Flying Gogoplata

So I was all ready to write a lengthy post about my thoughts on Braid, having promptly finished the game in 3 days (not including all those hours I didn’t play the game, of course). I went over to take another look at Yahtzee Croshaw’s Braid video review (embeded below) so I could address some of his criticisms, and it was rather dickishly revealed to me that I haven’t, in fact, finished the game. If you happen to know me and my video game habits, you’ll know that I’m generally a pretty obsessive gamer, and as such this “secret stars” business is unacceptable.

But for now, I suppose I’ll have to make do with my “unfinished” experience.

Braid says a lot about where video games are as an artistic medium, and where they can go. Presentation, narrative, and interaction are executed excellently individually, and mix in very interesting ways, so much so that it is difficult for me to talk about them separately. Typically these three traditional pillars of the medium have such stark, solid, and buffered borders it makes one wonder why they are even sharing the same mental space in the first place.

First things first, though. I know that all one of you (perhaps two) that may be reading this aren’t quite as video-game obsessed as I am. Braid is, at its simplest and basest description, a 2D environmental puzzle platforming game. Think of Super Mario Brothers (they clearly want you to), meets Rubik’s Cube, where the world is the cube and part of shoving the cube’s pieces around involves controlling time in very specific ways. It’s an awful and probably unhelpful metaphor, I know, but it’s the best I could do. It is short and sweet and does so much in it’s several hours of gameplay that it has gathered immense amounts of critical acclaim. Enough, at least, that a friend of mine (who I know damn well does not play video games) was asking me about it within days of its release on XBox Live Arcade.

I tend to be somewhat skeptical of hype, especially in this industry, but I will admit that it was very hard to keep a minimal dosage of skepticism while playing. I just liked it. And the more I played, the more I wanted to like it, and the more it satisfied. I would say that the basic requirement for this was that it played well, but I have seen way too many failures at this step to take this for granted. It is a game that is meant to be played, and like all good games of its kind, meant to be solved. Braid brings two main gameplay metaphors to the table here, one decently novel and one satisfyingly classic. The environmental puzzles (the latter of the two) are just amazingly well crafted, thoroughly challenging while still being clearly solvable, and satisfying to complete. There are a few specks of easy here and there, but it’s really just there to cut you a break. The challenging puzzles are so wonderfully deceptive at times, giving the impression that your brain must not be working right; that on any other day the solution would be glaringly obvious. And the fact that there IS a solution is glaringly obvious.

The time-manipulation gameplay mechanic is its fresh blood. In some ways it isn’t entirely novel: it has the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time “oops, I died. lets rewind a little” platforming mechanic. But unlike PoP that isn’t it’s sole reason for being there. The temporal manipulation in each world is actually a part of the puzzle itself, an axis about which to manipulate its state. Progress requires an awareness of not only its physical configuration, but it’s configuration with respect to a temporal position that can move forward and backward, branch, and change at different rates. Clearly this is an aspect better played than described.

This is where it starts to get a little sticky. Braid has all the gameplay elements of a good game, but so does Go, and I wouldn’t call that art. Braid uses its choices of gameplay mechanics to interact with its narrative and vice versa in a way that simultaneously evokes and defies the archetypes of its medium (this is, by the way, a phrase I previously never would have thought I would write about a video game). This is most obvious in its relationship to Mario. Regardless of why the designers chose to work in the lost art of 2D platforming, it is always clear when you create such a game that you will be evoking/influenced by Shigeru Miyamoto’s work. Braid has an easy way out of this in that the platforming isn’t the central gameplay mechanic, but a means of traversing the world, but instead they decided to work within that construct, admit it’s influence, and challenge it. They draw the comparisons for you: goomba-like enemies dispatched by head-bopping jumps, a level named “Jumpman” in the shape of Donkey Kong’s tower, and constant reminders that “the princess is in another castle.” But with every dragon and every castle we are reminded that in spite of the fond memories we have of the Plumber, it’s narrative was simplistic and insufficient at best. It accomplishes this with contrast: how silly it must seem to save a princess, to have her consistently out of reach, without some plausible human motivation for doing so. Braid, in contrast, is a love story that in many ways reminds me of a video game I played when I was a kid.

