18 Apr 2007
The Washington Post had a very interesting article (which I found via Raph Koster’s gaming blog, of all places) describing an experiment they did to essentially see if people would inconvenience themselves for something unexpected and beautiful. They took a world renowned violinist and plopped him down as a street musician in a commuter packed metro station. It’s a really interesting article, so you should just go read it.
There’s a lot to think about in that article. But I’m going to take a tangent off of one small comment from it on our willingness to experience new things:
“For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.”
It’s one of those odd human truths that at some point in everyone’s life they experience a cut off point past which they cease seeking out new things (in particular, music). It’s the scariest thing to me about aging. Having my body fall apart pales in comparison to losing my desire for new experiences. The unknown and unfamiliar are particularly uncomfortable things for me, but I consider it part of my human journey to push myself and try to grow as much as possible.
It’s ironic that our technological revolution has empowered individuals so much that we’re growing apart and losing our ability to do anything truly interesting with that technology. Technology has always been pioneered by the socially inept (i.e. nerds). But the time has come to blow past that and start making technology something social and collaborative. Most of the interesting individual software pieces have already be written - the true next frontier is technology working together, and technology working for real people. And this technology can’t just aim to satisfy our every selfish indulgence - we should have software that actually makes us better people.
There’s so much to be done here. In the realm of music, Pandora has made a great start. The whole concept of “play me something that I want to hear, but haven’t necessarily heard before” is brilliant. It needs to explode into other places. Movies, TV, news, food… really just about everything is in need of some quality individually-tailored recommendation system. All the content is there - the problem is that no human can parse all the information available today. People will stick with what they know because finding something else is too hard. We need to make it easy.
17 Apr 2007
I recently caught Unbreakable on TV. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy that movie. It’s so… understated. I guess you could say it’s about a superhero, in that you’ve got a person with a superhuman ability who does something heroic. But that sounds too grandiose. It’s more like the story a dude who learns something about himself and does some stuff. At no point would a moment where this guy gets into yellow spandex or form fitting leather seem normal. For a comic book themed movie it’s very down to earth.
Comic book movies got a resurgence after the releases of X-Men and Spider-man back in 2000 or so. Everyone on some level likes these kinds of stories, because the underlying message is plain and simple: “you’re special.” But if you just blindly go for the whole superhero theme, you’re missing the point. X-Men is great because each character has a ridiculously specific power that often alone would be useless (making much of it about character interactions), and it’s also got this interesting political story of the how the many treat the few. Spider-man is great because the character is a total geek (young, awkward, and flawed), but also because his heroics are on a small human scale. Both these franchises are relatable on some level. Especially in the beginning, where it’s basically just glorified adolescent awkwardness. The discovery portion is consistently entertaining, but afterwards… not so much. When it goes from personal to epic… ugh.
And of course we’ve got Batman. He doesn’t even have super powers… unless money counts as a super power. He’s rich and pissed off - what’s not to like? Well, when he gets too campy, that’s no fun. As long as its dark, gothic, morally ambiguous batman… that’s good stuff. Again, imperfection is relatable.
So far so good, but then there’s Superman. Superman can do everything. He can fly, melt stuff with his eyes, deflect bullets, lift just about anything, and of course rewind time by flying around the sun real fast. He’s so ridiculously overpowered that they had to write in some crazy green crystal to give him a weakness. And on top of this he has the most boringly good personality ever. Why should we care about this guy? Honestly, who gives a crap? I get that in the beginning he came in a time where we needed heroes, and that he wasn’t always so ridiculously super. But at this point I’d rather we just call it quits and never return to this franchise ever again.
These days we have Heroes. It’s part Unbreakable, part X-Men. And the TV format lets us spend more time getting to know the characters. The announcer for the commercials and spoilers drives me nuts, but the actual content of the show is quite good. They stuck us with a big break mid season, but thankfully there’s only a week left before I can get my fix again. I just hope they don’t all meet up to form a Justice League to discuss their new spandex uniforms.
07 Apr 2007
Penny Arcade’s post today stirred some thoughts on the whole concept of “unlocking” in games.
It’s pretty standard practice these days. Not all of the content of the game is available at the beginning and you have to do something to make it available. In some situations that’s totally natural. In a sense the whole RPG game mechanic is based around unlocking content. But when the content isn’t naturally tied into game balance it does raise some questions.
The source of this recent round of discussion has been around Guitar Hero II. When you pop in the game, only a handful of songs are available and you have to beat them to unlock more. And you really have to crank up the difficulty if you want to be able to unlock everything. This isn’t anything new – the first Guitar Hero was this way and so are many other rhythm/singing games. But is this cheating you out of content that you should be able to access right out of the box?
I have mixed feelings about this. From a singleplayer perspective I enjoy the challenge of having to work through a progression of harder and harder content. I like that it took some work to get my reward (as long it was fun, not work). But from a multiplayer perspective I find it extremely annoying when I can’t just jump into the action with my friends right out of the box. Warioware, for example, requires that you essentially clear the entire singleplayer experience before being able to do any multiplayer at all.
