Not Dead Quite Yet

It’s amazing how hectic life can get.  For an extended period of time to boot.

Anyways, much to talk about as far as topics on games and personal projects.  I know what few readers I have are absolutely breathless.

The Value in Playing Games

When I was a kid, if there was one thing I could always get away with buying, it was books. To my parents books were educational, something I could learn from no matter how trashy the material was. With that I was allowed to stagger out of libraries and bookstores laden down with enough tomes to last me maybe one or two weeks (I read fast in those days. These days too). And then I’d just get more books until my bookcases were overflowing and I was making stacks on the floor and in my closet.

On the other hand, if there was anything my parents refused to help me with, it was with purchasing video games. They just simply couldn’t understand how my brother and I could be obsessed with such stupid wastes of time. The only way I could ever get my hands on them was by buying them with my own money or by getting them through special occasions. I suppose to my parents they were seen as mental candy, sugar that was just rotting out the good stuff in my head and would prevent me from going to a good college. In fact, when I got accepted into Cal my parents expressed wonder that I actually managed to get in despite seeing me do nothing besides play computer/console games.

To be honest, there is some justification in their critique. It’s much easier to point out all the good things that came from my voracious reading habit then from my gaming addiction. It helped my writing, increased my vocabulary, aided my speed and retention rate, increased my knowledge base, strengthen my imagination, the list just goes on. So I think it was inarguable that my time spent reading for hours on end was not wasted.

It’s much harder to argue in defense of my gaming time.

Why play games at all except to kill time? Learning things like THACO, or the recoil of a MP5, or the proper build order in a game like SC seem to only benefit me when I exist in those worlds. Trying to apply them, hell, trying to talk about them in the “real world” is at best, futile.

But I have alot of fun playing games. After all, I wouldn’t have stuck with this obsession for 18 years if I didn’t think it was worth something. So what do games have to offer?

I think that if you focus on things you directly learn from games, you’ll just end up seeing nothing but meaningless arcana. Zooming out though, I can point out numerous amounts worthwhile life skills. Teamwork from playing with others online. Learning how to work with people I’ve never met before. Aspects of human nature. How to quickly analyze a situation and respond effectively. How to lead others effectively. That talent can’t make up for hard work. To ignore discouragement. How to persevere and overcome. And that’s ignoring the training to my hand-eye coordination, peripheral vision, reflexes, etc.

Like anything in life, I think you only get as much back as you put in properly. If you focus your efforts, talents, and time, you can find the worth in just about anything reasonable.

With that said though, I think that more can be done to make games much more beneficial in the real world.  Some people believe that should be done by teaching about real life issues by making games on the Holocaust or about the conflict in Israel-Palestine.  I think that’s the wrong approach, and I think it all feels a little hokey personally.  I want to talk about the timeless.

There is Always a Narrative

So the director of Pirates of the Caribbean wants to make a game.  Bully for him.

But he says something that is a real pet peeve of mine.  I quote:

“Verbinski said he was not only interested in creating new genres, but that he wanted to explore the different aspects that make the game medium unique as well. For example, he said he was interested in new approaches to narrative, and would like to see a game that evoked strong emotions instead of simple excitement. However, he also said he’d like to explore gaming with no narrative at all, since the interactive nature of games means the developer doesn’t necessarily have to impose a story on the audience.”

Okay, the part about a game that evokes strong emotions is good.  That part about a game that has “no narrative at all” is what really gets me going.

Yes, games are unique among varied mediums of entertainment where the narrative is not always on rails.  The consumer has choice.  Unprecedented control really.  Games such as The Sims it is often pointed has no direct narrative, instead, the narrative is created by the player.  Hail the great strength of the industry.

I don’t buy it.

Even a piece of art as vapid as orange banners draped in Central Park has a narrative.  No one is necessarily going to interpret that piece of “art” the same way, but by interacting with it, they enter the artist’s view of the world nonetheless.  My point is that when something is created in a game, while there may be no clear cut narrative, the creator still made a contract with the consumer.  And that contract is that the consumer is entering a world that the creator has made.