It takes some fairly nontraditional stances in it’s narrative as well. Like it’s gameplay, there isn’t a whole lot there that hasn’t already been done, but it chooses and executes very well. It’s story isn’t strictly linear, a concept that is so easy to fuck up. Each part of its written narrative is a moment, paralleling its temporal gameplay theme, and jigsaw visual theme. Each page stands independent of the next, fits into a context of the meaning of all the other pages, and doesn’t require a particular order to understand. It is abstract but with a very clear arc, making for a concrete story that manages to be very deep due to the large but contained space of interpretation. It’s clearly about something very specific, though there isn’t any evidence of this in the text, which leaves one with the impression that they are projecting something that isn’t implicitly there. It’s a choice that allows for its story to be universal, to be specific to everyone, to millions, while only telling one story.

The presentational style wraps it all together. Visuals and sound are constructed to evoke the spaces where our experience of time behave a bit more like they do in the game: memory, future projections, counterfactual space.

These three pillars come together in a beautifully palindromic end sequence that is no less than absolutely fucking stellar, totally new, and only successfully possible with the set of tools and choices they have provided. I will avoid spoilers here, but this game is worth playing solely for this sequence.

Video games have always seemed to be capable of benefiting from a theatrical production model. This may be my experiential bias, but there are many mappings. Video games, like theatre, are necessarily interdisciplinary, both in its production and in the instance of the art (in theatre, the performance, in gaming, the play). Braid is inspirational in that it showcases what a small, independent production team can do in a way that is truly interdisciplinary. They all contribute excellence in their individual areas of expertise that are only complete in the context of the whole work. No pillar is ignored or secondary. However, Braid also highlights the costs and constraints of producing art in this medium. Small production teams must make compromises, and often they will compromise quality somewhere in exchange for cost. Braid opts to take the hit in cost, bankrolled in large part from the producer’s own pocket, highlighting how inaccessible this medium still is to many artists. Theatre is exciting in part because it can be produced guerrilla style. Video games are a long way from guerrilla production.

As I’ve alluded to before, there’s little I can say here that would be very meaningful without actually playing it. I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts on it, but if you don’t have access to it (no XBox, no 15 bucks), I’d be happy to have you over to play on my box. I’m really dying to know some of your perspectives on it, as I can be full of shit at times.

PS – Yahtzee Croshaw’s review is below just because I like it. Also, thank you Ashley for guilting me into posting. I hope this serves as sufficient penance.

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.

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.

Here’s one I found linked on Slashdot the other day. Clive Thompson speaks a bit about the advantages and (mostly) disadvantages he finds with the use of voice communication in virtual worlds.

I had always been fond of the idea of voice chat and had wanted it available even during my first forays into online and networked gaming. Text chat was cumbersome for most PC games, particularly those heavy on the left hand keyboard (read: First Person Shooters. I am missing three fingers on my left hand making this a bit more complicated for me). On consoles, it was near impossible unless the game had an on-screen keyboard or predetermined taunts/commands (read: lame). My house’s rough equivalent to voice chat while playing LAN games of Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena was leaving our room doors open and hollering taunts and challenges from across rooms and floors. Of course, the opportunity for strategy was hindered by this crude communication mechanism. Needless to say, I had quite a good time when I got my first gaming headset with my XBox Live kit. There was something about being schooled in Halo 2 by an apologetic 12-year-old Japanese kid that was really funny to me. It also made team/game setup quite a bit easier. I used it quite frequently until my XBox got stolen from our gaming room.

