Cruise Elroy

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.

Video games, webcomics about video games, video games about webcomics about video games, webcomics about video games about webcomics about video games. What a world!

Penny Arcade’s mouthful of a game is, as you’d expect, aimed squarely at fans of the comic. It’s an adventure/RPG hybrid whose pleasure comes not from the gameplay itself, but from following the oddball story and clicking on every last object to read the descriptions. From the first unnecessary italicization it’s clear that Tycho’s fingerprints are all over this thing; every line of text is witty, unabashedly vulgar, and gleefully overwritten in the Penny Arcade tradition. Gabe has left his mark as well; though I’m not sure I was fully convinced by the 3D world, the 2D dialogue menus and comic-book-style cutscenes kept Precipice firmly grounded in the PA universe.

It’s a good thing the humor works so well, because while the game is fun the mechanics are ultimately unremarkable. The meat of the gameplay is in the battle system, which has a lot to like — the overkill bonus, the frenetic special moves, the blessedly simple item mechanics. By the second half of the game, though, I was steamrollering over everything in my way; I think I could have beaten the final boss if he had had twice as many hit points. As I learned with Grandia II, it’s hard to appreciate a good battle mechanic when the difficulty curve bends in the wrong direction. Add in the disappointingly linear adventure elements and weak customizability, and I’m not convinced the game would hold together without the Penny Arcade license.

As it is, though, I think it does hold together — as with No More Heroes, the gameplay works well enough, but it really isn’t the main draw. For fans of Gabe and Tycho’s unique brand of humor, Precipice delivers in spades.

Do you want to know what shame looks like?

The CycloDS Evolution is a special cartridge for the Nintendo DS that lets you run unsupported software. I ordered one today.

Now, there are lots of wonderful and innovative “homebrew” programs that this unlocks. You can turn your DS into a personal organizer, a miniature drawing tablet, a media player, and a digital music studio, among other things, and I very much look forward to trying those projects out. But the real draw for these cartridges is the ability to store and play game “backups,” which is to say games downloaded from the Internet.

I’m not proud, but I’ll probably do some of that too.

As with downloading music, it’s easy to come up with justifications. I buy the vast majority of the games I play. I’ve downloaded about a dozen Virtual Console titles, even though I already own some of the original cartridges (and I could emulate them all for free on my computer if I wanted). And there are some games that I would gladly pay for but can’t — Electroplankton, I’m looking at you.

At the end of the day, though, there’s not really much of a gray area. I may be square with myself about sampling the DS library, but that doesn’t make it any better, objectively. Right?

Some questions for the peanut gallery:

• Morally speaking, do you see a difference between emulating old games — say, from the 8- or 16-bit era — and downloading new ones?
• How do you feel about fan translations?
• Do you have any compunction about emulating or downloading games? Why? Do you do it anyway?

I’m done with No More Heroes now, and since I wrote my last post just a third of the way into the game I thought I’d put it to bed with some final thoughts.

Links

As it turns out, No More Heroes has inspired a ton of critical discourse, so rather than rehashing what everyone has already said I’ll just link them up here. I’ve mentioned a few of these already, but it’ll be useful to collect all of them one place:

• “No More Heroes is not punk” by Schlaghund (if you only read one of these links, make it this one)
• “No More Complaints” by Leigh Alexander
• “Do you feel lucky, punk?” by Michael Abbott
• “Grasshopper” by Steve Gaynor
• “It’s just lines and colors” by Michael Clarkson
• “What ‘No More Heroes’ Really Means” by “Cowzilla3″
• “No more No More Heroes embargo” by Mitch Krpata
• Zero Punctuation video review by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw

Warning: choking hazard

One of the issues that comes up in several of those essays is the game’s low-fidelity aesthetic, especially the setting. Santa Destroy evokes the open-world environments of Grand Theft Auto but lacks any of the, well, fun. The city is drab and unremarkable, the people are wholly non-interactive, and the landmarks are few and far between. I actually spent the entire game using the mini-map to get around since there was nothing interesting or important to look at and never developed a mental map of the place. And why would I? There’s no there there.

