Two (too?) easy games

The most difficult part of reviewing a game is reviewing the difficulty. A few games — Super Meat Boy, I Wanna be the Guy — can uncontroversially be called hard, but the essential question is actually whether they are too hard. Since that level of difficulty depends not only on the individual player's skills and experience, but also on his values, it can be difficult to state what goes over the line. It is even harder to accurately say whether a game is too easy, primarily because most reviewers are skilled and experienced gamers, many of them drawn to the hobby during its early days when challenge was practically all a game could offer in terms of fun. "Too easy" often equates to boring, perhaps to the detriment of games like Soul Bubbles. I have seen the "too easy" charge leveled at two games I played recently, Kirby's Epic Yarn and de Blob 2. In both cases, the statement is wrong, but for very different reasons.

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Values and Characteristics of the Cinematic Action Genre

In his review of Enslaved, my colleague Brad Gallaway makes an argument for placing that game in a new genre, one that he feels has arisen fairly recently. Using the traditional naming conventions for narrow genres, the proper term would be "Uncharted clones", but I don't feel that description is quite adequate. While Uncharted is certainly the most identifiable game in the class, I believe the genre itself pre-dates that game. Uncharted represents not a new kind of game unto itself but an exemplary actualization of certain values in game design. Here I intend to put a name to those values and show how they relate to the characteristics of games in this group, which I think of as "Cinematic Action" games.

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The Dunning-Kruger reticule

In my review panning Alpha Protocol, one of the many issues I singled out for complaint was the disconnect between the reticule and the actual position hit by my bullets. I've received a few comments through various channels that reflect a belief that I simply didn't understand how an RPG works. I think it's pretty obvious that I do; most of these comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of my complaint. The point here is not that when my character shoots there is a complicated set of calculations that decides whether or not I actually hit where I was aiming. Rather, my complaints about this are complaints about the interface, because the meaningless reticule adds a needless layer of opacity to the RPG system.

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Lost in Infinite Space

The last three games I've played have something in common, in that they are noble efforts with imperfect outcomes. Infinite Space, Metro 2033, and Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon all have significant positives offset by serious negatives. In particular, I thought Infinite Space and Metro 2033 were pretty compelling despite their problems. The easiest of these to talk about is what's wrong with Infinite Space, so I'll start there.

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Why I used to love Santa Destroy

In Suda 51's No More Heroes, I loved the city of Santa Destroy. That's a controversial position, because Santa Destroy bored almost everyone else to tears — the excision of the city from the sequel, Desperate Struggle, was met with almost unanimous praise. Judged strictly by its impact on the gameplay, the town had few redeeming features, and there's not much point in disputing that. But Santa Destroy had value to No More Heroes in other ways. In excising it, the sequel lost something.

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Blog of the Round Table: The denouement of the rings

The role-playing game, as a genre, owes much to the imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien. The same could be said for much of the fantasy genre in film and literature as well, but the diversity of approaches in these media reflects intricate linkages to multiple concepts of fantasy and folklore. Role-playing games, which build lengthy, epic storylines in fantasy worlds populated by multiple sentient races, follow in the footsteps of Tolkien's magnum opus. In terms of the time investment and the breadth of the imagined world, many RPGs are quite similar to The Lord of the Rings, but while that trilogy keeps going for several chapters after the climactic fight with the forces of Sauron, a game typically stops dead after its most intense battle, with ill effects for both character arcs and the closure of the story. Since they've taken so much from Tolkien already, perhaps games could look to his last chapters to find inspiration for gameplay beyond the climactic fight.

Let's begin by considering the case of Eowyn and Faramir, two characters who are slowly falling in love during the late phases of The Return of the King. Their stories effectively end with a scene in which Faramir confesses his love and asks Eowyn to consider him. It's not particularly realistic, but RPGs that have a particular focus on relationships and the use of conversation trees (Mass Effect, for instance) could take a cue from this. A relationship that has developed slowly over the course of the game could be realized in the aftermath of the final battle. Obviously, you could make this dependent on successful navigation of a conversation tree. In a game like Mass Effect that links conversational proficiency with actions and attitudes during the game, making this tree impossible for a particular alignment could be a way to emphasize the personal cost of the decisions that have been made.

As part of his closing arc, Aragorn, who is concerned about his ability to maintain Gondor in the future, is led by Gandalf into the mountains, where he finds a seedling offspring of the sacred tree Nimloth, symbolizing the rebirth of the nation. This is, essentially, the novelization of a fetch quest, and a gameplay denouement of this kind would require some extra elbow grease to be emotionally effective. However, if an appropriate symbol is developed throughout a game, then a mission to retrieve that symbol could be a good way to bring closure to an epic RPG. Having defeated the great enemy, you find an object that matters personally to the characters and implies hope for the future.

The hobbits have the most elaborate denouement, in the form of their journey back to the Shire, and the elimination of the forces endangering it. This approach has several advantages, which are shared between trilogy and game. Firstly, many interesting characters are developed at the beginning of the story who must necessarily be left behind when the journey at the core of it begins. Returning to those characters reminds the player (or reader) of the things that seized his interest back when he started. Additionally, seeing the central characters in the presence of the initial supporting cast again provides a yardstick for measuring their increase in maturity, confidence, and power. Because RPGs, particularly of the Japanese variety, are often concerned with the maturation of the hero as a parallel to his leveling up, this is an effective way to reflect on the implications of the game as a whole.

The triviality of the destruction of the forces of the Shire displays the newfound strength and leadership of the hobbits of the Fellowship, but it also points out another possibility for closing out a story. For some reason it is typical to have the final boss or the leader of the opposing forces be some immensely powerful warrior, but this need not be the case. You could set up a story where a relatively weak king is supported by an army of incredibly powerful soldiers. Defeating his minions could be tough, but the king himself could be a trivial boss. The climactic battle could come much earlier than the final fight, with the last battle in the game serving as an expression of a new power relationship in the world. Something along these lines occurred near the end of Final Fantasy X, where the real climax of that game is the battle against Yunalesca and the bosses within Sin constitute various moments of farewell, although admittedly some of these fights are not easy.

The final phase of The Lord of the Rings that I want to draw attention to is the departure of the ringbearers from the Grey Havens, symbolizing their passage into the next life. Characters in RPGs often die as a part of the story, or occasionally (as in the Fire Emblem games) perish permanently if they fall in battle. A journey to carry their spirits to the next world, or simply to return their bodies to their home villages, could provide gameplay that puts those losses in context. One could also make the bodies a physical burden in some way, making this journey more difficult in a Lonesome Dove kind of way.

Of course, these various approaches could also be combined in various ways to provide a closing chapter that follows the climactic boss. My point here is not that The Lord of the Rings is the apotheosis of effective denouement in fantasy storytelling. However, the way it ties up its character arcs contains a number of ideas for developing a more interesting closing to an RPG story than just a cutscene followed by a credit scroll. Extending the gameplay beyond the climactic boss offers the opportunity to put a satisfying cap on the character and world development, and thus make the whole story a richer and more rewarding experience.

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Alpha Centauri's narrative tension

I still remember reading the PC Gamer issue in which Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri received the highest rating that magazine had ever given, in which it was implied that this might be the greatest PC game of all time. An examination of subsequent "best of" lists shows that their prediction or their memories failed, but it's worth asking what about the game so captivated its players. I think that in part — and this is something you would not expect to say for a game of this kind — this was due to the story. Other games in this genre, including subsequent entries in its sibling Civilization series, have no greater narrative arc than a grand national romance. Alpha Centauri rises above this tradition with truly differentiated factions that imbue the different societies with real character, an explicit historical story, and a implicit but definite narrative embodied by its technology tree. When these elements work together, this interwoven narrative stands as one of the game's unique strengths. Yet these different influences can also create an unhappy tension with one another.

Alpha Centauri has an advantage over its cousins, the Civilization games, in that the different playable factions represent ideologies rather than nations. As Alex Galloway discusses in Gaming, the "civilizations" don't represent anything more than stand-ins for particular assemblies of AI traits. Unique units aside, the different "civilizations" have few differences, for gameplay reasons and because most real civilizations have adopted very similar patterns of success. In Alpha Centauri this is true to a certain extent, but by using each faction to represent an ideology, the distinction can be taken much farther.

