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

March 7, 2010 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games | 9 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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Trying to Catch the Wind: An Interview with Jenova Chen, Part 1

January 25, 2010 in Artful Games, Game Art, Game Psychology, Interviews | 4 comments

“We should find ourselves indulging in similar daydreams if we started musing under the cone-shaped roof of a wind-mill. We should sense its terrestrial nature, and imagine it to be a primitive hut stuck together with mud, firmly set on the ground in order to resist the wind. Then, in an immense synthesis, we should dream at the same time of a winged house that whines at the slightest breeze and refines the energies of the wind. Millers, who are the wind thieves, make good flour from storms.” – Gason Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

At the 2009 GDC, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jenova Chen, a designer and developer who needs no introduction. Over 10 months later, Jamie Love of GameSugar.net persuaded me to publish the interview in the form of a podcast. Many hours of editing later (thanks Jamie!) the first part of a two-part interview is now available online.

You can listen to the interview in a flash player here, or download the mp3 directly. (Warning to the bandwidth-challenged: the file is 75mb)

I hope you enjoy listening to Jenova’s thoughts on the relation between art and games – it’s a rare opportunity to sit down with such a generous and articulate soul. Part 2 of the interview is forthcoming, and like this one will be posted on GameSugar.net.

Tags: Interviews

The Humble and Valiant (ie. Filthy Rich/Powerful) Hero

November 26, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Game Psychology, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 19 comments

keef-thief Into my first 10 hours of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I’m already flush with gold. My gnomish gunsmith, despite his commitment to doing only good deeds in the world, has a silver tongue and he’s already bedded one of the girls at Madam Lil’s (a bawdy house) in Tarant for free. He struts around Tarant with not a party of likeminded adventurers, but groupies attracted by his charismatic charm.

I’m nearing the end of Fallout 3, and my wasteland ranger who has spent most of his adult life trying to free the wastes from oppression and slavery, is loaded with every kind of ammunition and ranged weaponry imaginable. Despite his meek and non-aggressive social demeanour, there is nothing humble about someone who’s packin’ a Fat Boy – a shoulder-launched nuke weapon – around all day.

While both of these games always offer a “high road” approach to moral choices in conversation as we would expect in a contemporary RPG, the games still rely upon a highly individualistic and egocentric play structure. In this article I try to understand how games supposedly devoted to allowing moral choices, in fact offer highly hypocritical experiences for the do-gooder player. (Spoiler-alert for Planescape: Torment and Ultima IV near the bottom of the article.)

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Games You Haven’t Played Yet: The Last Express

October 8, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Art, Retro Gaming | 7 comments

After hearing another writer complain that there haven’t been any new games out there that caught his eye, I realized that many of us are staring in the wrong direction. Why do we spend months (or years!) looking for upcoming releases, when we should be looking in a gigantic library of quality games already at the tips of our fingers? So, in the spirit of offering something new to the current generation of gamers, I’m beginning a series of recommendations for games that bring something new to the gamer’s repertoire… yet were released years ago. And in that spirit, I could imagine no game more appropriate than Jordan Mechner’s masterpiece: The Last Express. Although stylistically different from Planescape: Torment, Day of the Tentacle, or Final Fantasy VII, I consider it one of the finest games ever made. Read the rest of this entry »

An Expedition into the Lost World of Exploration: ToeJam & Earl

September 23, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 4 comments

The extremely thoughtful and critical comments in response to my previous post got me thinking about the role of exploration in games. In this post I’ll try to do some justice to how gamers can still hang on to a sense of exploration for its own sake, and enjoying games as a form of pure entertainment.

Last night I was sitting with a friend of mine talking about our experiences playing games as kids. We were surprised to learn that we had both owned the cult classic (yet poorly marketed) ToeJam & Earl for the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive in the 1990’s and brought back some fond memories for each of us.

Its re-appearance on the Wii Virtual Console was a welcome gesture, but I was disappointed with reviewer responses who felt that characters move “lethargically slow”, the gameplay was “unfair”, the funky visual style too “dated” to be enjoyable, and that its 16-bit synth music was too crippled for contemporary gamers. At the same time, most of these reviewers begrudgingly admit that it’s likely a “classic” and enjoys some nostalgic street cred, especially for its two player co-op mode.

After reading those reviews, I realized that ToeJam & Earl - a cult staple of the average SEGA generation child’s household – has become just another brief glint in the endless library of emulated games available for casual play. This is where I want to part ways with the average reviewer out there, and try to show why ToeJam & Earl is still an important game today, and offers something wonderful to the kind of curious, exploration-driven, non-competitive, fun-loving, and non-violent child (or adult!) gamer that we talked about previously. It’s a game that you should be playing with your partner, your child, or a close friend, right now. Nostalgia for its own sake is a very real, and I think very dangerous, part of reflecting on older video games. I think that re-vitalizing them and finding value in them for a new generation is a noble, and difficult task. I’ll do my best.

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Games We Can Dwell Within – What is Interactive Space?

September 4, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

Corvus Elrod’s Blogs of the Round Table for September managed to tempt me out of my self-imposed thesis writing /afk, with one of the most interesting BoRT topics I’ve seen. To boot, the topic is exactly what my PhD dissertation is being written on: how can we conceive of “space” – spatial relationships, objects in space – in video games? If games are, as Chris Crawford claims (ffwd to 4:32), a “fundamentally spatial” artistic medium – we better understand what the heck the word “spatial” really means for us as gamers. (Thank you to Kimari of Indigo Static for passing along the video.)

