On Motivation

This week I’ve been sinking a lot of time into two games, neither of which are terribly new, but both are rated very highly. I’m new to both of them, although one of them is a Total War game, so I’m hardly new to the franchise. The other is a browser-based, story-heavy RPG set in ‘Fallen London’ – a gothic, alternative-history, Victorian-era London that has been dragged below the earth by bats – called Echo Bazaar. It’s as weird and awesome as it sounds.

These games have almost nothing in common, apart from the fact that I am addicted to both. In fact I’m writing this in-between doing action in Echo Bazaar. Echo Bazaar has this rather annoying mechanic that means you only have a certain number of actions you can do per day and only a certain number of those actions you can do at one go. You begin the day with ten actions, and have another 30 waiting to be used. You get a new one every seven minutes up to a limit of ten. In those seven minutes, I usually tend to busy myself doing other stuff, or staring at the count-down clock, waiting for more actions. This means that I get a little bit of time to sit and wonder ‘why is this so appealing, and why am I willing to waste so much time for what amounts to a very small amount of gameplay?’

Likewise, in Medieval Total War 2, the other game I’ve been playing this week, you get a fair amount of time between turn to twiddle your thumbs. While watching the computer play every other faction apart from my own, I tend to wonder why England’s conquest of the entire western world is so damn important that I’m inside making it happen while the hottest week of the summer is busy happening outside (yes, at the end of September).

I’m going to university tomorrow, so I’ve also been busy preparing everything for that. True to form, I’ve left all the important stuff until the very end, so I’ve been fairly busy. While waiting on hold to various banks, I’ve wondered to myself why I always seem to leave things until the last minute before doing them. It’s not an affliction that is unique to me, by any stretch, but it’s incredible that I could have easily done all of this literally months ago, but didn’t. In fact I’ve been seriously lacking any motivation all summer. Days on end with nothing to do haven’t really given me the will to do anything. Aside the occasional moment of creative energy, I’ve really been lacking in any desire to do anything.

All of this has leads me to ponder on the nature of inspiration and motivation. Why do I want to desperately to conquer the Holy Land for Christendom? Why do I want to stake my soul on a card game for the chance of wining my heart’s desires (in Echo Bazaar)? Why do I leave it until the last minute to sort important things out? Why do I waste time when I could be doing much more interesting things?

You might remember that a couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog about some cooking I’ve been doing recently. I think the reason cooking appeals to me has a lot to do with the answers to the above questions. The reason I really like cooking is that feedback is instantaneous. You make something, it smells good, it tastes good, you’re satisfied. You get a very simple payoff for the effort of the cooking – you get to eat it. I have the inspiration and the motivation to cook because I know what the outcome is and I know when it will come.

But there’s something more than that; I don’t just enjoy cooking because I get to eat what I cook. I am always striving to make better and more interesting food. I make something and instantly critique it, not because I’m not satisfied with the taste, I almost always am, but because I want to better myself. I want to make meals that taste better because I see it as a challenge.

These two things are a large part of what motivates me to do things and inspires me to do them well. The outcomes of an action or the deadline for an action to be completed are very obvious motivators. If you can see a tangible result from your work, it’s a lot easier to get off your backside and do it, likewise if you have to do something by a certain time, you tend to do it.

The desire to do whatever it is I’m doing well is something that really drives me. In part it’s about being better than other people, but largely it’s about being bettering myself. It’s a challenge that I rise to.

This is how games like Echo Bazaar and the Total War games pull you in. Echo Bazaar is based around numbers. Everything you do increases or decreases your stats for certain qualities or affliction which have an impact on what happens to your character and what options you have open to you. It’s pretty standard RPG stuff. The reason I keep playing it is that I want to keep pumping up my stats and so unlocking more and more of the game’s content. The game is heavily story-based, and your stats dramatically affect the way the story goes, so it’s not just increasing stats for the sake of it.

The Total War games use missions with a time limit and overall victory conditions to drive your conquests, and the feedback for success is obvious, both in easily available graphs and the map showing the extent of your conquests to date to give you more and more things to strive against. Game play might only be a combination of moving little men around a map and town planning, but it’s compelling because there is a purpose and a goal to it. I want to play because I want keep succeeding according to the game’s definition of success.

A lot of games are built on this premise. I joke with a friend (who is probably reading this) who plays Football Manager that he is basically just playing with spreadsheets, but the same thing applies to FM. You keep playing it because you want to get Worcester City playing in the Champion’s league, no matter how meaningless that is. All RPGs work on this premise – you play in order to keep pumping those numbers up. You want to get a level 80 character, so you’re willing to grind for hours to get there.

Of course sometimes games lose touch with what exactly the end goal is. I ended up quitting playing Mass Effect and Fallout 3 because there was too much grinding and doing what seemed like very pointless tasks without a tangible result. I wasn’t getting any reward for my effort, or even any success in the broader sense of the game, so couldn’t see the point of doing it anymore.

Another similar way in which this is expressed in gaming is scoring. Something as simple as Tetris is addictive because you have a high score to beat. Challenge mode in Batman Arkham Asylum gave you a very simple way of measuring yourself against both yourself and others. The combat and the stealth mode were both wonderfully put together, but that’s no reason to keep playing the same level again and again. The only reason do to that is to try to beat the score you posted before.

The most interesting thing about this, however, is the way it works in reverse. In Echo Bazaar today (while I’ve been writing this post) I got a random ‘Opportunity’ that dramatically increased one of my stat, increasing it to the point where I could continue on the next step of the storyline that I’d just begun. Rather than feel happy that I’d been able to advance without the effort of building up this stat, I felt robbed. I had been allowed to advance without taking the effort and time to get there and it felt wrong. It’s not like it takes any skill to play the game – it’s all dictated by chance – but part of the reason why you become invested in the game is because it takes time to achieve anything. It felt wrong that I hadn’t had to put that time in, which is very strange.

The reason for that feeling is that success is not necessarily all that fulfilling in and of itself. Success unearned or underserved or even unworked-for is somewhat hollow. A well designed game makes you work for your success, so it feels good when you make progress, without allowing you to lose sight of that progression. That is why we keep returning to some games when we’ve already played through the content.

This is true in games because it is true in real life. I enjoy eating, but I appreciate a meal more if I’ve prepared it. Creating something will almost always be more satisfying that experiencing someone else’s creations. It’s not even limited to creativity; simply accomplishing something is more rewarding that having someone do it for you, certainly in my experience. The more challenging that accomplishment, the greater the sense of achievement. Of course, the more detached that sense of achievement is from actually doing the thing, the harder it is to find motivation; as was the case with my long, lazy summer with no lengthy spell of inspiration.

That summer has now come to an end and I’m off to uni next week, so I apologise if my blog post is late or non-existent next week, I will probably be drunk.

Language, Sex, Violence, Other?

I’ve been thinking a bit recently (yes, I’m fine, thanks) about how we define ‘adult’ in terms of media. No, I’m not talking about porn, although I suppose that is part of the issue. What I mean is they way in which both consumers and writers perceive what is and is not ‘adult’ content. This comes mostly from watching the recent episodes of ‘Torchwood: Miracle Day’, a self-confessed ‘adult’ Dr Who spin off.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying ‘Miracle Day’, but I have long been of the view that Russel T. Davis, the executive producer, creator and head writer of Torchwood, is not a good writer. He’s a fantastic plotter and producer, but his technical writing is not good at all. Torchwood has always been guilty of falling into the trap of trying too hard to be ‘adult’. There have often been sequences in the stories in which everyone stops for a sex break, or plots revolving around sex itself, usually dealt with in a very crude and unsophisticated way.

My argument is that such open, often very forward and explicit attitudes towards sex is not indicative of ‘adult’ content, but is instead rather juvenile. There is no need for half of the cast to go off and have sex midway through the episode; it often does not actually add anything to the storyline, or the characters. It’s gratuitous, immature and often quite silly. Hardly adult.

Sadly, video games are usually the worst contenders for this. The Gears of War games are almost always given ‘mature’ or 18+ ratings, even though the games have no real depth or sophistication, just gore and violence. They are not ‘mature’ games, they are quite obviously immature. Similarly the portray of characters, particularly women, as gender stereotypes can hardly be defined as ‘adult’. Femme Fetalle characters wearing next to nothing being highly sexualised and often consciously objectivised is not adult, it’s childish.