The factions have material differences between them from the get-go, strengths and weaknesses that encourage divergent modes of play. The ecological handiness of the Gaians rewards a priority on interacting with Planet, but hinders population growth. The academic prowess of the University encourages technology-first gameplay, but forces the player to work diligently to protect his secrets from being stolen. While most of the game's "Secret Projects" can benefit any faction or style of play, certain ones become crucial for particular factions — denying them the ownership of these projects can be every bit as strategically important as obtaining the benefits for yourself. In this way each faction truly develops its own character, assisted in this by the recurrent voices of the faction leaders, whose writings and sayings provide context for many of the discoveries and projects.

These "characters" enter an overarching narrative of a fractured society landing on a new world (called "Chiron" or "Planet") already inhabited by a semi-sentient collective intelligence. The various factions are competing with one another for territory and resources, and with the alien life form for dominance of planet. Relationships between factions remain mostly antagonistic, but the game imposes an arc on the interaction between the player and the lifeforms of Planet. Certain events are triggered by the player to make an explicit arc, while the game's technology tree enforces its own narrative of cooperation. Scientific advancement relies on developing a further understanding of Planet, which in turn allows the cultivation of its lifeforms to produce the food, energy, and minerals necessary to survive or dominate. The apex of the scientific approach to victory is the fusing of human consciousness with the collective mind of Planet.

The problem is that this doesn't seem like an outcome that would sit well with every faction, and would appeal to some for very different reasons. The Gaians would happily join with Planet because this idea lies at the core of their civilization anyway. The collectivist Hive would also appreciate the idea, but Chairman Yang would mostly enjoy the power it gave him over all life. Surely a collective consciousness would be anathema to the capitalists of Morgan Enterprises or the Survivalists — though for these factions one could just choose to pursue the economic domination or world conquest victory conditions. That would not escape the fact that these societies are forced to pursue scientific goals at odds with their philosophies along the way.

And what of the Lord's Believers? To say nothing of the theological difficulty involved in acknowledging the existence of an intelligent lifeform not contemplated in scripture (and this would be socially important), the pursuit of immortality by giving up one's soul to an alien creature must surely be horrific to them. If you assume their ideals are honestly held (and in all fairness, the game does not), conquering their neighbors by the sword or filthy lucre would be just as bad.

Of course, the tech tree holds just as much offense for the Gaians as it does for the Believers — surely a bunch of tree-hugging environmentalists would hate to develop synthetic fossil fuels and pollute a whole new planet! And why should they? This is, after all, science fiction... instead of supercomputers, why not let the Gaians learn how to engineer Planet's xenofungus into a problem-solving neural net? Instead of learning to build tanks, why couldn't they biologically engineer armored monsters from Planet's mindworms and locusts? Of course, allowing truly varied alternative technology trees one creates a more difficult problem in terms of balancing, especially if some of the branches are mutually exclusive. However, Alpha Centauri would have benefited, in a narrative sense, from allowing tech trees that were more friendly or more inimical to Planet. An alternate endgame (perhaps one involving a new colonization effort?) might have been of benefit also.

This, then, is the respect in which Alpha Centauri's narrative falters. The technology tree creates an implicit story for every faction, and the problem with this is that it is the same story, for societies that are radically different. A more flexible and varied technology tree, with defined, exclusive routes towards more varied endgames and units, would have benefited the game by allowing each of its "characters" a destiny that fit, rather than contradicted, their principles.

Note: I played Alpha Centauri as part of the fun at Vintage Game Club. We're starting our next game, Majora's Mask (available via Ebay for N64 and Gamecube, and through Virtual Console on Wii), next Friday. If you're interested, we'd love to have you join in the discussion.

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The falling action

Most games, even particularly interesting ones, are hamstrung by the fact that they end too soon. I don't mean that the gameplay itself ends too quickly; indeed most games would be served by chopping out a few hours. What I'm talking about here is that the story gets cut short. Whether RPGs, shooters, or brawlers, the finale of most games goes like this: climactic boss battle, short non-interactive cutscene, The End. Sometimes the short cutscene gets replaced with a long one, but the basic pattern is widely accepted. This hurts game narratives because it forces the player to assess the implications of the game's climax while almost entirely outside of the game world. It is left to the player to imagine what the world of the game is like after, and while this occasionally fits a narrative design it does not always do so. Fallout 3 reached a positively manic climax with Liberty Prime's assault on Project Purity, then dove right into an abrupt (and almost inexplicable) closing sequence. The recent downloadable content, "Broken Steel", feels like an attempt to add a real denouement to the Enclave arc, and in this it largely succeeds.

Most quests in "Broken Steel" differ from those of the main game in that they are essentially devoid of meaningful moral choice. The events of the add-on represent a single infiltrator's actions in a military campaign, and as such most of its quests amount to extended dungeon crawls. While a number of new and extremely powerful enemies appear across the Wasteland, none of them take the form of Enclave soldiers — the new Hellfire Trooper is not significantly more effective than his compatriots — and when this is combined with the elevated level cap, the effect is a slow reduction of tension throughout the adventure. Sure, things can get a bit hairy during some segments (particularly the harrowing encounter with Reavers in the Presidential Metro), but every time you face the Enclave they feel weaker than before. In the final act of the add-on, I infiltrated the Enclave's mobile base and single-handedly took down their elite Sigma squad in the space of a few seconds. Things never really got any harder after that.

Broken Steel doesn't have any grand finale to match that of the main story, but that's not the point. The new content isn't about a heroic charge against overwhelming odds to conquer a fortified position; it's about stomping bugs. There's no new antagonist to confront, nor even an old one, as the new segments don't seem to notice if you let Colonel Autumn live. All you have are progressively less dangerous firefights, gradually easing off the pressure until you demolish the Enclave's last stronghold with fire from the sky.

The accessory quests don't add much in the way of gameplay or new areas, but they do allow the player to consider the non-military impact of freeing Project Purity. Notably, the Wasteland still has problems — cleaning up the water didn't immediately eliminate the widespread contamination, mutation problems, or raiders. Solving some of those problems simply created new ones: now the challenge is to ensure that the distribution of the pure water goes smoothly. These quests don't really have much in the way of interesting moral choices, but they help put the player's earlier decisions in perspective, allowing him to reflect on the implications of the choices he made earlier.

The weakness of "Broken Steel" is that it has little to offer beyond violence. The quests are mostly straightforward battles, and allow none of the flexibility inherent to some of the main game's more interesting missions. The player can't side with the Enclave, or even use his powers of persuasion to help destroy his enemies from within. The only choice the player can make is to shoot or die, and while that approach has its uses it's unfortunate that players who take advantage of the full range of character customization available in the game aren't rewarded with interesting alternative routes to victory.

The impression one gets from interviews is that the developers at Bethesda believe players reacted negatively to the fact that their game ended. For me, at least, this wasn't the case at all. It wasn't that Fallout 3 ended, but how it ended that felt unsatisfying. The assault on the purifier didn't feel like a personal triumph, the conclusion of the adventure came as a surprise, and the in-universe reason for ending it was contrived and ridiculous. After the events of "Broken Steel", however, I feel like the game could have stopped without any trouble. The powerful weapons and increased level cap slowly deflate the tension of the narrative throughout this episode, and the final crawl through the Enclave's mobile platform feels like the player's expression of personal dominance over their military engine. Despite its weaknesses, this aspect of "Broken Steel" is quite welcome: it makes the player feel like the story really is at a conclusion, by moving the end of the game away from the climax of the story.

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Go for the Overkill

While many publishers have largely decided to approach the Wii by speeding up their casual-game assembly lines, Sega has started to position itself as a go-to source for more adult fare on the friendly little console. This is the strategy behind the upcoming first-person shooter The Conduit, as well as the already-released games MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill. MadWorld was blessed with a striking cel-shaded art style and gameplay that had the potential to use the Wii remote in really interesting ways. So it's perhaps surprising that Overkill, a light-gun game that holds the Guinness record for most swearing in a video game, turned out to be so much better. There is a phrase in the previous sentence that tells you why that happened.