When we think of computer and video games, the word “space” is almost automagically translated into “coordinate space” or Cartesian space. After all, almost all games since the late 70’s used some kind of X/Y coordinate system to plot pixels on a screen; in the 90’s that became X/Y/Z space as 3D games took off. This is a technological understanding of space – it envisions space as a kind of empty vacuum in which objects can be arranged in a consistent way – and we perceive those objects according to some kind of spatial formula (ie. 2D or 3D coordinates).

I want to affirm a very different understanding of “spatial” than what most gamers and writers think it means. Space, as we experience it playing games, is not a Cartesian coordinate system for representing objects, characters, narrative, or sound… I believe that there is a much deeper understanding of space in video games that we implicitly live as we play them. And I’ll try doing articulating this different theory of space without any kind of techno-jargon — just a bunch of examples from a game that expresses the kind of space I’m talking about. My point is going to be that gamers experience space in a totally different way than mathematicians like Descartes did or programmers do.

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The Poetics of Super Mario World

June 5, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Game Psychology, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

smw-sm

Although I am still living in exile from my beloved blog, I did manage to get an editorial piece published over at Toronto Thumbs. In it I reflect on the problem of “nostalgia” and whether playing old games is a case of wearing rose-coloured glasses, or does it have to do with something something deeper..

Thank you to the Toronto Thumbs staff for giving me this opportunity to write something for them, especially to Sir Jamie Love for the impetus to try writing this in the first place.

Bye for now. Miss y’all!

Searching for Imaginative Space? Apply From Within.

April 15, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Philosophy, Retro Gaming | 12 comments

The recent excitement, and subsequent furor, over the new Legends of Zork browser-based online roleplaying game inspired me to think about how much we have changed as a gamer culture since the days of text-based adventure games.

For many of us, Zork hangs among our earliest memories of computer games. In many ways the series’ massive fanbase – in its entire gamut of casual and hardcore and obsessive players – is our miniature equivalent of the Star Wars fanbase: it is rabid.. it demands quality.. it cannot tolerate any deviation from canon.

So designing a new game based on the Zork franchise was a dicey and dangerous decision, especially considering the close ties the series has with the history of video games in general (it was among the first games derived from Colossal Cave Adventure). Stakes were high for everyone involved.

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GDC. Day Two.

March 25, 2009 in Artful Games, Indie Games | 1 comment

11:52am.

“To me, part of the art is really understanding the story… to me, if you boil music down to one element that’s a really important thing when it comes to emotion… it’s tempo! Tempo is what conveys emotion and conveys energy. You find tempo in speech, speech is musical.”

I nod, encouraging him to go on with the thought, doing my best not to interrupt with the thousands of ideas he evokes in my mind as he speaks about his music. We order a couple more cappuccinos and try to concentrate on the conversation… we are becoming drowned out by the shrill cackling of the cafe patrons beside us. I slide the microphone a little closer to him, angling it away from the next table.

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GDC. Day One.

March 24, 2009 in Artful Games | 1 comment

1:20pm.

The sun is high in the sky, and I’m jogging toward the Moscone Center – a large, sprawling building with one foot in art deco architecture, and the other half in post-modernism. I briefly glance at the hundreds of intellectuals, gamers, coders, writers, students, artists and sound engineers, all meandering aimlessly with black “GDC 09″ tote bags slung over their shoulders.

I told Jenova Chen that I’d meet him in the main lobby in ten minutes — that was fifteen minutes ago. My cell phone rings again, and the VOICEMAIL message flashes intermittently. I see a young man twenty feet ahead of me, dressed carefully in a brown corduroy jacket, sliding his iPhone into the inside breast pocket as he moves toward the exit. It has to be him.

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The Artful Times, Issue #1

March 19, 2009 in Artful Games, Books, Game History, Game Industry, Indie Games, Retro Gaming | 2 comments

tass_times_newspaper

I’m not much for hyping up news, but I came across quite a few exciting stories this week. Because writing ‘feature articles’ is so darned difficult, I thought that an occasional ‘Artful Times’ newsletter might be a fun way to end the week

GDC ‘09

The 2009 GDC begins next monday, and I’ll be there! If you’d like to get together for a lunch or coffee, please drop me a line. This is my first GDC and I plan to document the whole thing as well as do a handful of interviews while I’m there. I’ll post whatever I can here during the week!

Lovin’ Rhythm

parappa_the_rapper Jamie Love posted a very enjoyable interview with japanese rhythm master Masaya Matsuura, otherwise recognized for his brilliant PaRappa the Rapper series that initiated the whole ‘rhythm game’ genre. Matsuura does not appear often in interviews, and his insights into Western (and japanese) gaming culture are poignant. In response to the idea that we, as gamers, tend to idolize certain characters and games from our past that are nonetheless exploited commercially in sequel after sequel; sacrificing our personal values for profit, he says:

We should talk about cultural values and proprietary values separately. Nowadays, nobody really has the idea that “Copies” are worse than the “Original” anymore. When I think about that, it is no wonder that new ways of thinking about possession will be eventually spreading and changing. When, for example, we have a million seller game, it is difficult for us to decide if there is only one main character, or a million of them, but for now we should appreciate that both assumptions can be held as valid.