I want to make clear that I’m not really taking about rating systems, but the perception of what is ‘adult’ content. However I think the point that needs to be made is that giving content that is not at all adult the label of ‘mature’ gives the wrong impression about what we consider mature. This is especially true when you consider the fact that the rating system is almost always ignored by consumers once children get above the age of 13 or so. Believe me, I’ve worked with 13 year old kids, they know all the language, they’ve seen and the gore and they know what a pair of boobs look like. If we are trying to protect teens from such explicit content, we are failing, so in giving such contend the label of ‘adult’ we are actually giving a very unhealthy impression of what it means to be mature.

Of course, this begs the question of what does it mean to be adult? This is actually a very difficult thing to define. When we describe media as ‘adult’ or ‘mature’ we mean content appropriate for adults, or mature people. Of course it is perfectly possible for teenagers to be as mature as many adults, but I don’t really want to get into that. It very much depends on the individual, which makes life hard for legislators, hence why they tend to draw a line in the sand at age 18. There is a difference between what is appropriate for children, young adults and adults and writers have to delicately balance their content to accommodate for their target audience.

Some content, themes and ideas are simply not appropriate for teenagers or children. Sometimes because it’s too complex (not wishing to sound patronising) or too dark. Often it’s simply that it deals with matters that they have no interest in or experience of, so it simple isn’t interesting or relevant to them. We should not use language, sex and violence as a measuring stick for these things.

To return to the example of Torchwood I mentioned earlier, I think Torchwood actually does a fantastic job of being quite mature. The current series deals with a phenomenon wherein the entire human race becomes immortal and digs straight into the consequences of that. People living through excruciatingly painful injuries and suffering on with no visible end in sight, a character who actually wants to die, but can’t, the moral issues now that murder no longer exists. Beyond that main premise, we have individuals using the disastrous situation to their own advantages, the power of the mob and a corporate conspiracy to name a few of the other themes that surface. It’s pretty dark. It explores some of the more unpleasant sides of human nature and of society. It’s pretty adult. It is not made more adult by random, all-together-now sex montages. In fact, next to the maturity of the rest of the series, those sequences actually look horribly out of place and almost comic.

The series is quite clearly targeted at adults. It’s not that teens should not watch it, it’s just that there’s a pretty good chance such things would go over their heads, or that they would, quite frankly, get bored by it. It’s not appropriate for less mature people simply because it’s not targeted at them.

In much the same way, a middle aged character who is going through a midlife crisis, dealing with divorce, debt and stress, might appeal to adults who can actually relate to such problems, whereas teens, even people in their twenties, would probably find that incredibly dull because they cannot relate to it. It deals with issues which do not mean anything to them. It’s adult in its content because it appeals to adults, not because it has content deemed inappropriate for children.

‘Adult’ or ‘mature’ content should not be a byword for sex, violence and gore, but simple an indication of the target audience. It’s is a message that the content is not meant to appeal to younger viewers and will probably not interest them. This is what Torchwood was designed for; Dr Who that appeal to the adult audience. That would not change if you got rid of the sex.

Video Games as a medium would take a massive leap forward if it started acknowledging its audience as adult and started building games with real adult content, games that, while being appropriate for kids, would be more appealing to adults, not because of the gore or the two dimensional female eye-candy, but because of the complex and sophisticated themes and ideas conveyed. This is becoming increasingly relevant as older generations get into gaming and the generations which have grown up with games, get older.

There’s nothing wrong with gory video games, or unsophisticated video games designed to be pieces of escapism. Just as there is nothing wrong with television which embraces gore and sex. Sex, in particular, forms quite a major part of most people’s lives. It is relevant and, when appropriate, can be used in a mature way. However, we need to get away from the perception that, for something to be ‘adult’ or ‘gritty’ or ‘dark’, it needs to have gore and sex and violence. We need to stop using these things as bywords for adult content. We need to grow up about our perceptions of adulthood.

Bigger Is Not Better

This week I’ve been playing a lot of video games. I have some free time at the moment (because I don’t have a job) and the steam summer sale ended not long ago, so I have a few new games to play around with. The games I’ve been playing are Portal 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2. Both sequels to games on my top ten list, and both a whole ton of fun in their own right. I’d like to compare both games to the game which they follow, and look at the upcoming sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum, Arkham City which is coming out very soon.

The thing I want to pick out about each of these three sequels is that they are all significantly longer than their originals. Portal 1 was only about three hours long, while Assassin’s Creed 1 and Arkham Asylum were about ten hours each. By contrast, Portal 2 is about six hours long and Assassin’s Creed 2 is fifteen hours and counting. From what I hear, Arkham City will be significantly longer than Arkham Asylum. I suspect that Assassin’s Creed 2 and Arkham City will be about twenty hours each, so let’s assume that a doubling of play time roughly a theme.

I don’t know whether other sequels fit this pattern, but it makes sense. Games cost money to make, the longer the game, the more money it takes, so an original game being given a relatively small budget by a studio because anything original is bound to be a bit of a gamble makes sense. With a relatively small budget, you can only make a relatively small game. If the game is a success, the sequel (and there will always be a sequel) is given a much bigger budget, so a much longer, more ambitious game is made.

The most startling example of this is Portal. Portal 1 was originally a very small project created by a team within Valve. It was thrown into the Orange Box along with Team Fortress 2 because Valve were a bit embarrassed that Half Life 2: Episode 2 took so bloody long. On the other hand, Portal 2 was a full scale project with the whole of Valve’s production team and budget behind it. It’s a full scale game, rather than just a little throwaway, experimental, indie game.

The reason for this, from Valve’s point of view, is very simple, they can make a hell of a lot of money selling Portal 2 as a game in its own right for the same price as any other game. Portal 1 was hugely successful and popular, so a sequel was always going to sell well. The reason behind making Assassin’s Creed 2 and Arkham City much longer is not so obvious. The thing that springs to mind immediately is that they think a longer game is going to be better. They can simply fit more stuff into a longer game and increase the variety of the gameplay experience. They can write a more interesting and complex plot, fully flesh out the characters and the setting. Most importantly though, you get players playing for longer, so they are going to be telling their friends about how much fun they’re having for longer, meaning that their friends are more likely to go and buy it as well.

Only the last of those is true. A longer game does not, by any stretch of the imagination, make for a better game. Just as a thousand page novel is not better than a three hundred page novel by virtue of being longer. It is perfectly possibly to tell a good story in a hundred pages, or three hours of play time, or an hour of screen time. There’s nothing wrong with telling one in a thousand pages, or twenty hours, or two and a half, but length bring about its own problems.

I’m currently re-reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Series and thoroughly enjoying it, but as I make my way through the 9^th book with no plot resolution in sight, it has being increasingly obvious that Jordan simple has too many characters and too much plot. It takes an incredibly skilful writer to deal with that much stuff happening without getting bogged down. Pacing gets harder and harder the longer and more complex your plot is.

The same is true for all mediums. A video game is just as likely, if not more so, to get bogged down in the detail when the plot starts stretching for twenty hours. Assassin’s Creed 2, thus far, has managed to get itself bogged down, partly by doing away with the very structured approach taken by Assassin’s Creed 1, and partly by simply having too complex a plot. You lose sight of the overall motivations of the characters, or those motivations simply stop meaning anything given the context of the action. This is partly down to poor writing, but the length of the game does not help at all.  I fear that the same might happen with Arkham City.

Of course, story is not as important as gameplay to most developers and most gamers. A longer game certainly meant that more gameplay can be put into the game, but then it also increases the potential for boredom. There are only so many time that one can stab an unsuspecting soldier in the back, or tie him upside-down from a gargoyle before it gets boring. Of course, after a few weeks or months break, it gets interesting again, but by that stage it’s easy to have forgotten why you were ever doing it.

Of course, a good sequel will always involve new gameplay aspects. Assassin’s Creed 2 has almost Prince of Persia type platforming sections (with all the same engine issues, but just as much fun anyway) and some really interesting vehicle sections. The latter are really well integrated into the story, whereas the former is not, so it feels a little bit pointless. That is actually indicative of Assassin’s Creed 2; there are lots of things to do above and beyond the plot, which makes it very easy to get lost and loose track of where you are in the plot. It also makes the game feel very flabby. The first game was very tight, because all the different sections of the game were tied (if a little tangentially) to the plot, whereas here, all the assassination submissions, platforming sections, rooftop races and punch ups having nothing to do with the task at hand, so they feel like they have been tacked on. This all helps to bog down an already convoluted plot, putting the pacing even further off.