Of course, spewing F-bombs in a game is not a guarantee that it will become a great experience, but that's not the point. Overkill's amazing proliferation of profanity is important as an indicator of what the developers were trying to do and how they succeeded. The entire design of the game is meant to evoke memories of the bloody, profane, and ridiculous B-movies of yesteryear. And it does, from the moment you see an ammo-draped stripper dancing behind the credits. The soundtrack, dialogue, and obvious continuity (and projection) errors are all reminiscent of the bad old movies, as are the posters that designate each of the playable chapters. Even the bosses serve as a sort of parade of monster archetypes from these flicks. Of course, this is all unbelievably crass, and you'll only like the game if you can find it at least as hilarious as it is revolting.

The game fits its target well because the on-rails light-gun game is a second-tier entertainment these days anyway, long surpassed by the greater freedom afforded in first person shooters. Overkill embraces this heritage, relying on its scoring system to enhance the replay value (although the "director's cut" expands the game also). The Wii's graphical limitations aside, the enemy models are noticeably ugly and low on polygons, and while this may not have been intentional it slots into the overall aesthetic anyway.

This isn't to say that Overkill doesn't have any brains (the zombies mutants need something to eat, after all). It's certainly aware of how crass it is, to the point where one of the characters (who previously unleashed a hilariously chauvinistic tirade against the game's female protagonist) offers a cursory feminist critique of the game in the closing scene. One could also read a little commentary on the history of the genre into the episode that takes place in a carnival. Light-gun games are, after all, the progeny of midway amusements, by way of the arcade, something you can also find in the carnival episode. Overkill keeps its commentary light, however, mainly aiming to evoke our memories of films we'd be embarrassed to admit having watched. The game knows that we know those movies were terrible in every way, and if it's trying to make a point beyond that, it isn't trying too hard.

MadWorld evokes memories of a particular movie: The Running Man. A whole city has been transformed into a bloody amusement called DeathWatch for... somebody, and the protagonist, Jack, must kill his way through the other competitors in order to stop the evildoers who arranged the whole mess. Like Overkill, MadWorld aims to get laughs out of the absurdity of its violence and an accompanying commentary track. MadWorld, unfortunately, never really gets going and even if it did it hasn't got a coherent destination.

The key problem with the gameplay is pacing. Overkill has a tremendous advantage in that its on-rails structure means that the developers can completely control the tension and the player's viewpoint at all times. This has its downside — once a player has "learned" a particular area it can get boring — but it also keeps the action going almost constantly. MadWorld, however, is a series of open areas in which the player can roam freely. This allows him to control his experience to some degree, but it also means that the player can feel somewhat directionless. Local shortages of enemies force the player to move, but in many levels enemies and interesting locations are clustered rather than evenly spaced. As a result, the player sometimes wanders aimlessly and can stumble into stretches where there just isn't enough to do. The scoring system exacerbates this problem by generally keeping players in these arenas for too long, allowing even its over-the-top violent antics to become repetitive and tiresome.

That explains how MadWorld falters as a game, but it also collapses as an idea. The cheesy visuals of Overkill contribute to its overall aesthetic intentions, and the black-white-and-red cel shading of MadWorld seems like it will do the same, targeting violent comics. But while Overkill dispenses with reality almost immediately and starts taking its story in more and more bizarre directions, MadWorld keeps itself firmly under the top, embracing lengthy cutscenes where people look shocked or frightened in freeze frame as various characters painstakingly explain the history of DeathWatch and the ordinary, workaday motives of the rich men who have organized it. Oh, they did it to make money, who could have guessed.

MadWorld doesn't even surpass its inspiration. Decades have passed, so now we have a lot more blood and dismemberment, but do we have a lightning-slinging opera singer wearing technicolor armor? MadWorld eschews incongruous beasts like Dynamo, instead giving us exactly what we expect from a game like this. The bosses always are and appear every bit as dangerous as Jack himself, and most of them are huge, violent monsters who can happily survive having an arm chainsawed off. It's surprisingly conventional, and even a little cowardly.

This extends to the concept of DeathWatch itself. The Running Man has a virtue in that it points the finger at its own audience: a totalitarian government organized the events, but the people watching, cheering, and wagering on the murderous game show were very clearly us. The rising popularity of MMA and the recalibration of football broadcasts as celebrations of the hard hit are evidence that the thirst for violent sport is as great now as ever. The target is there, and MadWorld's bloody excess and sportscaster-like commentators are like a loaded gun aimed right at it, so it is almost infuriating that the game never pulls the trigger. The Running Man at least afforded the possibility of an uncomfortable moment, when the viewer attempted to reject the idea that he was like the spectators in the film and then realized he'd just spent 90 minutes cheering on bloody murder too. MadWorld goes to some effort to assure its player that ordinary people are victims, only the jaded rich think murder is sport, something about pharmaceutical companies, blah blah blah. The reality Jack is every bit as brutal and disgusting as the thugs and aristocrats he's opposing, and he is us. You could do something powerful with that, if you were so inclined. MadWorld's developers apparently weren't.

House of the Dead: Overkill succeeds because it takes its every weakness and makes it serve the overall aesthetic. It's a relatively ugly game built on an unpopular mechanic that's linear by its very nature, and it works magnificently because of the B-movie horror context. MadWorld has every advantage over the other game when it comes to artistic style and gameplay mechanics, but like its directionless players it simply loses its way. It's not just that it doesn't commit; the game doesn't even seem to know what it could commit to. Overkill seemingly aims lower than MadWorld, but because it is built into a coherent aesthetic experience, it hits higher.

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Who's in the party?

Along with the Vintage Game Club, I have recently been playing Chrono Trigger, a game widely hailed as one of the best console RPGs ever made. While the game has many attributes worth praising (not least the continuity of world and battle screens), I was particularly interested by its combination attacks. Almost any two characters that are in the combat party can combine their unique individual battle techniques into more powerful "Dual Techs". For instance, Lucca can charge Crono's sword with fire while he performs his "Cyclone" attack to create the "Fire Whirl" tech. Frog and Ayla can combine their weak individual healing skills into the "Slurp Kiss" that slightly heals the whole party. I think it odd that this approach has seen so little use subsequently, since it seems like modulating abilities based on party composition has great potential for infusing characterization into the combat mechanics.

Of course, most role-playing games, especially in the JRPG genre, give the player characters with complementary abilities or specialized roles, so that certain rosters are somewhat more effective than others. Having the characters explicitly combine their attacks is much less common, and is typically reserved for high-powered finishing moves, as in Kingdom Hearts II or Tales of Symphonia. Chrono Trigger differs from these games in that its combination techniques span a spectrum of opportunity costs (also, the animations are short). Some of them do require a significant investment of MP and can only be used sparingly, but others have a low enough cost that they can be used almost every turn. As a result, the shared abilities are almost as important as the individual abilities to the tactical evaluation of a particular party composition.

This had an interesting effect later in the game, after I managed to get Magus to join my party. Magus is a strong and versatile character with hard-hitting magic attacks of several different elements. Considering just his individual abilities he's a good character to have in the party. Yet, I almost never used him because he didn't have any dual techs at all. He couldn't increase his effectiveness by teaming up with anyone, and rather than give up the tactical flexibility, I left him out. It felt mechanically like he just didn't fit in with the party, an appropriate note because he is a major antagonist for much of the game. The mechanics of the game isolate him in battle just as the story suggests he would be isolated in the group.

This seems to me like the sort of thing that should be done more often. The enormous cast of many JRPGs means that most of the playable characters and their relationships never really get fleshed out, despite the hours of cutscenes. Why not use the combat system to do some of this work? Envision a set of party dynamics, and use the availability of combination attacks to illustrate those dynamics. If you imagine that Marle is jealous of Ayla and Lucca, creating friction in the group, express this by limiting their combos or making them less powerful. Then, when the player needs Lucca in the party for her fire attacks, the tactical limitations would encourage the player to respond by removing Marle from the combat group. The player's choice of party members remains an act of play, but through the manipulation of the mechanics it becomes an act of narrative characterization as well.

We can push this further by making the available combos respond dynamically to narrative. Events in the story that bring two characters closer could make new combination attacks available to them. When the relationship between two characters changes, the set of shared techniques could be adjusted to reflect the difference. This need not be tied to the planned story: a relationship system like that of Tales of Symphonia could be used to guide the evolution of combination techniques.