Look, there may be no “story” per se in a game as interactive as The Sims, but there still exists a narrative.  Will Wright gave people a world where they could create virtual towns, with virtual people, who have virtual dogs, and have virtual sex.  A virtual representation of our world.  But the point is that the world still has limits.  Space aliens don’t come crashing in.  Ninja armies don’t go careening around in T-Rex attack robots.  You get the idea.  The setting, the tools, the milieu was defined by the dev team.  They defined the world that players could play in.  Instead of creating a single path to explore, they created a bubble for players to explore.  There is a narrative, the shape just morphed.  Don’t get me wrong, The Sims is an impressive piece of work.  But it’s playing house, except instead of plastic doll houses and stick thin female dolls, its all on a computer.

This probably sounds fairly nitpicky, but it’s one of those things that rubs me wrong.   It probably has to do with my frustration with the current state of narratives in the industry.  Stories are so bad as it is, that whenever developers get excited about the next “Web 2.0″ esque game, I get really antsy.  I almost see it as if they’re deliberately trying to dodge the problem instead of facing it head on.   As if they’re trying to dodge the possibility that there can be a good narrative and interaction at the same time.

WTB Better Game Music

Ever since I’ve heard this song, I keep thinking it would be simply be badass in an RPG.

There is an intensity in that song that I find lacking in most RPG scores.  My main complaint about RPG music, especially in the PC section, is that it’s too pretty. It sounds nice, its technically fine and easy on the ears. But it doesn’t evoke anything in me.  It often sounds dainty rather then elegant, gliding rather then soaring.  Even the combat music is hardly thrilling. There is no emotion in the music, no sense of adrenaline or life. To be fair it isn’t easy to compose a good score but I feel that most studios seem to settle for less then mediocre.

I’m not interested in music that simply blends into the background. A good soundtrack should enhance the experience, not cover up holes.

An example of this done right can be seen here:

As usual Sound Team JDK delivers.  There are other good examples of course, such as MGS2 which was done by Harry Gregson-Williams.  It might be fair to argue that my standards are rather high, but I don’t see a point in lowering them except to ease the pain of disappointment.  And since doing so is rather pointless in my view of the world, I’ll stick to my standards.

In other news, I would love to get some custom music for a project I’m working on. If someone reads this and knows someone talented, I’d love to have their contact info passed on.

The MMO Trap

So you’ve spent a quality amount of time with your MMO character but you’re starting to feel unsatisfied and are thinking of quitting. Then you think to yourself “But I’ve spent so much time with this character. . .”

STOP. Take a break from the game. If you’re feeling hardcore, delete that character now, unsubscribe, and remove the game from your computer.

If the game ever feels like an obligation, that’s when you need to take a moment and re-evaluate why you’re playing. A game is meant to be fun. Why chain yourself down with virtual obligations when you more pressing ones in real life?

I don’t play games if they aren’t fun for me any longer. Bottom line. This is why I have never played any FPS competitively and am so reluctant to join guilds on MMOs. Anything that could make my gaming experience feel like I’m somehow responsible for playing is poison in my mind. It destroys the purpose of play entirely. If I practice to get better, it’s because I want to get better, and that I find that increasing my ability within the game is fun. Not because I need to because I’m part of a team. This is not to say that I am unwilling to join organizations based around a game, I will if I think it will be fun. But if I ever find that it ends up not being fun I will leave without much regret, no matter who I am playing with.

This may sound rather selfish and all, but this mentality has allowed me to drop MMOs I’ve played for extended periods of time without much trouble. As long as you remember that games are about having fun, you won’t have to worry too much about an addiction. Unless you associate getting your virtual hamster pellets to be more fun and important than accomplishing real life things. Then you might have trouble.

What’s Our Strategy?

I was playing TF2 on my favorite server, theMachine.org when a player on my team asked:

“Guys, we’re losing. What’s our strategy?”

Tactics? On a public server? Funny. Granted that theMachine.org has pretty solid regs as far as players go, it’s still not exactly CAL level on there. Looking beyond that however, the truth is that there isn’t much to say. You go out and kill things.

Well, that’s half the battle. The other half is learning movement, to exploit openings, to know when to rush, and when to make tactical retreats. Those are the two halves to any team based FPS in my mind, killing and movement. You know how to do both and all other FPSs just blend together.

