Jonny B. Good

I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan Blow yet, but I get the impression that he’s the type of man who does what he does, not for the attention of the gaming media, but because he thinks that’s the way things should be.

And I’m going to have to agree.

I’ve spoken of Jonathan before, and if you haven’t heard any of his talks on design, you should, if that’s the kind of thing that interests you. Jonathan has made news recently based around many of his design philosophies. I had thought that these views were lofty and optimistic, it was difficult to point to any one of them and demonstrate a successful title that really embodied it. Then it came about that Jonathan was bringing a game to market, and I had intended to draw a bead upon it with a critical eye, looking forward to pointing out in his game where he was defying his own rules.

So much for that.

I realize that Braid is currently only available for Xbox Live Arcade, which I’m happy about from a business standpoint, but I almost wish it was more widely available in this case. I feel bad for friends of mine who would rather spend a few hundred dollars in coffee than own an Xbox, because they are missing out on an a profound experience. Braid is coming to PC later this year, but many of these friends own Macs (probably for the same reason they don’t own an Xbox 360). So let’s talk about Braid and Jonathan’s design beliefs.

Jon holds the stance that playing a video games should be a holistic experience - you shouldn’t need to be artificially prodded into doing one thing or another, rather the game play space should naturally draw you to areas and concept that should be interesting, and you should discover them for yourself. Braid contains no tutorials, and as the central game mechanic is about playing with the flow of time, describes a world in which things can happen which are not expected. Nevertheless, the game is built in such a way that you will naturally discover the quirks of this world, in a very organic fashion, and every time you do, you feel really good about it.

Jon is vehemently against scheduled rewards (a term I used, and I believe he coined). These are the little meaningless bonuses that at their best, try to get you to explore areas of the playspace you might not have, and at their worst, are a cheap mental trick designed to keep you in front of your box. Nearly all games contain these in some way, they’re so prevelant, it’s difficult to imagine a game without them. Braid is such a game. Taking them away gives the game a clean, minimalistic feel. It invokes the feeling that you’re free of distractions, and can be focused on the exploration at hand.

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Jon is of the opinion that there is often a dichotomy between what the gameplay is trying to tell the player, and what the story is telling the player. The canonical example is Bioshock, in which the story tells you that the choice between saving or destroying the little sisters is critical, and the game play tells you it doesn’t matter (because the difference in rewards for doing one or the other are trivial). Braid’s story is tightly integrated with gameplay, and in fact it didn’t occur to me until the sixth world that the story being told was an allegory for what was happening in each level, and vice versa.

Finally, Jon believes that developers should think about what they’re teaching their players when they give them a game to play. On this point I think the world needs a balance, and in general we are lacking developers who live in Blow’s camp. Games have been used to teach people since time immemorial. As a tool for teaching, it is certainly important that what is being taught is a Good Thing. I think, however, that from a pragmatic standpoint, not everyone is interested in learning. There is a place in the world for people who want nothing but to be entertained, and someone will always be there to fill that desire.

So what is Braid? It is a world turning experience on both an intellectual and emotional level. Braid integrates complexity out of simplicity, it evokes a sense of wonder and delight. Free of distractions, you are brought into a masterfully crafted world where you are repeatly filled with a sense of delight as you learn. The feeling is much like the feeling of exploring in Portal, only more so. Jonathan values this feeling so much, that the official walkthrough simply urges you not to use a walkthrough - and he’s right. Using a walkthrough robs you of much of the experience you get out of this game, and you can never get it again.

Braid is a bittersweet, magical journey, and missing it would leave your hand off the touchstone of our generation. Jonathan Blow earns my respect in spades, and the world will never be the same again.

Colorblindness and Videogames

Destructoid has a good article up about the problems those of us who are colorblind or color-impaired (like me!) have with videogames. To discuss this a little further, approximately 10% of the male population suffers from some degree of color impairment. The article’s author seems to be significantly more colorblind than I am, as he can’t tell the difference between the red and green on Big Daddies in Bioshock. Neither of us, however, can see the boat in this picture (I’m told there’s a boat here).

I’ve never found my colorblindness to be so significant that it ever impaired my ability to play videogames, but I’m certainly on the less severe end of the scale.

There have been noises in the industry about taking accessibility into consideration when designing a game, which I think is terrific, although of course there are always trade-offs in doing so. In the realm of color-blindness however, the solution to this problem is nearly always to never use color as the sole indicator of anything in the game. This is not only often reasonably easy to do, it’s also sound design practice to aid those who are not color-impaired as well. It’s nice to see that Peggle has gone to the trouble to design an entire mode around the colorblind, but it would have been reasonably simple to simply add symbols into the design of the blocks in the first place.

