Cruise Elroy

It’s important to balance the difficulty of a game in an absolute sense, but it’s also important to pick the right types of difficulty.

When I play a sports management simulator or a Japanese RPG, I accept that my actions won’t directly decide the results. The challenge in these games, and others with similarly high levels of abstraction, comes from manipulating a complex system of rules and statistics. If my team has a bad season, I can trade for better players or work on the ones I have; if my fighter constantly whiffs with his sword, I can level him up to improve his abilities.

With highly abstract games, progression is not marked by one’s improvement as a player, although you certainly get better at manipulating the system. Rather, it’s marked by the characters’ improvement. Leveling up, buying new equipment, and recruiting more effective players are all in-game enhancements, not ones that are not dependent on how the player’s skill. Contrast that to a less abstract genre, like a platformer or an adventure game — there may be incidental power-ups for the avatar, but it is ultimately the player who must overcome the game’s challenges.

Broadly speaking, then, we can say that there are two ways to make a game difficult — by challenging the player’s skills directly, or by challenging her obliquely through the abilities of her in-game character(s). A problem arises when the type of difficulty is matched with the wrong type of game.

In the computer RPG Oblivion, your character has a numerical rating for each of twenty-one skills that relate to various in-game tasks. A higher Blade skill allows you to do more damage with daggers and swords, for example, and a higher Athletics skill allows you to run faster.

At the same time, though, Oblivion has several player-driven elements that undermines the system. The Security skill makes it easier for your character to pick locks, but if you (the player) get good at the lockpicking minigame the skill becomes useless. Similarly, a high Speechcraft skill makes NPCs like you more, but an easy “persuasion” minigame accomplishes the same thing. The relevance of the skills system is diminished somewhat when the player can do an end run around her character’s limitations.

Why would Bethesda allow such a thing? I think the answer lies in the criticism leveled at Oblivion’s predecessor, Morrowind.

Morrowind’s combat system, even though it allows direct control over the character, works a bit like a Japanese RPG. When you swing your weapon there is a statistical chance of missing your enemy, even if the weapon visibly connects with his body. Similarly, there is a dice roll when you attempt to block an attack, so even if your opponent’s weapon visibly connects with your raised shield it still has a chance to penetrate.

This is a system of rules and statistics in an inappropriate place — or, put another way, the combat is difficult in the “wrong” way. With a first-person action-based combat system, the player expects to have her reflexes and coordination tested; in Morrowind, she is instead at the mercy of equations based on her character’s skills and attributes.

In many ways, Oblivion fixed these issues. If your weapon connects with the enemy, you will score a hit, and if his connects with your shield, you will block it. The damage dealt or absorbed are still calculated based on your skills and attributes, but the fundamental mechanic has been shifted to more reasonably reflect what’s happening on the screen. This is the “right” kind of hard for this combat system — if you want to dodge an attack, you need to actually move your character out of the way, not raise your Agility attribute.

My theory is that Bethesda overcompensated with these corrections and accidentally obviated the need for skills Security and Speechcraft. By putting the benefits of those skills directly in the hands of the player, they removed the incentive to level them and chiseled away at the game’s RPG core.

This post is a contribution to Corvus Elrod’s Blogs of the Round Table. The other entries for this month are available below:

Today I subscribed to the excellent new blog Versus CluClu Land (thanks, Michael), a heady project from one Iroquois Pliskin which analyzes games from a philosophical perspective. Its unique focus got me thinking that many of my favorite writers often approach games from the perspective of another branch of knowledge.

Leigh Alexander writes about games and sex. Roger Travis writes about games and classics. Michael Abbott writes about games and film. Corvus Elrod writes about games and storytelling. Iroquois Pliskin writes about games and philosophy. (And here at Cruise Elroy, of course, I write about games and music.)

It’s certainly important to study games on their own terms — in fact, I often recommend Mitch Krpata’s series A New Taxonomy of Gamers, in which he argues that our current vocabulary is insufficient for critical discussion and posits new terms to better describe the different types of gamers. At the same time, though, there’s a lot to be said for the multidisciplinary approach of the blogs I listed above. We risk insularity and irrelevance when we only discuss games qua games; Situating our analyses among other well-established fields of criticism lends the discussions legitimacy and perspective, and makes our dialogue richer.

So here’s to you, Iroquois, and all the other writers who tackle video games with a unique frame of reference. I hope to see more from all of you in the future.