I think companies and/or producers have a tough mission to bring imaginary characters to life both culturally and proprietarily. Also the imaginary character will doubtless become increasingly realistic and tangible in the near future. Then we will be forced to rethink how we treat them once again.

(Apologies for the news image – I couldn’t help myself)

New Bible Unearthed; Church of the Mushroom Cloud Believers Deny Existence

the-holy-bible-the-game

Over at the IDGA Game Preservation Mailing List, Elliot Davis mentioned that someone has posted a scan of the complete design document for the cancelled Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel 2 game. We all know that Brotherhood of Steel was a terrible followup to Fallout 1 and 2, but apparently BoS was only intended to cover the costs of the game engine. BoS 2 was the game that Interplay wanted to pursue – but filed for bankruptcy before production could begin. The design “Bible” reads like a D&D campaign manual and features a lot of previously unseen sketches and artwork consistent with the Fallout universe. I suggest getting it while it’s hot – who knows how long it’ll be before the nasty C&D letters are fired off.

“Ifnkovhgroghprm” actually means “Nikstlitselpmur”

kq2

AGDInteractive let me know that their amazing re-makes of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II have been once again remade! The artists have went back to them and redrawn all of the background art at high resolution, and made improvements to the music and speech packs. (Not to mention that their website was re-designed and re-launched by the wonderful Eriq Chang). After investing thousands of hours in these projects, their efforts have finally been ‘rewarded’ and recognized by Activision (the company that swallowed up Vivendi & Sierra On-Line’s properties): in a newsletter AGDI said, “We were informed that Activision would honor our outstanding agreements with Vivendi by allowing us to finish our pending contractual projects, but that we will not be granted permission to start any new Sierra remakes in the future.” Bad news: we won’t see a King’s Quest IV or Quest for Glory remake. Good news: we’ll see Himalaya Studios work on their own original ideas and hopefully see a new adventure game in the next couple of years!

(and if you recognized the title of this news item, you’ve played too much King’s Quest)

A History of LucasArts – Thankfully not written by George Lucas

dott_swc_small

Although the book was released in December 08, I somehow missed it! Rob Smith, the editor of PlayStation magazine, writes the history of LucasArts and fills it with amazing (previously unseen!) production artwork and paintings. I have some strong attachments to LucasArts, despite their 10 year dive into obscurity. The years between Maniac Mansion and Grim Fandango punctuated some of the best gaming experiences of my adolescent and post-adolescent life. Even now, when I load up Loom and Sam and Max Hit the Road on my Nintendo DS (thank you ScummVM!) I am reminded that true mastery involves insight and constant revision. I’m looking forward to reading this book; if you have read it, please chime in with your (dis)recommendation. This seems like a nice coffee table book, especially with the glossy photos inside.

Home of the Underdogs Revived After Being Euthanized

And I wasn’t planning on announcing this for at least another two weeks, but my good friend gnome das Gnome’s Lair beat me to it After Sarinee, the old curator and creator of Home of the Underdogs (a site devoted to posting ye olde abandoned games) lost HoTU due to a mixture of disinterest and her web host dying, a few folks from the community decided to lend a hand and get it back up to speed. There are several ongoing revitalization projects, but the one that has caught my attention the most is HOTUD.org – a complete revision of the site using Joomla and community-driven content. The site is currently in an ‘alpha’ stage and you should not yet start posting reviews/content, but if you’re as excited as I am about the project, head over to the forum to keep an eye on the site development. We’ll let everyone know there when it’s ready to rock’n'roll.

Bastard in a Basket

February 11, 2009 in Artful Games, Irritating Rants | 8 comments

boy-bawling

Yesterday, Brian Green over at Gamasutra posted his reflections upon the necessity of establishing “artistic legitimacy” for games. The article does not go into any depth or detail into what cultural/artistic/financial legitimacy actually means for people who are culturally/artistically/financially oppressed; instead it amounts to a bunch of rich kids screaming “You don’t understand us!” and “We hate living in this house!”

I apologize for my derisive tone, but I have never seen this degree of self-aggrandizement and self-pitied whimpering in all my time spent writing about, and criticizing, games. But really, does this kind of whining lend any legitimacy to developers at all? Besides – why has nobody asked if we really want legitimacy? Does legitimacy make good art? Since when was someone stopping developers from making games about the horror of war, or guilt and penance? I hate to rain on your parade here, Green, but most developers stop themselves from making artful games because they perceive a “small market” for that kind of thing. Brian Green claims that “we are stuck making works that can only be appropriate for children”. You say that you’re stuck in the children’s game business? Honestly, I’d like to see Mr. Green name 10 children’s games released this year that did not suck. Compare that to the hundred violent action games that were released, and made money, and we can start talking. Until then, this is self-deception to the nth degree.

Seriously. The folks of “Project Horseshoe” who came up with this idea need to pack up their sleeping bags, take their football, and go back home. Or move to Hollywood where you’ll get all the ego-stroking you need.

Note: Kumar Daryanani Arias posted a very insightful reply over at “Destral’s Blog”; it is worth reading in relation to Green’s article.