A Critique of Video Games

To say that there’s a debate on whether or not video games are art is rather disingenuous. There are those who feel that video games are not, but I think it’s been demonstrated that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The very question of “Are video games art” doesn’t make sense. One doesn’t ask if drawings or film are art, these things are a medium through which art can be expressed. Anything can be a medium through which art is expressed, but that doesn’t mean that everything created using that medium is art. I doubt that Mr. Ebert would deny film being a viable medium for art, but he’s not exactly advocating the artistic merits of American Pie either.

And so we could discuss what the qualifications are for artwork, but I could make an entire blog devoted to that. The reality of the situation is that those types of decisions are made by consensus of the art critic community. We currently have a lot of game reviewers, who are paid money to play games and essentially tell the world if those games are worth paying for. This is only a valuable service only insofar as you can trust the integrity and opinions of those reviewers. Likewise, this service could be performed by a community, but is only useful insofar as you can trust the opinions of that community (and if the community is primarily composed of the idiots you find on XBL making various homophobic references, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in that). This is, however, not the same thing as evaluating the esprit of the game, as a work. And this is an area where things get a little fuzzy.

I’ve written before about the separation between an action which is highly addictive, and an action which is personally satisfying. These things are metabolically separate functions within humans. Unfortunately, they are often confused, and this is evidenced by a lack of clear distinction in this concept within the language (i.e. A game is simply “fun”). Case in point: N’Gai Croal chooses desktop tower defense in Slate’s Gaming Club game of the year.

Is obsession a valid selection criterion? I’d say so. It’s certainly one that I apply to other art forms. Whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about.

- N’Gai Croal

We don’t have accepted vocabulary that marks the difference between an experience that stays with you after you leave it because of the profound implications it has (For a film example, Memento) or because the experience was psychologically addictive (Spiderman 2). My point is, you can do both (The Matrix, the first one anyway).

Popularly, Jonathan Blow has seized upon this idea and seems to have emerged as the apologist for the concept. Unfortunately, I don’t feel many people seem to understand what he’s saying. In the same Slate Gaming Club article, Seth Schiesel talks about how Blow hates on Bioshock because it pretends to be an emergent Sandbox, when really it’s a constructed reality. I don’t really think that’s the point. While Blow does seem to prefer the Will Wright-esque emergent concepts that arise from atomic game rules, that’s only because of the satisfying experience it can provide. What he is essentially saying is that most games feed upon artificial scheduled rewards - the drug pathways, in my lingo - while very few provide a meaningful take-away.

What Blow is really asking is this: If we are going to make meaningful art, what is the mechanism that video games afford art that are not done through film, painting, poetry, or music? In his mind that mechanism is the structure of gameplay; the rules of the created world, and the exploration of those rules, should be the source of a certain profound satisfaction. I would call this a ludological art fundamentalist viewpoint. Certainly I can’t think of better contender for what the core of that experience would be, but I would take a more moderate viewpoint. Much as film is a unique medium from stage theatre, to say that the essence of the art in film is only in the cinematographer is disingenuous as well. Much of what makes a truly great film overlaps what makes a great play. So it is with video games.

Blow criticizes Bioshock for creating a non-authentic satisfaction. He argues that Bioshock’s marketing makes the claim that the game is about morality and choice, but this is not evidenced in the gameplay constructs (because your choice is irrelevant). I would say that Bioshock’s marketing as a game about choice is really quite brilliant. The game is not about choice, but rather the illusion of choice (Would you kindly agree with me). The fact that rescuing or saving the little sisters makes little difference in the stable state reinforces this concept, and it does it through gameplay.

Beyond that, I think the game is also a very powerful exploration of Objectivism, and one gets to literally explore the implications of that philosophy. Instead of through narrative and watching it occur, as one experiences in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Bioshock literally allows you to explore the aftermath of an environment which had adopted that philosophy, through the use of audio diaries and your experiences with the characters in the game. Those are not strictly ludological concepts, but are borrowed from film, which is perhaps why Blow doesn’t account for them. That Bioshock is able to do this, and at the same time make it relatively straightforward to bypass if you’re interested solely in entertainment shows that this game is a shining star of entertainment and art fused together. No, it’s not perfect, but art rarely is.

