Be Careful What You Wish For

Compare and contrast these two articles.

I think by now, we all know and understand the dangers of "realism" such as it applies to modern games. The shit-brown and grey colour palate has lost any vestige of novelty that it once had. The iron sights of the M-16A4 assault rifle and the AK-47* have become tired and familiar...you know the drill

*or AK-74 and other models/derivatives thereof.

Although Yahtzee writes that Peter Moleneux is to be admired because he still lives in a time when the games industry produced auteurs, and that gaming today suffers because this is no longer so. I think, however, that Moleneux and the shit-brown shooter collective share a key problem. It's realism, or at least, the promise of realism.

Different games and different developers have this problem for different reasons, but it's the same problem: "realistic" doesn't equal "fun". The obvious starter is graphics: realistic graphics are very nice to look at, to be sure, but when you put a premium on verisimilitude, you miss something: readability. For those who followed the development of Team Fortress 2, the original concept was to make a very realistic class-based military shooter. That was all thrown out when the developers realized a) everyone was doing that already and b) it wasn't very much fun. When they decided to start over, they put a premium on making easily identifiable player silhouettes. They added a kill-cam to show you where you were killed from. They made the team colours stand out against the environments.

A stealth game, it is not. But when you die in TF2, it is rare that you don't understand WHY. And when you can do that, you can learn from your mistakes. That's how games are supposed to work.

So how does Peter Moleneux suffer from the same problem? Well, Fable may not have realistic graphics, but I think he's trying to "solve" the "problem" that RPGs have where you can only interact with certain parts of the world. In your classic RPG, you can visit the village, you can rent a room at the inn...but not with all the gold in the Kingdom (which, of course, you do acquire) can you buy and own property, unless it's specifically part of the plot. You can talk to the barmaid, but you can't ask her to marry you, or have children with her. Not very realistic. The end result is that you don't feel immersed in the world because your character, like the player, is merely an observer.Well, thinks Peter Moleneux, with FABLE 1/2/3, I can FIX THAT!

I sympathize, because I do feel that way about some RPGs. Of course, like Yahtzee says these features all SOUND good on paper, but when you actually implement them...it turns your swashbuckling adventure into either too much of a management sim - or too little of one if that's what you were looking for.

The Problem (capital T capital P) is that when a developer confuses a game with a simulation, they end up making a product that is a little of both, and enough of neither. Games are by nature based on arbitrary rulesets, abstractions of a greater reality. It's OK in a game if you can't sex up the Barmaid, because maybe that's beyond the scope of the rules. Conversely, it would be ok if ALL you could do was sex up the barmaid (dating sims, anyone?). Games are conducive to narratives and literary conventions because the character doesn't really have a life to live; they have a single purpose: complete the quest(s) (get lamp, slay the dragon, rescue the princess, get eaten by a grue...). Simulations, on the other hand, are by their very nature more suited to a sandbox style of play. They can have objectives, sure (see: ARMA 2), but their most powerful moments are always player-driven. Of course, games and simulations give different kinds of satisfaction. Games have an end to them. You can WIN a game, and that's satisfying. You can't win a simulation, but what you can do is create and play. The problem with a sim/game hybrid, in my mind, is that an experience like Fable has conditioned you to treat it like a game...and when the game ends, it drops you in a sandbox with no more challenges to complete, and it feels empty.

We used to know that you could only talk to the NPCs with names, and that's how it was. Now that the unnamed NPCs CAN talk, we're sad because they don't have anything interesting to say.

-LOUD!

Civilization V

I decided to buy Civilization V about a day after launch. I don't know why the wait. It's certainly part of the reason why I've taken the last few days off (that, and a pretty serious creative drought), so for your trouble you will at least get a preliminary review.

I never got into the Civ series as such; my entry point to Sid Meier-brand games was Alpha Centauri. I was too much into Age of Empires to bother with the slower pace of Civ 2, I gave Civ 3 a pass for whatever reason, and I've tried out a few games of Civ 4. So what do I think of Civilization V? Compared to Civ 4 it's a few steps forward, a few steps back, and a few steps sideways. While it carries on the visual aesthetic of Civ 4 for the most part, the feel of the game has changed appreciably in some ways. Compared to Alpha Centauri, I think Civ 5 is good. Better? Maybe not, although that could be my preference for Science Fiction.

