‘s enormous scope, your Paragon and Renegade scores are an abstraction of how the galaxy perceives Shepard. You can earn Renegade points for everything from making sarcastic comments to setting people on fire, but their contribution to your total Renegade score will have a more potent effect than your handling of those individual situations. In essence, your actions and dialog choices reveal what sort of person Shepard might be, and the game extrapolates from there to fill out the rest of her personality.
There are some unpleasant side effects to this approach, however. Most obviously, the impacts of otherwise ambiguous moral choices are diluted when there is invisible arbiter judging your actions. Late in the game there is a mission where Shepard is effectively forced to choose between brainwashing and murder. It’s presented as an agonizing dilemma, but in retrospect it’s not; the game doles out Paragon points for the former and Renegade for the latter, clearing up any confusion about which path was the righteous one.
Another issue is that because some dialog options and missions are only available for characters with a high Paragon or Renegade score, it is preferable from a gameplay perspective to maximize one score instead of balancing both. And since the relevant dialog choices are mapped to particular spots on the wheel, it’s easy to short-circuit your roleplaying experience by clicking in the same spot during every conversation.
Dragon Age neatly sidesteps these issues by eschewing moral absolutism. Your decisions are only given weight by the approval or disapproval of others, and you can only predict those by understanding their backgrounds, motives, and personalities. There is no general consensus on whether your character is a good or bad person; you must earn your reputation separately with everyone you meet. It is possible, and even likely, that your actions will make you a pariah when judged by one moral code and a hero when judged by another.
I don’t mean to suggest that Dragon Age 2 ought to use this exact system, or that Mass Effect 3 ought to adopt it — certainly every approach comes with its own set of issues. But for me, the messy case-by-case morality is what makes roleplaying in Dragon Age interesting. It feels more dynamic, and more effectively represents shades of gray. As long as they can maintain that I’m happy to trust BioWare with whatever alchemy they’re planning.
I’ve finished Mass Effect since my last post. Though I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, and it grew on me as I progressed, I never found the thrill that I got at the peak of my Dragon Age playthrough. It was engaging but not enthralling; I never grew bored, but neither did I obsess over it.
Mass Effect 2, though, is a different story. Entire afternoons and evenings are vanishing against my will; most of the twenty hours I’ve played so far were over a period of only three days. I admit I’m a little mystified by this, because for all its improvements it doesn’t feel like a terribly different game from its predecessor. After thinking about this for a bit, my theory is that there are two changes in particular that have made Mass Effect 2 a phenomenally different experience for me.
The first is its refined structure. The first Mass Effect sometimes felt like a fundamentally linear RPG dressed up as an open-world game. There were lots of planets to explore but little to see there; lots of equipment to collect but little to differentiate it; lots of side missions to do but little to recommend them. My time spent away from the meat of the game felt vaguely unsatisfying.
Mass Effect 2 cuts the fat and is better for it. While it feels more constrained in some ways, the strength of its set pieces and the epic scope of its story are enough to sustain the universe’s grandeur. I know the planet-scanning minigame has gotten mixed reviews at best, and it probably could have had a more fulfilling implementation, but I maintain that it fits this type of game better than the pseudo-sandbox approach. In short, the Mass Effect 2 experience feels more integrated; I don’t have to make a mental switch between playing the game proper and doing some filler quest like scouring the galaxy for lost dog tags.
The second change, and the more important one, is the redoubled sense of compulsion that Mass Effect 2 creates. Missions in Mass Effect 2 are very clearly delineated. When a new one begins, you are conspicuously presented with the character select screen, and everyone in your party will suddenly realize the ability to unholster their weapons. After completing a mission, you receive a detailed mission report screen that summarizes your accomplishments, predicts possible reactions from other characters and factions, and lists any new discoveries or acquisitions.1 These clear bookends have the effect of compartmentalizing each mission, such that it’s more difficult to abandon one halfway through.
And once you’re back aboard the Normandy, how can you stop playing right then when you could quickly duck into the Research Lab or the Armory to check out those new toys? And while you’re wandering the ship, how can you avoid chatting with your team members, who probably have something new to say about the latest mission — and, potentially, new missions of their own? And when you learn that your favorite team member has been accused of treason, how can you not speed to her rescue right away?