I've seen a couple of excellent essays (from Jay Barnson and Nayan Ramachandran) recently trying to dissect what's wrong with the JRPG and suggest ways that the genre could be revitalized. My own advice is to let the gameplay tell the story, too. Persona 4 and The World Ends With You both did this, in different ways, but you can still apply the lesson even if you aren't so unconventional. Use the gameplay of party dynamics to reinforce the story of personal relationships. Make "these characters belong together" part of the player's thinking in every phase of the game, and the stories of those characters may gain more resonance.

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Silent Hill's twists unravel

A writer takes a significant risk when he adds a plot twist to a story. In the best-case scenario, the secret that changes everything gives the audience a feeling of revelation. Everything clicks into place and suddenly makes sense. Laying the groundwork for that feeling is a tricky business, though. It's very easy to sell the setup too hard, making what's coming too obvious. In this case the twist merely bores the audience, which is not the worst thing that can happen. If the writer works too hard in the other direction, and does not give enough basis for the change-up, the audience may reject the surprise, in which case you lose them entirely. Beyond these considerations, the big reveal has to be timed well, so that it builds rather than deflates the emotions of the audience. Silent Hill: Homecoming has two twists that don't work out as well as they could. Their failures owe much to the nature of the medium itself, so it's interesting (to me at least) to examine them.

If you think I'm going to go through this without spoiling the surprise, then you'd best prepare yourself for a shocking twist.

The first surprise that Homecoming springs on the player is the fact that its protagonist, Alex Shepherd, is not a special forces soldier. He is in fact an escapee from a mental hospital, wearing his father's old dog tags. This revelation is primarily used to set up the later, more significant twist, so it doesn't end up clarifying much about the game's situation. Unfortunately, what it reveals does not mesh well with the player's experience.

In contrast to previous entries in the series, Homecoming features a dynamic combo system. This arguably improves the combat experience, and certainly accelerates it. Alex and his monstrous opponents move quickly, strike quickly, and dodge quickly. Also, firearms now come with a targeting reticule, and precision shots are key to dispatching certain enemies. All of this makes a great deal of sense and feels very natural if Alex really is a special forces soldier, much less so if he is some schlub who sneaked out of the mental ward. The player's entire experience of Alex strengthens the impression that he is a well-trained soldier, versed in the use of multiple weapons. It simply doesn't make any sense, in terms of this interaction, for Alex to be something else. In short, the game does too good a job of convincing us that Alex is who he believes himself to be. If the player had been burdened with the cumbersome combat of earlier Silent Hill games, by contrast, he probably would have already started to doubt that Alex was a highly trained veteran. In this sense, the move to the new combat system, despite the improvement to the gameplay, was probably a mistake.

Of course, the entire plot of the game could just be one of Alex's delusions. The fact that all the clocks in his hometown are stopped at 2:06, connecting with the suggestion that he was in room 206 at the hospital, would seem to support this idea. Yet this idea doesn't seem to lead us anywhere further. For one thing, Alex continues to fight like a super-soldier even after he learns that he isn't one. For another, the monsters inhabiting Alex's hometown don't really seem to reflect any psychology. Silent Hill 2 featured a man roaming through a town populated by the demons of his own mind, but the secondary characters of the game helped provide a map to his psyche. Here we have nothing to go on. Do the ferals represent the family dog? Did someone's smoking habit produce the Smog? The Nurses might symbolize Alex's unpleasant time in the hospital, and the Schisms might be saying something about Alex's conflicted feelings towards his parents. Overall, however, the monsters just feel like monsters, thrown into a game because they look frightening. If they attacked differently (if the Lurkers tried to pull him under water) or were differently armed (why not give the nurses drills or icepicks?) the lines might have been more clearly drawn. Unfortunately, while the monster designs are reasonably scary they seem to have little to do with Alex's soul.

The news that Alex isn't a soldier ends up being just too hard to swallow. The mechanics of the game do too much to convince the player that Alex really is a trained killer, and the presentation doesn't really sell the player on the idea that the whole game is in Alex's head. The devil of it all is that it's such an unnecessary choice. Would it have cost the story so much for Alex to have really been a soldier? It's a needless twist, poorly supported. The most interesting lesson here is that the gameplay is a core reason why the twist doesn't work well. The player's experience simply can't be ignored when you're trying to set up a surprise like this.

Homecoming's second, more shocking revelation is that Alex's brother Josh, whom he has been pursuing and trying to save throughout the game, died some time back in an accident for which Alex was responsible. His bad psychological reaction to this event was why Alex ended up in the mental hospital to begin with. The game's writers did a good job setting this up: when you learn this it causes many of the game's events to click into place, just as you would want. For the Silent Hill fan, however, this revelation is surprising only for the sheer audacity of the choice to recapitulate the central twist of an earlier game. Problems in the cutscene itself, and poor design choices around it, also conspire against the central twist.

The cinematic in which we learn what happened to poor Joshua simply didn't work for me. One key issue was that the Alex Shepherd of this scene didn't seem to exist anywhere else in the game. In the game itself, Alex comes across as very serious and adult, which admittedly could be the product of maturity. However, in other flashbacks Alex also seems to be mature and caring. These perceptions simply don't fit with the childish speech and behavior Alex displays in the flashback to Josh's death. The Alex we see on the boat in the cutscene acts and speaks like a 10-year-old; although physically recognizable, he is psychologically unrelated either to the Alex we see in the game or the Alex we see in other glimpses of the past. The flashbacks and found materials should have been put to use to get us acclimated to this character.

The scene also lacks a certain internal logic. Why has Alex rowed them onto the lake? Even a few fishing rods in the boat would have made this into a non-issue, but instead this question is allowed to hang over the whole scene. It becomes even more difficult to swallow if you've explored the town hall. Reading material found there suggests that Alex himself might have very good reasons to be afraid of the water. In an almost painful error, the writers have Josh actually ask Alex the question, forcing the player to confront the scene's logical failing.

Inconsistencies in character and plot make the revelatory cutscene needlessly difficult to swallow. Realizing the angle that the writers decided to take makes the surprise seem obvious and disappointing — this series already had a main character who killed a loved one and forgot that he'd done so. Although various scenes in the game and the found materials do an excellent job of supporting this development, the big reveal itself nonetheless manages to find the worst of both worlds by being at once too obvious and too absurd.

The reveal has a timing issue as well. Alex spends the whole game trying to save his younger brother. When the big twist gets revealed, that quest gets deflated. Josh is dead; nothing Alex can do will save him. Immediately after this revelation, we have the big, final boss fight. The thing is, the twist completely deflates this battle. Knowing that the main character's principal motivation has evaporated, it's difficult to see why he would struggle to survive at all. Why should I force him to fight, when victory would still mean failure?

So I didn't. I let Alex die, and turned off the XBox.

I eventually came back and tried out the various endings, of course, but I never felt right fighting Amnion. Alex's singular determination to save Josh had caused his psychotic break and propelled him through legions of hellish demons. With that determination gone, I was left searching for a reason for him to continue, and it just wasn't there. I don't contend that this is the only proper reaction or interpretation, but it is a valid one. In a movie or a book, continuing through the battle with Amnion isn't a problem, but in a game the player's emotional reaction to the flashback really ought to be considered, especially in a game where the player is making choices about Alex's emotional reaction to his journey home. If the developers were absolutely committed to the idea of putting this cutscene where it was, they should have offered the player the option to accept death from Amnion. Several of the game's existing endings could conceivably follow from such an outcome. Moreover, an ending wherein Alex trades his own life for Josh's using the powers of the town could have been profoundly affecting.

Alternately, the big reveal could be moved to after the fight with Amnion. If Amnion were to swallow Joshua in front of the player, an act that would have symbolic meaning, it would provide a strong motivation to win the final battle. Seeing Josh tumble, drowned, from Amnion's body would be a sensible stimulus for Alex's final flashback. Better yet, it would shift the disorienting emotional shock to a moment when the player can actually try to process it, rather than just diving straight into apocalyptic combat.

The decision to hit the player with the revelatory flashback just before the final battle feels at odds with the requirement that the player win that battle. Giving the player the option to progress by losing (it is survival horror after all), or shifting the flashback to the end of that fight would help sustain the emotional momentum of the story. For a game, that momentum is critical because the player is the agent who continues the story. You have to keep him on board.

