h. Play

I fell.

Steam got me. Steam is awesome (I don’t get that people are afraid of this platform while they use iTunes and don’t see the problem with it). With the release of Left 4 Dead 2, I ended up playing the games I bought and didn’t play like Half Life Episode One and Two. Pretty great. Of course I’ve downloaded L4D 2 Demo and of course now I want and I am waiting for the L4D/L4D2 pack at 39$.

About Episode 2: crazy how npc like Alyx are emotionally bringing something while I totally didn’t care about the story. It’s boring. Aliens. Portal. Rescuing whatever.

Also enough with these corridors, especially when they look like intestine. It’s boring, it’s not really scary it’s just gross. I don’t like having the feeling I’m running into a giant sphincter. you find it funny? Okay..

The part outside with the car and the Striders is great though. But the last part when you can’t run with the gravity gun and some bomb you have to throw while you have like, 7 weapons including a rocket launcher is just plain annoying. I know it’s for balancing the gameplay but it’s not logical at all. Against Striders you really want to run.

Nothing like a gameplay flaw to put you out of the immersiveness.

Alyx Vance, hacker, scientist daughter, chatterbox

On the other side L4D 2 is making sense. Not a lot of weapons, only two to carry and tough choices (long distance riffle with a fried pan or shotgun and unlimited gun?). The AI Director is great. I don’t know how many run I did but they were all feeling different and that’s pretty much the point of it. It works, even on a solo game offline, even if the level design is quite linear.

But still, it’s classic fps. Watching cutscenes in HL2 I could not help but think about some fps with HUMOR! Why do we have to get this seriousness in this type of games I don’t understand. I want to laugh and move my mouse to look at the sky before having some action, not listening to a discussion trying to be mildy amusing in a dark corridor, waiting for the next dark mission in an alien belly (or worse, a missile silo).

Modern Warfare 2 is out and it’s the biggest game launch of the year. I watched a lot of footage and the fact it’s connected to wars from now with this uber realistic aesthetic makes me feel I don’t like it. Not funny at all.  

And this is it, I feel fatigue: last week headlines were about Zynga –Farmville, Mafia Wars, YoVille!- using scam practices to get revenue.

Also this inner interview of Keita Takahashi at Gamasutra:

“There are two main reasons for it, I think. Firstly, I‘m just frustrated with the industry as a whole. I can’t seem to predict where it’s going, which makes me feel uncomfortable," he says. "Or maybe I just don’t like where I think it’s going. I’m not sure."
"That’s probably related to my second frustration. I just can’t perceive where the fun is in recent hit video games. I see nothing in them that resonates with me and, their success leaves me feeling confused. The things I find interesting and enjoyable just aren’t reflected in the popular games of today and, I feel like there’s not much room for my voice because of that.”

I sort of feel the same way, even if I’m enjoying a good fps. I feel I could be addicted as a user. I could be addicted to some Facebook scam games easily too.

But as a developer I don’t think it’s great. It’s complex but I feel what Keita means, especially with games like music games or something as bad looking as the last Tony Hawk game. On the indy side, I feel fed up with the retro 8bit aesthetic, or platform games.

So the game market either seems like it’s not fun or it seems like you have to dig the addictiveness, especially with leaderboards and online rankings. Like this report said free-to-play game developers are using the social weaknesses –like peer pressure- to gain audience and money.

It’s not that it’s shocking in itself. It’s more like we’re basically doing the same shit that casinos and pachinko machines are doing for decades.

This is not good. It’s a sign that we’re totally in the mainstream though. But fuck, I don’t want computer games to go this way. I mean, not THAT much. And when I see EA rushing for this business instead of doing costly AAA, it’s not a good sign (they said that they would invest on quality and innovation; no more the case I guess).

I hope you guys at Project Horseshoe found some hope. Please share it!

That’s what basically stories to games are.

At the GDC 08, Ken Levine creative director on Bioshock told the audience something that would not please everyone:

“The bad news for storytellers is that nobody cares about your stupid story”

It’s still a point that hurts a lot of people but it’s totally true, even if we see a lot of game to movie conversions. It’s not for their stupid stories, it’s for the money. Because without interaction, Doom or Dead or Alive are just awful, plain bad stories.