One of my biggest gripes with Twilight Princess (and, indeed, many adventure games) is that I never felt any attachment to the world. It’s nice that I can defeat Ganon and save Hyrule, but what is it, exactly, that needs saving? Most of the game world is a vast expanse of empty space that’s just an excuse for Epona to get a workout. It’s pretty, and there are certainly well-developed parts, but on the whole it’s not particularly memorable.

Okami’s Nippon, though, is teeming with personality. The art has a lot to do with that, but it’s Ameratsu’s interaction with the land — repairing cursed zones, revitalizing blackened trees, feeding hungry animals — that establishes the player’s unusually strong connection to the game world. I find that I look forward to reviving Guardian Saplings not just so that I can progress through the story, but so that I have a new area to explore and nurture.

Speaking of exploration, the sense of scale in Okami is phenomenal. I’m over nine hours in, but the game still feels like it’s in its introductory stages. I constantly run into areas I can’t get to and objects I can’t interact with, and the various lists on the inventory screen indicate that I still have quite a long way to go.

My biggest complaint so far is with the writing. To be blunt, the characters are not nearly as charming as the game seems to think they are. When I excitedly showed Okami to a friend, he read some of the dialogue asked me if it was a game meant for little kids. I don’t think that’s an unfair question, really; Issun in particular is a badly forced attempt at comic relief, with lines that sound like Midna or Navi in Zelda fan fiction.

There is a similar whimsical spirit to many of game’s characters, which would be fine if they weren’t all so one-dimensional — the personality that Okami cultivates in the world itself is lost in its inhabitants. I’d probably skip the cutscenes if I didn’t want to follow the plot, but the story is enjoyable (dialog notwithstanding) and often contains important information. I’m willing to forgive the flaw, though; plenty of games feature less-than-stellar characterization, and there are a lot of other things to like here.

It may be a while before I get back to Okami, as I’ll be traveling next week and then focusing on Grim Fandango for the Vintage Game Club after that. It has me hooked, though, and I’ll definitely see it through to the end.

As a left-handed guitarist who plays righty, I’ve always found it odd that most people fret the strings with their non-dominant hand. It seems to me that you’d need more dexterity to make complex chord shapes than to strum; why waste your good hand on a simple repetitive motion?

I’ve often had similar thoughts about video game controllers. We take it for granted that the directional control is always on the left and the buttons are on the right. But isn’t it strange that most people control a D-pad or analog stick with their bad hand? Doesn’t directional control require more precision than simply tapping your thumb?

I’ve had the opportunity to explore these questions with the Wii. Since the Remote and Nunchuk act as disconnected halves of a controller, it was finally possible for me to manipulate the analog stick with my non-dominant hand, like a righty.

Super Mario Galaxy was the first game I played this way, and the results were mixed. The Super Mario 64 controls are burned into my muscle memory, so it took a while for me to mentally flip all of the buttons. More crucially, I had trouble with delicacy; I ran at top speed everywhere, and occasionally did so in the wrong direction and into a pool of lava. Righties may be used to controlling an avatar (or fretting a guitar) using their non-dominant hand, but it’s difficult to flip everything around after years of experience.

With practice, though, I got pretty decent at playing with the controllers backwards. While it never felt completely natural controlling the analog stick with my right thumb, it was definitely more comfortable holding the heavier Wii Remote in my dominant hand. In fact, I ended up playing most of the game that way — including that killer Luigi’s Purple Coins star!

Thinking I was pretty badass I went on to play Twilight Princess and No More Heroes with the controllers reversed too, but in those games the results were less than stellar. I never quite wrapped my head around the controls for Twilight Princess; even in the final dungeon I’d constantly hit the wrong button during battles. That, combined with my lingering awkwardness in using the analog stick, made Link a bit less graceful than I would have liked.

In No More Heroes I had to struggle with the fact that the wrestling move instructions were all backwards. After trying to do mental gymnastics every time Travis flipped someone over his back, I started just crossing my arms when those parts came up so that the positions of the controllers in space matched their positions on the screen. I’m sure I looked ten times sillier playing that game than I ever did playing WarioWare.

I decided that my success with Galaxy was an aberration and resolved to go back standard controls for Okami — directional control with the left hand, buttons with the right. Now I’m thinking that might have been a mistake.

Here’s the thing: holding the Remote + Nunchuk combo normally puts the Remote in my bad hand. Since Okami makes extensive use of the Remote’s infrared pointer functionality, I constantly find myself drawing like a righty and cursing the wobbly circles and squiggly lines.

In Galaxy the pointer wasn’t terribly important since shooting Star Bits was largely unnecessary. In Twilight Princess I just used it to fire the occasional arrow or Clawshot, which I think I could have pulled off with my bad hand. Drawing shapes in Okami, though? The recognition is finicky enough as it is; my crappy right-handed penmanship is only exacerbating the problem.

