Warm Praise for Cold Horror

If you read this blog you know I'm interested in narrative game design, in how game developers craft, encourage, and control storytelling. In the summer of 2011 I and a colleague of mine, Jason Beene, conceived and managed a student project in experimental narrative. The result, after eight weeks, was The Snowfield, an open-world survival game set during WWI. In January it was chosen as a Student Showcase Finalist at the Independent Games Festival, and I want to share some of responses we've gotten so far.

Cold, Comfort, Harm: The Snowfield - Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In the Bleak of Winter: The Snowfield - The Nocturnal Rambler

This Week's Best PC Games - PC Gamer

And Then the Whimper: The Snowfield - SPACE-BIFF!

The Snowfield is a Haunting and Mysterious PC Game - GameThunks

There's a lot of good praise here, and a lot of valid criticism. Two things stand out for me.

The goals of the project was to create an open and emergent system, the theory being that this would encourage players to tell their own stories. In the end it wasn't as deep or complex as I'd hoped, but we did try make the few simple mechanics and behaviors we had as evocative as possible. The going assumption in commercial game development is usually that narrative evokes emotion, but we wanted emotion to evoke narrative, to motivate players to dramatize their experience in the retelling. This quote from the SPACE-BIFF! blog does exactly that:

At one point I brought a soldier the letter he had been muttering about (or was it just any old letter, written by some other sweetheart to some other brave boy?). He stood there for a few seconds with the paper pressed to his face while I trembled and hoped to return to the warmth of the fire. He took so long that I turned away and began to head up to the bombed-out house where a few fellow soldiers had congregated. My conscience caught up to my numbness and I turned back to retrieve him. But he was gone, disappeared into the bitter grey.

I was also heartened by the write-up at The Nocturnal Rambler, for mentioning that The Snowfield reminded him the devastating final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth. Aside from real historical research, the two main inspirations on The Snowfield were the British sitcom Blackadder and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, both wickedly damning portraits of an especially damnable war. They are the two pieces of popular media that made me aware of WWI as a great human tragedy, and we tried to imbue some of their uncompromising sensibility into the game.

The Snowfield was an overly ambitious project, but that's typical of a lot of experimental games. Even though we accomplished a fraction of what we envisioned, it's nice to see the release version having some impact on people. You're always so close to a project you're involved in that it's hard to know whether it works for an audience at all. Though I feel a lot more could be done with the project in terms of narrative, the feeling evoked is apparently so strong for some it hardly matters. Also context, the fact that The Snowfield is being read against commercial war games, seems to lend it additional impact. It had never occurred to me, as one blogger mentioned, how few games (if any) deal with the aftermath of battle.

Interview With Terri Brosius & Dan Thron

Part 9 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

This week is Terri Brosius and Dan Thron. Dan was an artist/animator on Terra Nova, System Shock 2, and Thief, doing much to solidify the look and feel of the Thief universe. Terri was a voice-actor in both System Shock (as SHODAN) and Thief (as Victoria) as well as a writer/designer for Thief, doing much to shape the overall story arc of the franchise.

I talk with Terri and Dan about how they got into the industry, what influenced them in their contributions to the Thief franchise in particular, and what they consider good storytelling/world building in video games.

If you ever wanted to know who to thank for Thief's infamous eyeball-plucking scene check it out!

Download the podcast here.

How Zelda Became Uninteresting

The Legend of Zelda, for a brief period of time, was one of the most vibrant, experimental video game franchises around. Now it's a shell, having been browbeaten into apology after apology for having dared be so interesting. The "trilogy" of Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Wind Waker, spanning 1998 to 2003, are the key games in the series, as they represent the apex, destruction, and transformation of the design that began with the original Zelda in 1986.

Zelda series helmsman, Eiji Aonuma, who took over from Shigeru Miyamoto after Ocarina of Time, has said repeatedly he feels haunted by that game. It looms large in the imagination of gamers as The Classic, never to be equaled, and Aonuma's job has increasingly become to replicate this platonic phantom - this mythical 'ideal Zelda' - that arguable never existed. Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Enough to hold a man's entire career hostage.