What I like about Civ V is that Firaxis has pared down the interface a little, and made it a little more helpful. Important events/cities/units get highlighted, the pop-up notifications are placed where they're noticeable but not too obtrusive, and most of the menus are tucked away by default so that you can see more of the map. It's good. I think it's going to be non-threatening to a new player of the series. Speaking of paring down, there are now only four advisors (Economy, Foreign Affairs, Military, Science). I think the number was getting out of hand in Civ 4. Military units don't stack anymore, which is - hear me out now - a good thing. For one it makes battles a lot more readable. It's a lot easier to gauge the threat level when you don't have to peer into every stack of units to see which has 5 guys and which has 15. As every review will also tell you, it means that mountain passes are actually of strategic value for city placement, because you can bottleneck armies in tight corridors (Thermopylae can actually happen in Civ V, where it probably couldn't in the previous games). Culture points now work to expand your city borders, you can buy new tiles for your cities to work (awesome when you really need to get access to a specific resource). You can also use Culture to unlock policies, which have replaced the civics of Civ 4 and AC. I do and I don't like this change. I remember thinking that it would be pretty cool if you could have a "build your own constitution" mechanic, where you could adopt certain laws and principles...and this is pretty much that. I'll get to what I don't like in a second. Finally, it's pretty awesome that the other leaders talk to you now...IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGES. So you meet Catherine the great and she speaks friggin' Russian at you. + Immersion!

There are a few changes that I'm ambivalent about. The switch to hexes doesn't feel like it makes a huge difference. The unit promotion mechanic is neat, but the initial options are rather small bonuses, or a full auto-heal to full health. So I either set my unit on the path to improvement (in which case it is still at low health and probably dies), or I heal it...and it doesn't actually get any better. The addition of city states is...well, I dunno. They give out quests that I'm never conveniently located to accomplish, and they get angry when my units are set to auto-explore and run through their territory. And as far as I can tell they're a resource sink where you blow cash on influence that degrades. Essentially, city-states are needy gold-diggers, and I'm not sure I like them.

And finally, the stuff I don't like. Religion's gone (except for the "piety" civic, but it's not the same thing). Civilization 4's treatment of religion was utterly respectful, and it really did add a historical element which had been missing from the game. I guess I understand that it's gone in the name of simplicity...and it's weird that I would whine about removing religion from a game, but here I am. I also sort of miss the old-school civics from Civ 4 (and also Alpha Centauri), if only because they were a little more concrete than the new policies are about how your government/economy/society functioned, and I'm kind of a stickler for detail that way. Oh, yeah, and the game needs a "formation" command so that you can arrange your armies to move in blocks for convenience. That would be pretty neat. Oh yeah, and I don't like the happiness/sadness mechanic being a civ-wide thing rather than base-specific. Also, the game says unhelpful things like "X unhappiness from population" without telling you which direction you want to shoot for. Are there too many people? Not enough? HELP!

Oh, and the intro cinematic is really pretty but did you have to make it play EVERY TIME I START THE GAME? Yeah I totally renamed the file to "____.old" so now it just has a mild seizure and tosses me into the menu. Pro, I know.

LOUD!

That Thing We Gamers Do (17/30)

Here's a possibly amusing exercise. I have here a character I've written for an upcoming Dungeons and Dragons game. I wonder if you can guess what his class is? (hint: it's not in the Player's Handbook)

For your consideration, I give you Yssan Karais (uh-SAN Ka-RAY-us):

Yssan was born one cold winter's day, in the back of a wagon. His mother was a travelling acrobat, contortionist, actress, juggler, and ventriloquist. She never did mention a father, and none of the men in the troupe ever claimed the honour. Yssan supposes that he might have been a lord or baron who requested a “private audience”, which was not unknown. Venita Karais was a woman of considerable talent and beauty. Before her death, she instilled in her son a warm heart, and great reverence for Ithene, goddess of her people. Each night, Venita would enthral not only Yssan, but the whole of the troupe with tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and horrors, sages and savages. Yssan fell in love with Ithene - fastest, cleverest, wisest of all immortals.

Venita was accosted and killed by street thugs in Caer Cadren, just before the outbreak of war. Yssan was only 10 years old. With not a quarter of his mother's talent, he was of little use to a travelling act, and was abandoned by the very people who raised him. Yssan bounced back and forth from street gangs to the care of the church for some years. He was conscripted by both sides for service in the town guard during the war, as the city changed hands. He would often hide to avoid the draft, but did not always receive warning in time.