And yet I can’t help noticing that I’m starting to improve. After several hours with the game my circles have become more circular, my lines more linear. Maybe, given enough time, the Wii will make me ambidextrous.

My post on fidelity and quality uses music as its example, but the real battleground in this debate is with graphics. Indeed, the desire for more realistic graphics has been a driving force in hardware improvements for decades; it’s only recently with the Wii that graphical fidelity has been intentionally sidelined in favor of other new features.

As with audio, though, more realistic doesn’t necessarily mean better. Crysis may look more like real life than Yoshi’s Island, just as the orchestral music in Super Mario Galaxy sounds more like real instruments than Mega Man 2, but photorealism is not in and of itself an objective improvement.

Actually, to be honest, I’m a bit worn out with photorealism. Sure, it’s technologically impressive to try to create a lifelike environment, but there are diminishing returns — I was floored when I first saw Super Mario 64 after playing Genesis games, but was only moderately excited by the improvements from Morrowind to Oblivion. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who would prefer to have the original sprites in Chrono Trigger DS instead of the 3D graphics of the Final Fantasy III and IV remakes. Low-fidelity can be beautiful too.

Anyway, all this is to say that Okami, which I recently started, is the best-looking game I’ve seen in years. True, it’s not any great technological feat, and more could certainly be done with the powerful hardware of the PS3. But frankly, if all games had such original art direction, I’d happily never play another photorealistic game again.

I’m unfortunately too busy to play Okami the way I’d like, but that hasn’t been much of an issue. Even playing for 30 minutes at a stretch I’m happy to just walk around the game world and marvel at the graphics. I can’t remember the last time I felt that way — maybe Ocarina of Time.

After I get a bit further in I’ll have more to say about the gameplay itself.

I hate to do this right on the heels of Michael Abbott’s refreshing optimism, but I’m a bit disappointed in the gaming community right now.

Two of my favorite gaming journalists, Stephen Totilo and Leigh Alexander, were quoted in a recent New York Times piece on the significance of Metal Gear Solid 4. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s been just over a week since the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the latest chapter in the popular video game series about a covert military agent named Solid Snake. And already, fans are exchanging rhetorical fusillades on the Internet, teasing out what the underlying political and philosophical messages of Metal Gear Solid 4 might be.

Encrypted within this discussion is a more sophisticated argument about the nascent medium of video games. Can it tell a story as satisfyingly as a work of cinema or literature?

Is the Sisyphean mission of Solid Snake — to rid the world of a robotic nuclear tank called Metal Gear — a parable about the futility of war or about its necessity? A critique of America’s domination of the global stage? A metaphor for the struggle between determinism and free will?

This is exciting stuff. It’s exactly the sort of discussion I’m trying to encourage with this blog (and that journalists like Alexander and Totilo foster with their work). I was thrilled to see such a high-level analysis in an article from a major publication, and I threw up a link on Twitter the second I came across it.

It appears that my enthusiasm was not shared, though, as Alexander was inundated with hate mail for her dismissal of Halo’s story at the end of the piece. Today she reflected on the response on her blog, Sexy Videogameland:

I guess I just felt disappointed in the audience, when even those who stood on my side of the issue were busy on message boards flaming something else they didn’t like about the column.

I have felt this disappointment for some time, mind you, at the fact that whenever we as gamers on the internet have the opportunity to discuss anything at all of significance, we lapse into contentious flamewars.

I always feel like we end up injuring the very thing we’re defending: our right to be considered a legitimate audience for a legitimate medium, our right to be considered as mature, responsible consumers, our right to self-regulate appropriate content, an entire kitchen sink of issues that ends up all chipped and powdered porcelain on the bathroom floor.

While I’d like to believe we’re all interested in defending those things, I’m not sure that’s true.

Alexander’s feature on Kotaku today discusses why the dismissal “it’s just a game” is not a satisfactory defense of the medium. Here is a response from commenter “Mikazukinoyaiba”:

“It’s just a game” is what I use because that is how I honestly feel, all of these discussions about games as an “artform” and how it should evolve, what it needs to do, and how it can mature do not interest me and actually starts to become pretentious.

Lets stop trying to take everything so seriously and examine it under the microscope.