I hope this is not what will happen with Arkham City, but I get the feeling that is will. From the little Rocksteady have told us, there will be plenty going on to distract from the main plotline. That sounds great, but the thing that really keeps players (or this player, anyway) playing a game is the story. I play games to drive the story forward and I find it very easy to get bored if my actions don’t seem to be doing that. The problem is that I also tend to do everything in games because I assume it’s all got something to do with the plot, so games which have loads of stuff going on above and beyond what is required for the plot tend to feel very flabby and unfocused to me. It’s the issue I have with RPGs a lot of the time.

I understand that I’m in the minority in that, but the point still stands; longer time does not necessarily make for better gameplay. New stuff has to be integrated into the plot, otherwise it feels tacked on, and more time simply means more time to get bored. After fifteen hours of Assassin’s Creed 2, I’m bored with stabbing people. I’m sure it will become interesting again in a few weeks or so, but for now I’m bored. I fear I will become equally bored after fifteen hours of Arkham City when it comes out.

Add to that the fact that a longer story is by no means a better one and you have a pretty decent argument against story driven games being longer than ten hours. In fact I think ten hours works really well for a game. It’s more than enough time to tell a really good story with interesting characters, Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Arkham Asylum, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Psychonauts all show us, and funnily enough all of those gamed are on that top ten list I mentioned earlier. It’s not that Assassin’s Creed 2 is a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, neither is Portal 2, it’s just that they’re not as tight or neat as the originals. They’re almost trying too hard to be bigger and better than their predecessors, while forgetting that bigger does not, necessarily, mean better. In fact, bigger is actually an awful lot harder to pull off. I suppose the perfect example of this would be the big RPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout 3, which are consistently flabby and overburdened.

Of course, I am in the minority. Most people, it would seem, are happy to play games simply for the sake of playing them. I suppose I am too when it comes to the Total War franchise and other strategy games. Nevertheless, I would like to see more games driven by their story, constructed around their story and with the story at the heart, not the gameplay. I firmly believe that games are a fantastic storytelling medium that needs to be exploited more. And that can and should be done by games that need not ever exceed ten hours of gameplay, because that just makes it harder for everyone involved.

The Wii U and the future of electronic devices

This week LA has been alive with nerds as thousands of gamers, games journalists and developers flocked to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). E3 is traditionally the place where Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo show off new consoles or new accessories to consoles. Two years ago Microsoft and Sony both announced their answers to the Nintendo Wii, for example. This year, yet again ahead of the pack, Nintendo announced its successor to the Wii, the Wii U, featuring a completely new type of controller.

The controller takes its cue from the Nintendo DS by having a touch screen as well as conventional buttons. The controller also has a front facing camera. Not only will the touch screen be able to interact with the console on the TV screen, but with a press of a button, the screen will be able act just like a TV screen, turning the controller into a handheld console, although with none of the manoeuvrability, as contact with the actual console needs to be maintained.

Nintendo has managed, yet again, to stay ahead of the curve and way ahead of its rivals, who are still floundering with motion control (which seems to have been abandoned by Nintendo, thankfully) and 3D, which also seems to be something of a blind alley. Time will tell whether the Wii U will be more indicative of the future of gaming, as opposed to a temporary distraction, as motion control seems to have been.

The Wii U certainly opens the way for some interesting gameplay. Touch screen has done wonders for the hand-held market, initially for the Nintendo DS, but more recently for the Smart Phone and Tablet market. I have little doubt that the future of hand-held games lies firmly in the touch screen world, and probably as part of a single, portable device that also works as a phone and an MP3 player. However this possibility has not been explored much in terms of larger devices, such as the Wii U. Touch screen should offer the player more versatility in what they can control with a lot more simplicity than a PC affords. Until now, the appeal of the standard controller has been simplicity and economy of buttons at the expense of versatility. The PC, meanwhile, has afforded this versatility, but at the expense of simplicity. A touch screen allows a wealth of versatility, without the complexity of a keyboard and mouse. This opens up certain markets to consoles, which have otherwise been largely the domain of the PC gamer.

Strategy games suddenly become possible, where before a strategy game built for a console was always going to come under huge strain from the limits of the controller. Now a whole new range of possibilities are alive in this genre. Likewise MMORPGs have generally been the reserve of the PC, but can now begin to emerge into the console market.

The Wii U has all kinds of potential with regard to the interface of the game onscreen. If much of the information currently held in the corners of the game screen could be moved to the controller, the game would look much more immersive. The clutter of obstructive interfaces could be dramatically reduced.

The touch screen itself provides all kinds of interesting gameplay mechanics, many of which were explored in the DS. The ability to literally draw on the screen with a stylus creates all kinds of interesting potential, from simple puzzle games to much more complex strategic or adventure games. This would essentially provide much of the functionality of a mouse.

Here is where the problems also emerge with the Wii U. Juggling two screens, a stylus and a multitude of buttons may well prove pretty challenging for the average gamer. Even with the Nindendo DS, this proved a challenge, but then the two screens were right next to each other. Having one screen at your hands and one on the TV screen across the room is going to make it hard to look at both at the same time, unless you hold your hands up so that both screens are next to each other, which creates problems of it’s own. Of course this won’t be an issue if you can work the stylus with the touch screen based on watching the main screen. This will require one-to-one interaction between the two screens. Whether or not that kind of functionality will exist remains to be seen.

This issue is most obvious with regards to the placing of stats and other information, usually put in the interface, on the touch screen. The benefits of clearing the screen of clutter may be outweighed by the problems of having to look at your hands to work out how much health or ammo you have left. That information is put in the interface for a reason – so it is easy to refer to it in game without distracting yourself.

In terms of gameplay, the main purpose of a controller is to convey information from the player to the game as easily and as simply as possible. The less the player has to think about what he is doing, the better. If the thought process moves beyond ‘what button to press?’ to simply ‘what action to take?’, making the corresponding button pressing automatic, then immersion has been achieved. A well controlled game does this perfectly well with what we have. I’m sure everyone who plays games seriously has achieved the almost Zen experience of simply pressing buttons automatically, controlling the on-screen character without actually thinking about the mechanics of it. It’s a simple enough experience to have, even with unsophisticated games like Tetris.

This is where the Wii, and were motion control in general, has failed. The controller felt like a barrier to gameplay; it always felt like you were having to actively control the game, rather than doing it automatically. The interaction wasn’t one-to-one, the control never really became instinctive.

I hope that the Wii U’s controller can do what motion control never did; become as natural and instinctive to use as conventional controllers. Hopefully players will be able to use the stylus on the hand-held screen while looking at the TV screen. If that does happen, if the new controller becomes a gateway to more interesting gameplay, rather than a functionality barrier to existing gameplay, then touch screens corresponding to larger screens may well be the future of gaming.

Even if it’s not, I think some really interesting innovation will come about because of the Wii U. I’m sure, even now, developers are busy plotting new and wonderful ways to exploit this technology. If done right, the Wii U could make for some fascinating gameplay developments and some really interesting games.

The other interesting thing that the Wii U represents is another step in the direction of the living room entertainment singularity. Consoles have been able to access the internet and play DVDs for a while now, but the Wii U comes with a camera that allows for video chatting, much like FaceTime for the Iphone. Now, we can watch movies, play games, makes video calls and access the internet, all with one device. The problem with the latter is that nothing beats a keyboard for typing, so the computer is not absolute yet. However, remote keyboards are not hard to come by, indeed I could see an Ipad app being developed that makes your Ipad into a remote keyboard for your Mac. The tablet you keep in your living room could easily double as a keyboard for your console.

For a while, now, we have been approaching two different singularities. I alluded to the hand-held singularity before. The other is the living room singularity; a device that will play games, access the internet, play movies, record live TV, play music, word process; essentially all the functionality of a PC, a games console and a DVD player. The new controller is simple indicative of the remote aspect moving another step in that direction. A game controller can already act as a TV remote, now it is even starting to perform the complex roles of a mouse or laptop touch pad.