Yssan would always attend services and ceremonies at the Temple of Ithene. He would pray for skill in battle, and he would ask the priest for guidance. He courted a comely young peasant girl, Trieste, and married her there (paying her dowry with money he had stolen or won in battle) in the seventh year of the war.

In one of the final sieges of the war, the priest of Ithene was gravely injured. Though the defence could not hold, Yssan took up residence in the temple, tending to the wounded for weeks while the siege pressed on. He performed services and temple rights for the living and the dead. He sang and told stories. He washed his hands more than he had ever done in his life, and still they were stained red with the blood of the dead and the dying. In the end, he saved the lives of the priest, a local justice, and ten others. So impressed was the priest that he pronounced Yssan a disciple of the faith. For this service, and some distinction in the general defence of the city, Yssan was awarded knighthood at age 22.

Trieste survived the war alongside Yssan. They have one child, a two-year-old daughter. They lost a baby boy during the war to disease and starvation. As a couple, the two are in many ways happy to be leaving Caer Cadren behind; it holds many painful memories for the both of them. Trieste has seen the people of her hometown raped and brutalized ten times over; Yssan has seen his friends die in robberies and battle alike. But they are both of them aware that Crossroad Keep will be a rougher life than even they are accustomed to.

And there you have him. I'm really excited to play this character; I intend to explore some profound themes with this guy. Here's a guy who is (I think) good at heart, he's trying to leave behind a life of petty (and not-petty) crime and take up his newfound calling as a priest...but of course he's going to find himself trapped. He probably knows too much to leave the underworld for good. There's also the question of whether or not he himself can give up the sword. There's this scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where Li Mu Bai (legendary warrior) has regained possession of the Green Destiny (suitably epic sword). He's practicing with it in a courtyard, and it is clear that the sword is an extension of his being, no matter how much he had intended to forsake it (and he *was* trying to at first). I think I found that moment more than a little inspirational for this character.

And, now that I'm invested in him, he's definitely going to die on some orc's lucky critical hit.

LOUD!

Something Fallout 3 did Wrong (12/30)

While riding my bike the other day, I was struck by this thought: Science Fiction is set when it is written...sort of. When we write speculatively, we're often writing about our present worries enlarged to the point where they threaten the girl/the world/humanity. And I was thinking about Fallout 3, which is sorta 1950s-style "retro" SF. And while Bethesda studios did a pretty good job capturing the aesthetic of that imagined future (with personal robots and atomic cars, etc.) I think they missed out on the social aspect of the 1950s. See, when people in the '50s imagined the future they could envision wondrous technologies...but they did not presage even an imminent social force like first wave feminism. Or for that matter much of the civil rights movement. I think it was William Gibson wrote that this "raygun gothic" style draws an eerie parallel to the striking architecture of the Nazis; a utopia for white man and white marble.

I was thinking that Fallout 3 is really more of a paean to that old futurism, presenting a lot of the flavour of 1950s society, but it misses a lot of the gender issues: opression, denial of female sexuality and independence...I'll give them the ghouls as an OK treatment of racism, but on sexism they dropped the ball. I was stammering my way through this to JAZ, who pointed out that no one really wants to be penalized for a choice like using a female avatar. And that's where I'm stuck, because I think that's pretty valid. I can't really condone a game that penalizes a character for being female, and yet if we don't...we're getting oddly revisionist about our history. And I don't think that the men who could conceive of free men on the moon but not free women on Earth should get off scott-free. I think the best solution I can imagine is if they could portray a struggle between the people desperately trying to preserve the remnants of prewar society (ie. The Brotherhood of Steel), and those who believe that you can't really separate the achievements and knowledge of a culture from its underlying values, which in this case seem quite probably sexist. That provides room for empowered females within the narrative of the game - PC and NPC - and introduces what I think is an interesting debate: whether it's better to rebuild on past success (note: the society whose heritage the BOS are preserving ALSO nuked itself to death), or blaze a new path. And it's not even too much at odds with existing faction goals, ie. those of The Enclave.

