The Brainy Gamer

Second thoughts

I'm standing in front of the gutted-out Washington Monument. I look up with the sun in my eyes, and I can see all the way to the top. I decide to go in. As I near the entrance I hear a radio playing a song by the Ink Spots. As I walk past it, I pause briefly to turn the radio off. Then I think to myself, maybe those two guards at the gate were listening to this radio. So I turn it back on, and I go inside.

I enter an elevator and press a button. It ascends and deposits me at the top of the monument. I see the satellite dish I've been sent to retrieve, but glancing to my right, I notice light streaming through an opening in the wall. I walk over to it, and when I gaze outside I'm frozen by what I see: the National Mall lies in ruins - the blighted earth once a park of green grass; the dilapidated Capitol Building shattered in the distance. I shudder when I envision the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial, both out of my view, blasted beyond recognition. I flash to a memory of my 8th-grade school trip to this very spot.

I turn my back to this view and pull up my Pip-Boy to check the map. The screen is washed out and hard to read, and I can't make out the controls. Ah. It's the sun beating down on the screen. I briefly close the Pip-Boy and turn to face the south. When I return to my screen, the glare is gone and I consult my map. I'm tired and need a place to sleep.

I grab the dish and return to the base of the monument. Billie Holiday is singing on the radio. I decide to chat with the guards, but neither will offer more than a cursory sentence, and one of them is decidedly rude to me. So I return to the radio, take out my sledgehammer and smash it to smithereens. That was the plan anyway, but it turns out I can only put a dent in it. So I turn it off instead. If those guards want music, they can turn it back on themselves. Wish I could have smashed it, though. I consider lobbing a grenade at them and running, but I've got other things to do. I need to deliver this dish and find my dad.

Some of our most gifted game designers say they want to get out of our way and let us discover our own stories in their games. Doug Church calls it "abdicating authorship." Patrick Redding and Clint Hocking call it "dynamic story architecture." Steve Gaynor calls the player an "agent of chaos" and observes, "It is not about the other-- the author, the director. It is about you."

My ongoing adventure in the rubble of Washington D.C. suggests to me that these designers are half right. I'm aware of my main quest, and I track it with interest, but I'm easily distracted by people I meet and places I discover. I'm pursuing my own objectives much of the time and - without really meaning to - my existence in this world has taken on its own storytelling dimension. Call it emergent narrative or some other fancy phrase, but when I'm standing at the top of the Washington Monument and remembering when I was 13 years old, or when I'm trying to figure out how to punish those two surly guards for being rude to me, I'm immersed in things that say more about me and my avatar than about any Fallout 3 quest line. I am, in important ways, authoring my own story.

But it isn't just about me. I'm also thinking about game design. And it's here that I think Church, Hocking, et al understate the meta-experience of playing well-designed games. My first thought at the top of the Washington Monument was personal and reflective. But my second thought, arriving seconds after the first, was "Wow, what a great idea!" This moment is like a Hitchock-Deus Ex cocktail. Give me a vital reason to reach the top of an iconic American landmark and make something important happen there. But Fallout 3 turns the tables. I don't meet the enemy or fight for my life; instead, I face the world as it now exists. I've already seen devastation, but this historic vantage point shows me the vastness and the painful resonance of it. And - crucially - this only happens if I look for it. I could simply grab the dish and run to my next destination. The designers trusted me to take the time to look. "Very cool," I think. "Great idea. Thanks."

I also think about game design when the glare from the sun obscures my Pip-Boy screen. "Are you kidding me," I think. "What a terrific, realistic touch. Amazing. Well done." Then it occurs to me these designers have figured out how to transform a standard menu system interface into a device that exists physically in the world of the game. "Excellent." Then I think about Far Cry 2 and Dead Space doing similar things, and...okay, now I'm just geeking out, but you get the idea. I'm thinking about game design, and loving it.

On the other side of the coin, I also think about game design when I can't smash the radio. Why can't I smash the radio? The moment I discover this, I think about arbitrary environmental interactions and wish I wasn't thinking about them. I'd prefer to think about how to smash that radio.

When game designers surrender authorial control to the player, unexpected and extraordinary things can happen. I'm enjoying Fallout 3 immensely, even though I feel only vaguely connected to the main quest. The game creates a wide space for emergent narrative, even when it stumbles in the presentation and depiction of its characters.

But succeed or fail, my awareness of game design is omnipresent, and I like it that way. It enriches my experience of playing. The in-world experience remains my first thought, but my second thought is nearly always focused on the system, especially when that system demonstrates originality or beautiful execution. I don't think I'm the only gamer who behaves this way.