For all the criticism I've leveled here, I didn't think Silent Hill: Homecoming has a bad story, or even particularly bad twists. As an effort to integrate the occult drama of Silent Hill 3 with the psychological horror of Silent Hill 2, it largely succeeds. The problem is that the play and structure of the game don't agree very well with the two main twists. They might work perfectly fine in print, or even on film, but these change-ups just don't play well. As a result, Homecoming feels like less than it could have been.

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"Run, you pigeons! It's Robert Frost!"

The title of this post comes from a line uttered by Manny Calavera, the main character of Grim Fandango as you fail to solve a puzzle. Because Grim Fandango is an adventure game, failing to solve puzzles is something you'll do an awful lot, so it was nice of the developers to at least give you a good laugh as you flail your pathetic way through the misadventures of a skeleton man in a film noir world. Adventure games always attempted to complement good stories with hard puzzles, and a widespread failure to achieve the right kind of difficulty probably contributed significantly to their fall from grace. As I've been playing Grim Fandango for the Vintage Game Club, I've been reminded of what kinds of problems they had.

This post will echo some things I said in the VGC forum, and it will also spoil the first two puzzles of Grim Fandango, so keep that in mind before you read on.

Adventure games had two kinds of hard puzzles. Some of them required you to pay careful attention to the game world, remember bits and pieces of dialogue, think creatively about the items you had found, and work it all together into a solution that gave you a great "Aha!" moment. The rest were bullshit. The problems Manny must solve in the first chapter of Grim Fandango mostly involve the first kind, but you start off, unpromisingly, with the second kind, and it is these that turned people off adventure games, with good reason.

At the start of Grim Fandango, Manny is desperate to get somewhere, but in order to get there he must get his boss to sign a work order for a car modification. To this point, the problem proceeds relatively naturally. However, in order to get the work order signed, Manny must leave his office building, discover a rope that his boss has used to sneak out of his office, climb up that rope, and change his boss' automated message so that the secretary will sign his name on the work order. This solution falls into the bullshit category for several reasons, the most significant of which is that there is no reason for the player, or Manny, to suspect that the boss isn't in his office, that he is using an automated message system to pretend that he is in, or that the message can be changed to make his secretary sign the order. In fact, because Manny has received an emergency work order from his boss just moments before, both he and the player have a very strong reason to believe that the boss is in, a view which the secretary reinforces by stating outright that she is only at work because the boss is. Without knowing that the boss sneaked out of his office, or that he did so in a way that allows Manny to sneak in, the decision to leave the building (which is required in order to find the rope) is nonsensical. A key step to solving the puzzle requires an unnatural response to Manny's problem.

When people say adventure games are "hard", this is a significant reason why. It's not that the puzzles are too intellectually demanding, it's that they require you to act in ways that are utterly unnatural to the solving of the puzzle. If there's an emergency and your boss isn't taking calls, you knock on his door. You don't go outside the building to check if he might have climbed twenty stories down a rope made out of ugly neckties. And if your wallet is locked in your girlfriend's car, you ask her for the keys. You don't try to combine a nearby cat with a mango from your inventory in hopes that this will produce a tool you can somehow use to unlock the passenger door.

Note that my problem is not that the solution requires Manny to go outside per se. In fact, getting Manny to go outside during this puzzle is an important part of making sure the player has the information he needs to solve the remaining problems of the early portion of the game. The illegitimate difficulty of this puzzle arises from the fact that the game never gives the player or Manny any reason to believe that going outside constitutes a step towards solving his problem.

Contrast this with the second main puzzle of the same game, in which Manny decides to steal a co-worker's client by intercepting one of his messages. To do this, Manny must find the room of pneumatic messaging tubes, break the system using chemical foam, find a way to keep the door to the system from closing after repairs are finished, and figure out how to stop the messages so he can read them first. Stealing the client requires several more steps than getting the work order signed, but the dialogue in the game and the items Manny notices in the game world all provide definite (if subtle) clues as to how the problem can be solved. Each step towards the solution makes sense in the context of the game world. The puzzle is difficult, but legitimate.

This distinction matters because the kind of difficulty involved has an effect on how the player feels once the puzzle is solved. Solving a difficult, natural puzzle makes the player feel like he's accomplished something—even if the player is frustrated while trying to solve the puzzle, success brings positive emotions because the player feels like he was in control of finding the solution. By contrast, puzzles that require unnatural solutions which are too obscure or don't make sense in the game world steal this feeling from the player. They make the successful solution of a puzzle seem like a matter of luck, rather than skill. In my personal experience, solving a puzzle under these circumstances can increase frustration, rather than relieving it.

Another problem with unnatural puzzles is that they break immersion. The work order problem can't be solved by thinking like Manny Calavera, but it can be solved by thinking like a guy playing an adventure game, who knows that you should explore everywhere to find the solution of a puzzle. Unfortunately, once I'm thinking like myself, my mind ceases to be active in the world of the game. While the game can get me back, each exit from the world of the game prompts the question of whether I should continue. If the player's mind disengages at a point of frustration, then he is always more likely to quit, at which point your work has gone to waste.

I started this post talking about adventure games, but I think these two points speak more generally to the use of difficulty in games. A high degree of difficulty, even unfair difficulty, is acceptable in a game so long as the player's sense of accomplishment and engagement in the game world are preserved. In games with very low difficulty, the player's sense of achievement may not be a design value of the game; however, even games with low difficulty must take care not to disengage the player with unnatural puzzles or other kinds of gameplay problems.

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Farah and the Prince

Corvus Elrod's proposed Round Table subject for June is instances of the role of relationships in games. This follows on previous posts of his in which he argued that great relationships, rather than great characters, define a good game. I don't quite agree, because I think the truly great successes occur when great characters and great relationships appear together. That, for me, was something that happened with the Prince and Farah in two Prince of Persia games. Now, I've written about the modern Prince of Persia trilogy before, focusing my treatment on the Prince's transformation and the ways in which the gameplay takes the player along the same path. This time I want to discuss the different ways in which the series' female lead, the Maharajah's daughter Farah, is used in the two games where she appears.

To be honest, Farah is not a fully fleshed-out character in either Sands of Time or The Two Thrones. Her interactions with the Prince show her to be strong-willed and to possess firm convictions about right and wrong, but it's tough to say just from the short time we spend with her what she would be like, were she not trapped in a city crawling with sand monsters. Only in The Two Thrones do we learn the most elementary things about her. Apparently, she likes pomegranates, the color red, and challenges, the last of which certainly serves her well in dealing with the Prince.

Without Farah, we'd know precious little about the Prince, either, and the Prince is a great character (and even more so in The Two Thrones). It's no difficulty to figure out that he's acrobatic and has a thing for revenge, but again this doesn't give us much of an idea what he'd be like in the absence of slavering sand fiends. Yet through the course of the game we also discover that he's a bit spoiled, something of a male chauvinist, fairly bad with women, has a deep sarcastic streak, and is charming despite his flaws. All of this knowledge we owe to Farah—not because of anything she says or does, but because of how the Prince reacts to what she says and does.

Granted, we could have been treated to a limp cutscene in which the Prince is scolded for his insolence by his well-meaning father. This, however, would not have been nearly as illuminating (or amusing) as the lines the Prince mutters while walking across a high beam just after Farah has told him to meet her at the baths:

I'll just ask the first Sand Creature I run into! 'Could you direct me to the baths, please? Well, thank you.' 'Don't mention it, I used to be a bath attendant back when I was alive...'

and later, as he works his way into a cavern full of waterfalls:

Oh, have you been waiting here all this time? I didn't realize you meant these baths! I went to the other baths clear across the other side of the city! I had a lovely wash and a rub with fragrant oils. Too bad you weren't there... Stop talking to yourself!

Without Farah, the Prince is just navigating scenery at these moments. With her around, even if only to push his buttons, we learn a great deal about what kind of person he is, beyond his desire to plunge the Dagger of Time into the Vizier's black heart.

It's important to note that in Sands of Time Farah does really not succeed in inducing any kind of change in the Prince. If nothing else, the end of the story, in which the Prince selfishly uses the dagger to kiss Farah without having her think less of him, should convince you of that. Even the scene in which he obeys her directions to stab the Hourglass plays out ambiguously, making it unclear whether he believes that this action will save his life or end it. Another exemplar in this regard is the entirety of Warrior Within, which neither needs nor deserves further discussion here.