The Storied Imagination: Finding Meaning in Games

February 6, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Game Writing | 5 comments

This is a short post, in reply to an articulate exposition of the concepts of “szujet” and “fabula” by Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog. His patient and detailed consideration of fabula – a theoretical consideration of the narrative order of events – gives us an idea of what the Russian formalists had in mind when they conceived of narratives and stories. So please, head over to Man Bytes Blog and read his post and the comments to it before continuing here, as I will respond to his analysis of narrative as best I can. I apologize if this seems a bit of an academic conversation, but I think we are in ripe territory for a powerful re-imagining of what the story means in relation to storytelling in games.

Note: This is way too long, but it is the quickly-written culmination of six years of study in my life. I’d like to thank Corvus for launching us into the heart of the problem concerning stories and games. Without the kind of community that has come together through Man Bytes Blog, this quality of discussion would never be possible.

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The Re-make Renaissance: The Art of Eriq Chang

January 17, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Art, Game History | 6 comments

Way back in August I had the opportunity to order a copy of Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine. As a bonus, Himalaya Studios included a promotional Quest for Glory II poster drawn by the wonderful print and digital artist Eriq Chang. After a few notes back and forth, Eriq agreed to have some of his work profiled by yours truly.

In this article I’d like to introduce some of Eriq’s wonderful work done for notable game developers such as AGDInteractive/Himalaya Studios, Infamous Adventures, and Telltale Games, among others. Eriq’s work demonstrates the kinds of deep, expressive, worlds possible when artists with a rich background in gaming transform their imaginations into ink and paint strokes.

Eriq has graciously contributed two previously unseen production illustrations from a cancelled King’s Quest IV remake, and concept art for the upcoming game PartWorld.
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A Poetic Text… Adventure?

January 11, 2009 in Artful Games, Retro Gaming | 12 comments

robert_frost1 Although I try not to post links, this little piece of BASIC poetry written by Matthew Sewell caught my eye. On the SWCollect mailing list, Matt wrote of his jeering poesy:

It struck me that the first line of the Frost poem was like the start of a Colossal Cave type of game (“You are standing at the end of a road…”). So I took it from there, adding a snarky Infocom voice to a poem that I consider over-serious. The code is primitive to be sure (though it does work), but both the editor and I were concerned about accessibility. Actually he’s the one who encouraged me to expand the frame of reference to several other games — he figured that if we’re doing this, we might as well commit to it. Anyway, you all are just about the only people I know who will consider it too obvious rather than too obscure…

Hardcore retro-gaming, text adventure, and BASIC-coding enthusiasts might be able to parse the program just using their imagination, but I needed some help. I copied and pasted the program (from Lines 10 to 490) into Joshua Bell’s Applesoft BASIC Interpreter, clicked Run, and enjoyed 45 seconds of pretentious smirking. Does anyone else find this ingeniously funny?

Maybe I’m getting old.

Ancient Artifacts of the Origin Museum, Part II

January 9, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games | 1 comment

p21_magicalarts Hi again folks. What were meant to be a handful of articles posted over a couple of weeks became a couple of articles posted over a few months! Due to teaching responsibilities last year I had to take an unscheduled hiatus from writing.

I’m excited to get back to our regularly scheduled programming, and I’m proud to launch into the new year with the second article in our Origin Museum series. In this part of the series, Joe Garrity (curator of the Origin Museum) shares his story of giving Richard Garriott a very special gift during the University of Texas Video Game Archive Fundraiser at Britannia Manor in 2007. The degree of craftsmanship that went into the gift is reminiscent of Infocom and Ultima ”feelies” – the expression of an artist’s love for their work, and I believe demonstrates how games not only entertain and surprise us – but how they can lead to new works of art and relationships with those around us.

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Ancient Artifacts of the Origin Museum, Part I

October 14, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 8 comments

For the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting a three-part series of articles based on several conversations I’ve had with Mr. Joe Garrity, curator of the The Origin Museum. You might remember Joe as the mastermind behind the scenes of a massive video game archival operation that took place earlier this summer at Mythic Studios, where 1 Terabyte of artifacts, source code, artwork, FMV, and design documents were salvaged from Electronic Arts’ archives of the defunct Origin Systems Inc. In this series of articles Joe tells us some of the stories behind artifacts recovered from Origin Systems (the creators of the Ultima and Wing Commander series). In our first part of the series, Joe reveals some (until now) unseen artwork by Dan Bourbonnais – an artist that worked during Origin’s “Age of Enlightenment”, and shows us some of the painstaking artistic work that goes into game production.

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The Lost Art of Game Packaging, and the Digital-only Turning Point

September 2, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 13 comments

Michael’s post over at The Brainy Gamer looks at how digital download services have begun to carry serious momentum and surely can only pick up even more as Microsoft’s XBLA and Sony’s PSN release more content. Many folks over at the Brainy Gamer are just as excited as Michael with the prospect of ‘no more plastic’, but I found myself less excited about the prospect of a future without physical packaging.

Part of those feelings can be chalked up to old fashioned nostalgia – it’s hard to give up fond memories of gingerly tearing the plastic off of a brand new game as a kid, reveling in the pungent odor of freshly printed manuals and carefully unfurling cloth maps of lands a’far. Closely linked to that is another aspect of physical packaging that I think is really important, and we’ve forgotten it in our unquestioned haste to deliver games cheaper and faster. That is, we’ve lost our appreciation of the game packaging as a craft and an art unto itself that provides a tactile engagement with games we otherwise lack.