I was at Aonuma's talk at GDC 2007, which was a double apology. First he apologized for making Wind Waker. Then he apologized for making Twilight Princess, the game that was an apology for Wind Waker. After the Western gaming press responded badly to Wind Waker, he tried to guess what this mysterious audience wanted. He did his best. He threw in a werewolf because he didn't have any better ideas (yes, he said that). But he still wasn't personally thrilled with it. The game was still a polished piece of craft, but the spark was gone, the bravery that made Majora's Mask and Wind Waker such stand out experiments, almost arthouse games.

Twilight Princess was a ploy to regain the audience that had rejected the creative direction the series was going after Ocarina - the right creative direction. This direction was not only different, fresh, and exciting. It was the only logical thing to do after the classic Zelda formula reached its highest expression. Ocarina of Time was the classic, dumb hero tale of every other Zelda game (boy has to save girl, goes through trials, finds sacred items, defeats wizard, etc.) done with exceptional epic flourish, culminating in the most awesome knight-versus-bad-mutherfuckin'-wizard fight ever in a video game. It was the game every other Zelda had been trying to be, and there it finally was. Done. What's next?

What came next was a marvelous dark fantasy mind-fuck. Majora's Mask was not only thematically and narratively the best thing ever associated with the Zelda name (it was what Shadow of the Colossus would get credit for being some years later, only deeper, richer); it was one of the most complete narrative worlds in a commercial game. Ocarina had dabbled in world-simulation, with its day-night cycles and open 3D terrain, but Majora's Mask was like Ultima VII on redbull. In a time when 3D graphics where inspiring most developers to make big, shallow worlds (Morrowind, GTAIII) Majora's Mask focused on being narrow and deep. Its nuance, the lives of NPCs as they existed in time, was unseen. And the time-travel mechanics, the clockwork social puzzle they formed, has never been equaled.

This all dovetailed together into one of the most total experiences I've had in a game. Majora's Mask inverted, subvert, destroyed - it ravaged Zelda every which way, all with a wicked smile. Never has a formula's self-destruction been so well-deserved, so resonant, and so wonderful. It did for Zelda what Watchmen did for superheroes, what Planescape: Torment did for Dungeons & Dragons. Saying it was the best Zelda game doesn’t begin to express its value. No other game in the series comes close. No game in the series ever will.

If Major'as Mask was the bonfire that burned Ocarina to the ground, Wind Waker was the phoenix that arose from its ashes. It was a Zelda game about a changed world, a post-apocolyptic regeneration to Majora's apocalyptic misery, though it remains one of the brightest, most pleasant destroyed worlds you’ll visit. It goes out of its way at every turn to emphasize the changed-ness of Zelda, from the cel-shaded graphics to the sailing mechanics to the story about how Hyrule is a relic of a dead past that should stay dead. Wind Waker is, if you’re clever enough to notice, an elegy for the series, a meditation on its irreversible transformation.

Ganon is the villain of Wind Waker because he wants to resurrect the Zelda formula. Why can’t things be like the good ‘ol days in Ocarina of Time, when everything was cool and epic? Because we all have to grow up sometime. Ironic that Wind Waker’s cel-shaded graphics got labeled “childish” by mouth-foaming fanboys who pined for their adolescent notions of adulthood, their cool wizard fights, their Link and Ganon who looked like they were drawn for Marvel Comics. Wind Waker’s gentle plea was a very adult one, and its rejection proof of how children, of all sorts, still hold sway over the art form.

Wind Waker was one from the heart, a game close to Aonuma. (His band, in which he plays percussion, is called 'The Wind Wakers'.) Twilight Princess, on the other hand, radiates desperation. Aonuma was grasping at something, anything, to give the global market what it seemed to want. What it wanted of course was crawl back into the womb, into its fuzzy memories of Ocarina, but have this infantile nostalgia obfuscated with so-called "darker" content... as if werewolves, shadows, a scarier Ganon with big biceps, and a mean-lookin’ teenage Link were the very definition of seriousness.