It won’t happen immediately, or even in a few years, but gradually, step by step, both these singularities will happen. The effect that will have on other technology is debatable, but I think the days of the desktop PC are numbered. More and more power is being crammed into laptops these days and consoles are rapidly catching up with the computer in terms of power and versatility.

One day, you will need one hand-held device, one laptop, one box hooked up to the television and possibly a tablet that doubles as a keyboard and a controller, to do everything you want, wherever you want.

My Top Ten... Video Games

You might remember that over the last few months I’ve done a trilogy of Top Tens regarding music. Well I’ve run out of musical things to do it on (well when you’ve done albums, artists and songs where else can you go?). So now I’m moving onto video games. I’m not a massive gamer; I don’t sink hours and hours into video games like some do, not have I played a massive variety of different games, but I have played enough to make a decent list. Again in no particular order.

• Bioshock: I’ve mentioned before how incredible Bioshock’s story is. Wonderfully self aware, with a really interesting setting and an outstanding plot. To cap it all it’s also very well written. Not only this, but the gameplay is superb. Probably the main flaw I found was that the difficulty setting were too extreme – medium kicked my ass, but easy was a breeze. Other than that it was pretty outstanding.

• Assassin’s Creed: I actually just finished playing through this one. Really well written, excellent characterisation. The plot is a little overblown and suffers from trying to raise the stakes a little too high, but still succeeds in making me want to know what happens next; it’s just a shame it ends without really resolving anything. I guess I’ll just have to play the second game instead. The gameplay gets a little repetitive at times and the game drags between assassinations, but it’s still really fun when hundreds of guards start chasing after you. I was a little dubious about the part of the game set in the present, but I very quickly warmed to it because it’s so well written.

• Prince on Persia: Sands of Time: So good to see an interesting and well characterised female protagonist and a well written love story in a video game. Another really well written game that really sucks you into the story. The pacing a little off because it really drags through the middle part, but the gameplay is good enough to get you through that. The platforming keeps coming up with interesting new things. If anything the difficulty curve is somewhat off, leading the combat to drag a little (not helped by the lack of variety). The camera is pretty horrible at times, but you get used to it eventually. Shame the writing fell away for the sequels, because Warrior Within fixes many of the gameplay issues.

• Portal: Need I really explain it? Fantastic story, wonderful aesthetic and brilliantly imaginative gameplay and excellent voice acting. The only problem is that it could have been longer, but then the challenge modes at the end serve to extend gameplay somewhat, so all is forgiven. Now where is Portal 2?

• Psychonauts: I’ve discussed this one before. Charming story, hilariously written and always fun to play. There are a few issues with the gameplay, but they’re not deal breakers, especially when you consider that the game contains a psychic bear, Napoleon’s ancestor playing strategy games in his own head with Great-daddy Bonaparte and, well a psychic fucking bear!

• KotoR 1: The only RPG on the list. One of those Western RPGs from back in the day when they still followed a fairly linear plotline, just with a large number of sideplots and a bit of freedom as to which parts of the plot you tackle first. This meant that it actually had pacing and was pretty water tight, unlike more modern RPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout 3, both of which are decent games, but are simply too bloated and meandering. In both games my save got wiped and I didn’t really care enough about the plot to go back to them. I’m one of those gamers who does everything in the game because I assume it is necessary to the plot, so I just end up getting bogged down in all the bullshit side quests. You could do this in KotoR without losing track of the plot, which, by the way, was awesome.

• Rome Total War: Finally I’ll stop going on about games with good writing, because R:TW doesn’t really have much of a story, it’s just a really, really good Turn Based Strategy game with lots of replay value. While Empire tended to get a bit too overwhelming and repetitive, Rome had a really simple and still interesting mechanic that meant you could just keep on playing it for hours on end, which I did.

• Battle for Middle Earth 1: Another strategy game that I have sunk hours into over the years. Shame the sequel was rubbish, but you can’t have everything I suppose. BfME managed to stand out from the crowd of Age of Empires clones by adding in some really interesting original features that I mention in my review of the sequel. It’s a really well balanced game that really is piles and piles of fun.

• Batman: Arkham Asylum: I wrote a review of this a while ago, so best just to check that out. It’s another really fun platformer with much better combat than the other games of the same ilk already listed. Not as well written and with a few gameplay flaws, but the story holds the game together well enough and the flaws are nothing too major. I can’t wait for the sequel to come out.

• Half-Life 2: Finally a game with actually pretty bad writing. I mentioned before that Half-Life 2 is not actually all that well written and fails to appropriately characterise the Protagonist. That being said, it’s fun. I mean really fun. Really well balanced weapons, a variety of different enemies and a good difficulty curve. If you want a good shooter with some interesting physics puzzles then Half-life is as good a bet as any.

It's in the Game

This week EA Games released the new Medal of Honour game. Normally I’d ignore such news because I’m not a huge fan of shooters, especially online ones. However this particular release has caused a media storm because it allowed the player to play as the Taliban against allied forces online. I said ‘allowed’ because EA have since backed down and renamed the Taliban ‘The Opposition’. This was a terrible decision and indicative of a wider problem with Video Games as a medium

The problem has to do with Video Games in the popular imagination. People see them purely as entertainment and not as art. People do not see that video games can make an interesting or profound point about the state of the world. Nor that they can tell a moving and engaging story. People who don’t understand video games think that they’re only there to entertain people. Games like Medal of Honour and Halo suffer from this especially because they are primarily online games in which no real story is told once the painfully short single player campaign is done with.

It does not need to be said that this assumption is entirely untrue. While there are some who would still dispute this, to most commentators in the industry, Video Games are most certainly an artistic medium. That’s not to say that every Video Games is a work of art and certainly not to say that the industry has produced as many great works as the film industry, even when you take into account their relative life spans, but the fact that Video Games can be used as a medium to tell as story and invoke an emotional reaction in the player means that they most certainly qualify as an artistic medium.

This popular misconception means that, whenever a video game has some content which is controversial, the media does not see it as an attempt to make an artistic point and make people think about the issues being raised, but simply an attempt to increase sales in some clever popularity stunt. This problem is compounded when the game itself is seen as rather juvenile; the image associated with a shooter like MoH is of an adolescent sitting in a darkened room getting over excited over shooting someone through the head. It’s not a great image and certainly one which acts as a barrier to viewing something as an attempt to make a mature comment on current affairs.

While this viewpoint is not without merit, it oversimplifies things. Calling the opposition ‘the Taliban’ probably was, in part, done because it would doubtless attract attention and increase media coverage and hence sales. No doubt many of the players would fail to comprehend the significance of playing as the Taliban beyond it being pretty cool. However for the majority of the audience, no matter how juvenile, the experience of playing the Taliban against the allied soldiers would be slightly more meaningful. Rather than the Taliban just being the bad guys who we all shoot against, the perspective changes and the allies becomes the bad guys who are shooting you. The realisation is that war is a pretty scary experience for them as well as for the allies. When you’re playing as ‘the Opposition’ it doesn’t quite have the same effect because it’s not rooted in reality and so the change is not quite so shocking.

Admittedly calling the opponent ‘the Taliban’ and allowing them to be played on multiplayer is pretty weak as artistic statements go, but if Video Games are ever going to be appreciated as an artistic medium, they are statements that have to be made and staunchly defended. If someone were to make a film told from the perspective of the Taliban fighting the allies it would probably be hailed as a racy and controversial work of genius. Sure there would be some who would oppose the issue, but most of the media would come to accept it in time. Indeed films like The Hurt Locker and Jarhead explicitly criticise Allied forces, but no-one bats an eyelid because films are accepted as a mature artistic medium. There’s no reason why a game should not be able to deal with mature and complicated moral issues with reference to current affairs without being criticised.

The fault here largely lies with EA, who rather weakly backed down in the face of media pressure. Developers have to stand up for video games as an art form or else the popular perception of them will not change. Indeed the industry has already shown how it is capable of weathering media storms; remember the controversy over the sex scene is Mass Effect 1 a few years ago? Now think how many RPGs have sexual relationships as part of them? Pretty much every RPG deals with sex and relationships in some way now. Perhaps if EA had decided to be a little braver many more shooters would be presenting modern conflicts with enemies taken from real life, rather than simply being set in ‘Oppositionstan’. Maybe even single player campaigns will start allowing you to play as the Taliban as well. I mean we’re used to playing as Nazis against the Allies, who’s to say we shouldn’t start playing as the Taliban as well?