This mix of discrete bite-sized gameplay chunks — which are themselves, it must be said, much improved — with strong narrative hooks to the next mission makes Mass Effect 2 brilliantly, insidiously addictive. It goes from strength to strength with few missteps, and is clearly the product of a developer at the top of its game.
My gaming habits have been unusually schizophrenic lately. Usually I only have one large-scale single-player game going at a time, but right now I’m partway into Super Mario Galaxy 2, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Bioshock, and Mass Effect, with the naively optimistic intention of finishing all of them. (Yes, that’s why I haven’t had anything to write about recently. That and long hours at the office!)
In any case, it’s Mass Effect that’s been holding my attention recently. I’ve been hesitant to play it because of a long-standing apathy toward shooters — if any of my current games goes to the chopping block, it’ll be Bioshock — but was convinced by the criminally low Steam sale price, my enthusiasm for BioWare’s Dragon Age, and a particularly evangelical friend.
My friend had already played Mass Effect before trying Dragon Age, and quickly abandoned the latter because the combat system was not to his taste. More memorably, he lamented that the player character does not have spoken dialogue as Commander Shepard does in Mass Effect, which omission struck him as a disappointing step backward. Having now spent time with both games, I have a hard time seeing it that way.
For those who are unfamiliar, Dragon Age and Mass Effect take different approaches to representing dialogue. In Dragon Age, each of your dialogue options is presented in a numbered list. Upon selecting one, your character is assumed to have spoken those words and your interlocutor immediately responds, complete with voice acting and facial animation. You do not, however, see or hear your own character speak.
In Mass Effect, you are presented with a handful of dialgoue options arranged as spokes on a wheel, each position roughly corresponding to a particuar intention or tone. Each option is a loose paraphrase, and selecting one prompts Commander Shepard to expand it into spoken dialogue: “Don’t try to study me,” for example, becomes “I’m not some artifact you can take back to your lab, doctor.” All characters, PC and NPC, thus have a voice.
Media Molecule’s Kenny Young outlines several problems he has with this approach:
- Frequently, my character will say something which I categorically had no intention whatsoever for them to say, in a way which just doesn’t suit the character I’m trying to be. I’ve been forced to choose from a small selection of directions which are compromised abstractions, the result being frustration with my character and the game.
- I’ve got to listen to the mouthy bugger, and if I skip this I have no idea what he’s just said because of the limitations of the aforementioned abstractions which are representative only of my character’s initial response and not the entirety of the rambling speech he then goes on to make.
- I am my character (right?), so why do they do things and say things which I have little control over, and know a whole bunch of stuff which I don’t? I mean, I’m meant to be them, but I’m having it rammed down my throat that I’m quite clearly not them. They are themselves more than I am them. If that’s what I was looking for I’d watch a film, a really good film that has a century-long legacy of perfecting this kind of storytelling.
- In summary – why give me a choice, the illusion of control, only to immediately remind me who’s really in charge? I don’t get this kind of frustration, certainly not to the same degree, playing a game with purely linear cutscenes.
While I admit having a similar (if less vehement) reaction to Young, I also appreciate why my friend disliked Dragon Age’s approach. Seeing and hearing characters talk to each other means there is one fewer element requiring a suspension of disbelief, and giving the protagonist a voice allows for cinematic flourishes that are simply not possible when she must remain silent.
For me, though, that’s exactly the problem with the fully-voiced approach: it feels cinematic. As much as I’m convinced by the writing and voice acting, the degree to which Commander Shepard is already realized as a character makes her inaccessible to me as an avatar. Clicking on my preferred dialogue options, even on weighty matters like the survival of a species, is not sufficient for me to inhabit her. I am not Shepard; I’m just a voice in her head.
That said, I am still enjoying Mass Effect and hope to write more about it soon.
Tonight I grabbed the Humble Indie Bundle, a collection of five computer games from small independent developers. It’s a fantastic deal: you can set your own price; all of the games are compatible on Windows, OS X and Linux; half of the proceeds go to the EFF and Child’s Play (or more, if you wish); and there’s no DRM. I hesitated — briefly — because I already own two of the games in the bundle, but after a moment’s consideration I pulled the trigger.