The only reason that I don't buy "well, maybe sex and gender are nonissues as of 2077 in the Fallout world?" is that it feels like a sort of developer fiat; "oh yeah: the rhetoric, clothing, hairstyles, personalities...they're all IRONICALLY retro, you see? The actual implicit sexism is totally gone!". Fallout wouldn't be Fallout without the 1950s aesthetic, and the 1950s aren't the 1950s if we overlook all of the things we did and thought incorrectly. I guess I'm just not a fan of the revisionism? I think Red Dead Redemption is an interesting counterexample, because they actually went ahead and put one strong female character into a man's world...and while her dialogue is occasionally a bit "nudge nudge, wink wink, I'm inventing suffrage" she works. If they had put a tough female gunslinger in her place (and there could be one in the game, I haven't finished it yet), it wouldn't have felt as authentic*. Bonnie McFarlane is a strong woman, but she's still a sorta-kinda believable historical character, which I think helps immersion.

*Revisionist Action Girl is kind of a played-out trope anyhow. If Rockstar got Gina Torres to do voice work for one, though, I'd be so down!

LOUD!

Bribe GM with Food (6/30)

We're almost at the end of theme week 1. I have no idea whatsoever as to the theme of week 2.

Tonight I'm going to cheat a little bit and write about games. And food. games and food. games with food! It's actually something I've been thinking about for a while, food (and other necessities) in gaming. At first blush, it's textbook simulationism, really: in real life you have to eat food or somehow get nutrients into your body or its game over. I was even going to say as much, but it struck me not too long ago that that's a very limited view. There's a lot of potential for narrativist use of food in gaming as well! I remember that in a D&D game run by Etarran, he described in elaborate detail this spiralling restaurant table, where the further in you went, the more you paid and the better you ate. And indeed some of the players ate there, but it was never "where are your characters going to eat tonight?" so much as "are you going to engage with the world?". Or I can imagine a very roleplaying heavy game in a medieval court, in which banquets (and doubtlessly poison) play a very important role, but for their social - rather than nutritional - aspect. And of course, one must remember that food is one of the easiest ways to bribe your GM to let you take that super-broken feat.

Some videogames that take the simulationist route with food are STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, The Sims 1-3, The Ship (I think?), and...the Oregon trail, I guess?. I guess food is also a healing item in STALKER, but you can and will get hungry and die of hunger if you're not careful in game. Maybe our generation was so traumatized by the Oregon trail that they decided never again to force a player to eat to survive in a game? I think perhaps that no one has thought of a compelling reason why food for food's sake would make a game more compelling. Think about it: Videogames tend to convey information by way of sight and sound. Sometimes touch if you have force-feedback. Food is taste, smell, and texture. There's essentially no overlap, unless you can figure out how to make an xbox controller rumble like you're holding a sandwich! STALKER doesn't even have an animation or sound effect for eating, and I think it's fairly obvious why: slowing the game down for food would likely be intolerable, even to a player hardcore enough to want to have to eat in a survival-horror game. There's just no possible REWARD for taking the time to eat. And don't give me this "but NOT DYING is your reward!" crap, either - that's the kind of game design philosophy that leads to quicktime events! Shooting a gun in a shooter is fun not because it helps you live when your enemies are dead; it's fun because there's visceral feedback. If you can't provide that, then go for some kind of intellectual fulfillment ("I outflanked/outwitted/outfought him! How daringly clever of me!"), but if neither is attainable, just leave it out. And that's what most game designers seem to have done.

Food as a nonessential stat boost shows up in a couple more places, like Bethesda RPGs, really. Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines if you think blood=food (also =mana in that game, hence why it's not in category 1). Or any RTS which has "food" as a resource. Alchemy is a pretty important part of Morrowind, and I realized once when I was crafting potions out of "kwarma eggs" and "saltrice" that I wasn't really brewing a potion so much as making fried rice! Remember when I was talking about rewards in games? A cooking/alchemy mechanic which rewards patience and study with stat boosts is a pretty good way to give players both intellectual and visceral pleasure from doing food-related things in a game. Especially if killing some enemies gives you ingredients ("woohooo! dog meat!"). There are two food-related quests in Mass Effect 2, which reward you with XP and ingratiate you with some minor characters/members of your crew. The food is entirely inconsequential by way of game mechanics, but having Shepherd bond with Dr. Chakwas over a bottle of brandy is one of my favourite moments in the game...and one of Shepherd's most human. As much as the whole "stat boosts" thing bothers me in a game like Fallout 3 (it's too lighthearted for the dire tone of the world, especially when you compare with something ACTUALLY dark *coughSTALKERcough*), I think that on the whole it's a reasonable compromise (I think Etarran may have even given characters some minor bonuses for eating at that cool restaurant, now that I think about it). The world seems all the more real for having food in it, but the player is rewarded for being engaged, rather than penalized for being negligent. On a final note, Team Fortress 2's Sandvich, Bonk!, Crit-a-cola, and Dalokhs bar are pretty much the embodiment of "food-as-stat boost", but they're weird in that they occur in an intentionally stylized gameworld where no one even NEEDED to ask "where's all the food?" in the first place.