Some people seem to have this strange fantasy that great tactics will make up for a deficit of skill. Not bloody likely. The thing is if you suck, the probability that you can execute said orders successfully without getting destroyed is just about nil. In essence people who think like that, or ask for these sorts of things, are pretty terrible. Besides, the best strategies are the simplest ones. Y’know, the ones with the least moving parts and the least likely to smash apart when it rams against the enemy offensive/defensive. And just getting the entire team on the same page alone is hard enough.

In the end, my response just ended up being:

“Just go out and kill something.”

Oh, and the person who said that? He ended up being one of the worst players two maps in a row. Go figure.

A More Human NPC

I came across this description of a public defender while reading an article on the book Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office :

The public defender assigned to represent Oliver is a brash, ostentatious lawyer named Marijane Placek. Placek might evoke grudging respect from readers for her prowess in the courtroom, but she’s hardly a sympathetic personality. She is icy, sometimes even rude, to the families of murder victims and is openly contemptuous of police, judges, and prosecutors. She seems to tackle her job with few guiding or undergirding principles: She supports the death penalty, for example, but fights to spare her clients, even those who have pleaded guilty, from getting it. (It was Placek who defended Joan Tribblet in what the attorney rather crudely calls the “Kentucky Fried Baby Case.”) She tells Davis she chose to be a public defender for no other reason than that, at the time, the position paid more than what a starting state’s attorney was getting. She thrives on whiskey and steak, throws lavish parties, and proudly sports an abrasive personality.

Although Placek occasionally gives obligatory nods to notions of fighting for justice or sticking up for “the little guy,” her motives seems to stem largely from a bruised ego: She’s a full-figured woman who has spent much of her life fighting ridicule and low expectations. “She wanted to be a winner at all costs,” Davis writes, “to turn upside down the way she was perceived and treated in the courtroom.”

I was instantly mesmerized by this description the moment I read it.  The sheer power of the personality of this blows away any NPC I have met in a RPG.  This person feels human, eccentric without being comical, and deeply intriguing.  Why can’t I play with complex characters like this in RPGs?

It could be argued that games don’t have the kind of narrative space to allow for this kind of character development.  But in my mind, it is possible if certain things are done.  Like creating side quests that are not completely devoid of NPC and PC avenues of growth and interaction (more on this pet peeve at a later date).

I would love to see more characters like this in the future.

More Choice != Good

So I believe that stories in games matter. So what? Am I happy with the status quo as of now?

Like hell I am.

There’s a fair amount of topics I could focus my ire on. Today though, I’d like to talk about choices in RPGs.

If you compare Western RPGs to ones made in Asia, you find an interesting design difference. The majority of RPGs come from Japan or Korea are devoid of choice (ex: the FF series, Magna Carta, etc) when given a dilemma. Compare this to Western RPGs (ex: BG, KOTOR, The Witcher) which offer the player choices in how to approach a certain situation. Now, which do I prefer?

To be honest, neither. While I see tighter and more impressive narratives as far as games go from Asian RPGs, playing a game on rails isn’t terribly interesting to me. And while I appreciate the choices I’m offered in a Western RPG, I can’t say it does much for narrative or that I find the choices all that satisfying. Much could be said on either style of RPG, but lately I’ve been irked more by Western RPGs.

When I play PC RPGs these days, I can’t help but get the feeling that the designers are trying to make a DM out of the computer.  In real life, a good DM is not only able to tailor campaigns to suit the needs of his players, he is also capable of improvising on the fly if the players throw him a reaction he was not expecting.  The result is that players truly can feel like they are capable of role-playing as they see fit.  For PC RPGs, the computer handles the duties of the DM, rolling the dice behind the scenes and parceling out the narrative.  And while the computer can render breath-taking environments and flashy spell effects, it cannot improvise.  The narrative must be pre-defined.

Here is where the problem begins.  PC RPG designers are determined to offer the player choices.  Fair enough.  But the problems begin when you try to offer choices that will satisfy every kind of possible character that the player will develop.  Evil Characters, Good Characters, Neutral Characters.  Stealthy or Combative, Bullying or Charming and the list goes on.  There is no way you can create effective and meaningful conversations, much less heartfelt choices for each of these kinds of people.  Still developers try to accommodate as many players as possible.  As a result the writing feels dull and without life for the PC.