The problem that Video Games have is that it’s not just the protagonist who is the Terrorist, it’s the player. Video Games are interactive media, so the audience is not just viewing passively, but actively taking part in the action on screen. This is a fantastic tool for emersion, but sadly makes any attempt to tell a story from a controversial point of view far too racy for the media to accept. This is a great shame because in terms of making an artistic point it’s fantastic. Any story attempts to put the audience in the protagonist’s shoes and nowhere is this done better than in Video Games because you are literally in the protagonist shoes. The potential for creating an emotional reaction is much greater because part of the work of creating an emotional connection is done for you.

Video Games have great potential to create an emotional response, indeed many of them do, however they have some huge hurdles, many of them self made, to get over before people take them seriously enough to consider them art. The most important one of these hurdles is the image of being nothing more than entertainment. Developers need to start taking themselves seriously and consider their games art. They need to stand up for artistic decisions and start making people appreciate games as more than just entertainment. I’m looking at you, EA.

Some hippie 'games are art' thing

Just recently I’ve been playing a lot more video games, due to an increase in time and ability to spend money online easily. As such I’ve started using Steam a lot more. Three games in particular have been taking up my time of late, BioShock, Half-Life 2 and Psychonauts. All three of which are really excellent games that you should all go and play if you haven’t already. And if you haven’t I warn you that this blog contains some spoilers for them.

Now these games have gotten me thinking about videogames as a story-telling medium. All three have really great stories (well not Half-Life so much, but it’s not bad), but I have issues with how they are told. Indeed I have issues with the way that stories are told in videogames as a whole. There seems to be fundamental flaws in the way games work that make it very hard to tell a story in a satisfactory way.

Video games are, by nature, an interactive medium. They player controls the main character’s actions and, in some cases, choices. The main character moves through the story, controlled by the player; the player is essentially acting vicariously through the on-screen protagonist. This creates a unique level of immersion – the emotional connection to the main character can potentially be much greater than in any other medium because the player is acting through him (or her). However, with this level of control and immersion, it becomes very difficult to characterise the protagonist. I think Half-Life 2 suffers most of the three games I mentioned at the beginning from this. Gordon Freeman never talks, never interacts with the other characters and never actually makes any decision beyond which gun to use. Freeman simply does as he’s told by Alyx and the other members of the resistance. This is particularly obvious at the end of the game (or is it at the start of episode 1? I can’t remember), when Alyx is talking about how thankful she is that Freeman came to save her father and that he didn’t have to do it. The thing I couldn’t stop thinking through that scene was ‘yes he did’. Freeman never actually made the choice to go to Nova Prospekt, he was just sent there by Alyx to save her father. Freeman is little more than a puppet. He kills the Combine because he is told to do so. I can’t name one character trait of Gordon Freeman’s because he is not really a character at all; he’s an empty shell, a plot device that gets things done by shooting it. He does not drive the plot; the plot drives him, and thus the player, through the game. BioShock has exactly the same problem, but then the principle twist is built upon this fact. The protagonist is actually a puppet. He does what he is told because he is told to do it. He is, in the words of Andrew Ryan, a slave. The writers of BioShock had the self-awareness to play on this fundamental flaw, which is why it is one of the best written games I have ever played. Most games however fail miserably to do this, leaving them unapologetically lacking a main character.

There are a number of well trodden solutions to this problem, some of which are more effective than others. The first and most obvious is to wrestle control of the main character from the player and put all the characterisation and story development into cutscenes. The problem with this is that it’s just like putting scrolling text or voiceover into films – it’s not making use of the medium. You don’t go to the cinema to read a book or listen to an audiobook, you don’t sit down at your computer and fire up steam to watch a film. Japanese games are particularly at fault here – I’m looking at your Hideo Kojima. When gameplay gets interrupted for hours on end so you can sit and watch the story being told to you, things are going wrong. This leads to games being divided into gameplay and story – your task as the player is to safely take the protagonist from one segment of the story to another, the player is not involved or immersed in the story at all. Video games are an interactive media, so the story should be told in an interactive way, not by taking control away from the player. This completely breaks emersion and means that the player is no longer experiencing the story in the same way as he is when playing BioShock for example. I don’t think that cutscenes should necessarily be completely removed from videogames, but I think they should be used with extreme caution and very infrequently. The confrontation with Andrew Ryan in BioShock is a perfect example of when taking control away from the player works really well. When a cutscene there is a place in gaming for cutscenes, but they should be short and used sparing. A good example of well used cutscenes is Psychonauts, in which they are short and occasionally require you to make dialogue choices, which keeps some player involvement, not that these choices actually influences the game in any meaningful way.

This leads me neatly into the second solution to this problem – the RPG. Rather than taking control away from the player, RPGs give him altogether too much control. The player now creates the character entirely; looks, personality, gender, character traits. They make all the choices within the game; the main character, created by the player, decides which way the story goes by making choices based on the character he is playing. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Well the problem of characterising the main character is solved, but in a way that raises completely new problems.

The thing about a well written, interesting character is that he has to have a character flaw that leads him to making mistakes, which are what drive the story. As the character tries to resolve the problems of his own making, he realises the errors of his ways and develops as a character. When you let people create their own characters, this character development cannot happen. The character will not act according to his nature, but according to the whim of the player. One minute the character may be an angel, the next he may be a complete bastard, depending on how the players is feeling at the time. Through most RPGs you get the chance to help various people out, or kill them and take their money (ok it can be more complex than that, but you get the idea). A good character would always do one, or other of these things, whereas it is perfectly possibly for a character in a RPG to help one person and then shoot the next for no reason whatsoever.

This leads onto another problem, specifically morality systems. If you choose to help the person, you get good karma (or some equivalent), if you chose the kill the person, you get bad karma. Often the resolution of the story will depend on how nice you’ve been to everyone through the game. Oddly enough, this is not how morality works in the real world. Evil people are not evil for the hell of it. Usually in such situations you don’t get much more reward for being a bad guy than for being a good guy, neither is the bad guy option any easier (indeed in many cases it’s harder, as in Knights of the Old Republic. Because of this there is no reason, as a player, to be evil other than just being a dick. People do evil because it is easier than doing the right thing, or for selfish reasons of wanting, or even needed something that another person has. BioShock is slightly better done in this regard – the decision to rescue the Little Sisters or harvest them for Adam – however it is slightly ruined by all the lovely gifts that you get for rescuing the little buggers every now and then. There’s no reason to mercilessly harvest them because you get the same amount of Adam either way. If games are going to have morality systems, they have to make doing the wrong thing pay better than doing the right thing, so people have to chose between an easier ride in the game or actually doing what is right.

Characters in RPGs are, by necessity, simplistic. When it comes to character creation, game developers have to give players a limited number of options as to what kind of person the character is, in order for all the different character archetypes to fit with the story. Take as an example Mass Effect, in which you are given 3 different character histories and resulting traits to chose from. In terms of creating a unique and personal character this is pretty sparse. Often you don’t even get this option at the beginning (meaning games have to play the ‘I lost all my memory’ card at the start, which is one of the most tired and unoriginal tropes out there), but you get the odd dialogue choice which serves for characterisation. Again these tend to be pretty wooden, boring and lacking in variation. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve not really liked any of the choices I’ve been given.

RPGs also create a massive problem in storytelling. Specifically pacing becomes neigh on impossible, especially in games like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. It is so easy to get bogged down doing side quests and gaining experience that you lose track of the plot. It becomes almost comic when you get told that you need to hurry before the token bad guy destroys the universe, but you then go off to dick around is not backwater planet or town helping locals to dig plantations or collecting animal heads, yet you still get to the bad guy’s lair just in time to save the universe. This is much more of a problem with more recent RPGs, which give the player far too much freedom to do what he wills. Sure this allows developers to show off the beautiful setting they’ve created, but at the expense of a well paced story. Some RPGs do get around this problem by being far less open – games like Knights of the Old Republic have a number of different locations you can go to, but it’s pretty limited and occasionally you get taken off to somewhere to complete something necessary to the plot that you don’t get any choice over. You still end up with a bit at the end where you can go finish off all your side quests, before finishing the game, but at least you do get some semblance of pacing. Either way you still end up with a poorly paced game – you tend to get a compulsory bit at the start, which tends to be quite well paced, then it opens out so you have a massive chunk in the middle which just meanders as you complete all the disjointed plot points between dicking about on side quests, then it all rushes to a conclusion. Hardly a steady acceleration to a climax.