The chronology of game packaging that Ryan Scott and Scott Sharkey present in their article Shrink Wrapped: A history of PC game packaging trends, from awesome to awful, is a good taste of how packaging progressed from the early years to the present. Unfortunately, a chronology is just that – it doesn’t bring to the forefront why packaging matters might matter so much to us. In this article I do my best to highlight one game with interesting game packaging – feelies, artwork, manuals, etc – and try to show how (for some people) physical interaction with the packaging can transform the nature of the game. I should note that some of the things I say later in the article could be construed as spoilers, so ye have been warned!

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Narratives and Interactivity Still Misunderstood

August 7, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Writing | 28 comments

Ico cover art by bigdogsleeping

Ico cover art by bigdogsleeping.

Michael’s “Narrative Manifesto” post at the Brainy Gamer gave me an opportunity to think about what’s at stake when we talk about interactive narratives. Although I can only sketch out some of the issues involved, I’d like to take a stab at understanding a few ways we tend to think about interactivity and narratives, and the kinds of assumptions they come with. I hope that I don’t come off too strongly here, but I think we’ve continued to repeat a grave mistake in our understanding of interactivity, and because of that are headed down a blind alley in terms of story development.

The basic premise I have is that the word “interactive” can be understood on at least two levels in video games. We tend to forget that one level of interactivity is more important than the other, often end up in situations where a player fights with the game instead of enjoying it for what it is. Instead of beating our collective heads against the wall as we try to design games that let players live out their wildest desires, we should be developing worlds that encourage players to explore them as living, breathing, places.

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The Medium is Not a Message

June 18, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 14 comments

This is a short response to Michael Abbott’s latest post over at the Brainy Gamer, on the topic of understanding video games as artistic works. While I couldn’t possibly put his eloquent words into finer poesy, perhaps the following few points are worth thinking about. I admit that they’re controversial points, but I don’t offer them for the sake of controversy – I simply want to extend the “language” for video games in whatever way I can. The best way to do this, I think, is to make some distinctions between the kinds of language often used in video and computer games, which are often mixed up and conflated with each other. This is my first official crack at it.

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‘> The Painting is Firmly Attached to the Wall’: The Frustrating Art of Art Games

June 7, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Research, Philosophy | 4 comments

Gamers are notoriously bad at dealing with loosely-termed ‘art games’. Myself included. With the recent releases of The Graveyard by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, and The Jackyard by Richard Hofmeier, I thought I’d attempt to take a somewhat broader view of ‘art games’, and try to understand exactly what an art game is.

In this article I take on the very common problem of players becoming bored or frustrated by “art games”. I try to spin some new language around games that help us understand how they relate to art, and vice-versa, all in the hope that more gamers have the opportunity to take on any kind of game without quitting in frustration.

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Treasures from the Tickle Trunk: Day of the Tentacle

May 24, 2008 in Artful Games, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

This article is part of a new series of articles that I call “Treasures from the Tickle Trunk” where I pull a game from my basement game library and take a deeper look at what it achieves. This style of article is deeply influenced by Corvus’s Narrative of the Moment series.

As I played through the demo of Penny Arcade Adventures this morning, I kept reminding myself that writing comedy is difficult – and writing interactive comedy well is nigh impossible. Not only is quick wit, rich satire, and goofy slapstick necessary, but it has to be reflected in gameplay in such a way as to play funny. With so few adventure games, and even fewer games with a sense of humor, I thought I would take a fresh look at one of the bright highlights of gaming humor in the 90s – Day of the Tentacle.

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So You Want to be a Hero: Have Gun. Save World?

May 20, 2008 in Artful Games, Philosophy, Retro Gaming | 9 comments

Cover art from Quest for Glory I, courtesy of Mobygames. Mario and Luigi. Indiana Jones. Princess Peach. Samus. Lara Croft. The Avatar. Cloud. Link. April Ryan. Bubblun and Bobblun. Jade. Bonk. A Boy (and his Blob). Wonder Boy. E.T.

Whether cavemen, plumbers, femme fatales, cutesy dinosaurs or aliens – they’re all bound to save the world by the end, or die trying.

Although taken tacitly as the standard for the vast majority of character-based video/computers, the Hero protagonist is the ubiquitous yet completely understudied workhorse in the history of video games. In this article I explore the uses of the hero in video game narratives, and how an over-reliance upon certain kinds of hero characters has limited the kinds of stories being told in video/computer games.

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Revitalizing Dead Culture: Why Game History Matters

April 22, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Game Writing, Philosophy, Retro Gaming | 19 comments

One of my guilty pleasures is in retro gaming and retro computing. My basement storage room is filled with arcane devices and hundreds of games: a venerable Commodore 64, an Apple ][e rescued from a garage sale, a local family's Apple ][gs that was donated to me, a MAME arcade cabinet, a Mattel Intellivision II - the list goes on indefinitely. I just can't bear to see these things tossed out. Lately I've found myself playing Ultima VII: Serpent Isle on my 486 DX2/66 (now with a Roland MT-32!), and my 360 has sat untended for months.