Food as decoration or pure flavour is probably in a lot more games than I remember. Counter-Strike has a map with fruit-filled market stalls, there are watermelons in Half-Life 2 (and the Vortigaunt chefs from Black Mesa East! Squeeeee ^^!), You have to knife a watermelon in the tutorial for CoD4...I'm sure you've seen it. There are, after all, a lot of games that don't really need to include "sustenance" into their respective paradigms. It doesn't really add much to the run-and-gun shooter, after all. But there's sort of a trend toward treating more and more objects as "real" in a gameworld. Physics are all the rage now, but I can't imagine that's the be-all and end-all of it. It seems funny to think that every game might someday include an eating mechanic...but perhaps stranger still is the molecular-level simulation of matter that will let you shoot a gun with ultimate fidelity, set fire to whole forests, hurl boulders, run through grassy fields, watch the sunset over the ocean with the sand running over your fingers...but won't let you eat?

LOUD!

Theory of Parallel Evolution

I just finished Mass Effect 2. I think it's good enough that I'm going to try not to spoil it for you. Daydream Believer remembered that the last time I had played a Mass Effect game I had decried it as somewhat ineffective. And I still believe that, although the ability to import your character into the second game does add some value to the first title (it's worth something in narrative and gameplay terms, so some props to bioware are due).

Some of my problems with Mass Effect are still there, but some are gone. I expected to hate the removal of the inventory system - which I thought was a cop-out compared to fixing it - but you know what? It works. Shepherd started the last game wearing the worst armour...which is kinda dumb when it's the STANDARD ISSUE for human troops, and you find better armour lying around in space barrels. In RPGs where you start life as a nobody, your peasant burlap really would make sucky armour, and this is absolutely OK, but we're talking about the Executive Officer of Humanity's most advanced prototype space frigate here! Mass Effect 2 has "fewer" guns, but they feel more distinct. I think that if nothing else, this is a lesson RPGs might want to learn and learn well: a worn rusty shortsword is not actually all that different from a pitted dirk of the badgerlord if all you do with either of them is click-click-click stab-stab-stab anyhow. When you aquire a new weapon in Mass Effect 2 it seems at least to behave differently (ie. Semi-auto versus bolt-action sniper rifle*). Rather than fishing armour out of space barrels, Shepherd can now augment her (yes, her) armour with components that you can buy around the galaxy, but these are 5-10% bonuses to complement your playstyle and not entirely better bits of armour that space pirates have and the alliance navy doesn't. It works, and since there weren't any items in Mass Effect 1 besides armaments, you don't miss anything. Omni-Gel is gone and no one cares, and there's no healing and only resurrection of your party with Medi-Gel (which wasn't part of your inventory proper in ME1 anyway, and is tracked the same way in ME2). It brings the gameplay and narrative more in-line, and I for one like the consistency.

*Yeah, the guns have "thermal clips" instead of overheating like before. A necessary gameplay convention perhaps but probably they would not be loaded into and ejected from guns in quite the same fashion as present-day ammo. Also beef: why "clip"? Modern guns don't use clips, they use magazines**...and "thermal magazine" is probably more correct anyway. Or just "heatsink"

**The clip is specifically a "stripper clip" which is a metal strip into which the bullets fit at one end so they stay together and can be loaded into the weapon, which (I think) has a spring inside it to push them up. A magazine has the rounds stacked inside a box with a spring mechanism at the bottom to feed them into the gun. I think "thermal magazine" is more correct not necessarily because I think the weapons in Mass Effect 2 use anything quite analogous to either clips or magazines mechanically, but mostly because of the other meaning of "magazine" ie the place where you store ammo on a naval vessel. Semi-logically a "thermal magazine" is where you would keep all your heat?