With a game like No More Heroes, the obvious question is whether this is a flaw or an intentional part of the design. Here’s a snip from Yahtzee’s review:

The awkward thing about No More Heroes, or at least about reviewing it, is that like killer7 it’s intended to be satirical, and when there are problems with the gameplay I’m worried that it was intended to be that way as a satire of… I dunno, pretentious video games — and if I were to call it out on that, then I’d lose my credibility with the cool alternative crowd. But then I remember that any game designer who sacrifices fun to make an artistic statement is obviously stuck so far up his own ass that he’s in danger of choking on his own head.

I’ve been wrestling with that last claim ever since I watched Yahtzee’s video. Do video games need to be fun?

Practically speaking they probably do, if they want to sell copies. But what about something like Jason Rohrer’s Passage, an indie game which made waves last December for its emphasis on metaphor over gameplay? Isn’t the medium big enough to include fun but thematically vapid games like Unreal Tournament and games with higher aspirations like No More Heroes? (Hint: yes.)

In any case, here’s what Cowzilla3 had to say about Santa Destroy:

The entire world is based around what Travis has interest in, there is literally nothing else. What is Travis interested in? What most young male gamers are: obsessively collecting objects (in this case clothes and models), killing bad guys, movies, the gym, sports and gorgeous women. If it doesn’t have to do with these things then it isn’t important to Travis and it doesn’t deserve anything more then an ugly gray building. Santa Destroy is a literal recreation of the self-centered world of a 20-something male and a comment on how this gaming generation views what is important in life.

I’d buy that analysis. There’s an argument to be made here about whether authorial intent is relevant — if Santa Destroy is actually empty because Suda51 didn’t have the budget to fill it in, is Cowzilla3’s analysis still meaningful? — but we’ll save that for another day.

The dark side

No, this isn’t about those ridiculous dessert-themed special moves. I think there are more serious themes at play here than winking allusions and gleeful self-referentiality.

In my last post on No More Heroes I mentioned the game’s conflation of sex and violence vis-a-vis Travis’s beam sword. I thought it was a fairly light-hearted joke in the game — ha ha, you have to pretend to masturbate with the controller. Then Michael Clarkson had this to say in the comments:

I found it interesting that most of the sexual content has to do with sexual humiliation. I mean, without spoiling too much, Travis is deceived, used, and humiliated in nearly all his relationships with women, and then there’s the dialogue every time he goes to “train” with his “master”. Not to mention the regular calls he gets from the Beef Head video girl, which also have overtones of humiliation to them. Travis’s success with women usually involves killing them. Speaking of which, do you think the fight with Bad Girl might symbolize a confrontation with his sexual haplessness?

It’s a sobering analysis, and I was taken aback that anyone read the game on such a serious level. But when I used Michael’s comment as a jumping-off point to probe a bit deeper, I decided that the sex-violence conflation is perhaps less light-hearted than I thought. This was my eventual response:

Bad Girl is the most overtly sexual of Travis’s female targets — she exudes a mix of submissive innocence (her coy nickname, her Lolita-esque little girl outfit, her crying) and violent dominance (her baseball bat, her endless conveyor belt of cloned S&M-bound men). If we set aside the old woman Speed Buster, she’s also the only female target who Travis enjoys killing.

Significantly, the final blow isn’t just a straight-up decapitation. Travis impales her with his beam sword — which, I remind you, has been infused with phallic symbolism throughout the game — as she unsuccessfully tries to beat him away with her bat. “Naughty girls need spankings,” he mutters. After bleeding to death, Bad Girl goes limp lying on top of him with her legs spread, the sword still sticking through her body.

Now, what does that imagery remind you of?

No More Heroes is not a game about rape, but when we consider its conflation of violence and sex there’s an unmistakable edge to the sexual humiliation theme. In the end, Travis’s “revenge” goes beyond the hackneyed fights of destiny with Jeane and Henry. He’s trying to be something more than the loser otaku everyone takes him for and get back at them in the process.

