March 2010

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The Angry Gamer

March 16, 2010 in Game Psychology | 17 comments

broken ps3 controllerA few minutes ago I got a text message from a friend of mine who’s been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on his PS3. The message read “Turns out AC2 is a very frustrating game, and this controllers fly apart like a chinese motorcycle.. lol”, with it the following photo (see left) was attached. I was disturbed, but not surprised, to see that kind of behaviour in a 30 year old man. The same went for a friend of mine whose 4 year old son threw his Gamecube controller at the family LCD tv, smashing it to pieces (see below). A mother I knew had two young sons who fought incessantly over the use of the computer to play Ultima Online, to the point of one of them destroying it in rage and jealousy. I asked myself: why do people become destructive in an activity that is supposed to be pleasurable?

I can remember my first bout of rage at a video game: it was ChopLifter for the Sega Master System when I was 12 years old. After many hours of play I had managed to get to one of the last levels without losing a single helicopter. In a matter of 30 seconds as I tried to fly through a cavern full of lava, I lost all three of my lives. I distinctly remember shrieking in rage, trying to rip the controller into shreds, and finally throwing it into the wall (to no avail). I shut off the system and stomped off, never to play the game again.

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When do you call a game a Game?

March 11, 2010 in Game Industry, Game Psychology, Game Research, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 15 comments

Yesterday I happened across an article about comic books in a local newspaper (See Magazine for fellow Edmontonians). In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?

All of those answers – yes they are, and no they aren’t, X – get us no closer to answering his initial question. And that’s the same question we’ve been trying to face for years in the gaming world. When do we call a game a game? Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey’s (Tale of Tales) creations The Endless Forest, the Graveyard, and The Path all provoked a response from gamers. Some praised their willingness to experiment with what has become a starkly conventional medium. Others simply raged with incredulity at what they saw lacking in terms of gameplay, while others said things akin to, “I want to tell you that, in its most banally distilled form, The Path is a game about exploration, risk, patience and vulnerability – but I’m hampered by the obvious fact that The Path is just not a game. At all.”

That last response is the one that interests me most. In some ways, it reflects the problem that Kenton Smith runs into in trying to define comic books in terms of their essential structure. Although Kenton is obviously sensitive to the importance of a reader’s experience in defining what a comic book “is”, he does not approach the question that way. Similarly, I think that most of us get caught up in using language that tries to define a game as “a thing” rather than as a kind of experience that we have. We create a problem for ourselves when we think of games only as things with definable properties separate from ourselves, when really no problem exists at all. We continue to try defining games as objects with properties – as Igor Hardy attempts to do in this recent article on adventure games – and end up confusing ourselves over what they really are for us. (Edit: Be sure to read Igor’s article and the comments below it, as well as the exchange between Igor and I. We have a lot more in common than I originally assumed!) In this article, I provide an alternative to the current understanding of games, and hope that it gets us out of this foxhole.

(Note: Chris Crawford’s wonderfully written The Art of Computer Game Design is a step in the right direction I think, but not a complete one)

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Interactive Storytelling: What Heavy Rain Didn’t Learn from Edutainment?

March 7, 2010 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games | 25 comments

With the recent release of Heavy Rain, I’ve had interactive storytelling on my mind again. I was excited about the game, and for months it was one of the justifications I had for buying a PS3 in the first place (second place to The Last Guardian). But after playing the demo and hearing many detailed reports from friends I trust, I’m left a little stumped with David Cage’s latest attempt at making storytelling a truly interactive experience. After all, David Cage’s personal blog makes the following goals central to the player’s experience of Heavy Rain:

  • An evolving thriller in which you shape the story
  • Mature content, reflecting a realistic world setting that explores powerful themes
  • Stunning graphics, animation and technology support an emotionally driven experience
  • Accessible gameplay via intuitive, contextual controls and interface

In this article I don’t want to harp on David Cage or Quantic Dream. The kinds of goals he has for his games are right up my alley, and if the games fails to satisfy those goals, it would be rather asinine of me to point fingers at him or his studio. Instead, I’d like to think about what we mean by an “interactive narrative” and why we are being led further and further away from a truly interactive storytelling experience, especially in games that attempt to simulate one. So let me be clear: this isn’t a review or a critique of Heavy Rain, but of the general kind of problems we face today in making interactive stories.

As a foil to Heavy Rain, I take a very simple and effective “edutainment” title from my back-catalogue of 1990s edutainment titles, and show that Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! (whew) manages to produce a far more immersive and interactive narrative experience using a gameplay approach that is simpler and totally straightforward. (And I’ll make it spoiler-free if that matters for you, I hope.)

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