So, when Gaynor writes about video games in his insightful essay "Being There" and suggests that:

"Unlike a great film or piece of literature, they don't give the audience an admiration for the genius in someone else's work; they instead supply the potential for genuine personal experience..."

I believe it's quite possible - even desirable - to achieve both. The richness of my personal experience in Fallout 3 is undeniable; but so is my respect and admiration for the genius of its designers. In fact, my awareness and appreciation of one naturally enhances the other, all within the same experience. And that, in my view, is a wonderful thing.

Beyond the end of the line

All roads lead to realism. In the arts, it's easy to track the predictable trajectory: artists reject stylization believing they will draw us ever closer to Truth with ever closer facsimiles of reality. Heroic verse gives way to Iambic Pentameter, which surrenders to Neoclassical couplets, which yields to Romantic prose, which succumbs to Realism, followed by Naturalism...just in time for the arrival of the medium that renders all theatrical realism self-defeating: Film. That's a woefully inadequate summary of theater history, but you get the idea.

One can find similar trajectories in the other arts. It's possible, for example, to condense the history of the cinema as an inexorable movement towards verisimilitude, with nearly every technical advancement designed to serve the prime objective: fidelity to real life. The closer we get to making movies indistinguishable from life, the more believable they are. Or so say the realists.

But history is never a straight road. Punctuating all of these movements are innumerable reactions against them. In the 20th century alone, the march toward realism has been met by counter-forces such as Expressionism, Surrealism, Absurdism, the New Wave, and the Third Cinema. While these movements rarely become mainstream, their impact on the dominant modes of theater and film can easily be seen. It's impossible to disconnect a single-camera show like The Wire, for example, from its influences in New Wave, Cinema Vérité, and Italian Neo-Realism.

Narrative video games are rambling down the same road to realism, and I wonder when the inevitable crossroad will appear. Cell-shaded games like Team Fortress 2 and The Wind Waker have notably demonstrated stylistic alternatives. Mirror's Edge has a cool alternative look, and the upcoming Prince of Persia adopts a painterly visual style. But the momentum toward realism among high-profile games is unmistakable, and most major developers continue to focus their efforts and resources at discovering new ways to immerse the player in highly detailed visuals that present realistic, if often improbable, environments.

I wrote recently about the stiff, lifeless character models in Fallout 3 and suggested that they detract from the overall experience of the game. Not surprisingly, several of my astute readers commented that the road to photorealism leads to places we may not want to go, and they reminded me that I expressed such a concern about Mass Effect nearly a year ago. True dat.

But when developers deliberately choose realism as their primary design aesthetic, then we must inevitably insist that they make good on that promise. We might imagine a Fallout 3 with stylized visuals, but the fact is that Bethesda has given us what they've given us, and for most reviewers the realistic visual style of Fallout 3 is one of its assets. It's a smooth ride, for the most part, as we take in the bleak, breathtakingly bombed-out environments. But the character models and canned animations are the potholes in that road. They detract from the otherwise exhilarating ride the game delivers.

As a designer (or a film director, or a painter, or a photographer, etc.), if it's photorealism you're going for, then you must deliver believably realistic subjects. We can object to the aesthetic (and I have many times), but in the end, we meet the game at the place it's delivered to us, and we hold it accountable for the places where it fails to deliver on its own chosen aesthetic.

So where does all of this lead? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the end of the line for video games may turn out to be Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, a game that ups the ante on realistic detail to an unprecedented degree. Facial motion capture, minute tracking of eye movements, purposely imperfect skin textures, and shaders that add never-before-seen nuance to the human face - all serve to render characters that look as lifelike as possible on a modern console (in this case, the PS3).

Will Quantic Dream deliver a trip to Uncanny Valley? Will Heavy Rain be a good game? I have no idea, but I'm personally less interested in those questions than I am in how the industry will respond to this new high water mark. Will developer X study the chinks in Heavy Rain's realistic armor in an effort to deliver an even-higher degree of realism? Will developer Y continue to tweak the PhysX engine used by Quantic Dream, squeezing even more natural movement out of it? When do we reach the end of the line?

At what point will a major developer chuck the whole photorealism schtick and build a big-budget ambitious narrative video game based on a completely different visual aesthetic? Not because it's cheaper; not so it will run on older systems; but purely because the designers believe they can do better than realism. This day is coming. History suggests it's inevitable. I say it can't come soon enough.