I’m not trying to say that RPGs are bad games, or even a bad way of storytelling, just that it is not completely satisfactory. You get really big problems with characterisation and pacing which really need addressing. Small changes to the format could easily make RPGs a much better way of telling a story. For example the options you get need to be limited by what you have already chosen – so if you have been evil previously, you get more evil options and fewer good ones until you get to the point where you have a really evil option and a slightly less evil option and vice versa. In many cases morality systems need to be far more ambiguous, so it’s less clear what the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ options are – the player has the think of the consequences of a certain action and decide whether that is right for the situation, you know, like how the real world works. More importantly games need to be less open. It is very bad narrative progression to allow the player to go wherever he likes whenever he wants. Sure have different choices and options, but this should be along fairly linear paths, rather than being completely open. Games like Fallout 3 tend to focus too much on the absolutely fantastic setting, rather than the story. It works in Fallout because the setting is so good, but I think the game would be much improved if you simply experienced the world while completing the story, rather than completing the story while experiencing the world. Knights of the Old Republic tends to get this just about right, although it could benefit from being even more linear.

So of the three different ways in which stories are told in games: the RPG, the game with cutscenes and the game with the silent protagonist, neither is ideal. I think the solution probably lies in some fusion of all three. Control of the character should very rarely be taken from the player, however the protagonist needs to be characterised, so he needs to be able to talk and interact. There have to be conversations and confrontations with other characters, his choices need to drive the plot, not those of others, but these need to be done so that the player can still control the main character – very rarely should the player be sitting and watching things happen. There should be choices which effect gameplay and the resolution of the plot, but this needs to be done in a linear way.

Obviously this is would be a very difficult sort of game to make, but I think that, as technology improves and as games develop, storytelling will get better. The games industry is still young and working out what works. I hope sometime in the future we get it right, but in order for that to happen we have to realise that it is possible and focus on video games as a storytelling medium, rather than simply focusing on making gameplay as entertaining as possible. We can do both, but at the moment we are mostly doing the latter, and it seems to be working, so I don’t see a major shift in focus any time soon. We can but hope.

Like self-indulgent butter spead too thinly over a peice of bread that is far too big

HAPPY NEW DECADE!!!!!

Well technically the new decade doesn’t start until next year, but if you’re pedantic enough to care then I feel sorry for you.

As is inevitable when a decade turns and I have too much free time on my hands, I have spend some time reflecting on the past 10 years, not just in my life (because let’s face it no-one cares) but also on the world in general. Obviously the most memorable (and not in a good way) event of the decade was the terrorist attack in the twin towers in New York in 2001, killing thousands and drastically changing the face of world politics. It was the catalyst for two controversial and politically damaging wars by America (with Britain tagging along in) against smaller powers as part of the uninformatively named War on Terror. Who knows maybe in the decade someone will tell us what that actually means.

9/11 was in many ways a turning point, but by no means a one off. Various other attacks throughout the decade, such as the 7/7 bombings on London and the Madrid train bombing are indicative of the dangers of the decade. The main enemy seems to be Islamic extremism, based largely in the Middle East. So far we’ve had little success in combating it.

The second major political theme of the decade has been climate change. Fears over what all that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere for the last 150 years might do to the planet reached fever pitch this decade, culminating in the Copenhagen conference late last year, which certainly blogs completely failed to cover… Anyway I really don’t know what to think about climate change. I can see that the science has a point, but I’m not exactly sure to what extent the government can force businesses to change. Much has been done over the last 10 years to build up a strong case for climate change; I guess the actual action to stop us all drowning sometime this century will have to come from the bottom up, not the top down, in the next decade or so. Maybe if we stopped dropping so many bombs on innocent civilians that might help.

Politics aside, this decade has seen massive advances in technology; computers have become faster, smaller and more powerful. Technology such as music players, phones and camera have now become something that everyone carries around in their pockets, usually as part of the same piece of hardware. The internet has gown to become a huge part of everyone’s life, in a way that many would not have seemed imaginable in the year 2000. To many the fact that we don’t have AI and space exploration yet will be a disappointment, but to be honest we could do without Blade Runner style Cyborgs running around putting us all to shame and beating Han Solo up (if you don’t get it go watch Blade Runner).

With this massive improvement in the power of computers comes a massive improvement in CGI. This has expressed itself most in video games which have become bigger and more beautiful than ever. Even post-apocalypse Washington DC is looking pretty fine these days thanks to games like Fallout 3. The internet has also allowed people to play against each other across the globe and expose their wilful ignorance to more people than ever. Games like WoW and Modern Warfare have all but dropped the pretence (or dropped it entirely) of a story in favour of getting people to pay through the nose to play for hours online while getting nowhere.

To me this is a great shame. Video games provide a superb opportunity to tell a very unique story because it is much more immersive and involved than a film or a book. The story is no longer being told to you, an independent viewer entirely outside the action, you the player are actually part of the story; you interact with it and possibly even effect its direction. ‘Sandbox’ games like Fallout and, well the majority of games released recently, allow you to fully explore the setting and choose exactly what your character does and says, even what he looks like. The game leads you in a specific direction, but doesn’t dictate how the story flows or even how it ends. However often more linear games rely on cut scenes to tell the story, which is basically like playing a game for 30 minute to and hour, then turning it off to go watch TV for a couple of minutes. I’m sure with the complexity of games these days story telling could become even more immersive. Maybe in the next decade we will see games focusing on storytelling again, rather than simply dumping you in an environment and asking you to explore or even worse just dumping you online with hundreds of other idiots and telling you to go nuts. The technology is there, someone just needs to use a bit of imagination and not jump on the bandwagon of what makes money, which they have done recently (see previous post on motion sensing).

CGI and special effects in general have also served to make films much more visually complicated, allowing for frighteningly realistic animation and stunts. A recent example of just how far we’ve come is Avatar, which I really need to see. The decade has been dominated by high octane action thrillers, with impressive special effects and fun explosions. These have a tendency to get in the way however of what really matters to a film; the story and the characters. Sure a film may look nice now, but as CGI gets better and better, is starts to look a little dated and all you’re left with is outdated animation which fails to impress. Let’s take the Star Wars franchise as an example. The first three films (that’s the three that were made, not one ones that come first in the chronology) are amazing films, with a superb story and brilliant characters. The animation and stunts and all that were good when they were made, but pale in comparison to what is achieved these days. Even so the films still stand out as some of the best ever made because a good story is timeless, it doesn’t matter that it looks a bit shit compared to the more recent Star Wars films because what matters is the story, not the aesthetics. Compare this to the most recent Star Wars trilogy. Looked pretty impressive at the time, lovely choreography, lots of explosions capped with some truly cringworthy one liners. Looking back now however, especially in the light of a film like Avatar, it’s not actually all that impressive any more. It no longer looks that good and all we are left with are a crap story, spoon-deep characters and a bitter taste in the mouth. CGI and special effect cannot compensate for a lack of a decent story.

Of course the film industry is not all terrible films that rely in looking impressive with no depth, films like the Dark Knight, Brokeback Mountain, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Minority Report and I could go on and on are brilliant films that will continue to stand out even when all rest of the bilge has paled again the slightly better looking bilge of next decade. I’m sure the filming industry will continue to play on gimmicks like 3D and CGI and produce some truly god awful films, but I’m sure there will continue to be some gems as well.

What we can gleam from the last 4 paragraphs and 10 years of visual forms of story telling is that games and movies have not gotten any better in the last ten years, just a hell of a lot prettier. Hopefully the latter will continue to be the case and we continue to get some damn fine stuff mixed in with the inevitable dirge of complete crap.