Twilight Princess is sheer pap of course, just a muddled variation on Ocarina’s good-versus-evil nonsense. It has none of Majora’s moral anguish and none of Waker’s transformative maturity. It barely registers in memory next to Ocarina, which at least had the benefit of straight-forward mythic simplicity. People liked it, but since it’s chief value was reminding people of Ocarina, it lacked any sort of future-trajectory of its own, rendering the creative evolution of the series effectively dead.

Skyward Sword represents a cautious step back towards the creative energy the series once had. Traumatized, but yearning to pick up its lost strands of inspiration, Skyward feels like a calculated attempt to bring back the color and spark of Wind Waker while avoiding the superficial elements that drive petty fans berserk.

Link and Zelda are cool-looking teens, with relatively human proportions, but the world and characters around them exhibit a stylized freedom closer to Wind Waker's. The fully open sky world, with its endless billowing clouds and floating islands, feels like a reiteration of the ocean from Wind Waker. The town and characters are fleshed out in a way closer to Majora's Mask, and the puzzle/dungeon design - which makes extensive, often ingenious use of the Wii motion controls - gives the most basic challenges (combat, navigation) a sense of newness. 

Who knows what Zelda might be today had it not been side-tracked by the blood sacrifice Aonuma was forced to make to the Western market. Skyward Sword might be truly exciting, yet another balls-out experiment in world/game/story fusion, rather than a surprisingly well-executed puzzle/dungeon exercise with clearly partition barriers between innovation and fan-service. While it's nice to see the series regain a bit of its purpose, this surgical approach to innovation makes it clear Nintendo is still scared shitless.

Where will it go from here? No doubt Aonuma is up nights trying to figure that one out.  God help him.

Bringing 3D to the Masses

Super Mario 3D Land may look cute and colorful, but it's actually an insidious plot to corrupt 2D gamers into 3D gamers. This happened 16 years ago with Mario 64, a game that wrote the book on a lot of 3D gaming concepts (analog-stick movement, simultaneous character and camera control, etc.) even though today it hardly ever gets credit for them. While brilliant, it ultimately failed to make 3D accessible to a broad audience. The games that followed in 64's footsteps abandoned its careful scaffolding and banked on an ever narrowing hardcore demographic, one that could already parse its complicated conventions. 3D Land - much more than other recent 3D Mario efforts - is a do-over, a back-to-basics attempt to get things right.

At first I was disappointed at 3D Land's simplified controls. Mario 64 was brilliant partially for its use of the then-novel analog stick, still the most nuanced and responsive uses of the interface (and somewhat due to hardware design of the N64 analog itself, far more sensitive and flexible than modern analog sticks). 3D Land, like many modern games, opts for a 'run' button, rather than mapping speed to the stick itself. Over the years we have proven ourselves impatient, unsubtle creatures with thumbsticks. We'd rather yank them around than carefully modulate our input, even when the controls respond to such modulation beautifully.

3D Land's choices aren't a knee-jerk acquiescence to modern gaming, however. They are a careful indoctrination strategy, designed to lull 2D gamers into a state of comfort. It takes only one level to realize 3D Land's template is not Mario 64 but New Super Mario Bros., the reboot of old-school 2D Mario that came out a few years ago (and proved very popular). 3D Land is quite obviously a 2D game modified to be a 3D game, not the other way around. This explains the 'run' button, the lack of a heath meter, the simplistic swimming mechanics, the appearance of the classic flagpole at the end of stages, and the profoundly 2D nature of its 3D spaces. It's classic Mario straight from 1986... except you can walk around things instead of having to jump over them.