The world according to Molyneux

"Albion rose from where he labour'd at the Mill with Slaves.
Giving himself for the Nations he danc'd the dance of Eternal Death."
--William Blake, The Dance of Albion

"Oh Albion remains, sleeping now to rise again."
--Led Zeppelin, Achilles Last Stand

In Fable 2, Peter Molyneux's Albion is a lush snow-globe vision of Great Britain that weaves together an eccentric melange of storybook tales and fantasy adventure - with plenty of sexual escapades and political intrigue to spice things up. Set in a wildly anachronistic blend of medieval, renaissance, and 18th century England, it's a greatest-hits mix of English culture ala popular literature and film, with a healthy blend of subversive Swift and scatological Monty Python.

The wonder of Fable 2 is that it all works. Unlike its predecessor, which offered the promise of a meaningful experience it couldn't deliver, Fable 2's towns, countrysides and highways are full of landmarks, characters and situations worth stopping for.

It's a testament to the richness of the game's environments that no matter how intently I try to stick to the main storyline, something always draws me away. In other games (e.g. Fallout 3) it's usually an interesting side-mission or character-request that pulls me away; but in Fable 2 it's nearly always the world itself that diverts me: a mysterious path leading away from the golden trail, a curious object on the horizon, the voice of a gargoyle insulting me.

I'll save the role-playing elements of Fable 2 for another post - and I highly recommend Corvus Elrod's recent posts on his experiences with the game - but an undeniably defining feature of great RPGs is the vivid worlds they present to the player. I've been thinking about how this works (when it works), and it seems to me we can identify certain key features that tend to distinguish successful RPGs when it comes to creating and delivering a coherent and satisfying world to the player.

So here's a stab at a feature list of features, so to speak, and how they tend to work in Fable 2. If I've forgotten something (as I'm sure I have), please feel free to jump in and fill the gaps.

1. A world that stimulates my imagination
   Molyneux's Albion is a sumptuous and stylized visual feast that somehow manages to make sense of all its parts. It makes no effort to logically explain why traveling bards, rifles, and magical energy swords all belong in this world, but they do. Albion is a fun (and often funny) place to be, but it also contains a dark side that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. I've had two dreams set in Albion since I started playing Fable 2, so I guess I can safely say: imagination stimulated.


2. A world that rewards exploration
   Much has been made of the dog who functions as your sidekick throughout the game. He is a terrific addition to be sure, only partly because he sniffs out treasures. But Albion offers a tremendous wealth of content - side-quests, off-the-beaten-path locations, mini-games, and assorted nutty characters - all of which feel like valuable, worthwhile in-game events. You explore Albion not simply to extend your play-time. Navigating this world delivers experiences that deepen and contextualize your character's journey through the story. Taking on the game's many challenges nearly always results in something more interesting than an EXP boost.


3. A world populated by distinctive characters
   Fable 2 has extraordinarily high production values (thanks Microsoft!), and nowhere is this more obvious than in the broad range of singular characterizations voiced by a talented cast of English actors, including Stephen Fry, Oliver Cotton, and Zoë Wanamaker. I can't think of another video game with quite the gallery of fully-voiced miscreants, sad-sacks, hucksters, and self-deluded suitors. Clever and genuinely funny writing permeates the game from beginning to end, and you will never forget a particular heroine nicknamed Hammer who simply will not or cannot stop talking.


4. A world that responds to my actions and decisions
   I won't say much about this here because to do so would involve much spoilage. Suffice it to say that Fable 2 significantly revises the binary Good/Evil formula that so limited the original Fable. Your choices really do matter in Fable 2, but not always in the ways you might expect. To me, one sure sign of successful game design is my desire, upon completion, to immediately play the game again in a different way. If only Fallout 3 and Little Big Planet weren't staring at me so forlornly...


5. A world that provokes me to ask "What if...?"
   Gamers love exploring the margins of games, testing the limits of design, and generally trying to figure out what they can get away with. Fable 2 responds to this kind of gameplay reasonably well. While it's no Fallout 3 (more on that soon), the game leaves room for plenty of "what if" choices (without the multi-game save function crutch of Fallout 3). Fable 2 defaults to a "safety on" setting that prevents you from killing innocent people by mistake. But you can turn this off, and when you do all sorts of "what if" possibilities emerge.


6. A world that makes me reflect on my own
   Fable 2 was assigned an "M" (Mature) rating by the ESRB, a rating I consider appropriate. I mention this only to point out an interesting fact. In nearly every conversation I've had with gamers considering purchasing the game, not a single person was aware of this. On a hunch, I spoke with the manager of my near-local EB Games store, and he told me, "You have no idea how many underage people we've turned away on Fable 2. I'd say at least a hundred, including phone calls."
   