But does playing these old games matter? Does writing about them matter? What value is there in sweatin’ to the oldies? Is it only for reminiscence or nostalgia? In this article I make a few arguments about retro gaming/computing that outline the meaningfulness of tying together the past and the future in the present..

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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Periscopic’s ‘The Thule Trail’

February 25, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Industry, Retro Gaming | 1 comment

oregon trail

Image courtesy of gaygamer.net

Although I initially reported on Periscopic’s excellent re-envisioning of the Oregon Trail some time ago, the game managed to garner nearly universal acclaim from gamers and critics alike, most notably indiegames.com who ranked it #19 in the top 20 freeware adventure games of 2007.

It took me a little while, but I managed to get a hold of Periscopic’s co-founder and Head of Conceptual Design (not to be confused with the Head of Impressionistic Design) – Kim Rees. Kim ever so kindly rounded up the crew to give us a peek at how Thule Trail was built from concept to finished product. Much thanks goes to Dino Citraro – Periscopic’s other co-founder – who invited me to ask a few questions about the game in the first place. The sheer craftsmanship put into this game is stunning and is a testament to how the right kinds of collaborative relationships in game development can lead to great things – but I’ll let our Oregonian friends over at Periscopic describe how that works… Read the rest of this entry »

Return to Dark Castle Trailer Released

February 4, 2008 in Artful Games, Indie Games, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

Return to Dark Castle Screenshot

Normally I avoid posting news, but I found this bit o’ information a little too tasty to keep to myself. First reported at the Dark Castle News blog, a Return to Dark Castle trailer video (Youtube version here) has been posted over at the publisher’s web site. The gameplay looks hilarious, and definitely captures the spirit of the original. I can’t wait for this classic to hit the Super Happy Fun Fun online store.

If you missed my earlier coverage of Return to Dark Castle you might want to take a peek at the article.

Dramatic Genius: LucasArts and iMUSE

January 31, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Research, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 5 comments

secret of monkey island When I was 12 years old I received $25 for my birthday from my aunt. With the $5 I had saved from the previous weeks worth of allowance, I had a whopping $30 to blow on something frivolous. I convinced my mother to drive my sister and I to the largest computer store in the city (40 miles away) so I could buy myself a new computer game. After searching through the racks for almost an hour, I gave up – the games I really wanted were over $60, and the games selling for $30 or less looked unappetizing. I had given up and was ready to leave when my sister grabbed a copy of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge off of the shelf and handed it to me: “Buy this one! It has monkeys!” At first glance I wasn’t interested, but the screenshots on the back of the box reminded me a little of my other adventure games like King’s Quest IV and Police Quest II. I reluctantly agreed to allow my sister to chip-in $20 to buy it, and pouted the hour-long ride home as my sister opened the box and pawed through the ‘feelies’ inside. Sitting in the den in front of our 286 I unenthusiastically installed the game, and loaded it up. Within minutes my sister and I were transfixed upon the monitor and practically rolling on the floor laughing at the ridiculous conversations and character expressions. Monkey Island 2 quickly became one of our favorite PC games and was the gateway to a larger world of cinematic adventure games. Within weeks, I convinced my parents to buy me an AdLib sound card for christmas so I could hear the glorious midi music. In this article I look at LucasArts’s seminal iMUSE system – the Interactive Musical Scoring Engine that was used in every LucasArts adventure game from 1991-2000.
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Indie Luvin’ Double Feature: ChipWits II & Return to Dark Castle

January 22, 2008 in Artful Games, Indie Games, Retro Gaming | 11 comments

When I was 10 years old, we moved to another province. One of the first friends I made in our new community was a kid named Fraser. In a far corner of Fraser’s basement, his parents had a Macintosh 128k covered in a protective plastic sheet. Although it was strictly taboo (the Mac was only to be used for word processing!), when his parents were busy upstairs Fraser and I would sneak into the room and quietly load up a few games he had copied from our school’s library. Two of the games that we secretly giggled over in front of that monochrome screen remain burned into my childlike mind to this day: ChipWits and Dark Castle.

ChipWits was an edutainment game that was released in the early days of the Macintosh. One part puzzler and one part GUI-based programming teacher, ChipWits used an icon-driven programming language (IBOL) to command a miniature robot on rollerskates around a room. Through combinations of operators and arguments, the robot would traverse the room picking up, eating, or frying objects at your maniacal whim. I don’t doubt that games such as The Incredible Machine, and more recently Chibi-Robo, gained much of their inspiration from this classic.

Dark Castle screeny Dark Castle was a mixed action/puzzler/platformer that put you in the shoes of the bumbling adventurer Duncan in his quest to defeat the Black Knight. The game featured eery waveform sound effects and wonderful character animation reminiscent of later ‘rotoscoped’ animation. (Interesting side note: Co-developer Jonathan Gay later came to pioneer the now-ubiquitous Flash animation software. The designer and illustrator Mark Pierce later became the co-founder of software giant Macromedia. Holy jebus!) Full of slapstick humor and frustrating puzzles, Dark Castle is probably one of the least known indie masterpieces of the 1980’s.