Is it a stretch? Sure. Does it jibe with the vague uneasiness I felt after the Bad Girl fight? Absolutely.

For a game that ostensibly sacrifices fun for the sake of artistic merit, No More Heroes sure has a lot of both.

At the risk of turning this site into the Brainy Gamer Revue, I’m going to play around a bit with Michael Abbott’s “gaming tripod” theory discussed in this post and this podcast.

Michael outlines three broad categories of games that are currently “supporting” the industry, like the legs of a tripod: games that favor narrative elements, like Grand Theft Auto IV; games that favor ludic elements, like Mario Kart Wii; and ultra-accessible “lifestyle” games such as the upcoming Wii Fit (which doesn’t have a snappy term yet, as far as I know).

It’s an instructive metaphor, and I think that it can be taken even further. First, though, I want to talk about a fourth category of games that’s been getting attention recently, which I’ll call self-reflexive games.

Self-reflexive games are aware of their status as video games. They obliquely reference other titles, ironize the conventions of their genres, and riff on the culture that surrounds the industry. Like a jazz solo that quotes an old standard or a novel that satirizes a particular author’s style, self-reflexive games require a smart audience to get the references and fully appreciate their design. In short, they’re games made for gamers, and their existence is a reflection of the medium’s maturation.

The idea of self-reflexive games goes back to 1995 (at least) with EarthBound, still one of the best video game sendups I’ve seen.¹ While it’s absolutely hilarious, it’s also impossible to explain to people who don’t play games. More recently there’s No More Heroes, which irreverently juxtaposes two decades of gaming aesthetics (according to my reading of it, at least). There’s also the recent crop of indie games, such as Kian Bashiri’s You Have to Burn the Rope, that have played upon gaming conventions in a humorously referential way.²

So what does this self-reflexive category have to do with anything? If we graft it onto the categories that Michael came up with, we can create two continua which are useful for describing how video games work.

The first continuum has ludic elements on one and and narrative elements on the other, and measures a game’s dependence on storytelling. This is a familiar dichotomy to those who have studied games. Way at the ludic end might be a game like Tetris — no story, no characters, just pure unadulterated play. Way at the narrative end would be something like Shenmue, a game that can have its interactivity removed and lose almost nothing in the process. Other games, like Michael’s Mario Kart Wii and Grand Theft Auto IV suggestions, fall somewhere between those extremes.

The other continuum measures how “video-gamey” the game is. I think of the two ends of this one as “accessibility” and “self-reflexivity,” which are perhaps not ideal terms, but they’ll do for now. Way at the accessibility extreme are titles like Wii Fit and Brain Age, which use the language of video games but otherwise barely qualify as such. Next to them are games like Wii Play and Mario Party, which are more traditionally “video-gamey” but don’t require a deep familiarity with the medium to enjoy. Moving down the line we encounter genres that are increasingly built upon gaming expertise: real-time strategy games, tactical RPGs, 4X games, MMORPGs.³ Finally, on the self-reflexivity end is your No More Heroes and You Have to Burn the Rope. For these titles, the mechanics aren’t the issue — their very appeal is limited to those steeped in the culture.

One of the neat things about thinking of games this way is that it places them in a greater context. One can almost imagine the definition of “game” distorting at the edges of the graph. Go too far past Shenmue in the “narrative” direction, and you end up with a plain old movie; go too far towards “accessibility,” and you end up passing Wii Fit and finding…well, real life. It’s no wonder we’ve had trouble defining video games.

As you can probably tell, I’m still working this theory out. I’d love to hear your feedback.

1. If you’d like to give it a try, EarthBound is likely coming to the Wii Virtual Console soon.
2. For further reading on these games, I recommend Tim Rogers on EarthBound (known as Mother 2 in Japan), Schlaghund on No More Heroes, and IndieGames’s interview with the creator of You Have to Burn the Rope.
3. It seems that generally speaking, the more bizarre or unwieldy the acronym, the less accessible the genre. Funny how that works out.