   Molyneux and company seem to have understood that Fable 2 must open up a world of gameplay choices, characters, and situations that speak to modern gamers in ways that go beyond the typical RPG tropes and good vs evil formulas. Homosexuality and same-sex marriage are perceived no differently than heterosexual or "traditional" marriage in Fable 2. Prostitution, casual sex, and other so-called taboo subjects are all just another day in Albion. The result, in my view, is a world that stands a much better chance of serving - however stylized - as a mirror on our own.

For another take on Molyneux's world-making achievement, I highly recommend "Fable 2: An open letter to Peter Molyneux" at PixelVixen 707.

Voice acting reboot

Narrative video games continue to explore new and better ways to tell us stories in vivid  environments with engaging gameplay. Technology plays a big role in all this, of course, and I've written here about the many ways game designers are leveraging procedural AI and other game engine approaches to make this happen.

But as my friend Iroquois Pliskin points out, innovation needn't be aimed exclusively at programming and technical improvements. Creativity can emerge from anywhere, aimed at anything. Simple human imagination can make all the difference, especially when applied to things that don't specifically rely on technology.

That's a good thing, because if there's one aspect of video games that could use an infusion of imagination, it's voice acting. Unlike other elements of game design, which have progressed measurably over the last 20+ years, voice acting remains mired in needlessly conventional, amateurish approaches to production. Developers too often accept shallow, 1-dimensional performances by actors as good enough for video games. Caricatures and stereotypes pass for characters, even when the writing transcends clichés, which isn't often.

Game writing may not often reach very high (and the nature of the medium may have something to do with that), but from an actor's point of view it doesn't matter; nor is it an excuse for poor acting. An actor must make a script come to life, regardless of its flaws or limitations. Believe me, good actors can often rescue a poor script with cleverness and imagination; but no amount of dramaturgical brilliance can salvage a play or film from bad actors. If you've seen Shakespeare butchered before your eyes, you know what I'm talking about.

If you want to hear first-rate voice actors elevate the toughest material of all - exposition - to something like lively drama, take a look at what Khary Payton (Drebin) and Debi Mae West (Meryl) achieve in Metal Gear Solid 4. Payton is saddled with endless streams of backstory and psycho-babble, nearly all of which he enlivens with humor, personality, and stylish characterization. West performs her own miracles. Here she is hauling a truck full of exposition in a scene with Snake.

Compare that to this chunk of awkwardness:

I honestly feel for the actors who must deliver such insipid dialogue, but they do themselves no favors here. Both fall prey to indicating; that is, playing the character in a way that tells the audience exactly what we are to think of him or her, instead of trusting the audience to discover these things for ourselves. In this case, the actor is the "cool detached RPG hero," and the actress is the "innocent young princess" - both from the RPG central casting department. I'm not saying these actors could have made this scene good; but they certainly could have avoided making it worse.

I spend most of my time teaching acting and directing to undergraduates, and I see them struggle with certain tendencies that limit their effectiveness and diminish their believability. These problems are common to young or inexperienced actors; but they can also arise with good actors who don't have time to adequately prepare for their roles. Perhaps not surprisingly, I see many of the same issues in video game voice acting. Aside from indicating, here are a few other common ailments:

Over-animated: Young actors often assume that acting means being larger than life. They make everything bigger than necessary to convey the character to the audience. This usually results in portrayals reduced to emotions like "nervous," "angry," or "excited." Emotions are adverbs. Actors can't play adverbs.

Forced formality: Actors sometimes try to charge their dialogue with weighty importance or magnitude. This usually results in an arch, fabricated style sure to provoke unintentional laughter. Again, no verbs, no acting. Two examples:

Johnny One-Note: Locking onto an inflection, a dialect, or a speech pattern to the exclusion of other meaningful choices narrows the actor's range and diminishes the character to a repetitive line reading machine. David Hayter's portrayal of Solid Snake has always troubled me in this regard. It seems to make no difference what he is saying: the lines are all delivered exactly the same.

Incompetence: Sometimes video games make fools out of people who have no business being actors. In my profession, we try very hard to give actors the tools they need to be stageworthy, even when they have very little experience. Apparently, some game developers simply don't see, or don't care, how intolerably bad these "performances" are. Things often hit rock bottom when localization issues are thrown into the mix.