And here’s “SgtElias” on a different post about Stephen Totilo and N’Gai Croal’s Vs. Mode:

I like Kotaku for the news and information, but I usually turn off when discussions on morality and such in games is brought up. I play video games to have fun. I enjoy a good story and I understand that there is more there to be analyzed. It speaks to some of the opportunities in this country though that people can earn a freaking paycheck discussing it though.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but I can’t help feeling disappointed that there are gamers ambivalent about the evolution of the medium. I always thought it was our job to proselytize about games and the media’s job to dismiss us; I guess I had things backwards.

In studying my gaming habits, I’ve noticed that I play games in one of two ways: in small doses over a long period of time, or in large doses over a short period of time.

The former category is made up of games with high replay value but no story to complete — sports games, racers, fighting games, and so on. I may typically play Super Mario Kart or Tetris for just a half hour at a time, but I’ll keep returning to them over the course of weeks, if not months or years.

The latter category is made up of linear or narrative games that can be finished, like RPGs or shoot-em-ups. I prefer to “binge” on these games, plowing through them in a few long play sessions. For example, I was replaying Chrono Trigger last week for my Blogs of the Round Table post, and got to the final battle after just four nights — but each night I had played for several hours. Why? Well, it’s fun, of course, but I also like holding an entire work in my head at once so that everything is fresh in my memory.

As it turns out, I consume a lot of media in the same way for just that reason. I’ll listen to one album almost exclusively for a week at a time, I’ll comb through years of archives of newly-discovered blogs, and I’ll read entire novels in one or two sittings (even long ones like David Copperfield). If this sounds strange to you, consider the ways in which we can now watch TV shows or read comic strips. We all drink from the firehose.

The issue I’ve had recently is with episodic games like On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. The artificial splintering of the narrative keeps me from playing the way I want — there’s not enough material for me to binge on, but I don’t want to wait for months to get a resolution. If I had started Chrono Trigger last week and paced myself to finish it in December, I’d go nuts.

Games have spoiled me. Unlike TV shows or comic strips, I’m used to having their stories available as quickly as I like. With episodic gaming, though, that option is no longer available. Maybe I need to wait for the box set.

Spoilers follow; proceed with caution.

Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite video games. It does almost everything well — story, characters, battle mechanics, music, you name it. Of all its memorable moments, though, the one that really stands out is when it kills off your main character.

Until that scene, I thought my attachment to Crono was tenuous at best. We never get a sense of his personality or desires; not only does he never speak, but the game’s plot is driven by coincidences and the actions of others, so we rarely see him act meaningfully either. As with many silent protagonists, my empathy was limited by his genericness. In short, there was nothing for me to latch onto.

My real sympathies, it seemed, were with the other characters. I found myself playing with Marle and Lucca as much as possible, even when they weren’t the most practical choices. How could I leave the two hilarious, brash tomboys at the End of Time in favor of a fat old robot and a histrionic frog?

At Crono’s death, though, the strength of my attachment to him was made clear. I found myself unexpectedly devastated. When the cutscenes ended and the “Who’ll you replace?” screen came up sans main character, I probably came as close to crying as a video game will ever take me.

Of course, this is not Aeris kicking the bucket in Final Fantasy VII. You can get Crono back — and I did — so there was no lasting harm done. The amazing thing, though, is that the game got me to care about its nondescript spiky-haired protagonist at all. Why did that happen?

Recently I came up with what I think is the answer: I was role-playing.

True, I loved Marle and Lucca as characters, but the real reason that I kept them in my party was because I felt like they belonged there — they were my friends, after all. When Crono died, I was upset because I took it personally: not only did “I” die, but I had let down everyone else. When I was asked to select a new party, I was uncomfortable because — well, it just felt wrong controlling someone else. It wasn’t me.

It sounds incredible to say, but I don’t think that any RPG before or since has actually gotten me to role-play like that. I never felt like I “was” Ryudo in Grandia II or Max in Shining Force any more than I felt like I “was” Mario. In those games, I never acted in a certain way because I thought it matched my character’s disposition; I was just the guy moving the plot along, making things happen behind the scenes to reveal more of the game.

Chrono Trigger was a sea change in how I understood player-character relationships. As someone who came to video games without any pen-and-paper RPG experience, its stellar characterization gave me an idea of what role-playing could be.

This post is a contribution to Corvus Elrod’s Blogs of the Round Table. The other entries for this month are available below:

I’ve been thinking about piracy and emulation some more, and I may have figured out why my position on it is so muddled.

If you want to become well-versed in most forms of art — painting, literature, film — you can get everything you need for free at libraries and museums (or, if you prefer, for cheap on Amazon and eBay). You can even find the old classics for free online. The barrier to entry is low, and availability is high — anyone with enough commitment can become a connoisseur.

