Flying Gogoplata

Some of my Facebook friends may have noticed this already, but I have decided to retire my Zombie. I have reached a status of Zombie Mogul, and have bested all my friends in Zombie Awesomeness (my primary goal).

Upon retiring, it is clear that I have gone down into history as the greatest zombie on Facebook, and no continuing player will ever compare to my legacy in its prime. You may run all the computer simulations you want, they will be nothing more than speculation. I would like to thank my army for all its contributions to my greatness.

In the end, I got bored and didn’t want to keep pestering my friends. And since it was clear that I had won and would continue to win if I kept playing, I saw no reason to continue. Anyone breaking my records I’m sure will be shown to be taking performance enhancing drugs.

Maybe someday I’ll write my thoughts on the zombie game and software, but I think I’ll avoid making any more promises on this blog.

Game Informer had a fairly interesting debate section in their July issue entitled “Can Drama Be A Game Genre?” I wish I had a link I could refer to, but unfortunately there is no online version of the debate.

The unfortunate part of both parties’ respective arguments are that they don’t address the question very well. Matt Miller, one of the associate editors of the magazine, weighs in on the pro side, arguing that there is more to life than violence and boss fights, and that like the film medium there must be a diversity of content in the video game medium if there is to be a diversity in audience. On the con side, Joe Juba (another associate editor) claims that forays into the genre (such as Phoenix Wright) lack substance and will eventually fail.

When I see the question “Can Drama Be A Game Genre?” I assume that it asks whether there exists a Drama game genre and whether or not it is a valid game genre. Miller’s response answers that it is necessary to have such a genre (as well as others) to be on par with other media, without addressing at all whether such a genre is admissible. Juba also fails to address admissibility and instead chooses to doom the genre as unpopular or ill developed.

I have written before on the importance of the distinction between gameplay/interaction and plot/narrative in a video game, and it seems to me to be at the root of this debate as well. Video game genres tend to describe a game’s gameplay and interaction. An adventure game calls to mind a particular interface and interaction schema, a role-playing game describes the players relationship to the avatar as well as the game mechanic, as does first-person shooter. We can run down the list of genres and I would find it very likely that what you know about the game has more to do with how you play the game than the game’s plot: puzzle, shooter, platformer, real-time strategy, turn-based strategy, racer, sim…etc. It isn’t entirely unprecedented for genre names to defy this model. For instance, what in holy hell is an action game? This genre exists in every online store and tells me absolutely nothing about the game, primarily because it describes the game’s plot elements.

This seems to also be true of the Drama genre. Drama doesn’t really describe a novel form of gameplay; most gameplay elements in drama games have their roots in adventure games, puzzles, and RPGs. Drama describes plot. Joe Juba’s description of the emptiness of the Drama genre comes from the fact that the focus is entirely on the narrative with little thought put on the gameplay. But whether or not Drama or Action are admissible as a video game genre depends on whether or not you allow plot describing genres in the categorization system. This seems valid to me, though I must say that it also seems problematic.

As I stated before, a category that describes the narrative does nothing to tell a potential player how the game is played. This isn’t a terrible problem because as time goes on there will likely be a number of gameplay elements that get associated with certain kinds of plot elements. However, the danger in describing video games primarily by their plot elements is that it leaves a very ill-defined interaction. Developers can, in this scenario, focus on the narrative elements while leaving interaction as an afterthought. Juba states “Anyone who denies the importance of story in video games is an idiot.” I disagree. More accurately, story is important in games with a story. I would argue that story is irrelevant to Tetris, one of the most successful video games in history. I would further argue that there are a great many games with awful stories that are enjoyed solely for their engaging gameplay.

I would press game designers and developers to put interaction at the top of their priorities. Miller makes the comparison to film, as many people do, but it is ultimately always a poor comparison because the nature of this medium is inherently interactive, an element that many of the classic arts do not have to deal with. The future of gaming as an artistic medium relies on the investigation of the interactive elements to express the art. Film makes better film than video games do, literature makes better literature, and theatre makes better theatre. But video games have a largely underexplored potential that these media do not, and it seems to me to miss the point to continue to evaluate this medium with the exact same tools as the classical arts.

Flixster, which I happen to know from the Flixster Movies facebook application, has an interesting new Movie Compatibility Test which takes your movie ratings, compares them to that of your friends, and tells you how movie compatible you are.

That doesn’t really sound all that interesting by itself. But the quiz asks you to rate about 50 movies to determine compatibility within genres. This seems like a really cool way to populate your movie rating database. You don’t ask people for ratings, you get people to check their compatibility (which requires them to put in ratings). Sounds pretty clever to me.

I hereby claim this blog as my blog within the world of Technorati. See my Technorati Profile for proof. ::Miniature flag of me here::

Apparently comments were broken. I’ve disabled the javascript components of comment posting and it seems to have fixed the problem. That will have to do until I get the urge to troubleshoot the theme.