Why do we accept such abysmally poor acting in narrative games? Have we grown accustomed to simply overlooking it? Or, after 30 years, have we come to see this kind of acting as a convention of the medium? Are video game characters like Snake and Marcus Fenix intended to be self-consciously iconic, with a purposeful lack of range or expressiveness? Does it even matter that these performances would be considered hopelessly incompetent outside their own medium? Perhaps voice actors in games are like divas in opera: perfectly suited to the requirements of their unique art forms, but a little silly when considered outside their natural habitats. I'd like to believe all this is true...but I don't. Frankly, it's just bad acting to me.

I believe good acting is good acting, whether it occurs on stage, in film, in a cartoon, or in a video game. It can be done well and quite professionally, as Mass Effect, Bioshock, GTA4, and the Half-Life series have proven. We may not wish to apply the same criteria to all actors across all media, but we ought not lower the bar for actors simply because they're portraying characters in video games. I think it's time for a voice acting reboot. If we want to advance this art form with sophisticated and imaginative storytelling, we need to insist on a process that enables good actors to properly do their jobs.

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Brilliant

Occasionally, somebody says something in just the right way, using just the right words. The rarity of such moments makes me appreciate them all the more. When they occur, they invariably produce an involuntary affirmative response from me. Yes! Precisely! Brilliant!

Such was the case when I came across a statement made by game designer Clint Hocking in a recent issue of Edge Magazine. I heard Hocking speak in February at GDC, and found him similarly eloquent, if eloquence can be wrought out of a 90-minute speech delivered in 45 - which it can. Hocking is an incredibly bright guy with big ideas; you just need to put on your smart cap with the chin strap and be prepared to keep up.

In the Edge interview, Hocking discusses his forthcoming game Far Cry 2 and his sense of it as an open world game:

I don't really think of our game as a shooter, I think of it as an open world game. I think we have a lot more in common with GTA or Crackdown than we do with Doom or Quake, that's for sure. The genre's evolving and there are lots of different interpretations of how they should work and what the genre's conventions are. Maybe that's why they're so attractive - because there aren't that many conventions yet - it's so freeform that it gives a lot more room for expression. It's certainly that which attracts me to it as a player - an opportunity to express myself. The ones I don't like are the ones where I feel I am not expressing myself.

Brilliant! For as long as I've played video games, I've never quite hooked into the thing that's happening to me which keeps me interested. I've called it engagement and immersion, and these are suitable terms. But Hocking's notion that games provide me the "opportunity to express myself" hits it squarely on the nose for me. Brilliant.

Clearly, expressing myself in video games can happen in all sorts of ways - with open world games and RPGs, of course, but also with well-designed platformers and action adventure games. Hocking's statement utterly captures why I'm enjoying Spore so much, but it also helps me better understand why I'm so enamored of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The Zelda franchise has always made me happy, but Wind Waker's oft-maligned sailing navigation mechanic and Link's expressive, animated presentation elevated the experience for me. I felt more free to make this Link my Link.

It also helps explain my affection for Zack and Wiki, a puzzle game that conveys to the player a strong sense of freedom to find solutions in his own way by turning the environment to his advantage. In this case, the freedom is essentially an illusion since there is typically only one solution for each puzzle. But how I go about solving it and the methods I use to explore and discover feel very much like my own.

And what is Portal, after all, if not an environmental puzzle game whose great innovative gift to the player is self-expression?

So, thanks Clint! :-) I imagine many of you found your way to the "games as self-expression" eureka moment long ago, but I hope you'll indulge me my little discovery. It feels like somebody just raised the light dimmer in my room to full.

Somebody say amen

I love RPGs. I've played them for nearly as long as I've played video games. Even after all these years, I've never lost my enthusiasm for them. If my total hours playing games were translated to a pie chart, RPGs would represent the biggest slice of pie...and, oh, what a tasty slice it would be! :-)

In particular, I've always loved Japanese RPGs. I realize not everyone shares my enthusiasm, but the 16-bit era - the golden age of console RPGs, in my view - engendered a permanent soft spot in my heart for the style and structure, as well as the epic storytelling and quirky, indelible characters found in so many of those great games. Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV - all big bites of a scrumptious JRPG pie. No worries, I'm dropping the pie metaphor now.

Soft spots can sometimes produce blind spots, however, and I think in recent years I've allowed myself to go easy on games like Final Fantasy XII and Dragon Quest VIII, ignoring their essential lack of innovation and celebrating how they function as superlative modern examples of games we've been playing for 20 years. I truly love these games, but I'm also aware of how reactionary the genre and its audience have proven themselves over the years. More than any other genre, even the smallest incremental change in gameplay mechanics or inventory management is generally hailed as either revolutionary by RPG defenders or an abomination by the traditionalists.