I don’t think that many people have explored the dynamic of using the gameplay, devoid of artificial rewards, as this satisfying experience, and that may be why it’s difficult to discuss it. I also think that adopting only the use of gameplay would make a game far more sterile than it could otherwise be. There are parallels between film and video games, and while it is ultimately to our detriment to make games that are trying to be films, ignoring the lessons learned in that medium serves no purpose either.

That said, I think Blow has gone somewhat overboard (which would make sense, considering this fundamentalist position). People who are interested in meaningful, authentically satisfying material will seek it out, and if it’s not available in the medium of video games, it is available in other fashions. Most people are not interested in being enlightened, and seek only entertainment. Having the entire industry produce nothing but games designed to be fine art will only result in the abandonment of the medium, for that exact reason. How many of the novels sold every year are truly profound? How many pieces of cinema leave concepts that dance in your mind as you drift off to sleep?

Daniel Radosh may be hungry for real food, but the rest of the world is clamoring for whatever cheap drugs they can find. This is not new, nor is it a sign of the times. This behavior is endemic of our species, and frankly I suspect it is a requirement for a stable society that most people not be interested in that which is profound. Ultimately most people will continue to make that which is entertaining, and occasionally a visionary will create a profoundly meaningful game. Those games will appeal to a much smaller set of people, and typically have much smaller budgets (would Citizen Kane have been even better if it had a $200 million dollar budget?). That doesn’t mean that AAA titles should not continue to push the boundaries of what is possible to make in video games, to explore the possibility space of what can be done with games, but I don’t think we need to get really whipped up about whether or not our games are art.

Unreliable Narrators

I love a good plot twist.  Unfortunately, most of the plot twists used incessantly in media today are not what one would call good.

The best plot twist is one that is implemented by leaving dangling threads in the plot and tying them into the twist later on.  The condition on this is that if the reader/player/viewer can guess the plot twist in advance – or is even aware that a plot twist exists – it can substantially dampen the plot experience.  The fun in the plot twist is in having all your assumptions shaken apart, being completely blind-sided.  If the individual suspects foul, they will begin concentrating on trying to detect the problem instead of experiencing your work.  Additionally, the twist needs to make sense and provide an eventual resolution to the plot.  This is where many ongoing TV shows fail – plot twists should exist by providing a plausible and coherent chain events that change in perspective because of new knowledge imparted to the audience.  Well designed twists occur by torquing the perspective of the audience, not the events of the plot.  This is where shows like LOST fail.  It’s difficult to construct an elaborate plot and continually shift the perspective of the viewer around in a way that provides a coherent narrative the entire time.  While it’s fine to answer questions with more questions, and some point you need to indicate to your audience that you know where you’re going with this and that it will all be resolved eventually.  Heroes does a much better job at this by keeping the arcs manageable – and writing out the entire outline ahead of time.

There is a powerful technique for creating an effective plot twist called “Unreliable narration”.  While it has been in use in books and film for decades, it has made very little traction in the realm of video games.  The underlying premise of the technique is that the player assumes what the narrator is telling him to be true and correct.  At some point in the plot, you can force the twist in plot perspective by revealing that the narrator (who is often the protagonist) has not been giving an accurate depiction of events, for whatever reason.  I can think of only three games that have used the technique in this way (one of which is the metal gear solid series, which is so convoluted I’ll avoid it entirely).  Out of respect for people who may not have played these games, if you want to avoid spoilers you’ll stop reading here.  The first game is Final Fantasy VII, one of the most successful RPGs of all time.  Cloud Strife appears initially as former member of an elite group of military called SOLDIER.  Much of the plot in the first half of the game contains flashbacks to Cloud’s past, but these stories are dotted with memory gaps that make the story inconsistent.  Later in the game Cloud regains his memory and much of the earlier story is shown to be false.  A second and more recent example would by Bioshock.  In an extremely brilliant move by Ken Levine’s team, the narrator, a gentleman named Atlas who guides the character through the first two thirds of the game is shown to be using mind control on the player based on the keyword “Would you kindly”.  The reason it’s clever is because the player has to perform these actions to progress in the game anyway, and the keyword is very well masked in the dialog.  The ‘big reveal’ in the middle of the game shows that many of the events leading up to that point, comments left in audio diaries and such, completely turn about the assumptions the player has made about himself up to that point.  Atlas is shown to be con-artist who has been using the player via the above mechanism for his own ends.  In true con-artist fashion, Atlas uses social engineering techniques to establish a bond with the player, thus allowing the delivery of foreshadowing while at the same time minimizing the likelihood that he will be suspected as being an unreliable narrator.