In The Two Thrones Farah's role changes significantly. She's no longer used to illuminate who the Prince is: that task is taken up by the Dark Prince persona. This is a necessary change because of gameplay and story considerations. In this game (as opposed to Sands of Time) Farah is used exclusively in a puzzle-solving capacity, and so she is an occasional, rather than regular, companion. Because the Prince as a person is in flux through much of the game, a constant companion is necessary, and so we have the voice in the head to illuminate his changing character.

Farah's role in The Two Thrones is as a catalyst for the Prince's transformation. The events of Sands of Time have given her emotional power over the Prince, even though the repeated reversals of the story mean she has never actually met him in the timeline of the game. Her attitude towards soldiers and fighting has not changed significantly from the first game, but the Prince's own battle-weariness and longing for her mean that he listens this time. Almost nothing that occurs in the game hurts him more than her rejection on seeing his sand form; absolutely nothing in the game affects him more than her convictions about his duty as Prince.

In the absence of Farah, the main plot of The Two Thrones probably would not change significantly: the Prince would cut his way through the city and destroy the Vizier regardless. However, Farah's presence determines who the Prince is, and why he fights, when he reaches his enemy. In that sense, she is essential to the story. Without her, the Dark Prince is the only Prince—without her, the Prince could never escape the warrior within.

The Prince's relationship with Farah is essential to both the games in which she appears. In Sands of Time, the relationship reflects who he is; in The Two Thrones it defines who he will become.

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Called to Arms: Resonance

Steve Gaynor posted a Call to Arms a few days ago, asking his readers to produce:

...a decentralized game design symposium; a call for new takes on interactive expression. If we've succeeded by now in conveying feelings like "exhilaration," "fear," and "victory," and conflicts such as "individual power vs. strength in numbers," "man vs. rule system," "entropy vs. order," and "good vs. evil," the Call to Arms focuses on some more elusive aesthetics.

He explicitly asked people who aren't in the games industry to contribute, so he has only himself to blame for the following proposal, entitled Resonance, for a oratorical simulator.

Resonance takes place throughout the history of a city-state. The particular kind of setting (fantasy/sci-fi/kittens) doesn't particularly matter because the idea is to tap into the universal aspects anyway. On each mission the player become the Muse of a Hero, whose task it is to guide the city through a crisis. The Hero comes with his own point of view, and strengths and weaknesses in communicating to particular demographics. The player's task is to preserve the city, and his only means of doing so are telling the Hero when and where to speak, and providing inspiration for the Hero's speeches.

Each crisis poses a sort of yes/no question: should the nation accept a large influx of refugees, should it go to war against an evil nation that does not threaten the city directly, should workers form labor unions, should income be radically redistributed, etc. By adjusting his strategy the player can allow either of the propositions to "win". The Hero's position is not always "right". Indeed, were I making this game I would have at least one mission where the Hero's choice is quite obviously wrong.

The Hero works his magic through speeches. In a speech, the Hero supplies the main talking points, but on his own the speaker is very dry and dull. Without inspiration from the player, his speeches suck the spirit right out of an audience. The player's task is to provide images that fit the speech and raise the audience's spirit. In doing this the Hero's influence (and the size of his future audience) is increased, listeners convert to his position, and those who are unconvinced become more open to it. At the same time, there will be an Opponent moving around the city trying to convince people of the other side of the argument.

Usually several inspirations will be suitable for each talking point, but they will affect different properties of the audience. I think a 3-4 point matrix like Fear, Anger, Pride, Acceptance would be appropriate. The city is divided into different districts in each era, with different demographics and varying levels of these characteristics. Harsh, divisive rhetoric lowers your side's Acceptance (making them more resistant to conversion) and increases their Anger, making them less likely to attend opposition speeches. However, among the portions of the population that are uncommitted or opposed to the Hero's position, this kind of rhetoric will increase their Fear and decrease their Acceptance, making them more difficult to recruit. On the other hand, inspirations that stress unity would tend to increase Pride of the people on the Hero's side and increase the Acceptance of other groups. However, in an area that already has low Acceptance among the Opposition, a good, harsh speech may provoke Fear that drives them to pay more attention to the Hero.

The strategic task of the player is a balancing act of trying to choose the right kind of speech to give at the right time to the right people, so that the city does not descend into a panic or widespread rioting. When Pride and Acceptance are low, and Fear and Anger are high in any group except those who are undecided, violence can erupt. Usually this will only happen in one district at first, if left alone the violence will spread. Fear and Anger will rise for all groups in neighboring districts. If your side riots, the Pride of your allies in other districts will decrease, while the Acceptance of the Opposition will decrease. So the Hero must calm the violence by giving speeches. If his influence is too low (from making poor speeches earlier), however, nobody will listen to him. The player has to keep the Hero popular, so just flubbing all speeches outright isn't really an option. However, flubbing a few key speeches may work. Having the city descend into riot is the only way to "fail" a mission.

The tactical task of the player (in speeches), is to choose the right inspiration to go with an idea, and also to time the delivery of that image correctly. The spirit of the audience will rise and fall during the speech, rising when the right inspiration is used and falling as the Hero goes over the nuts and bolts. The player has to choose the right time within each talking point to apply the inspiration, and also when to use more powerful vs. less powerful inspirations. So this could be implemented like a rhythm game of some sort. For instance a player could use gestures with a Wii-mote to set up the speaking cadence and then some button combo to use the inspiration at the right moment.

The mission hub takes the form of a giant, labyrinthine library. The character starts in the deepest part of the library and must find his way out. As he moves through the library, the character finds two kinds of books. Opening "Histories" initiates new missions, and when a History is completed a nearby door unlocks, allowing further exploration. Also, the character can find "Literature" books that give him new inspirations. Because the "combat" is oratory, these will obviously include important speeches ("I Have a Dream", the sermon on the mount, "Never, never, never" etc.). However, since the player's task is to supply imagery and inspiration they should also include poems (Dwarf Birches, If) and excerpts from plays (Henry V) and novels.

Different outcomes to the missions unlock different doors and thus different routes through the library. The inspirational Literature available to find along the way (and the powers to be used in combat) therefore depend on the outcome of the missions. In addition, the Hero of each mission becomes available as an inspiration power for future missions; the strength of this inspiration will depend on the mission outcome. This need not be linearly related to whether he convinced people of his position. Losing to the opposition for strategic reasons while performing well in individual speeches may result in a powerful inspiration; succeeding strategically while barely scraping by in speeches may result in a weak one.

Unlocking the final door of the library releases the character as a citizen into the city he has created through previous missions. The character of the city will be decided by the character as well as the facts of the decisions made. So, if the city accepted the refugees, then traces of that race of refugees will still be physically present. In addition, the inhabitants of the city will tend to be kind and helpful. If you opted to take on the evil city, they will be proud of their city but have a militaristic streak. The city will be facing one more great moral crisis, but one that is a trick question, in which one of the alternatives seems quite reasonable and comforting but is, when properly considered, a path to destruction. The player must now serve as his own muse, working up influence from street level so that he can convince the city to do the right thing. This will be easier or harder depending on the ways that the previous missions were performed.

Having only one Hero position per mission would simplify the programming task while confronting the player with the fact that people can be just as honestly passionate about a proposition he disagrees with. If I were to pick one feeling out of Steve's laundry list that I meant the design to speak to, it would be vindication (in seeing the city you created through your actions as a muse). The individual missions could be tailored so that they speak to several of the conflicts he proposes, though the conflicts of Pragmatism vs. Romanticism and Tradition vs. Progress are clearly built into the fabric of the design (such as it is).

Well, this may be the worst idea for a game ever, but I had fun thinking about it, so thanks, Steve. Readers should check out the post I linked to above for some of the other entries. All of them are interesting and would make good, or at least intriguing, games.

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You're like a tiny god!

By now many of the nerds in my audience have heard about Foldit—the server seems to be wanged, so clicking on that link may not do anything for you. The idea behind Foldit is to use the processing power of human beings to address the protein folding problem in the context of a game. Despite many years of trying, predicting the fold of a protein and moving a random coil into this shape is a task that computers typically find very difficult. Distributed computing efforts, like Vijay Pande's folding@home or Rosetta@home, are one way of addressing this problem for some limited cases. Foldit, from David Baker's group, is conceived as a way to train the ROSETTA program to get better at moving structures to their ultimately predicted shape. This may sound complicated, and the system isn't perfect, but almost anyone can play and it's surprisingly fun.