Nevertheless, I've made it one of my little missions in life to convince people who don't like JRPGs (especially young gamers) that they ought to try one. I attempt to dissuade them of their notions of clichéd save-the-world plots and stereotypical reluctant, conflicted, emo heroes. "Play Persona 3!" I tell them. Okay, so maybe the kids are a little emo, but here's an RPG with great production values that goes places you won't expect. "This game will change your mind," I tell them.

But no. Persona 3 is a PS2 game, and PS2 games are so 2006. These are Xbox 360 owners, and they want a true, updated next-gen experience. So when I urge them to play a JRPG, what do they do? They play Infinite Undiscovery. And, of course, they think I'm an idiot.

In case you're not familiar with it, Infinite Undiscovery is an action-RPG released earlier this month exclusively for the Xbox 360, developed by tri-Ace and published by Square Enix. I won't attempt a full review (or even a mini-review) of Infinite Undiscovery, but suffice it to say that the game is yet another standard-issue JRPG with a reluctant hero of unknown parentage who must realize his special status and save the world. While it's not impossible for such a familiar story arc to succeed, unfortunately Infinite Undiscovery steers directly into a headwind of clichés and never veers away.

Despite claims by tri-Ace that the game contains ten years of ideas that can only finally be realized on the Xbox 360 [1], the game's "true evolution"[2] of situational battles and real-time combat are hardly genre-redefining. They do very little to dissuade a JRPG naysayer that this game does anything more than rearrange the JRPG furniture. And am I really still reading screen after screen of text dialogue on a modern, next-gen RPG that comes on two discs?

I need some help out here, folks. I need somebody to say amen...and mean it. I keep telling everybody JRPGs matter, but with every Infinite Undiscovery, Blue Dragon, and Lost Odyssey, my case gets thinner and thinner. Certainly, JRPGs are important (and Final Fantasy XIII will inevitably sell a gajillion copies), but I fear they have become beautiful, intricate museum pieces; highly desirable to collectors and enthusiasts, but largely irrelevant to an art form that insists on meaningful innovation. Outmoded and ever-so quaint. Tiffany Lamps.

I have a horrible nagging suspicion the party's over, but nobody has the heart to tell me.

Beautiful simplicity

I attended a lecture several years ago by a gifted physicist who spoke about the world's most famous equation: E = mc². He contended that Einstein's groundbreaking formula could be explained in a variety of ways, but for him the most apt description was to call it beautiful. To a physicist who understands the complexity and implications of the system captured by that simple elegant equation, there can be no more appropriate response, he said. Another scientist, world-renowned theoretical physicist Brian Greene, puts it this way:

E = mc² is certainly an easy equation to write down...but you really have to keep your head on straight to recognize what the symbols mean in any given situation. It is not an equation that reveals all its subtlety in the few symbols that it takes to write down."[1]

I've been reflecting on this notion of beautiful simplicity a lot lately, provoked by a minor convergence of events: the lively response to my post about Spore; my own experience with the game as I continue to progress through it; and Leigh Alexander's most recent post which questions game reviewers' assumptions about complexity and depth. Here's a snippet from that essay:

I have noticed lately that the primary reason some major titles -- Spore, for example -- have suffered in reviews is because they lack complexity in certain areas of the design; "complexity" is often substituted for "depth."... I wonder, from what perspective are reviewers judging complexity, in the broader sense? Are we talking about controls, the sophistication of the game mechanics, the game's length, its plot, characters, what? ... It's got me wondering -- why has simplicity become a dirty word, and why does an absence of complexity seem to translate automatically, in reviews, to a lack of depth?

I remember with some fondness a time when many of the very best computer games could be described as exercises in unintuitive complexity. These games were often brutally difficult, not because the core gameplay was too hard, but because the interface or navigation tools or feedback system (or all of these) were baroque by today's standards. I have a big soft spot in my heart for Nethack, but I'm not pining for the days of its termcap interface and keyboard map.

One of the most difficult tasks for any designer or engineer is making a complex system (a car, a computer, a video game) simple to use and easy to understand. One of Einstein's greatest gifts was his ability to communicate ideas and concepts to a variety of audiences, many of whom weren't equipped to understand the hard science underpinning his ideas. It's possible to speak plainly about complicated things, but it usually requires a lot more work.