If anything is clear from the above assessment, it should be that writing an unreliable narrator well is extremely difficult.  Even in literature, it’s not a technique that is well-executed often.  Nevertheless, some of my favorite movies use this technique to great effect – The Usual Suspects, Lucky Number Slevin, and Memento.  I’d like a more coherant breakdown of the tools for making effective use of the technique, and to see those tools used to improve the generally dismal state of Videogame plots.  Suprises are cool.

As a more wonky alternative, I think it would be interesting to play a game where the player was made aware that the avatar was actively lying to them and had to work around it as an obstacle by forcing them into logical contradictions or social situations where the truth would come out.  There’s a mechanic, would it be possible to build a game around that?

Identifying with a Blank Face

I finished the fight last night (after losing 2 hours of progress by not saving).  My friend Reed made a comment about the way I was speaking whilst playing Halo 3.  You see, all of the commentary I was making about the game was in the first person.  I was saving humanity, not Master Chief.  In a sense, I was master chief.  This is a technique video games can employ to create a strong narrative in ways that film and literature never can. 

When you watch a movie or read a book (other than a choose-your-own adventure, which I’m not counting), you’re being told a story about someone else.  This doesn’t mean it can’t be a great story, but it’s still a story about someone else.  Even so, if you look at many of your favorite books and films, you will find that you probably identify rather strongly with at least some of the major characters.  You may not realize you do, but on some level, those characters you like you probably unconciously see as a kind of alter-ego of yourself, based on character traits of that persona.  The more strongly you identify with a character, the stronger your emotional connection will be to the work. 

Unlike in film and literature, protagonists in games can be very vaguely defined.  Creating a vague definition of a protagonist is a tricky thing.  If done well, the player will project their own thoughts and feelings into the void of your protagonists character.  If done poorly, the player will fail to identify with your hero at all, and as a result feel no emotional attachment to the situation the character is in, and therefore the narrative of your game. 

There are two major ways in which video games can create vague character definitions.  The first is to not show the player what the character looks like.  Master Chief has a helmet on, at no point do you ever see his face.  Jack from Bioshock is not obscured in any way, but because the game is always shot from the perspective of jack, and all the mirrors in Rapture are conveniently broken, you never see what he looks like.  This goes a long way to helping the player identify with the protagonist (because if you could see his face, he would look like you!).

The second method is to limit or completely curtail the protagonist’s dialog.  There is a long history of silent protagonists in video games with rich plots for this reason.  Examples include Link from The Legend of Zelda, Gordon Freeman in Half-Life, Jack in Bioshock, Chrono in Chronotrigger, Ness from Earthbound, and Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII.  The technique is not as simple as abstaining from dialogue, as identification requires traits to create an emotional connection.  The trick to this technique is to use the other supporting characters to suggest a variety of traits the hero may possess (without spamming the entire continuum of character traits).  If done well, the player will latch on to those which suit his fancy and ignore the rest.

Creating a vague character is not the only way to get players to identify with your protagonist, but it is a way that works for a broad spectrum of people.  Idenification with the protagonist does not ensure the game will be loved either, but it does help to bring about a strong emotional reaction.  If the character you identify with suddenly starts acting in a way inconsistent with your views, or if the work as a whole doesn’t meet your standards, you will probably hate it - but at least you have strong opinions one way or another.  On the other hand, it’s difficult to love the narritive in a game if you don’t identify with the main character.

Digital Distrubition… It’s so beautiful

If it’s not clear to anyone yet, I love Steam a lot. Nevertheless, most of the games available on it are older games who’s owners are trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of. Approximately one quarter of the games on it are actually released for the first time on Steam, but nearly all of these are games developed by Valve (who are using their own medium to sell games for lower distribution costs) or independent developers who see Steam as a channel for cheaply creating video games.

So when I see that Bioshock, a game many have been eagerly awaiting for three years is now available for pre-downloading through steam, it makes a man weep. While I was aware that Bioshock was being released simutaneously for Windows and Xbox 360, I did not realize that the category of Windows was broken down into “Retail Stores”, “Steam” and “Direct2Drive”. Unfortunately there’s no way that I’m aware of to download a Big Daddy figure, so I’ll still be getting the physical retail version methinks. I did this initially when Half-Life 2 came out, and Steam automatically added the game to my account, so that in the future I could install it via download. Perhaps the same thing will happen with Bioshock?

At any rate, seeing a 3rd party AAA title being released through Digital mechanisms means to me that yet another nail has been put in the coffin of the malevolent entity that is Gamestop/EB Games. And the peasants rejoiced.