The latter can also be said for the music industry. This decade has been characterised by some truly dreadful, manufactured abominations, mostly popped out by the X factor poptart making factory run by Simon Cowell. This decade has probably seen more talentless clones singing other people’s songs than any other. Thankfully there have been some genuinely talented musicians trying and in some cases (like Muse and Coldplay if you like that sort of thing) succeeding, but in most cases (like most of the bands I like) failing to get a look in. To be honest this has and will continue to happen for the same reason that crap films and crap games will continue to be released; people are morons. Yes I lost my faith in most people’s opinions long ago and it’s hardly surprising given how popular Twilight and Lady Gaga are between them

Right, so to wrap up the decade, we have only really progressed in that we have found better and more interesting ways of blowing people up and entertaining ourselves. We are no cleverer and our stories are no better. We make the same old mistakes and will continue to for as long as it takes for the ice caps to melt and us all to drown in a flood of stupidity and water.

Before you sigh in relief that this frightening mass of self-indulgent drivel has finally finished, I have a couple of announcements to make.

Because I have decided that I still have too much free time and I got some weird flashes of inspiration, I have decided that in the New Year I will be starting 2 new different but slightly linked projects.

The first is called Project 365, the idea being that you take at least one photo per day all year so that you have a pictorial record of the year. With any luck I will manage to keep it going for longer than a month. The second and more interesting one is inspired by something called ‘postsecrets’, whereby people write shameful secrets on postcard sized images and send them in anonymously. However because I am not nearly as depressed as the people who send in these things (seriously read them, they really heart wrenching), I have decided to do a similar things, just with little sound bites that I enjoy, either from me in my day to day life, or important, intelligent people who have something interesting to say. My first comes courtesy of Wil Wheaton’s twitter (the guy who played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation)



I shall be putting them up on this photobucket account, the Postcards every Wednesday (roughly) and the daily photos whenever I can be bothered to make an update, probably every couple of days and at least every week with any luck.

Desert Bus, for the Children

I think I have mentioned, if only in passing, Loading Ready Run (LRR), a sketch comedy troupe from Victoria in Canada. They produce really excellent comedy which you should all go watch here. More importantly however this week they are doing one an incredibly charity event in the name of Child’s Play.

Child’s play is a charity set up by Gabe and Tycho of the webcomic Penny Arcade. It works across the globe, although mostly in the USA, to improve the lives of sick and injured children in hospitals by providing them with Toy and games. Not quite working to alleviate world poverty, but valuable work nonetheless. It’s been going since 2003 and has raised millions of dollars in that time thanks to the philanthropy of the gaming industry. In the last two years LRR have contributed over $80 000.

They have achieved this mostly through an event called Desert Bus for Hope (DBfH, sorry for all the acronyms and hyperlinks), which is happening for the third time in the coming days. DBfH is a gaming marathon whereby four members of the crew constantly play ostensibly the most boring video game every created, Desert Bus. Desert Bus simulates driving in a bus from Tuscan to Vagas and back, an 8 hour round trip along a perfectly straight road. The only thing that keeps the player involved is that the bus steers slightly to the right, forcing the player to continually correct it. The more the public donates to Child’s Play, the longer the crew plays this game. The donation needed per hour goes up each time, so as the marathon gets longer the amount needed to increase the length of the marathon increases. That being said last year they went for over five days and raised over $70 000.

Yesterday, at 6:20 PM (PST), or 2:20 AM (GMT) Desert Bus for Hope 3 started. Having been going for 18 hours already, they have so far raised almost $18 000 dollars. The aim of course is to beat last year’s total by a considerable amount. This is not possible however without the donations of ordinary people worldwide. As in previous years the even is being streamed live on Ustream here. You should all go and check it out, watch the stream for while, donate some money if you have any to spare and generally support the event. They auction off things and give challenges, so it’s well worth checking it out.

Again, please do support the event in any way you can, it’s a great way of forcing a group of Canadians to do your bidding in the name of charity if nothing else.

Nanananananananana batmaaaaaan

I have a great idea for a super villain. As a child his rich parent were murdered by a poor person. From this day on he hates the poor and the homeless and tries in his own sick and sadistic way to punish them for their collective crime against both himself and society as a whole. Having trained as a ninja, he returns to his home city to terrorise the local lower classes. Taking over his father company he uses his obscene wealth to lead a double lifestyle; playboy by day and vicious murderer of vagrants by night. He deploys his company’s wealth and arms manufacturing prowess to develop sophisticated equipment to help him on his deluded quest for vengeance. His main weapon however is fear. Turning his own childhood fear of bats against his perceived enemies he dresses up as a bat and terrorises the poor of his city, stalking the shadows, striking without being seen, swooping down on his unsuspecting victims and picking them off one my one. Who will stop the batman’s vendetta against the underprivileged?

I have of course, with some changes, just described to you one of the most well known superheroes ever created; Batman. The point, unless it wasn’t obvious, is that Batman is not exactly your archetypal virtuous superhero who fights crime and never puts a foot out of line. Put simply, Batman is a bastard. He runs around in the shadows beating up petty criminals and using the various gadgets on his utility belt to interfere with the plans of crime lords. He is not an ever-present demi-god who is so absurdly overpowered that he can completely stop all crime ever; he is a very rich guy trying with limited success to stop crime in one particular generic city in America somewhere. Batman makes villains fear him because he does not do the honourable thing by beating them in a fair fight; he sneaks up behind them and hits them over the head. This is because, were Batman to face up to a bunch of criminals with guns he would get shot several times before he could use his ninja training and belt full of gadgets. What makes Batman such a good superhero is that he is very human. Ok so he’s a pretty badass human with ninja training and loads of cool gear, but he’s still a human. It’s not like he’s juiced up on some radioactive bullshit that gives him special powers to fight crime.

Why, you may ask, am I blathering on about Batman? The answer to this question and actually the main topic for this week’s blog is the new Batman game that came out recently, Batman: Arkham Asylum.

The clever thing about the Batman universe is that they created this place called Arkham Asylum, a mental institute where they can lock up all their super-villains, allowing them to be reused. Batman doesn’t actually ever kill anyone; he just sends them off to Arkham so that when the writers need a new idea they can just break one of the old hands out for Batman to reel back in again.

Exactly such a thing has happened in the game; The Joker has broken out of the Asylum and reeked havoc on Gotham until Batman caught him to throw him back into Arkham. Inevitably it’s not that simple; the whole thing is a set up to get Batman locked up in Arkham with all the maniacs and a good helping of thugs to go with them. The perfect set up for a videogame.

Because it’s confined to Arkham Island the game is set in a fairly small location, so all the action takes place in a very limited area. This makes the game very tight, allowing it to tell a coherent and well paced story. The storyline is pretty well linear, although you are free to move around the Island as you please to complete all the side quests, which mostly constitute finding a load of random things scattered around the various buildings on the Island by The Riddler. By setting very deliberate and obvious limits on the scope of their story, the game developers have succeeded in making a very close-nit and coherent storyline, which really works well.

There is one massive issue with the storyline which really annoyed me. While the presence of Arkham Asylum means that you can reuse villains, it also means you can never reach any sort of closure. At the end of the game we are left with all the villains being put back where they belong, the status quo has been restored. The perfect set up for a sequel. In fact we are given one parting shot in the very final cut scene which more than suggests a sequel. Given the success of the game I expect that someone at Rocksteady games is already mulling over how they can spin the story out for another few hours. Open ended storylines where nothing is really achieved except the restoration of the status quo is not good writing.

The main problem any serious medium will have with Batman is that he is essentially a nutter running around in pyjamas and a cape. It’s very difficult to be dark and gritty when you have Batman running around fulfilling every child’s dream by dicking around on the rooftops and flying. Ok so he’s easier to fit into the modern fad of being gritty and realistic than most superheroes because he wears black rather than the incredibly vibrant spandex that most superheroes wear and has very dubious morals, but he still dresses like a bat for goodness sake. The game compensates for this by dressing up all the villains in even more vibrant colours and making half of them batshit insane. Of course this works because they’re in a mental asylum. The Joker especially is presented as being completely off the wall (as is appropriate). For most of the game he sits in a room making snarky comments as Batman runs around beating up his minions, he seem to take pleasure in the fact that the thugs that are getting haunted by Batman and are completely helpless to stop him. This of course gets around the fact that there’s really no point posting guards when you know Batman will just beat them up, perhaps the Joker just enjoys watching them suffer.