This, it seems to me, is precisely what Will Wright and his team at Maxis have accomplished with Spore, and I believe it's a notable achievement. In certain ways it's analogous to what Jonathan Ive did with the iPod: put an immaculately designed and easy to use system in the hands of people and let them have fun with it. If this was an easy task, the iPod would be just another MP3 player.

Simple, elegant, and easy to use are, in fact, very hard to do. The achievement of Spore is just this. Its extraordinary complexity has been made invisible, and its depth has been hidden inside a menagerie of colorful creatures.

The diminished journey

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. --Joseph Campbell

The profound influence of the Monomyth, the Hero's Journey, on narrative video games is easily demonstrated. When my students first encounter Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, they make the leap to video games with barely a nudge from me, listing all the games they've played that conform to Campbell's familiar paradigm: the call to adventure; the road of trials; achieving the goal (resulting in self-knowledge); returning home; and bestowing the boons, the gifts, of his journey on his fellow men (and women, presumably, though Campbell notoriously ignores them in most of his work).

While Campbell's star may have fallen among modern mythology scholars, I continue to find his work compelling because it never fails to capture the imagination of students encountering it for the first time. Helping students work their way through the stages of the Monomyth and witnessing the lightning bolt discoveries and inevitable connections to familiar fairy tales, games, films, and books they know can be an exhilarating experience. They suddenly discover a broader context they never knew existed, and this encounter often compels them to consider cultural or religious differences more openly and non-judgmentally.

But if you take the time to explore the hero's journey as it relates to video games, you soon realize something is missing. Although there may be much room for improvement, narrative video games do a terrific job of depicting the call to adventure, the journey, the victory, and the return. Link, Master Chief, and Snake have each in their own ways followed the mythic path. But where are the boons?

It might be said that securing peace or avoiding nuclear annihilation or piecing the Triforce back together are boons all by themselves. They make people feel happy and safe. Princesses are saved and kingdoms restored. Ultimately, these are the rewards of a hero's victory, right? Well, actually no. Not according to Campbell at least.

Campbell believes the most difficult part of the journey is the re-entry back into society. The now-enlightened hero must bring his knowledge of the world and the bitter truth of existence back to the people he has saved. And they aren't always so happy to see him. In fact, much of the resonance we derive from the hero's journey emerges from this difficult and complex exchange. As we see with characters like Ethan Edwards in John Ford's epic western The Searchers, sometimes the victorious hero returns to society, only to be rejected by it. The very things that made him fit to do the job now make him unfit to live among the people for whom he sacrificed everything. They want no part of the boons he brings them.

Can game mechanics interactively convey this part of the journey? After the victory is won, what sort of engaging play experience can be designed around the hero's return to bestow the gifts of her journey? If we agree this final leg of the quest is no less essential or defining than the call to adventure or the hero's trials, are video games destined to provide a somewhat "dumbed down" version of this journey?

To be sure, Hollywood has generally settled for the "hero victory, roll credits" formula, but not always. The Dark Knight can be seen as a meditation on the hero's efforts to integrate himself into a society that both embraces and rejects him. The boons he brings are scrutinized by the film in a variety of meaningful ways, and I think the film can be seen as an exploration of what Campbell calls the "master of two worlds"; a hero who paradoxically can be seen as belonging to two worlds, and to neither.

Is it possible to imagine a video game that could explore such rugged territory? I hope so, but I don't know. We seem always to find ourselves staring at the same question: would it be fun? One might argue $500+ million domestic box office for The Dark Knight suggests audiences are prepared for this kind of  journey, but I think such an argument takes us back to apples and oranges.

The real question, to me, is whether or not it's possible to design a compelling game that can convey, or provide an environment to explore, these complex situations, many of which are negative and unrewarding. And even if it can be done, would anyone want to play it? If the answer is no, are we then left with a truncated and diminished version of the hero's journey?

Meta4orce - chat with the designer

I've been enjoying an email exchange with the developer of an interactive animated sci-fi detective series called Meta4orce. Written by acclaimed comic book writer Peter Milligan, Meta4orce molds together a four-part episodic animated series with eight integrated online games to tell the story of a team of genetically-altered detectives tasked with solving highly sensitive criminal cases.

The game was commissioned by the BBC as an experiment in online interactive entertainment (the animated sequences were broadcast on BBC2), and it's available to play for free anywhere in the world. If you're familiar with the BBC's license fee system, you know that much of its televised content is restricted to UK residents only, so the worldwide availability of Meta4orce is a pleasant and welcome surprise.

