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:

Much of my bloviating intelligent criticism about the game will probably be offsite, but I’ll cross-post some of my thoughts here on Cruise Elroy too. I hope to see you in the forums!

One day I went to his office to show him a piece I was working on for class. It was just melodic fragments with some chord symbols sketched out underneath, but I wanted his opinion on the direction I was taking. He looked it over and asked, “What’s the instrumentation?”

I hadn’t decided yet, and told him so.

He stared back quizzically. “I don’t see how you can compose without knowing what you’re composing for,” he said. “I always keep the instruments in mind.”

I don’t really work that way, I said, and we got to talking about The Real Book.

The Real Book is a bible for jazz musicians. It contains hundreds of pages of music like this one, called lead sheets. Lead sheets are stripped down transcriptions that contain just a melody and chord symbols; no instrumentation, no dynamic markings, no detailed arrangements. And it is this tradition, not the classical one, that has informed my compositional thinking — much to my new professor’s chagrin.

The Real Book’s lead sheets are based on separating content from form, somewhat like the functional division between HTML and CSS. The written part — melody and chords — contains the core identity of the piece. This must be present in some respect for the performance to be recognizable. However, virtually all of the formal considerations — what the instruments will be, how the chords will be voiced, how long the solos will last, and so on — are at the discretion of the performers.

As someone from a jazz and popular music background, I typically consider a piece independently of a particular recording’s qualities. When I listen to Thelonious Monk play “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” for example, I hear the angular melodic lines and playful reharmonizations in the context of a baseline “regular” version (say, George Harrison’s), but I still keep the two separate. Whether or not Monk is too dissonant for your ear is a completely separate issue from whether you think “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” is a good song.

That separation, incidentally, is why I argue for the quality of old game music — as far as I’m concerned, focusing on the “fake,” low-fidelity sound misses the point. The music is there; the rest is aesthetics.

(UPDATE: Be sure to see Tommy’s response to the following criticism in the comments; as it turns out, we’re on the same page.)

Here’s a snip from game composer Tommy Tallarico’s interview with Guinness World Records:

Isn’t video game music just a constantly repeating loop of blips and bleeps? How can this be a full-time job?

This is actually a huge misconception among people who haven’t played a game in awhile. The reality is that when I first got involved in the game industry over 18 years ago a lot of the music was short repetitive bleeps & bloops. This was because the technology at the time didn’t allow for real music and live musicians. [...] In the mid 90’s DVD’s became a viable storage medium for games. Once this happened, composers and musicians could now use real instruments to create game music. It was an exciting time because no one had ever hear [sic] their video games make these kinds of sounds before.

And this is from the biography on his website:

Tommy Tallarico is a veritable video game industry icon. As one of the most successful video game composers in history, he has helped revolutionize the gaming world, creating unique audio landscapes that enhance the video gaming experience. He is considered the person most instrumental in changing the game industry from bleeps & bloops to real music now appreciated worldwide by millions of fans.

Tallarico rightly dispels the misconception that game music hasn’t evolved past “bleeps and bloops”, but he perpetuates another misconception in the process: namely, that game music before the DVD era was not “real” music.

I have a lot of respect for Tommy — he is, after all, the most prolific game composer of all time. But the idea that old game music was not “real” is a load of bull.

Yes, some of the lasting appeal of old game music can undoubtedly be attributed to nostalgia — but not all of it. There is artistic merit to the pieces of the 8- and 16-bit era that is irrespective of the technical limitations imposed by the hardware. The fact that they are performed by now-antiquated synths does not preclude them from categorization as “real music.”

As the co-creator of Video Games Live, Tallarico must have noticed the continued popularity of Mario and Zelda music. I think that, in his excitement over the new possibilities afforded by modern consoles, he has underestimated the compositional quality of older game music. He has conflated content with form.

(By the way, that lead sheet up above is actually the Koopa Beach theme from Super Mario Kart. Out of context, its harmonic language is indistinguishable from a bona fide jazz standard. But hey, it’s all just bleeps and bloops, right?)

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.

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.

(If you missed the updates to part one, there are lots of new pieces to see there too — everything from Road Rash 3 to On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.)

Interested in joining? Michael has graciously agreed to host this round, so head over to this post for the full scoop. We already have around two dozen a ton of participants! If all goes well, we’ll probably do more games in the future. It should be fun!

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.

Take a look at Robo’s theme from Chrono Trigger:

[See post to listen to audio]

I want to draw your attention to two things: the IV-V-V-vi harmonic progression, and the rising melodic contour using scale degrees 1-2-2-3.

Now listen to number-one hit and internet sensation “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley:

[See post to listen to audio]

As you can see (and hear), both feature the same progression and melodic contour. The only significant difference is that Robo’s theme resolves to a tonic or tonic substitute in bars 4 and 8, while “Never Gonna Give You Up” continues to cycle through the IV-V-V-vi progression. (As such, it never resolves to I; my Roman numeral analysis is in the relative major for the sake of comparison.)

So in effect, you’ve all been getting rickrolled for years longer than you thought — for certain values of rickroll, anyway.

(And yes, I know I’m not the first person to make the connection. But I suspect I am the first to do a comparative harmonic analysis!)