Unfortunately, neither of these games have been playable on modern systems without frustratingly clunky emulation software. That is, until now! I was very pleasantly surprised when I found out that both have been remade into modern sequels by indie developers:

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Inviting the Imagination: The Power of Words

January 19, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Writing | 15 comments

A View of Sigil by Fuflon

Pictured above: ‘Sigil View’ by Fuflon, courtesy of deviantART.

A few weeks ago, Michael over at the Brainy Gamer wrote some final thoughts on his play-through of Planescape: Torment, a cRPG that many consider to be one of the best role-playing games to ever hit the PC. The beginning of his post caught my attention right away:

Planescape: Torment is a text-based RPG. True, it manages to squeeze every bit of isometric splendor out of Bioware’s Infinity Engine. And yes, the game occasionally treats you to a pre-rendered cutscene. But these are merely window dressing. Planescape: Torment places all its narrative eggs in one giant 800,000 word basket.

In this article I begin to explore the idea that photorealism in games ultimately detracts from immersion and gives players the feeling that the story and characters are contrived and un-real. I suggest that immersion and dramatic investment aren’t a product of good technologies, they are a product of good artisanship.

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The Endless Forest: Play & Poesis in Games

October 30, 2007 in Artful Games, Philosophy | 21 comments

Rah-Bop’s deer art

Pictured above: Concept art drawn by Rah-Bop. Artwork found in The Endless Forest forums.

When I logged into The Endless Forest, the first thing I did was fiddle with the controls. I walked my fawn around in circles. I had it rub its side against a tree, and eat some purple flowers. I visited an ancient stone shrine that made my fawn’s head glow after kneeling before it for a minute, and visited the ruins of a cemetery. It was serene, but lonely.

Then I logged out, slightly frustrated. I was worried that I had missed something crucial… a cleverly hidden gameplay mechanic, a story-line or introduction that failed to get trigged… some kind of point to the game!

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Blogs worth reading: The Brainy Gamer

October 12, 2007 in Artful Games, Blogroll, Indie Games, Mainstream Games | 3 comments

‘Brains’ from Thunderbirds Last week I got an e-mail from Michael over at The Brainy Gamer, and I was thrilled to find another author interested in both the arts and video games. He started writing in August, and he already has a fairly large collection of articles available for your perusal. The articles themselves are absolutely worth your time, and go far beyond mere opinion pieces or news items – something I immediately look for when I read an article,

Why don’t mainstream media outlets like Time and the NYTimes get video games? Why do they so regularly and predictably fail to get beyond the worn out Pong / Pac-Man / Mario reference points?

I think it’s because most of them rely on a 19th century model of journalism that continues to define what the news looks like today. Journalists and editors tend to use three basic criteria when determining what they will deem “newsworthy” – conflict, novelty, and prominence. J-School 101 dictates that a story about a video game is worth writing only if it meets one or more of these standards. {more here}

And not to mention prolific! Somehow he manages to pump out an article every day. His articles cover the entire gamut of video game culture – from mainstream games, to indie games, design and production, artwork, storytelling, politics, and (you’ll find) … his loathing for Halo 3 (agreed!). And mostly importantly – it’s refreshing to find an academic who actually has a history of playing video games [and still plays regularly] and is not just a ‘ludological theoretician’!

Anyhoo, I’m not trying to up-sell you here – The Brainy Gamer speaks for itself and I’m enjoying the reading so far.

As for the Artful Gamer – I apologize for the large lag between posts. I’ve been recruited to serve as the Best Man at a wedding for a friend of mine, and those duties (aside from marking 10000 midterm exams) have obliterated my opportunities to write. Coming soon is my review of Ultima VIII: Pagan, an interview with the creator of now-defunct indie MMORPG “Omega Syndrome”, and a short article on pencil’n'paper roleplaying games.

A Game Begins with an Idea

October 1, 2007 in Artful Games, Indie Games, Philosophy | 8 comments

Illustration by Blake

Pictured above: Illustration from William Blake’s Gates of Paradise.

I recently came across a post over at Jeff Tunnell’s blog that reminds game designers how important it is to have many design ideas in mind, rather than just relying on a single idea. It made me think about one of the central problems in modern mainstream game development: a lack of fresh, innovative games. As I was writing this article, GameSetWatch posted footage from the Independent Games Summit of an “Innovation in Independent Games” panel consisting of Jenova Chen, Jonathan Mak, Kyle Gabler, and Jonathan Blow. After listening to the hour-long discussion, I decided to integrate many of the comments into this article, because they were inherently relevant and profound for any discussion of the creative process.

While many people assume that independent game developers, by virtue of being unconstrained by publishers, auto-magically have creative, interesting ideas. However, as I hope to demonstrate – creative innovation is far from guaranteed simply because we’re ‘indies’, and requires a certain kind of developer or team to come up with something worth playing.

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Interview with Stephen Emond, author of Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide

September 25, 2007 in Artful Games, Books, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 4 comments

On September 4th, the University of Texas Videogame Archive held a fundraising event to both raise money and promote the development of the new museum collection. An article over at GameSetWatch listed some of the memorabilia that were auctioned off at the fundraiser; one of those items was a pre-release copy of Emond’s book, “Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide”. A web search yielded few results, and I was compelled to contact Stephen regarding his soon-to-be-published book. He told me that not only was his book auctioned-off at the fundraiser, but he was an invited guest for the entire affair. I asked Stephen a few questions about his experiences at the fundraiser, his interests in the Ultima series, and (of course) his upcoming book.