In Edge’s Death Of The Author article Clint Hocking sums it up pretty well when comparing storytelling in games and other medias:

“[..] I’d rather play a game and then read a book than play a game with a story that isn’t as good as a book – particularly when it’s wrecked by the difference between what I’m doing and what I’m told is actually happening. I’d rather have two distinct experiences than one that feels like a bastard child.”

Storytelling is as old as the humanity. It works well on linear medias (books movies comics, thousand years of polishing) and doesn’t with non-linear medias such as games.

So is it really important in the interactive media?

I think that it’s not. Games stories are good for one thing: setting up the world.

SW theme + live setting: massive WIN. Of course Vader is on bass.

I asked myself why Monkey Island or Grim Fandango was so much good memories despite the fact of being adventure games, heavily storytelling focused. It’s not because of their stories, it’s because of their themes and world settings. Look at the story of Monkey Island:

“The game starts off with the main character Guybrush Threepwood stating "I want to be a pirate!" To do so, he must prove himself to three old pirate captains. During the perilous pirate trials, he meets the beautiful governor Elaine Marley, with whom he falls in love, unaware that the ghost pirate LeChuck also has his eyes on her. When Elaine is kidnapped, Guybrush procures crew and ship to track LeChuck down, defeat him and rescue his love”

It’s sort of a super cheap story you encountered in other medias millions of time. This is not really what stayed in my mind after playing it. What stays is the setting of evolving between Caribbean islands day and night. What stays is the humorous overall setting. What stays is hanging around doing my thing and trying to solve puzzles in this crazy world, mix of old golden age of piracy and contemporary US culture.

Same for Grim Fandango. But crazier.

And I really feel that a lot of games with “stories” are just appealing to people the same way those two games did on me. The fantasy setting of WoW appeals to people, the social interaction appeals to people. The story comes at the end. It could almost been removed (though hardcore people read all that quests shit), it’s not crucial to the quality of the game.

The Fantasy setting is strong because it relies on the roots of storytelling:

“Fantasy games have one unique feature that has not yet been duplicated in other genres: they are approachable and easily understood by the player base. If you say a game is “fantasy,” then you know it’s going to be roughly based on medieval technology, with some magic, probably some elves, and monsters to slay. This is because fantasy games are based on legends and fables that we’ve been telling/reading to our children for hundreds of years. Fantasy stories are part of our culture, and just about everyone has been exposed to them. Because of this, fantasy games are easily understood by the player base.”

That’s why SF is a niche for nerds (don’t take it personally, I prefer science to supernatural stuff in a medieval world). That’s why Eve is Eve. I mean, empty (300,000 accounts compared to 11 millions in WoW).

The same with Final Fantasy and japanese RPGs. Stupid and boring stories, outstanding and unique world settings (character design is a big part of it) that makes you want to dig and dive into it, thanks to the complex and deep RPG game system. Story is the cherry on the cake. And most of the time it stinks.

Anyway the thing is, these world settings are terribly missing the point that we are FREE to have any world setting we want. The recent Brutal Legend is a good example.

And believe me if you haven’t read One Piece, this picture is pretty normal.

I always think about mangas and animated movies as a crazy source of world settings. They always have something particular, a twist you didn’t see anywhere. Just thinking about FLCL or Mind Game and I have sparkles in my eyes figuring out something playable in that sort of… Mmh, maybe they are too crazy.

Instead we go the safe path providing classic, over-used settings trying to be as cool as the next action movie. Is that all we can do?

I’m sure it’s not.

Go go go! will always be downsampled in my mind.

I miss playing this game. Sometimes a lot. It’s been one of the funniest game I have ever played with Bomberman and Mario Kart of course.

It’s not about killing. It’s all about situations. It’s all about player stories. Collaborative gameplay, in the best immersion setting you can have: First-Person-View.

When people say that these games are all conveying violence. Of course there are bullets, headshots, blood (I would have put less of this one in TF2) but looking at these games from that point of view is wrong because you can judge any game with moral and none are made with that in mind. Otherwise, what the hell means a plumber eating mushrooms and getting stronger with it while jumping like crazy? A subliminal go-get-some-drugs message that’s right. Or not.