Mass Effect 2 is not without problems, of course. I think Shepherd (especially male Shepherd whose voice actor sounds like he is being paid 10 cents the hour to dictate inter-office memos) is now one of the weakest characters in the cast. Frankly, it's because Shepherd is a blunt instrument whose power is heart; that's just not the interesting person to be when you live in the future. Yes, Shepherd had to be a soldier to set up the plot correctly, and yes fully-voiced dialogue means that you don't necessarily get to have as many options as you might in another RPG, and yes the target demographic of this game is probably frat boys who don't like pontsy RPGs with faeries...it's still irksome. Shepherd was not limited to being just a gun-wielding jarhead: she could be a tech expert or a biotic (read: telekinetic), or any hybrid of two of the three skillsets. In-fiction, Biotic abilities are rare in humans, so biotic Shepherd is not rank-and-file military, rather she'd be spec-ops - as might techie Shepherd. Yet still Shepherd's limited dialogue options make it hard not to sound like a knownothing. I sort of expect that if someone is at the vanguard of humanity, she should perhaps have recieved - you know - ANY prior education about the other species present in galactic politics. Techie Shepherd would presumably have risen up the ranks as an engineer of some kind, maybe aboard ships? She is definitely of a commissioned rank, and therefore presumably possesses some kind of military-sponsored degree? The few moments in Mass Effect 1 and 2 where Shepherd actually speaks or acts as though she knows more than I personally do are really actually quite satisfying. I don't expect the writers to do ALL the work for me, but it makes for a more interesting dialogue if both Shepherd and her conversational partner can be engaged in educating the player about the universe. Witness:

Shepherd: "Pilgrimmage? That's when young Quarians leave the flotilla and make their own way in the galaxy, right?"

Tali (a Quarian): "Not exactly. You see, we're not just out to see the worlds*** - we have to find something of value to the fleet and bring it back."

Shepherd: "I've also heard that the Pilgrimmage is related to your marriage customs. How does that work?"

Tali: Well, you have to understand that Quarians marry outside of their birth vessels to ensure genetic diversity. When we get married, we move to the vessel of our spouse - or they to ours. Of course, when a captain takes on a new passenger, he or she needs to be sure that they're useful, and committed to the well-being of the fleet"

*** Important pluralisation when your universe has more than one of these.

As compared to what happens in Mass Effect 1, where (as I recall) Shepherd basically asks questions as though she has only recently come to terms with what a Quarian is. I know that not every character I roleplay has to be intelligent to the point of genius. All I'm asking is that Shepherd talk a little more like she has actually lived in the universe she inhabits. To boot, Mass Effect 2 introduces a lot of sharp, intelligent characters...and it really makes Shepherd seem quite dull in comparison.

On the shooting front, I think they have their cover-shooter mechanics more or less done right. I think the regenerative health AND shields are maybe a bit much, and that Halo, for all its flaws, got it right with it's hybrid of resource-management health with a nice recharging bar of forgiveness overtop. Enemies can also have three layers of defense (barrier/shield, armour, health) and it's weird that you can't seem to have armour that can soak damage like they can. The powers from the first game are back, and they're useful enough. But since every character has fewer and certain defenses preclude the use of certain powers, it doesn't feel as though you have as many options in combat as before. I think the developers should have seriously considered ripping off BioShock's handling of a shooter with guns and magic powers, rather than keeping a holdover system from when they were making an RPG with guns rather than a shooter with exploration and dialogue.

Recently, I've heard that Dragon Age II will be getting "The Mass Effect" treatment in terms of dialogue and story; you'll be able to play only male/female versions of a single protagonist, you'll have the dialogue wheel that instead of giving you full-text responses lets you declare your character's intent (actually, as one Kotaku poster put it, borrowed from Alpha Protocol...)...and I don't think I'm happy. Even if I like Mass Effect, I don't think it makes for a very deep RPG. I do like the idea that action games can have a narrative and characters and not be just one linear path from start to end lined all the way with ablative meat...I REALLY DO! But taking an RPG and "advancing it" by 1) making it more like this franchise you already have and 2) eliminating the one actually nifty feature of your first game (the distinct origin stories for different character types)...seems like a bad idea. I think Mass Effect 2 is actually a perfect game for introducing people to PC RPGS if they tend to be first- or third-person shooter fans. I know I have had a lot of trouble getting into games like Morrowind from a cold start, because at some point I just want things to go boom. Games like ME2, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, and to an extent even Fallout 3 are good because they sort of bridge the gap: they have less all-the-time shooting and more character interaction, more world exploration...but they also have BOOM. I don't think Bioware needs two franchises to straddle the divide between action and RPG. On Kotaku, someone said that Mass Effect was "dragging the RPG into the 21st century", and I don't think I like that notion because it sort of expresses the ideal that games should be flashy and showy and cinematic but at the cost of depth and character and player choice. I don't like that. I think that Dragon Age could and should evolve, but not in this particular direction.