The game is relatively simple to use, if a little flaky. You are handed a peptide chain with secondary structural features already formed. You can move these motifs into the form of a packed structure by manually moving them around, by letting ROSETTA wiggle them freely, or by giving ROSETTA general directives about where to move the elements during this wiggling. Directing the automated movements is pretty seamless, though clashes sometimes have a way of causing the whole protein to blow up. Many of these clashes can be resolved by "shaking" the side chains, also a relatively seamless automation.

However, your manual control is limited and occasionally awkward. Sometimes, Foldit just won't move a side chain where you want it to go, and at other times it will persistently rotate the wrong angle. As I noted above, the secondary structural elements are pre-set, which is okay for helices but seems a little off in the case of strands. Also, many of the loops are much more rigid than expected. Many of these problems could be solved by context-sensitive menus that allowed you to select and rotate a particular bond angle; this could also help with the axial rotation of β-strands, something I very much wanted to do in two of the puzzles. I have yet to see hydrogen bonds or charge-charge interactions between side chains, and indeed the game has comparatively little information about side chains generally. In default mode, unless they clash, they're visible only as little nubs with a faint glow to tell you whether they're hydrophobic or not. A lot of this may be simplification on the part of Foldit to prevent "impossible" conformations, but this is a limitation the creators should explicitly try to avoid. Avoiding what it feels to be impossible may be one of ROSETTA's flaws, after all.

Playing Foldit is an interesting experience, and the puzzles are fun and challenging without requiring any detailed knowledge about biochemistry. People who do know something about biochemistry, however, may find themselves frustrated by their inability to make moves that seem sensible. And, the simplicity means that people who don't know any biochemistry probably won't learn anything lasting from Foldit. The controls are a little wonky and at times seemingly unresponsive. Still, this is just the open beta version, so hopefully some of these minor annoyances will be fixed going forward. Once the furor dies down (in about a week or so), you should head over to the site and see if you're interested. The game is free to download, but requires an internet connection.

In related news, an article by Baker that I covered earlier concerning the use of ROSETTA in combination with directed evolution to produce relatively active enzymes has been published in this week's edition of Nature. It's an interesting article, and definitely worth reading if you have an interest in protein engineering.

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It's just lines and colors

Anyone picking up No More Heroes will wonder just what the hell it is that he's playing, because like creator Suda Goichi's previous game killer7 it defies easy categorization. That prompts a question, though: why should we want to categorize these games? Does figuring out what bin to drop a game into make the world easier to interpret, or do our categories, and the conventions that come with them, impose meaningless constraints on our appreciation and enjoyment of art? Early and late in No More Heroes Suda breaks the fourth wall—a sign that the game is trying to say something about its own medium. Suda seems to be illustrating the limits of video games—the borders of what they can do, and the borders of what we allow them to do.

Spoilers follow; abandon all surprise, ye who enter here.

The protagonist of No More Heroes, Travis Touchdown, is a scrawny, unattractive pervert with a bad haircut and questionable hygeine who apparently gets plenty of fiber in his diet. Travis is a confirmed otaku, and his motel apartment is filled with collectibles from an anime called "Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly" that is clearly a fusion of moe shoujo (behold the cute magical girls) and mecha (they pilot enormous robots called 'Glastonburies') styles. In addition, he's obsessed with lucha libre wrestling. Having won a "beam katana" in an online auction—and if you can't guess what that's supposed to be you need to stop reading—he is entered in a competition to become the world's #1 assassin by killing everyone ranked above him, a task he engages with gusto, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious even to him. Basically Travis is a dork who has been handed a real functioning lightsaber and told to go kill.

And kill he does. About half of the game involves taking on hordes of enemies using the beam katana and wrestling moves. Depending on the context one or the other will be more effective, but the ultimate killing blow always comes from the katana, ending your enemies' lives in a shower of blood and cash that one reviewer compared to a gory slot machine. At the end of certain missions Travis finds a 'ranking battle' against one of the better assassins. The grunts along the way have little personality, but each of these ranked assassins has something interesting to set him or her apart.

I would love to say that all this constitutes some kind of commentary on violence in video games, but I'm not even sure that's possible anymore. A kind of Poe's Law has come into effect, in that it's no longer possible to distinguish a game that parodies excessive violence from a game that celebrates it. Video game violence has progressed beyond the possibility of irony or satire, and maybe the fact that No More Heroes reinforces this idea is kind of a message in and of itself.

When confronted with the idea of a person being cut in two vertically and exploding in a shower of blood and coins one is tempted to say that boundaries are being pushed, but it's important to understand the degree to which the combat emphasizes constraint. I don't mean a physical constraint here, but rather an intellectual one. Travis' primary attacks and defense (his 'Force') are all derivative of existing entertainments (Star Wars and wrestling), and his special attacks are mostly named for the characters in the aforementioned "Bizarre Jelly". The Assassin's Association is his way out of his fanboy lifestyle but at the same time his very mind is locked into shape by the mass-market pap he has consumed. What keeps him trapped in his lifestyle is not the absence of fame or money: it is his inability to imagine anything else.

But of course, not all of the game is killing. In order to reach the ranking battles against more qualified assassins Travis needs to gather quite a lot of money, and to this end he works a variety of demeaning part-time jobs and simple assassination missions. To get to all of this work and shopping he tools around the game's town, Santa Destroy, on his monster motorcycle.

The mission-based structure and ability to roam freely around town certainly recall Grand Theft Auto, but the resemblance here is only skin-deep. The town is plenty large, but spots for actual activity are rather few and far between. Indeed, about half the town has essentially nothing to do at all beyond some dumpster diving. As for the people walking around, you can't speak to or attack most of them. What you can do to them—run over them with the bike—seemingly neither harms them nor draws the attention of law enforcement to you. In fact, though you'll encounter plenty of police cars, nobody seems to care that you're running over pedestrians and lampposts, or leaving a trail of bodies that have been bisected in interesting ways.

What we're confronted with here is the structure of a Grand Theft Auto without any of the texture. If you've ever seen one of Mondrian's compositions this feeling may be familiar to you. Suda has tossed in the lines and the colors, but none of those things are actually being built into the representation you expect. A Mondrian has content, and so does No More Heroes, but the sparsity of identifiable content has the effect of emphasizing the structural aspects of whatever it is that you are dealing with—in this case, a game.

Games are fundamentally constrained systems. Consider Grand Theft Auto itself for a minute. It's widely and rightly praised for its flexibility and content, but there's no escaping the fact that it's a game about a violent criminal doing things that are violent and criminal. Niko Bellic can't hook up with a handsome French man named Pierre, move to Provence, and start over as a vintner. No, Niko's a criminal, and that's the whole idea of a GTA game. The freedom of the sandbox games is an illusion, and No More Heroes loses the inner texture that creates that illusion, leaving behind the framework to remind us of what we expected to see. Suda seems to be arguing that realism in games isn't necessarily a valid pursuit. Their nature precludes them from matching reality, and even if they did match it, they would cease to be art and become something else.

"The expression of reality cannot be the same as reality."—Piet Mondrian

The second idea, that our expectations constrain our own approach to media pops to the fore in the game's finale. There is another nod to the creative prison, in the form of a mysterious masked man stating that he is Travis' father. There is also a reference to the external limitations imposed by censors and corporate development cycles. But the principal source of constraint that Suda points out is us, the conventions that are enforced by our expectations.

This underlies all the enormously convoluted twists in the storyline and the amnesia that we only learn Travis has as soon as he overcomes it. As Travis' family multiplies rapidly to include an unsuspected brother and sister (both of whom he must kill), the whole story of the game is thrown into doubt, and seemingly discarded characters inexplicably reappear. None of it really makes very much sense, and that's kind of the idea. The plot developments have been thrown in to satisfy convention, without the narrative fabric that would allow one to make sense of them. The point here is to emphasize that features which rightly ought to be part of the content have been forced to become part of the structure by our expectations.