That small hesitation got me thinking about games that I’ve purchased (or received as gifts) more than once, and why that sort of thing happens. Here are the ones I could think of:
- World of Goo: One of the games in the Humble Indie Bundle. I had bought it from Steam shortly after it was released, and then bought it again as part of one of MacHeist’s bundles. It also one of two games that I actually own three copies of, the other being…
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: In addition to the original Nintendo 64 cartridge, I have digital copy from the Wii’s Virtual Console and the emulated version on the GameCube Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition disc. I bought the former because I was at college in Boston and my Nintendo 64 was in my closet back in New York, and I apparently had an irresistible urge to replay Ocarina immediately. I bought the latter for Majora’s Mask but never got around to taking it out of the box for some reason. That was all right, though, because…
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: I also bought Majora when it came out for the Virtual Console last year (though I didn’t start playing it until recently). My main justification was that Wikipedia had listed some problems with the emulation on the GameCube rerelease, but if I’m honest I probably just didn’t want to deal with the GameCube controller.
- Aquaria: The other Humble Indie Bundle game I already had, from a Steam sale. Aquaria holds the dubious distinction of being the only game I’ve bought twice and never actually played!
- Mario Kart 64 and Sonic the Hedgehog 2: I own both of these games on their original consoles and on the Wii Virtual Console, for reasons similar to Ocarina: I wanted to play them right away, and the original consoles weren’t immediately available. (Boy, did Nintendo ever hit the sweet spot with their pricing.)
- Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy!: I played the hell out of the shareware episode, and vaguely remember convincing my dad to get me the non-shareware one for Christmas when I was seven or eight years old. A couple of months ago, I saw that the entire series was up on Steam for five bucks.
- Soulcalibur II: I have this for both GameCube and Xbox. The Wii was the only current-gen console I owned for much of this hardware generation, and I jumped on a bargain bin copy.
- Civilization IV: Mac and PC. I played the Mac port for a while, but it felt buggy and slow. I caved once the collector’s edition of the PC version went on sale.
- Myth: The Fallen Lords: Two PC copies — one standalone, and one as part of the Total Codex collector’s edition with Myth II. Between the expansion pack and the user-generated content, I didn’t feel so bad about buying the first game over again.
Here are the first few bars of “Drive My Car” by The Beatles.
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Could you find the meter? If not, don’t feel bad; this is a notoriously difficult passage to process. Musicologist Alan Pollack once called it “two measures-worth of the Beatles most rhythmically disorienting music ever.”
What you’re hearing (without bar divisions) is something like this:
If you’re like most people, your natural inclination is to hear a downbeat when the bass riff ends on the low D — in other words, that sounds like the place where the “one” of a new measure should go. Working backwards, that means that the opening guitar lick should start on the downbeat of the previous measure, since it began four beats earlier.
Here’s what that idea looks like, transcribed along with the next couple of bars:
The first six beats feel all right, but the end of the second measure is problematic — Ringo’s drum fill starts on a nonsensical offbeat, and there’s an extra eighth note before the verse that is unaccounted for (see the end of the first line). It seems like Paul’s low D isn’t actually a downbeat, even though it felt like one!
We can fix this by shifting the intro’s bar lines half a beat later:
It admittedly takes a bit of mental effort to hear the first measure correctly here. Once you get to beats three and four of the second measure, though, the meter is unmistakable; the quarter notes in the guitar and the aforementioned drum fill reinforce the “real” rhythm.
All right — moving to video games, here’s the intro to the Labyrinth Zone theme from Sonic the Hedgehog:
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And here’s a transcription:
Like “Drive My Car,” the Labyrinth intro seems to have a pretty clear downbeat at first listen — in this case, the first kick drum hit. The opening three snares combined with that descending harmonic progression have the effect of a dotted quarter-length upbeat.
Here’s what that looks like written out with the next two bars for comparison:
Again, the most logical rhythmic interpretation is demonstrably wrong. Just two and a half beats after that first kick drum there’s another one to start off the “verse,” giving us two incomplete measures in a row.
If we fix the bar lines, we find that the ostensible three-note pickup is itself the real downbeat:
As with “Drive My Car,” this is not the rhythm that your ear wants to hear — what we initially thought was the downbeat is actually between beats two and three!
Nothing groundbreaking here, but an unlikely connection: both pieces use clever rhythmic and melodic figures to temporarily disguise the meter in their introductions.
“I was sort of nervous if we could recreate the same vibe on the East Coast,” Gabe says in the PAX East episode on PATV, comparing the convention to the existing one in Seattle. “And I think we have.”