If you want to become well-versed in video games, though, you’ll need to shell out. New games are notoriously expensive; old ones can be just as bad, and rare to boot. If you can’t get a hard copy, your (legal) options are to pay for a subscription service like GameTap or GameFly, or pay by the download on Steam or the Wii Virtual Console. Both options offer limited selections, and while they can be cheaper than eBay the charges still add up quickly.

In the past, most gamers had lived through much of the industry’s history, so gaming literacy came with the territory; now, that’s starting to change. Today on Kotaku some gamers admitted they had never heard of or played the original Golden Axe. I was amazed. For a moment I even felt old, which is an odd sensation for me in the context of video games. But can we really expect a young gamer to have played Golden Axe, the way that we might expect a literature student to have read The Old Man and the Sea?

If the answer is yes, then we owe that expectation to emulation.

I have a hard time morally supporting piracy, but there’s no question that it’s filling a niche. It’s increasingly difficult to achieve gaming literacy through legal means — accessibility is poor, and the cost is prohibitive. If we hope to perpetuate video games as an art form, we’re going to need a way to expose people to them, and until Gabe Newell gets “every game that’s ever been available” on Steam there aren’t many good options.

In his blog post Call to Arms, designer Steve Gaynor calls for game concepts that explore conflicts and feelings that games don’t normally address. Below is my submission.

Summary: A puzzle game disguised as a platformer, Bumbershoot uses player expectations to disguise its true mechanic. It’s my hope that the subversion of a familiar genre will address the conflict between convention and innovation, while the “metagame” of figuring out how to play will evoke a unique sense of discovery and accomplishment in the player.

Play: Bumbershoot looks like a simple 2D platformer. There are critters to jump on, coins to collect, and obstacles to overcome as the character progresses through each level. The game offers no instructions beyond explaining the controls, so an experienced player will treat it like a Mario game.

However, the feedback and reward mechanisms that are typically found in platformers are absent in Bumbershoot. Jumping on critters doesn’t yield any powerups or bonuses (and isn’t necessary anyway, as they aren’t actually dangerous); collecting coins doesn’t make a “pling” noise, count towards an extra life, or otherwise give any indication of being useful; getting to the end a level doesn’t cue victory music or a cutscene, but just dumps the player unceremoniously at the beginning of the next one. In short, the player can complete the game “normally” by moving from left to right through each level, but the game will give no particular indication that she’s doing anything right. If all goes well, such a victory will be hollow and unrewarding.

During play a score is displayed prominently at the top of the screen, but typical platformer actions like the ones described above have little or no effect on it. Meanwhile, seemingly random actions will send the score through the roof, and the game makes a big deal out of those events. Right now I’m thinking of the score-tallying beeps at the end of a level in Super Mario Bros. or the extra life fanfare in Sonic the Hedgehog, but there may be better signals.

The point of the game is to first realize that typical platformer behaviors are not rewarded, and then figure out what behaviors are rewarded instead.

The plan is for each level to have a different hidden task. One might require the player to perform some action in time with the background music, like the Koopas in New Super Mario Bros.; another might be to jump on all objects of a particular color, or to touch all the floating platforms. Ideally they would be simple enough that the player could find them and unusual enough that she won’t do well at the game without trying to. If necessary, there could be clues embedded in the environment — the colored objects could catch the light and sparkle to attract attention, for example. Completing these tasks will increase the player’s score, trigger sound effects, earn extra lives, and feature all the other reward mechanisms that gamers have come to expect.

At the end there will be a high score chart and a catchy song, because after Portal, You Have to Burn the Rope, and On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness I’m convinced that every game needs to end with a catchy song.

Concerns:

• Designing the hidden tasks would be difficult. At least a couple of them will need to be obvious enough that an average player will stumble upon them so that the meat of the game isn’t missed completely. Ideally I’d like to see someone play it like a standard platformer, accidently earn a ton of points for something that seems insignificant, and then think “what the hell did I just do?”
• Using a mysterious game mechanic to evoke a feeling of discovery may not be enough to make the game hold together. Hopefully combining that idea with the genre subversion is enough to keep a player interested. If necessary, the score could be replaced or combined with some other kind of feedback.
• Since the real impact is the initial discovery about the nature of the game and not in the subsequent puzzle elements, the game needs to be pretty short. As with Jason Rohrer’s games, I actually think Bumbershoot will make its point rather quickly — perhaps five Super Mario Bros. 3-length levels would do the trick.

You can follow the discussion of Bumbershoot on Steve’s blog here.