Video games are constrained by their programming, but also by our expectations and the conventions those expectations enforce. In giving us the lo-fi accessory graphics and textureless structure of Santa Destroy, Suda embraces the former; the gonzo finale seems to be his way of lampooning the latter. Taken as an expression of any particular genre, No More Heroes certainly fails to impress. But in a way it seems this is almost the point. The genres and their conventions are stale, and no level of graphical power or snazzy controls can disguise that fact. Nor can we get around the creative problem by smashing genres together.

In many ways, the array of games on the market resembles Travis' collection of Luchador masks. Each of them has different colors and additions, but in the end there's no escaping that they're all essentially iterations of the same thing. That's not just because designers and the corporate suits who write their paychecks are lacking in creativity. It's also because the consumer rarely tolerates or accepts something that doesn't fit preconceived notions of genre. In the end, No More Heroes is a game about games, an acknowledgment of the limits of what they can do, and a protest against the limits of what we let them do.

There are a number of other takes on No More Heroes that I quite liked.
Yahtzee's review is hilarious but NSFW.
Steve Gaynor has a comprehensive review.
The Brainygamer compares No More Heroes to the French New Wave and also serves up a more conventional homage.
Insult Swordfighting has a good take, too.
In theory, if you are reading this review, you already subscribe to those blogs. If not, then why aren't you subscribed to those blogs?

Comments on my view or recommendations of additional alternative interpretations are certainly welcome.

More good reading on No More Heroes
Dan Bruno at Cruise Elroy talks sex and violence. He also has a postmortem with extra linkiness.
Schlaghund has a view very close to my own.
Cowzilla has an article at Destructoid that also asks what No More Heroes is saying about us.

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Creative focus in game and technology development

Tynan Sylvester has a really incisive opinion piece up at Gamasutra illustrating a fundamental disjunction between what developers look at in a game and what players look at. The gist of his piece is that developers often focus on "scaffolding": the mechanics and code that underlay the game world. Meanwhile, the players consider mainly the "masonry", that is, the experience of the game world itself. The not-so-subtle point here is that many of the minds behind games have put their creative focus on the wrong thing.

The developers of Crysis and like games, as well as the graphical powerhouse consoles, succumbed to the tyranny of precision, the mindset dominance of quantifiable fidelity. The simple fact is that the graphical capabilities of hardware and software are easily measured, in terms of resolution and framerates and numbers of polygons on screen at a time, and it's easier to improve something if you know how to measure it. Unfortunately, creation of these super high-definition visuals takes a great deal of effort and expense, and ultimately it doesn't help that much. What players really want is an experience that feels real, not an image that looks real. Experiential fidelity, unfortunately, can't be quantified, and it's difficult to plan hardware (or even software) that creates it.

The success of the Wii and DS, however, suggest that good feel can be, if not created by hardware, at least encouraged by it. It's too simplistic to try to explain this success by saying that these platforms "tapped into another market". If that's so, then we must ask why they tapped into that other market. The answer is that these systems create an experience that the user can relate to, despite their shortcomings in terms of graphical excellence. The remote and stylus are very intuitive control devices. As a result, the player can interact with the game worlds easily, and often exactly in the way he expects to, rather than pressing buttons on some bizarre alien boomerang. Although the Wii and DS may not be great scaffolds, they allow for some great masonry.

I don't mean to say that graphics don't mean anything. However, though they are the most easily measured aspect of a game's performance, they do not define what makes a great game. It is the experience that matters. The graphics help create the experience, but even the best graphics in history cannot rescue a game that has lousy audio, an idiotic story, or nonsensical mechanics. Nor am I trying to sell coding short: lousy coding can ruin (or almost ruin) an experience easily. The point is that the creative focus of hardware and software developers should always be on the experience to be created. Everything else must flow from that.

You should check out Sylvester's website, by the way. He's got some really interesting stuff up there. I particularly liked his piece on Hitman and his article on substance and style in game design, although I disagree with some conclusions of the latter.

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Odin Sphere gameplay notes

So I came to a compromise on the review issue. I'm not going to do much discussion of the aspects of a video game that don't relate directly to the theme or the atmosphere, which are the subjects I want to focus on in the critiques. At the same time, there are going to be some instances, like this one, where a game really deserves some additional criticism or discussion for some of the design aspects. In some cases this will be because of exceptionally good choices that were made in the design process, but in others it will be because of the flaws in the process. And the simple fact is that Odin Sphere had several flaws, some of which nearly made me toss the controller down and take the disc out.

Odin Sphere is an example of a rare case in which the coding, rather than the artistic direction or the writing, was the weakest link in the game. Music, graphics, story, and design create the experience for the player. Coding can't create a good experience if these elements are trash. It can, however, work against them by pushing a player's mind out of the world of the game. It's a thankless task to be a programmer, I'm sure. The designers, artists, and musicians get all the print. But it's the people in the trenches writing the game engine that make all the other aspects work together to create art. In this case, unfortunately, the programming (and perhaps the hardware) wasn't equal to the task that the experiential elements demanded.

Although it is graphically beautiful, Odin Sphere doesn't seem to run on very efficient code. Anytime a large number of moving elements are present on screen the framerate drops, sometimes significantly. This isn't just a problem with too many enemies—the frequent slowdown in the Netherworld stages is associated with background elements. Even stages with relatively few enemies can suffer significant drops if too many phozons are left floating in the air. Because several of the boss battles are very complex, with lots of moving elements, they can be especially afflicted. The battles against Odette and Belial get to be very frustrating because of the framerate failures. The feeling that you could punch in a combo and go make a sandwich before the animation stopped really removes you from a fight.

Speaking of going to make a sandwich, Odin Sphere features some truly amazing load times, especially when going between the Pooka Village and the restaurants. No number of charming little animations will hide the time it takes to move between screens and stages. Often there is substantial loading after you enter a stage as well. Slowdown and load screens kill a player's engagement in a game.

Aside from the technical base, a few design elements were notably off. The controls were a bit muddy, and made to feel more so by the fact that cancels were impossible. Once you start a combo your only option is to see it through or stop acting entirely, which was something of a problem in the more complex boss fights. The inventory system also could have been much improved—it seemed like half the time you weren't fighting was spent managing the tightly constrained inventory. Shrinking that down so much didn't feel like it served much of a purpose; there's no need to be "realistic" about the inventory size in a game where each level ends with a gigantic treasure chest falling from the sky. The inventory management was a needless distraction from the game's better elements.

Another flaw was that the revelation of recipes for alchemy and the restaurants didn't match up with the modular nature of the story. You find a recipe for a moderate healing potion in the first book of the story, but the stronger healing potion isn't found until the fourth book. In the meantime, however, you have brought several characters to a point where the "H" potion isn't of any benefit. There was no gameplay or story reason to hold the Elixir back, and doing so forces the players to replay books in order to give their characters a meaningful healing potion for the final stages. Revealing the recipes piecemeal would have been more acceptable if the player was free to experiment and find things on his own. However, you aren't allowed to make any alchemy mix for which you don't have the recipe.

As for the restaurant, the fact that the story is told very much out of order makes its recipe system seem extremely strange. Why can Velvet buy "egg on toast" right away, when in the linear timeline that recipe won't be found until much time has passed? This complaint can also be leveled at the alchemy recipes. In short, the recipe system was illogical and needlessly forced a replay of previous books.

The reason the replay of previous books was a problem was that you literally had to replay them. That is, once you finished all five main books and wanted to buff your characters for the final battle, you had to start each of those books from the beginning, rather than entering each one at a point later on where you had access to all or most of its levels. As a result, you had to play rather a long time to reach a point where you could buy the bags you needed for inventory or get the raw materials necessary to make elixirs. It seems like this could have been avoided.

For the most part, however, Odin Sphere features reasonable design choices. The diversity of fighting styles of the main characters means that the repetition of levels and bosses never gets boring. The character development system is intuitive and still manages to feature an intelligent trade-off. And for the most part, the game is very forgiving about providing you with materials to produce the potions you need in the areas where they're needed (the notable exception being Titania). While most battles allow you to get by just by whacking at your enemies and using special powers, you can usually find additional strategies or tricks for each particular fight that makes it easier. The game is balanced, has a relatively even difficulty progression, and only one really unreasonable enemy (the slimes). The choices are solid but not spectacular; for the most part this is a game where the mechanics try to make themselves as unobtrusive as possible. That's why the smaller failings seemed so glaring.

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