Tycho agrees, but is quick to deflect any commendation: “Yes, to the extent that we can even — to the extent that the vibe at PAX is even created by us.”
This is an argument that the Penny Arcade guys have made before. PAX, they say, is not about generating a community; rather, it facilitates the assembly of an existing one, tapping into the collective consciousness that stems from our shared experience as gamers.
It’s also an argument that, in the past, has struck me as false modesty. Penny Arcade is still immensely popular, and Gabe and Tycho are still pseudo-celebrities in the gaming community. They’re hounded on the show floor for autographs and photos, and they’re featured in the Q&A and create-a-strip panels.
After further consideration, though, I think their sentiment is genuine. The scope of the convention feels so massive that the idea of it revolving around a comic seems preposterous. I know of a few attendees who actively dislike Penny Arcade, and others who are barely aware of it.
If you want to see the heart and soul of PAX, don’t look to Gabe and Tycho; look to Wil Wheaton.
Being a non-Trekkie, I first discovered Wil when I listened to his PAX 2007 keynote. It’s chock full of crowd-pleasing game references and fiery language, including a memorable opening salvo directed at Jack Thompson and the first appearance of the oft-quoted “Wheaton’s Law” (viz. “Don’t be a dick”). Between all that, though, is a remarkable and impassioned attempt to humanize our shared pastime.
Wil paints gaming as an integral part of his life, arguing that he is not merely unharmed but enriched by his experiences. His identity as a gamer is worn as a badge of honor; it has been foundational to his social development, and forms the basis of some of his strongest relationships. The potency of this interaction between games and community — a common thread in Wil’s writing — is the real spirit that underlies PAX.
After hearing that Wil would be again be delivering the keynote at PAX East, I and hundreds of others waited in line for hours to ensure that we got in. And after he finished to a standing ovation, about a third of the crowd headed for the doors while Gabe and Tycho took the stage. They didn’t look upset, or even surprised. And why should they? It’s not about them.
PAX East was such a giant sprawling experience that I probably can’t cover everything I saw and did. I do want to talk about some highlights, though, and I’m starting with perhaps the most unexpected one: waiting in line.
While the Hynes Convention Center itself felt large enough to accommodate everyone, the individual rooms were often far too small. There was therefore a lot of waiting in lines, either in the hallways or in the designated Queue Room, for panels and concerts and the like.
The Queue Room featured a setup by Get in Line Games, a company which apparently specializes in entertaining captive audiences. To accomplish this they set up large screens around the room and displayed simple games that could be played via text message. For example, one asked video game trivia questions and then provided real-time feedback on a bar graph as people sent in their responses.
At first I thought this was just a cute low-key diversion, but the more I watched the more I appreciated how well-designed it was.
The key is what the website calls the terminal host. In between games, a hidden MC typed messages into a terminal window displayed on the large screens. These included everything from instructions on how to play (“Here’s the number to text”) to quelling frustration (“I hear the doors are opening soon!”) to cheap nerd-culture references (Rickrolling, lolcats) to teasing the audience (“I see a lot of neckbeards out there today!”). Having messages that were both live and topical did wonders to engage the crowd. It’s what separated Get in Line from, say, a movie theater trivia reel.
The games themselves were pretty thin, but as with the terminal host’s banter they worked because they were tailored to the audience. There was one storytelling game in which the details were selected by multiple choice; the first question was “Who should the main character be? Text 1 for Mario, 2 for Pac-Man, or 3 for Aeris.” After we chose Aeris and told her to go jump on Goombas or something, Sephiroth suddenly descended from the sky and impaled her to raucous applause. They knew their audience!
The centerpiece of the experience was a clever collaborative platform game. The terminal host asked us all to stand up and lean to the left; cameras pointed at the crowd photographed us in this pose. After doing the same for a right-leaning picture, we had to “play” by leaning left or right in unison to control the character. From where I was standing it looked like well over 90% of the room was involved here — people were waving their arms, shouting instructions, cheering when we did well, etc. If all of their games were this engaging, they would be set.
The main drawback to Get in Line is that there simply wasn’t enough content. I was only exposed to it twice, and the second time was largely identical to the first. It seemed difficult for the terminal host to get people excited when many had already been in line for an hour and a half (and had seen all the games the day before). If there were more Get in Line events with the same content yet again, I can’t imagine they went over very well.