LOUD!

Look at you, Student; a pathetic creature of flesh and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my calculus course ...

I'm not entirely sure how one goes about integrating a math lesson into a first-person-shooter game, but it seems as though someone has. Naturally, of course, the reaction from some parents has been less than stellar. These luddites are ruffling my feathers. Bad.


Educational videogames are counted among my favourite memories from grade school. In fact, I defy you to find someone who grew up in my generation who does not have a deep and enduring love for Treasure Mountain/Mathstorm, Outnumbered!, Gizmos and Gadgets...heck, maybe even Reader Rabbit! These were games we played of our own volition, practically from the moment we learned how to use the school computers; games which managed to craft fun experiences with educational content. I think that it's perfectly reasonable for educational games to keep up with the times. That means they have to compete in terms of content and entertainment value with the games we buy off the shelves. I don't think they need bleeding edge graphics, but basically they should look and feel like something kids would take seriously as a video game first, and the educational experience should seek not to bludgeon the poor child, but to insinuate itself seamlessly into the normal course of gameplay. It's a bit like hiding spinach in food, I guess.


So on the matter of an educational first-person-shooter: FPS gameplay is popular, recognizable, and it's been in vogue since about 1993. FPS gameplay is relevant, and that's very important. If you make an educational FPS you're doing some novel things. One, you're allowing a skill that kids will likely have developed outside the classroom to be helpful inside the classroom. This means not only will kids understand your game from the get-go, it creates a two-way relationship: you want them to learn math, and you can offer them the chance to improve their FPS skillz at the same time. You are offering BOTH a long-term reward AND a short-term reward. I think it's a good answer to this supposed "problem" of the modern attention span. Instead of sticking to the bankrupt rhetoric of "well, kids should just suck it up and be bored at school because it's good for them!" you're saying that learning doesn't have to suck. If you've got reservations about the violent nature of shooters, check yourself: this educational shooter's main weapon is some kind of goo gun. For that matter, videogames feature avatars pointing guns at avatars. If you want something that actually teaches kids to point something at another kid and pull a trigger, how about you go on a crusade to ban super soakers, nerf guns, paintball and laser tag! I even think that shooters could use an injection of non-conventional arsenals. You don't need graphic headshots and real-time dismemberment - just give people a reward for good performance. Maybe you're playing capture the flag with guns that force your enemies to dance uncontrollably for three or five seconds? Or maybe you've got portal guns Aperture Science Hand-held Portal Devices and you have to get your opponents stuck in infinite loops or toss them off cliffs. If that's too violent for you I suppose you've been petitioning childrens' TV stations to stop showing road runner and coyote cartoons for the last thirty years, haven't you? Hey, why not something like Iain M. Banks' Lazy Guns that summon anvils or what-have-you above the target's head? In a cartoon world, that hardly stuns a guy! I think I've made my point, but essentially I think that the blithe equation of the shooter genre with gut-splattering violence is the same kind of irritating short-sightedness that makes commercial shooters so bland and samey!


I remember reading a book by Seymour Papert in which he discussed why the education system seems to be faltering, while kids spend more and more time captivated by videogames. His response (paraphrased) was more or less "Isn't it obvious? One of these things has grown and adapted to teach a child often complex concepts using multiple forms of stimuli as best as cutting-edge technology allows. One of them has not". In short, education is stuck at the book (printing press/movable type is 15th-century tech, for those keeping score), and this generation seems to demand something a little more their speed. Dare I say that rather than working so hard to ban iPhones in school that we should instead be proud to say "Trouble with calculus? There's an app for that."? Banning games like this educational shooter - which I intend to try and review at my earliest convenience - sets a terrible precedent. When you think about it, it isn't too different from some other topical issues in education: sex education and the intelligent design fiasco. In each of these cases you can see that one side is trying to supersede evidence (or in the case of educational videogames the chance to even gather evidence about their efficacy as learning tools) with ideology. Even though learning about safe sex is PROVEN to be an actual bulwark against unintended pregnancy and STIs, children should be taught abstinence-only education because it's wrong to even condone premarital sex. Even though evolution fits all the observed data, we should teach our children that there is "controversy" because some nutjobs are convinced that "5% of an eye isn't useful" = "YHWH designed the eyeball" (in case you've never heard of the light sensor and its uses, these guys are already wrong). Even though videogames offer us a way to fully harness technology to teach and engage, we can't use them to teach our children because learning isn't supposed to be fun. Or participatory. Or even vaguely remotely violent. OH REALLY?