On “These Games Are So Bad It’s Not Funny”:

I don’t know why his random pot shot at Brecht annoyed me, though it seems to be because it speaks to a somewhat common misunderstanding of Brechtian theatre. I’ve heard it before in the classroom as well from one of the most arrogant amateur playwrights I have met – “It seems like what [Brecht] is advocating is bad acting.” What Brecht advocated was a theatre which exposes its mechanism so that the audience cannot be lost in the world of the play and forget that they are watching a constructed work of art. This can be implemented at every level of the presentation and performance.

The job of the actor in any performance is to construct a character using the tools of behavior, of action. That character CAN be realistic, but it DOES NOT HAVE TO BE! What matters, for the acting to be good, is the intention to construct a character and good execution. Good execution without purpose is not artful and it reads as such. Good intentions with poor execution is boring. Neither is just painful.

I am not in any way an idolater of Brecht. His work is definitely worthy of criticism. But it does frustrate me to see it criticized for things he didn’t write. It’s sad to me that the only implementation of exposure of the mechanism of acting can be bad acting. That Gestus can only be wooden. It speaks to a lack of creativity and innovation.

Though I don’t intend my writing to solely to follow Clive Thompson, he’s written on quite a few interesting topics. His most recent Wired commentary criticizes the enormous lack of so-called “B” video games, a criticism I can’t help but take issue with.

Primarily, the definition is off.

Why isn’t there such a thing as “B game” — a game so bad it’s good?

Certainly, the phenomenon exists in every other form of entertainment. Everyone loves B movies — films that are so atrociously acted and scripted that they become perversely enjoyable. There’s also plenty of B television. (For two seasons I religiously followed Pam Anderson’s show V.I.P., mostly for the odd joy of tallying up the clichés and acting so wooden it was nearly Brechtian.) The pleasure of B entertainment is pure, narcotic-level irony — the peculiar joy that comes from seeing something that is trying to be good but failing on every level.

Something that is a B is still really good. B-Movies I think have gotten this strong association with awful movies with cult followings. It seems to me that a B-Movie is more generally a film that misses the “A” grade, but still has very strong redeeming qualities (hence the name). It isn’t a masterpiece of cinema, and can fail or miss the mark at one or several levels, but is nonetheless enjoyable. This can be (and often is) because the trainwreck is enjoyable in an unintentional manner, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes the production budget leaves the presentation wanting while still having an engaging story (Serenity). Sometimes the narrative and dialogue can be clichéd and predictable but still have enormously endearing characters (My Name is Earl). The flaws are obvious, but forgivable in the totality of the experience.

Given this definition, I think it is easy to see a great many games as B-Games. I would argue that very few of even the best games are actually A level, primarily because there are slightly more levels on which to evaluate games. The evaluation modality Thompson highlights is interaction; most games that master the interaction and gameplay typically get an A grade so long as the presentation is reasonable. Most of these games also have awfully cheesy and clichéd narratives, story arcs, and characters though. They have really really enjoyable total experiences, but are by no means masterful in their totality. Even some of the most well reviewed and received games, like Halo for instance, suffer from this flaw. Other games can’t afford or don’t reach high presentation quality but are nonetheless fun. Presentation is even more problematic because it’s such a moving target in the video game medium.

Even when setting the bar a little lower, there are still plenty of B-Games out there. Let’s look at publisher Electronic Arts for example. They often produce those movie licensed games that are said to sell regardless of their quality. But they often also produce games like Return of the King which are just good enough. They’re a little lacking in substance, but for the most part are pretty fun. Aside from the EA Sports arm, EA has quite of business of making mediocre to B level games, a plausible result of their scale. They have the resources to make a LOT of games but must walk the corporate balancing act of keeping production costs as low as possible, pushing quality down, while also keeping revenue as high as possible, pushing quality up (you might recognize this process as profit maximization). This produces throngs of games that are more than playable, but less than stellar.

Thompson does, however, raise an interesting question about the importance of interaction and gameplay. For the experience of a game to be enjoyable for its interactive audience it must necessarily be usable; it must be playable. A poorly implemented game mechanic or control schema will more than likely break the total experience irrecoverably. There are plenty of games with mediocre to flawed to sub-perfect mechanics, but it is difficult for me to imagine a game that has a broken mechanic and is still redeemable.

This is primarily because I haven’t written anything in quite some time. This is secondarily because I have spent so much time tending my blog software that I am currently out of the mood to write about the thing I wanted to write about.

But for those of you who care, I’m now running on WordPress 2.2.1 (the latest stable version). I have also modified all my feed links to default to the Atom format. For those of you who prefer atom, you can now just click on the provided links without having to know the magic url incantations. RSS2 is still supported, and to find that link, replace “rss2″ with “atom” in the feed links.