In my conversation with one of the game's designers, Iain Lobb, he's written about the challenges of creating a console-like experience in a browser (Meta4orce is a Flash-based game) as well as the game design/theory implications of the project. He's trying to integrate short games within a linear narrative animation; which, when you think about it, means the game elements function as cutscenes to the narrative, rather than the other way around. The experiment here is to provide a different kind of interactive experience for gamers.

And that's where you come in. :-)

Iain was kind enough to solicit my feedback on the project, and I asked him if he would be willing to let me extend that invitation to my readers. He eagerly agreed, and so here we are. If you're interested, head over to the BBC's site for the game and give it a look. Then return here and post your comments and questions for Iain. He will pop in every so often to respond, and I hope we'll be able to generate a useful discussion.

Meta4orce is intended as a casual narrative game that blends media in an interactive online environment. I encourage you to meet the game where it is and consider the possibilities and/or limitations of such an experiment. As Iain asked me in his original message, "Are projects like this the future, or is it just a one-off experiment that will never lead to anything else? (like Dragon's Lair or those multi-disk CD-Rom movie/games of the 90s)."

I'm grateful to Iain for his willingness to engage with the community in this way, and I invite you to join in what I hope will be a constructive conversation. See you in the year 2034.

[Note: the Meta4orce site works best for users with broadband connections.]

Why would you want to do that?

Without meaning to, I've found myself bumping into the question of difficulty in games recently. I can't explain why, but I've been thinking and writing about it a lot lately, and in the process I've become painfully aware of my own hypocrisy on the subject. On one hand, I want my non-gamer friends to play Braid; but they can't, and that troubles me. On the other hand, I would love for my non-gamer friends to play Etrian Odyssey; but they can't (or won't) and I couldn't care less. Etrian Odyssey is a hard game, folks. Deal with it.

At least I'm aware of my hypocrisy. That should count for something, right?

A small part of me quietly thinks Etrian Odyssey is the ultimate (and portable!) lithmus test to determine authentic, old-school, hardcore gamer cred. If you dig this game - I mean derive real satisfaction from playing it - you, my friend, have attained Gamer Enlightenment and reside in the 9th Sphere of dungeon-crawler Heaven.

I came face to face with the essence of this peculiar form of transendence when my copy of Etrian Odyssey II arrived the other day. My wife was intrigued by the game box and asked me what kind of game it was. I explained it was an RPG that hearkens back to the roots of the genre and games like Wizardry. When that didn't register, I added that it was a turn-based exploration game that required the player to draw his own dungeon maps. "You mean the game doesn't show you where you are?" she asked. "Nope. You're totally on your own. It's like back when games required you to draw maps on graph paper, except with this game you can draw them on the bottom screen of the DS." After looking at me blankly for moment, she asked, "Why would you want to do that?"

Hm. Why indeed. It's a good question, isn't it? Why would a modern gamer choose to play a game that resolutely refuses to incorporate nearly every major advancement made in the genre over the last 25 years? And why would a modern developer (Atlas) devote its resources to building an antique, outmoded RPG?

Etrian Odyssey demands much and offers very little in return. It severely punishes your mistakes and requires a lot of apparently unnecessary work. It is a grind in the purest sense; no auto-saves, no mini-maps, increment-only movement, frequent random battles and brutal bosses. It is unforgiving, unyielding, and it refuses to hold your hand or even acknowledge your measly existence. And those are the very reasons I love it so. I love Etrian Odyssey precisely because it is so unfashionably hard.

No doubt, a certain amount of ego comes into play here. Surviving in Etrian Odyssey is verification that I've still got it as a gamer and classic RPG player. I haven't lost my chops. To be sure, in this genre "chops" translates to dogged persistence and indefatigable enthusiasm - not exactly skills, but admirable traits nonetheless. I may not be as fast as I used to be, but it's good to know I haven't lost a step when it comes to bulldog perseverence. :-)

And there's something to be said for occasionally taking the hard road. Etrian Odyssey offers great fun and deep satisfaction, but you must dig and sweat before the game will yield them to you. Some would say this is no fun at all. But I say a map well-drawn and a dungeon well-explored are their own rewards.

If you're a big fan of RPGs, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the genre's origins. There are lots of ways to do that, including playing games like The Bard's Tale and Wizardry yourself. But Atlas has done all of us a great service (yet again) by capturing the souls of these games into a handsome modern package and by bringing the original Japanese versions of Etrian Odyssey I and II to North America, Europe and Australia. I recommend the sequel for its improved navigation and inventory management, both of which make the game...uh, yeah, easier. On second thought, I recommend the original.