Fortunately, given that an almost constant commentary is given, the voice acting, is on the whole, pretty good. The only person who got on my nerves to much that I literally had to turn down the volume was Harley Quinn and I’m pretty certain that was intentional. The only annoying thing was some of the dialogue, which was at times so filled with clichés that I wanted to cry. Batman especially was stoic and full of emotionless tough guy drivel that I was almost hoping the Joker would win. Writers can’t seem to realise that they can give the main protagonist a personality without making him a complete pussy.

Actually to give due credit to the writers, they did include some really well done sections using Scarecrow to confront Batman with his past, creating a real sense of vulnerability. This is especially well created when the figure of Batman is replaced by Bruce Wayne as a child, walking through the rain soaked streets of Gotham when the soundtrack to his parent’s murder is played. Unfortunately these elements are few and far between and the actually levels where you fight scarecrow don’t quite live up to the cut scenes.

Another techniques used by the writers to make Batman less of a cold, heartless bastard is to have Joker and co. constantly comment that locked up an Arkham is exactly where Batman ought to be. While this is a step in the right direction, in many ways it doesn’t go far enough. Joker keeps on saying that Batman is a nutter, but never seems to present any evidence, simply repeating the same old one-liners over and over again. The idea that Batman is as bad as the criminals he’s fighting could have been presented really well by using Scarecrow’s hallucinogenic drugs to present Batman with a twisted view of his own past, much as I did at the start of this review. Instead the idea of Batman’s insanity is presented in an incoherent and underwhelming way.

I’ve just noticed that I’m almost at two pages in Microsoft Word and I still haven’t mentioned gameplay, so let’s do that. Actually there’s very little to say, the combat flows beautifully, is fun to play and appropriately challenging. The main problem with it is that there is too little variety. Once you’ve beaten up one thug with a pipe, a brick, a knife or an electric rod, you beaten up them all. A couple of different variations of thug would make some of the fights less samey. Despite this the combat system is one of the most entertaining I’ve ever played.

While unarmed thugs are taken out with seamless, flowing combos, thugs with guns are generally taken down by creeping up behind them and taking them out silently. These stealthy elements mix with the hand to hand combat seamlessly and progress nicely in difficulty, although the game doesn’t really exploit the final developments of that progression. There is one really challenging level near the end, but nothing after that, which is really disappointing. One does have to wonder however why the thugs don’t ever look up and why whoever designed the interiors had such a fixation with gargoyles.

It just would not be Batman without gadgets. There is always the danger of overpowering Batman with a whole dirge of different gadgets which can solve any problem. Fortunately the game balances the gadgets really well, meaning that, although new things become available, they don’t necessarily make life any easier. Gadgets allow access to different areas, most of which only contain more of the Riddler’s challenges. The main issue with the gadgets is the way in which Batman gets them; at one point he even calls in his batmo-plane to deliver a new gadget. Why not just get in the bloody thing and use that to stop the Joker? Maybe Batman is insane after all, that or the writers couldn’t think of any other way of getting that particular gadget to you.

The principal weakness of the gameplay in Arkham Asylum is the boss battles. Batman seems to have an infinite number of Batarangs because every single goddamn boss fight requires that you throw one at an appropriate villain at an appropriate time. One would hope that the developers could think in slightly more innovative ways of defeating people like Killer Croc or Bane than simply throwing a Batarang at them and running away. The only thing that makes it harder is that you have to beat a load of thugs up at the same time. As I have already alluded to the fact that Scarecrow levels are particularly underwhelming. The first one is good, but after that they don’t get much harder. If only they did because the sections themselves are excellent. Probably the best boss battle is the one with Poison Ivy, which is both challenging and really fun, although even then it’s still just throwing a Batarang at the giant plant. It also contains the game’s one quick-time event, so it looses marks there. The pinnacle of inadequacy comes with the final boss battle against a juiced up Joker. Essentially it’s a fight against a load of thugs with the occasional bit where you have to run away from a giant version of the Joker. That is all the game can offer? Fighting one of the most psychopathic and brilliantly insane super villains of all time and all the game can offer is exactly the same as it has for the last few hours? All the developers can think of to do with the Joker is given him some spinach like half the other bosses in the game and make you avoid getting beaten up by him? After completing the game one is left with an underwhelmed feeling of ‘is that all you’ve got to offer’. We are left with the feeling that the game is rummaging around in its toy box, searching for something new to show us. The Joker is a crazy psychopathic clown for goodness sake, how hard can it be to create a really wacky and at the same time truly challenging and original boss fight?

Despite its flaws, this game is superb. If you haven’t bought it yet, go and do it now. Batman Arkham Asylum is one of the best games I’ve ever played. Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s well worth the expense. Not only does the story make for hours of fun, the challenge mode allows you to make the most of the game’s best bits. Given the game’s success I think it’s inevitable that a sequel will emerge at some point. Let’s just hope that they put as much time and effort into making it as good as this game as well as trying to iron out some of the issues. The game could easily have taken a different direction and I hope a sequel will try to develop some of the things the game didn’t really do very well. I fear that any sequel will fail to live up to the game’s very high standard, but, if done properly, a sequel could be just as good if not better. Anyway, to sum up this absurdly long blog, Buy. This. Game

Post-Natal

This week saw the world’s biggest nerd-fest; E3 take place in Los Angeles. E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) is, as the name suggests, an exhibition for video game designers to launch their upcoming projects to the world. After last year’s disappointing series of sequels, E3 returned to form with some very juicy announcements from all three of the major console makers that are sure to give every video game nerd across the globe raging erections. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all announced new controllers for their respective consoles.

Given how much money the Wii has been raking in for Nintendo it was inevitable that the other console developers would want to tap into the market and they have taken the opportunity presented at E3 to do that. Sony announced a motion sensing camera, which seems to be rather limited compared to Microsoft’s Project Natal; a motion sensing device more accurate than anything produced previously. Microsoft claims that it can do voice and face recognition, and register movement to an accuracy that does to require a controller and allows the player to interact with characters on screen in a completely revolutionary way.

Of course Nintendo made claims about the Wii’s motion sensing capabilities which proved to be rather overoptimistic and because of that they’ve announced yet another accessory for the Wii that makes the control actually do what it’s supposed to do. We are now a few years down the line and the promotional videos show Project Natal working very well, but I can’t help but fear that the motion sensor will not live up to expectations.

I am also sceptical that the motion sensor will work with more hardcore games like Shooters and RPG’s. Clearly motion sensors make for a more realistic experience, which is great for sports games and such, but the whole point about video games is that you can take on the attributes of someone or something else and do things that you would not normally be able to do. There is no way that a game which centres on motion sensors can provide this experience. The hand-held controller remains the best way of playing hardcore games, so removing it can only really condemn Project Natal to a casual gamer’s gimmick. From an economic perspective this is no bad thing; the Wii has made massive profit for Nintendo by appealing to the casual gamer and Microsoft understandably wants to muscle in on that market. However Project Natal seems to be a break from the hardcore gaming demographic that has made the Xbox 360 so successful. Hopefully Microsoft will recognise that controllers are still the best way of playing most video games and continue to release games that do not depend solely on the motion sensor.

You would hope that the novelty of motion sensing will wear off eventually (although the continued success of the Wii demonstrates it’s continued popularity) and people will stop making ever more gimmicky games that have arbitrary features which are only there to make use of the motion sensor. Until then I guess we’ll continue to be bombarded with ever more realistic sports games. Inevitably people want games which effectively emulate how the sport is really played and this is probably where Project Natal’s real potential lies, until people start thinking outside the box and just going outside to play the sport in question for real. Rather than standing in front of your television posing like a sportsman you could just be outside doing the same thing, looked less ridiculous, burning more calories and getting more direct sunlight.

It remains to be seen just how effective Microsoft’s foray into motion sensor based video games will be. I can see Project Natal selling very well (although it will have to in order to make up all the money Microsoft and no doubt spend developing it), but I don’t think that full motion sensor based gaming without any controller is the way it will go. I can see better and better takes on what the Wii has already don’t being successful with both casual and hardcore gamers, but Project Natal really represents more of a gimmick which will work in the short term rather than that next generation of video game consoles. Nevertheless, with consoles now living in every household and videogames no longer being the reserve of nerd living in their parent’s basement, the casual gaming demographic will only grow, meaning that the major developers will have to pander to their desires to continue to compete. Fortunately that hardcore gaming market continues to be large enough that the major developers cannot ignore it; the increase in popularity of casual games will not spell the end of the hardcore gamer.