Astute players should recognize this strategy - of embodying the "2D-ness" of a space in the level architecture, not the controls - from Metroid Other M, another recent Nintendo reboot/update. Other M's medieval sexism distracted a lot of people from noticing it was doing some very interesting things with 3D. It was a throwback to the early days of 3D, when developers tended to preserve the strong orthogonal logic of 2D worlds in their 3D worlds. As much as hardcore gamers hate to admit it (and they do) there's a simplicity to north, south, east, west orientation that more complex 3D worlds struggle to achieve. Try to teach a non-gamer to play both Asteroids and Assassin's Creed and you will see what I mean. The literacy gap between 2D and 3D interfaces is massive. Gamers understand them, but the rest of the world was left behind in the 90s.

3D Land is the most calculated experiment I've seen in shepherding players from 2D to 3D, mostly because of how openly it plays with the idea of 2D versus 3D, inviting the user to engage with these concepts in a self-conscious way. 3D Land bares more than a passing resemblance to Paper Mario, the surreal Mario spin-off that parodies the concepts of 2D and 3D by allowing the player to look at a 2D world "sideways" and see all its inhabitants as flat strips (hence the title). The way the world looks when switching between views in Paper Mario is almost exactly the difference between 8-bit Mario and 3D Land, a fact 3D Land seems to acknowledge with its occasional "fake enemies made of cardboard" gag.

The impression left is that someone took a 2D Mario level and "built it" in real life, and now you're navigating through it - a human video game. 2D platformers have been recreated in real life before, most notably in the late-80's Japanese game show Takeshi's Castle. (The idea of "being in a video game" was one of the organizing principles of the show, as seen in the short pixel art animations that introduced each event.) Nintendo imported this idea to the U.S. for the New York launch of Super Mario 3D Land, setting up a Takeshi's Castle-style platforming challenge in Times Square.

This is a great way to teach 3D to people. Everyone understands these kinds of spacial constraints when encountered in the real world, so why not just replicate them in a video game? The irony of 3D gaming is that 3D space is "real" in a sense. It is unabstract, a 1-to-1 simulation of space as it actually exists. 2D space is abstract, an imaginary reduction of real space onto a flat plane. So why then is 2D much easier to navigate than 3D? Because, if we acknowledge the complete reality of video games, we must acknowledge that they take place on a screen, and screens are flat.

North, south, east, west are the most logical orientations for anyone controlling an object on a screen. 2D games take place unabashedly in screen-space, not real-space, and designing to that reality makes games more intuitive, more connected with the matter-of-fact-ness of mediated televisual experience. 3D games don't take place on a screen, they take place in a screen. But since we are never in the screen with them, we need all sorts of convoluted gear to bridge the barrier. 3D games that fail to acknowledge the screen always feel awkward, because they fail to acknowledge the primary agent that shapes our interaction, instead pretending like we're "immersed" in some world... but can never feel more immersive than remote-controlling a robot via video.

Games like Super Mario 3D Land are built around the screen, around its logics, its limits, its shape. They are 3D spaces articulated in the language of 2D spaces, because that is ALWAYS the language of screens. This is why when 3D Land indulges in some of the more esoteric 3D conventions, it carefully constructs screen-based metaphors around them. As an adept 3D gamer I missed the ability to enter first-person view at any time like I could in Galaxy, but I have to admit re-imagining that convention as tourist binoculars - the kind you might find at Niagra Falls or the Empire State Building - is a stroke of genius. Like all clever scaffolding they make you realize 'first-person view' has always been like using tourist binoculars.

Super Mario 3D Land may not be everything I want out of a 3D Mario game. But I find it hard not to be impressed by its laser-thin shrewdness when it comes to reaching a 3D-averse audience. It slips the drug of 3D - the drug of Mario 64, of Galaxy, that intoxicated me so long ago - into their soup, in doses small enough to give them a gradual, imperceptible high.