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John Watson, famed game designer, passes away

September 13, 2007 in Artful Games, Retro Gaming | No comments

Interring Lothian

Above: Screenshot from Lothian’s burial in Ultima VIII: Pagan.
(with respect and admiration)

I was saddened to read, courtesy of Raph Koster’s blog, that John Watson – a respected and well-liked designer/programmer/writer for many Ultima and Wing Commander games (among many others since) – passed away on September 9, 2007. After reading through the memorial page that has been set up by the Wing Commander CIC, it is obvious that his unexpected death has been grievous for his friends, family, and co-workers; I offer my deepest condolences to those who knew him.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Ultima series has always held a special place in my heart. I can imagine no better time than to write a full review of Ultima VIII: Pagan in light of this sorrowing news, and attempt to redeem what I think was one of the most underrated RPGs of the 1990’s (to which John is listed as the co-designer and a co-writer of). I will post the review and analysis in the coming weeks.

Death in Video Games

September 11, 2007 in Artful Games, Philosophy | 11 comments

The rather irritating death screen in Fallout

Above: How many times did you see this screen when you last played Fallout?

Throughout the summer there was an interesting thread in the Mobygames forums on the subject of ‘death’ in video games, in response to an article written for The Guardian. The general feeling among players questions the importance of death in games, and why it remains to be such a central part of the medium. I wasn’t satisfied with The Guardian’s article which doesn’t penetrate the issue very deeply, so I thought I’d take a stab at the notion of what death ‘means’ in gaming, and how (as designers) we might start to re-think the rather hackneyed game mechanic and come up with slightly more novel ways of making deaths meaningful for players.

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Ultima VII finally comes to the PSP

September 2, 2007 in Artful Games, Indie Games, Retro Gaming | 7 comments

When I was in junior high school, there were only a handful of kids with computers. Most of Ultima VII Box (small) those who were fortunate enough to have a computer in their home weren’t interested in learning how to use them, and even fewer used them to play computer games. Except for a couple of kids that were in my grade. One of those kids, Willy, found out that I liked role-playing games and handed me an old creased black box while my social studies teacher’s back was turned. I looked up at him, wondering what I’d have to trade for the rather austere black box with the words “Ultima VII” on the front.
He shrugged and whispered, “Here. You can have it. I can’t figure out how to play it.”

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Auteurship, Indie Games, and Out of this World/Another World

August 6, 2007 in Artful Games | 7 comments

A recent post over at Mentisworks that reviews a great collection of indie titles got me thinking about just how auteurs (a word borrowed from film-making, where a film is characterized by a film-maker’s particular authoring style) also exist in the game industry. Michal’s review of a collection of 27 indie games demonstrates the kind of personal styles that go into each creation, and how each author (or two, or three sometimes) develop a game that suits their particular interests and artistic/game influences. While I find that most of these games definitely show some amount of artistic (in the broad sense) skill, there is one game that always comes to mind as a truly impressive example of independent game artistry: Another World/Out of this World. I highly encourage you to play the game (a new Windows XP-compatible remake is available. Play the demo or buy it here). Afterwards, read on for my review/critique…

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The Art Debate? (Continued…)

July 31, 2007 in Artful Games | 1 comment

As a small update to yesterday’s article – Christian McCrea at The Escapist posted his own views on game journalism, criticism and reviewing. Most of the article says nothing new, to be honest, but it does at least provide an attempt at adding something constructive to the debate. If you’ve read the article already, I’ve formulated my own response in the Escapist forums, which hopefully didn’t come off too preachy or indignant. The comment thread for the article may be worth reading as people respond to the article, and my comment on it. For the sake of completeness, however, I’ve included my own response below:

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The Art Debate – Does it Matter?

July 30, 2007 in Artful Games | 5 comments

For some strange reason, the stars aligned on the weekend and several news sites produced responses to Ebert’s recent column “Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker” in which he replies to some of Clive Barker’s claims on video games as an art form. There was of course the obligatory response from the gaping advertisement-feeding maw of Kotaku, who (for once) provided an intelligible response; unfortunately the response came from a talented film critic who seems to have never played a video game in his life. Joystiq, Ragnar Tornquist (creator of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall), and a slough of other news sites provided their own commentaries on Ebert’s volley. Most notably, however, came much more informed responses from Arthouse Games and Mentisworks, who had already spent time discussing the subject over the past year. The question I’m left with here, however, is why does this all seem to matter so much?

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Mentisworks: Okami, Art, Storytelling

July 25, 2007 in Artful Games | 3 comments

In a freakish coincidence, Michal over at the Mentisworks blog posted his commentary/analysis of Okami.. the critically-acclaimed (and surprisingly financially successful) game from now-defunct japanese development team Clover Studio. This is a project that I always wanted to do myself, but lacked the time to release some polished thoughts on the game. I highly recommend reading Michal’s thoughts on the game, which cover everything from aesthetic style to storytelling with a bit of philosophy to round things out. In the coming weeks I’d like to formulate a response to Michal’s thoughts, trying to link Okami in with other contemporary games such as Shadow of the Colossus and Ico, which I believe both share in the same sense of artistic integration.