I had always just assumed this was going to be the way of the world. As the bandwidth became more available, the technology more efficient, and the hardware more accessible, people would gravitate towards voice chat as the superior communication medium in the online world. People would be collaborating, conspiring, taunting, trading, pretty much doing everything in a rich world of language. As the article points out, the tend towards voice chat is starting, but the effects aren’t quite as welcoming:

…voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality — even your regional location too. (I can tell a Texan accent from a Minnesotan, and you can probably tell I’m Canadian by my nasal “oots.”) With voice, the real world is honking in your ear.

This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players — particularly younger men — could hear their voices. (”They got hit on a lot,” Malone says.)

Meanwhile, shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.

“Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room,” as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog. –Clive Thompson, Wired

It saddens me to see a technology that is enabling for me to be disabling for so many other people. What’s worse is that it seems to be particularly disabling to women (of which there are far too few of in the gaming world, in my humble opinion) and those at the social periphery (who already have to deal with being in the periphery in REAL life). Being primarily a shooter fan, this possibility went right over my head. Shooters tend to be a bit of a boys club, an environment that has no problem welcoming folk like me. The environment seems to be thoroughly different for role playing games, where one of the options available to you is to construct a completely alternate identity.

I hope, personally, that there is a way to reconcile the communicative power of voice chat with the notion of a constructed identity in online worlds. I see promise in a very simple, almost gimmicky tool in Halo 2: voice distortion. Players have the option to enable voice distortion which thoroughly masks most identifying elements in voice. There is, however, only one voice distortion option, leaving those choosing to enable it sounding like a Covenant Elite (read: like an idiot). But it doesn’t seem to me like a terrible (or terribly difficult) idea to allow a mechanism to construct a vocal identity that matches the alternate identity. Some kind of voice distortion filter construction system that varies pitch and other sound signal properties that map to identity.

This doesn’t solve the problem of accents identifying geographic/social origin. In a pipe dream of a solution, we could have a voice processing system that identifies individual phones in a sound stream and modifies them to map to the phonemes of the language and then converts them to the phones of the intended constructed identity. That is, understandably, a bit much to ask at the moment. This also doesn’t address the problem of the socially disadvantaged. What about those who just don’t interact nearly as well with vocal social interaction? I’m not sure I have the tools to even begin to tackle that one. The only thing I can think of at the moment is to make text chat easier and more integrable with voice chat.

Every so often I like to think of the various links my mind makes among different ideas. Sometimes they’re arbitrary, sometimes they are supposed to be there. Here are a couple I got from 300.

When I hear Spartan, I think of two things. I think of the legendary Greek citizen-warriors that were so awesomely depicted in 300. There size and stature were massively depicted in this film, easily 6′5″ at a minimum. And then there was Xerxes who towered over them, making him easily 8-10 feet tall. This massive size and stature was about the same for the depiction of the UNSC cyborg warrior, the SPARTAN-II. The link here is intentional. The SPARTANS of the Halo universe are an obvious allusion to the Greeks. Even in their story arcs there are similarities. The Fall of Reach is often compared to the Battle of Thermopylae, and the united forces of the Covenant to the many nations of the Persian Empire.

The wolf imagery used in the film is obvious foreshadowing to the tactics of the Pass of Thermopylae. But the imagery goes beyond tactics. It is used as a unifying image, in the pack mentality of the Spartan Hoplites and their loud unison bark-howl battle cry. I can’t help but think of my homies at the Wolf House, and our tightly knit pack. The best of us have often referenced the Battle of Thermopylae when playing Assassins.

I break them. Often, I’ve found. More on the Halo gaming will have to come later, I imagine, if it even comes at all. I’ll have plenty more to write about in the coming weeks, however, as I have a standing weekly appointment with my Underground Video Gaming Cabal to shoot up the screens at the Wolf House. But for now, you may consider me an ass hat.

It is currently 2:30 am and I just finished an awesome four hour Halo session with a bunch of old friends. It was our first time playing over system link and it was ridiculous. My eyes are bloodshot, my body is tense, my head is pounding. One would think I would be going right to bed right after I finish this post. And I am.

Except I am now watching folks play Soul Calibur 2.

I will definitely be writing more about this tomorrow…