As the game progresses the levels slowly open up, like those in Mario 64, but the transition is subtle and seamless. All the while the game presents the stereoscopic 3D, the selling point of the 3DS, as if that were the innovation of the game. It's just a ruse, a good excuse to get a second shot at the vast swathes of people who have been kept from the pleasures of 3D gaming by a decade of dual-analog controllers and byzantine level architecture.

The people who fail to understand those things are not the freaks. We are.

The Narrative Fatigue of Dark Souls

I just finished Dark Souls, the notorious sequel to From Software's 2009 sleeper hit Demon's Souls. Dark Souls was a game I was more excited to play than any other this year. Demon's Souls was a revelation for me, one of the richest, freshest, most daring AAA games of the last decade. It was also - contrary to popular belief - a superb narrative experience, with a game system and a fictional world that informed each other in resonant ways that hearkened back to the heyday of Origin and Looking Glass.

I was expecting a lot from Dark Souls, and "a lot" is exactly what I got. It is an absurdly massive game, making Demon's Souls, which took me 100 hours to finish, look small. I only finished it just last night, and my first thought as the credits rolled was: what the fuck was that?

I was expecting it to be cryptic, but I wasn't prepared for how terse it was. It was over in 30 seconds. If I include my hour-50 restart, I played Dark Souls for 150 hours. Demon’s Souls took me 100 only because I let it. I could have easily finished it in less, but I wanted it to be longer. I was ready for Dark Souls to be over by the end, but I plugged onward in good faith, assuming that a narrative payoff similar to Demon's Souls was waiting for me at the end, an ending sequence that was the final key to decoding the moral politics of its crypto-gothic mythology. Instead I got an almost immediate staff roll followed by an auto-restart / auto-save.

Demon’s Souls let you keep your end-game save if you wanted to poke around. But Dark Souls literally forces you to replay it, over and over, to solve its narrative riddles. If the game were 10 hours long - like Silent Hill, Deadly Premonition, or other similarly cryptic story-driven games - this might be good, but it’s 100+. Who the fuck has time? Really? You really expect me to devote every evening I have for a year to solving your fucking riddle? You gotta be joking.

Demon’s Souls, while also cryptic, didn’t seem like such a fuck-you to the player when it came to stumbling upon its key narrative components. If you paid attention it was hard to miss, and its climax that put a lot of its more puzzling bits into perspective. But Dark Souls... even if you do figure it out, there is no pay-off at the end. At first I thought it was just the ending I got, but I looked at the other ending on YouTube and it was almost as slight.

I didn't expect answers, but I did expect the core questions I had about Lordran to be addressed and given illuminating, perhaps decisive context. What happened to the world? Did you really end the curse of the undead? Was Gwyn and the fire-worshiping religion he founded, which seemed to have created as many problems as it solved, morally better than the alternative... a dark world ruled by men, without the gods? The game is right to leave this question unanswered, but I expected an inkling of what the consequences of these two paths might be, how their pros and cons might play out. Instead the game just jerks you back to be beginning without being able to process anything new.

In a way this all seems like an extension of the same “problem” the game has with its difficulty design. I still maintain Dark Souls isn’t as fair as Demon’s Souls, in spite of what the developers say. It has more cheap deaths, more things that are impossible to predict, more riddles that seem designed to fuck with you. In the first game you got the feeling that they weren’t trying to be especially difficult or cryptic. It was just a beautiful, strange, brutal game world that had its own dark logic, a logic that wasn't very difficult to decipher and, once deciphered, ensured you would both survive its challenges and experience most of its content.

Dark Souls is a classic example of people listening too much to their own press. Demon’s Souls didn’t need to be bigger. It didn’t need to be harder. It didn’t need to me more cryptic. It was brilliant the way it was. The extra weight just makes the whole experience flabbier, looser, more unwieldly. Sure it is obviously by the same minds as the original, which is why it has the same seductive draw, and a lot of the same great elements, but in the end it’s too much - way too much - of a good thing.