So essentially I feel that unlocking is a nice incentive for personal growth, but should never get in the way of social gaming. And when you think about those personal milestones, we already have a system to reward those: Xbox 360 achievements. So in the modern world of account-based gaming is the whole concept of unlocking irrelevant? I think partially yes, but not completely. In my recent run through Saints Row I liked the fact that completing activities netted me both achievement points and new outfits, cars, weapons, and whatever. But in this case the bonus content is the minority, not the majority. So I think there’s still a place for unlockable content, but only on the periphery. Solve those whole personal milestones with non-gameplay currency (i.e. achievement points).
06 Apr 2007
Played on Xbox360
I actually finished Saints Row a couple weeks ago, but I felt compelled to keep playing it because there was just so much extra stuff to do (links: GameSpot, GameSpy, GameFly). The game is an unabashed GTA clone, but it’s a pretty decent one. It nails all the core elements of driving and shooting, and gives you plenty of varied missions. It doesn’t hit the strong thematic stride of Vice City or San Andreas, making it feel more like GTA III but with more contemporary gameplay.
In many areas the gameplay is even more polished than the latest GTA game. Your map is very interactive and lets you set waypoints that will actually map out driving directions. The customization allowed on your character is very impressive, enabling you to craft whatever thug your heart desires. But it’s not all an upgrade - Saints Row definitely suffers from a lack of a mid-mission check point system. There’s nothing more obnoxious than a difficult mission that starts over with a long cross-city drive every time.
There was nothing particularly wrong with the story, character models, or voice actors. They were all passable, and sometimes even good. But the dialogue suffered from extreme Mountain Dew syndrome. It’s as if someone decently talented wrote the script, but then afterwards marketing came through and marked it up with “cock sucker” this and “muthafucka” that. And I’m not even talking the casually swearing - that’s a given. It’s more the random Tourette’s outbursts. Basically every cut scene had at least one, and it was totally unnecessary. As if a game revolving around gang violence wasn’t “hardcore” enough.
The radio stations have always been one of the most entertaining parts of the GTA series, and here Saints Row falls short. The track selection just isn’t that good (and I mean in quality, not quantity). In Vice City I would find myself still grooving to a song even after the 20th time; in Saints Row most of the tracks grew tiring a couple seconds in. The one exception was the classical station - which is always perfect for gang banging. I have a great memory of toying with a policeman by letting him chase me on foot as I slowly backed up to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries.”
The side missions in Saints Row are definitely noteworthy. These aren’t just the tried and true taxi and ambulance circuits. There’s ho stealing, drug running, depraved senator escorting, and much much more. But my favorite was “insurance fraud,” where you throw yourself down stairs and in front of cars to make the most believable injury with the most witnesses. If that’s not fun, I don’t know what is.
Saints Row is graphically pretty buggy. So much so that someone even wrote a musical about it. I also thought it was odd that when your cars got beat up sometimes instead of a crumpled hood they looked more like a wrinkled shirt. But whatever - none of the bugs ever got in the way of the gameplay.
Overall Saints Row was a pleasant experience. The content of this type of game is totally violent. And juvenile. And offensive. And socially backwards in about every way. But it’s fun. It’s true, I wish there were more game developers that picked up the sandbox format and applied it in a less delinquent way, as with Simpsons Hit & Run. But in the meantime since I personally am not in danger of gang banging in my real life, I’ll gleefully continue pimping hos and rolling deep in my virtual one.
30 Mar 2007
Gamasutra posted a great article on Rethinking the MMO. If you’ve ever played one of these games, it’s worth a good read.
I’ve pulled out some quotes that spoke to me:
“To make matters worse, the game mechanics do not often require players to adapt in a meaningful way, leading to repetitive encounters where the player performs the same set of actions every time.”
“Players will spend hours at a time churning through feeble, ineffectual opponents rather than taking on more risk, because the game rewards them more for adopting this style of play.”
“it is natural for players to want to empty the cookie jar of quantifiable accomplishment as quickly as possible, even if they get a stomachache in the process.”
“Players should not have to choose between building their persistent entity and doing something fun.”
“There is rarely creativity involved, and the only meaningful customization is typically a series of one-time choices made at the start of the game (character creation)”
“Although they are still constrained to the path dictated by the designer, there are few interesting experiences between the start and end, the trip is painfully slow and entirely predictable, and the whole point of the journey is to get to a destination, not to enjoy the ride.”
“In the land where everyone’s a hero, heroes are commoners. In a game where gaining power is the primary goal of the game, this design flaw is significant.”
“RPGs are about saving the world or otherwise fixing some sort of hefty problem. The objective purportedly is to alter the game world. An RPG where altering the game world would break the game therefore has a serious flaw.”
“While it is certainly debatable whether such games are evil, soul-consuming, life-wrecking monsters, the fact remains that they are more enjoyable when played in long stretches than when played in short ones.”
“Playing with others is fun; organizing and preparing is not.”
The article doesn’t pull any punches when criticizing the genre, but it’s obviously written by people that love these games and really want to see them improve. And I’m totally with them. The key things that make the MMO appealing are persistence and epic scale. But the classic RPG gameplay expanded to this model doesn’t always hold up.
I enjoy WoW. Obviously I wouldn’t play it so much if I didn’t. In this brutal genre WoW is more friendly than most. And its recent expansion has improved this even more. But there are still a lot of places where it could evolve. I hope the good folks at Blizzard are taking these issues to heart and thinking about how to give their crack more substance… while maintaining the trademark addictive aftertaste.