It is not possible to satisfy all the needs of every player, that much is obvious.  Where I disagree with current developers is that the above format is the correct one to pursue.  I liken their method to telling someone to bring their own character to a play where the rest of the cast has been decided.  When they arrive, they are given several generic scripts and told to pick whichever they like best.  I would rather have the player arrive to find that he has a character.  It will have lines tailored to the personality of the character, but will allow the player moments where ad-libbing does not affect the story, and moments where their improvisation within the limits of the character will affect the story in a fashion consistent with the overall theme.

In other words, give the player a pre-defined PC.  Allow dialog choices at unimportant moments, but also have moments where dialog is already decided.  When choices are allowed, only allow choices that are within the bounds of the character.  This I believe will not only allow for a more interesting narrative, but the potential to allow for a more immersive one that causes the player to get drawn in.

I Believe Stories in Games Matter

I can’t understand those people who believe that stories in games don’t matter.

It’s true that games can get away with sub-par or even horrific tripe that sounds like it came from someone who fed his mind a diet of only comic books and fantasy novels. That’s because in the end a game is. . . well a game. It’s an activity more then one of passive acceptance like reading a book. The person playing the game has to be doing something fun. Mario doesn’t exactly have New York Times Best-Selling writing, but it’s still a classic game. So if you asked me to admit that games do not need stories to exist, I would agree wholeheartedly.

But not needing something is not the same thing as not mattering. I could subsist on a diet that contained absolutely no kind garnish or spice, but I’m fairly certain that after the third meal or so I’d be craving something less bland. Stories in games I think of the butter and steak sauce with the meat and mashed taters: it might not be the main course, but it makes all the difference anyways.

Still the ground I’m fighting on is rather narrow. There are genres of games that don’t need the developer to create a fully fleshed out story. Prime examples are simulation games such as The Sims where the story is primarily driven by the player’s own imagination. The developer merely provides the tools. And if the player’s imagination leads him to create situations where an entire family dies in a blazing inferno. . . well so be it. Simulation games are not the only kind of games where the developer relies on player made spice, other genres that spring to mind are Puzzle Games, Sports Games, Multiplayer FPSes, etc. I don’t need to know why some terrorist group is planting a bomb in order to get satisfaction out of popping someone in the head with an M4.

Where the added flavor of stories really matters is in the single player subtype of games. A developer in my mind can never absolve himself entirely of the responsibility to create a story\setting in this scenario. In these situations, the developer creates a unspoken contract with the player, no matter how interactive the game’s world is. That contract is that creator has made a space for the player to play in. Sounds pretty obvious right?. What exactly do I mean by that sentence?

What I mean to say is that gameplay does not exist in a vacuum. People need a space to play in, and more importantly, something to play against. Games are inherently about struggling against something. Be it the environment, an AI, or another player, games are not a reflective activity like reading or an experience like television where no interaction is required. A pulse is in fact, a necessity. While other genres can get away with players doing most of the heavy lifting on the players or environment end, the single player genre has a heavier responsibility.

This is getting TL;DR. Looks like I’ll need to break this up into pieces.

Budgeting Time

Scratch releasing my Darwinia mod by Early September.  I’m starting to wonder if I can manage to get it ready by the end of September.

From the way things are looking I might have to get serious about scheduling my days and how exactly I spend my free time.  But because of the nature of the classes I’m taking, I’m starting to feel I might have to start setting aside certain times for certain activities like I did back when I was in ROTC.  Between three demanding classes (one of which taught by a CS professor notorious for his draconian projects), an Archery DeCal, games\modding, leisure time, and friends\family things are started to feel pinched.

What it all boils down to essentially is I need to start prioritizing my time properly.  I honestly have not been properly handling the situation as I have been gorging myself on entire anime series (the joys of having a terabyte of space) instead of tending to other more pressing business.

For anyone who actually keeps up with this blog: I still plan on posting here about games and my own pompous thoughts on things of that sort.  I just need to get things into order.