Dark Souls took a LOT of my time. A lot of my life. Demon’s Souls did too, but when the credits rolled on that game I had a warm feeling that all that time was well-spent. It was because of that feeling that I got up and immediately wrote my essay on the game that was eventually published. This, what you’re reading now, is what Dark Souls prompted me to write when the credits rolled.

I may one day write about the game’s good points - about how brilliant its non-linear level design is, how awe-inspiring the world is as a narrative object if you manage to explore all of it, how its multiplayer system feels like a cynical morality play, and how, in the end, its inversion of 'good' and 'evil' is subversive in ways most games can't imagine, let alone attempt – but I don’t feel like it now.

Right now, I don’t want to play video games anymore.

Interview with Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc

Part 8 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

This week is Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc. Marc was a programmer/designer at Looking Glass for most of the company's life, and was one of the major voices in shaping the overarching design aesthetic of the company. This is partially what lead to Marc being a thinker, writer, and educator on game design, developing the MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) as a simple tool for creating emergence-centric games. I talk with Marc about his time at Looking Glass, how he remembered dealing with simulation, fiction, and emergence across various projects, and how those lessons and strategies have filtered out into the rest of the games industry after the company folded.

If you ever wanted to know how performance-enhancing drugs can help you in System Shock or what the exact difference is between the design philosophies of Deus Ex and Thief, give it a listen.

Download the podcast here.

Blog Anxiety

I've been having a real problem updating the blog the past few months. This is because I've been busier this year, in terms of travel and projects, than any other year in recent memory. Since March I've been to Spain, Singapore, Montreal, Holland, Texas, and have been bouncing back between Boston and New York it seems like every other week. In this time I've begun several blog posts, but haven't been able to finish them properly.

At this point my backlog is fairly massive, including some stuff from last year. I've got articles on Epic Mickey, Minerva's Den, Ocarina of Time 3D, Catherine, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dark Souls, and one on the overarching politics of Metal Gear that I've been tinkering with for months.

I feel like the "window" for many of these has passed. Ideally, you want to get out posts when the game in question is still topical. On the other hand that's weird of me to say, since I often write about older, obscure games that have nothing to do with what's "hot" in gamer circles (and pride myself on the fact). Clearly it wouldn't be out of character for me to publish them anyway.

I'd like to release all these articles by the end of the year, in addition to the final Looking Glass podcasts, the next few of which are finally finished and coming (Mark "Mahk" LeBlanc is next). I plan to release an article a week, even if I have to force myself to post some of the above articles in a less-than-ideal form. 

This is a blog after all, I often need to remind myself. My style (I've come to realize) tends toward the shape, length, and voice of traditional print media essayists. I read a lot of early 20th century political writing like George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, and for film criticism my touchstones are people like Pauline Kael Jonathan Rosenbaum.

What these people do isn't so different from what bloggers do, but print media, being less ephemeral than digital media, does have the added advantage (or disadvantage, depending on your perspective) of being "final" in a sense a blog never is. You want to polish things off, be absolutely sure you put your best foot forward, and be as certain as possible that what you publish might have some value for posterity.

It is this mentality I have trouble letting go of online, and I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. I once saw Arianna Huffington interviewed on The Daily Show, calling herself a blog "evangelist", and claiming you don't have to filter yourself online. You just post your thoughts, as messy as they are, and keep going, free from having to edit or polish. Blogging is just raw, uncut thought.

John Stewart seemed to think this was a bunch of crap, arguing that we have editors for a reason, and doesn't it makes sense to at least try to make something good - to revise it, to scrutinize it, to streamline it, to improve it - at least a little bit before you publish it? Huffington was having none of this, of course, but Stewart didn't seem convinced. Neither am I.

While it's obviously possible to tinker too much, I do think a degree of old fashioned print media self-scrutiny is useful. I dunno about you, but I tune out quickly when a blogger just seems to be writing their stream of consciousness thoughts on a topic. I expect a writer to parse their own mind, to exercise some discretion and select the best bits for my consumption. I want a statue. Not a slab of rock.