At the last Indiecade there was a panel around FPV games, encouraging wacky concepts. The only concept I have for a FPV game is something like that:

AV-98 Ingram

I don’t want a human scale anymore, neither a little one. I want to be a GIANT. And not in a realistic slow painful way like MechWarrior, but in a way where I can move as fast as a human would, but in a robot of 12 meters for example.

So of course you would run in streets and manage to avoid cars, trucks and not to destroy everything in the city.

I would set a police procedural background (and other secret stuff) where you have to team with pals to arrest crazy robots like in the Patlabor serie. I loved how it describes the boredom of a little team of people sent to fix stuffs in the city. It’s really different from the simple plot of conflicts and wars you have in the Battletech world. Here, it would just be driving a robot, team up with friends and being careful to the city while wondering what the government or the army are up to.

You would be severely punished if not being careful, or rewarded if the mission was worth the damages (tough gameplay balance to set up!). You would be downgraded in the leaderboard if doing a mission would kill citizens and or making the city look like a battle field.

Of course it would be a MMO with destructable environments. Like in CS, I would emphasize action or combats on ressource scarcity, pushing people to work together. Want to capture this crazy robots? Make a plan because it’s not gonna happen by bunny jumping and railgunning the sucker.

The main problem of FPV games now is that you’re not responsible at all. They all have this “survive, whatever is happening” design. L4D makes it legitimate with zombies. TF2 makes it legitimate with a cartoon-ish style sending the message that “it’s all for fun don’t worry”.

I know, this PatlaborMMO is not very wacky, but I really have hard times to believe in really weird stuff with this immersive setup that is the FPV. Throwing kisses to others? Mmmh, no. A gun that create things? It works with 2D even in non- fast paced action game (Sprout Gun from Grim Fandango) but in FPV? Too weird..

Sometimes I really feel that we can’t go crazy producing games in some specific technical settings.

Still, we need to keep searching.

Suda51 was saying in a Gamasutra interview that his company was like a “video game band” with four members: script writing division, programming division, graphic art division and sound division”. All equal. Fab Four.

I’d like to dig that a little more.

Ok they’re only three. But you need confidence doing that don’t you?

If we look at the music history, we can see that the more people from a band know each other for a long time, the better it is for the formation to go further, to break through, to be successful whatever you put in on this last term.

What people knowing each other for a long time means? It means we’re talking about close friends or family. From the buddy in high school to the brother.

Rage Against the Machine child hood friend bassist of the vocalist. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger classmates in the early 50s. Freddie Mercury classmate with the first bassist and co-founder of Brian May’s band called Smile and renamed Queen.

Do you know a band that placed at least a single in the charts for five or more decades (50 years people!)? Besides The Rolling Stones, I know one. the band’s name is The Isley Brothers.

You get the idea.

It makes sense. I may be wrong but creating computer games and creating music are astonishly similar with this mix of absolute and total freedom when beginning to the extremely complex and subtual balance you need to achieve at the end of the production which if not obtained, can ruin everything. In graphic creation –from paint to movies- you have so much opportunities to mask hide or enhance. It’s all about illusion. Sound and games are more realistic in this creative sense.

To make it possible you have two choices: do it alone. Or do it with people you really can go with. It’s of course easier when it’s friends you know very well ie when you are all in a hard and stressful position and that you still don’t want to punch or stab them. I mean, for real :)

That’s why the indie game scene is full of little teams. That’s why AAA games get better when the core team is the same from an iteration to another. That’s why they fail when the team is not anymore (and with all the layoffs these last months, fear).

Look at the success of Zeno Clash, a game from a little team from Chile. I was really curious to see who they are because a large 3D world with a story, new gameplay and unique aesthetics is a FUCKING achievement for a team of four people. Four people, three brothers.

I’m not that surprised.

It scares me. I feel like I don’t have a band and never really did. As time passes by, it seems more and more out of touch.. I just tried to make me better at doing audio and games. I have a mental barrier for coding. But I should do it.

Then I would be like Prince.

Also if we want to mark our time with our medium, we need more friendship of xx years relying on the same visions or even family members into games in dev teams and less 3 months contracts, less ephemeral collaborations.

It is not happening at a big scale yet. The computer game creative-wise is kind of stagnating.

Maybe it’s unrelated.