Looking into the future, I even see a use for games not explicitly designed for educational purposes in learning. Unless you want to argue that education shouldn't keep up with current knowledge and culture, I fail to see how Dragon Age or Morrowind should not be analyzed when we look at the legacy of - say - Tolkien in high fantasy! Do we really understand our culture's concept of villainy if we don't analyse Bowser, SHODAN, and GlaDOS? The world didn't end in 1980, so why should education?


-Loud!

Munchkin-Fuu

As a DM (Dungeon Master, more generically GM or Game Master when discussing games which have a designated mediator but aren't D&D), I often find myself reflecting on the differences between roleplaying games and other narrative media. Specifically, the limits of what a storyteller can accomplish within each. The more I think about it now, though, I see that 'limits' might not be the right word. With sufficient care, almost any situation can be presented in each format. That is not to say, of course, that certain situations are not by FAR easier to accomplish within one frame than in another. For example: trapping/immobilizing/arresting the characters in a TV show, not necessarily all together at once? No problem. Try to run a game session with the whole party stuck in jail for the duration? You'd probably hope to encourage some in-character roleplaying, funny dialog, futile escape plans. In the case of a single character, you might hope to spark some introspection. Problem is, you're likely to get two or three hours of the Not-So-Great-Escape as the party tries every possible hare-brained scheme to extricate themselves from the clutches of the lord regent/police/league of evil.  This is, of course, because that in non-interactive media, the author has total control over the characters. If they need to stay imprisoned, then that happens. If they need to escape, that's easy, too. In a tabletop RPG, however, you're not the only one writing the story; you're sharing the responsibility with several other people...and one set of supremely callous entities of unimaginable power aka the dice. Dice are wonderful because they're sort of necessary to facilitate a player pretending to be something they're not. Without numbers mapped to actions, you need to be actually capable of great oratory in order to convince a non-player character to assist you, to calm a crowd, whatever. Without numbers mapped to actions you'd probably need to know real facts about weilding a sword in order to be an effective melee combattant. The dice also make the game unpredictable, which is a boon insofar as unpredictability creates tension. They also act as a check on the GMs authority over the world (although both Rule 0 and the mighty GM screen are what one might call "counterbalancing factors"*)

Apologies to people who play pen and paper RPGs and for whom this is really, really old news.

Etarran brought back from the holidays a box set of Samurai Champloo this year, and we've been watching it pretty avidly for the past week and a bit, and one of the things I've noticed about the dichotomy between this show in particular and gaming is a dichotomy in power level....well, sort of. In roleplaying game texts, game masters are often advised not to allow characters to begin the game with one skill at the very highest level of human potential (ie. the best at x that the character or anyone else has ever met). Legendary status is never to be granted lightly, and it is generally supposed to be a goal for character advancement. There's a very good reason for this: players need to be challenged by the game, which probably won't happen if they're the best swordsman ever. Unless the GM wants to inflate to comically great proportions the swordfighting skills of the average mook, combat just won't be very interesting, nor will it be very tense for a character at the very top of his or her profession. There are narrative and gameplay reasons. Now consider Samurai Champloo, where each Jin and Mugen are more or less the greatest warriors alive (so far as the audience can tell). The thrill of combat tends to be in the stylization, but hold up - where's the narrative tension if they're so unstoppable? It's all in the character flaws, of course: outside of their utter mastery of the sword, Jin and Mugen are both kinda fuckups in their own way. Even Jin - who is presented as serious, and presumably organized - manages to lose important travel documents. Mugen is compelled to pursue attractive women even though so far they have a 100% betrayal rate. Jin's personal code gets him into trouble, and so on. These are things that ideally players could be counted on to do: rather than take the careful route around the dungeon with 30-foot chicken-bearing trap detecting poles strapped to their shoulders, they would make their own misfortune. To certain types of gamer (and I am no exception), this is pretty counterintuitive: play nonoptimally? GET into trouble without a plan for getting back out? For that matter, are there any players who would - as Jin does in one episode of SC - willingly allow their character to get beaten up for a code of honour?

Sometimes this sort of thing can happen. In Dungeons and Dragons it is actually possible to play a character who would willingly die rather than cause harm to another individual (Vow of Peace and Vow of Nonviolence). In the Serenity RPG we played, Etarran was a psychotic wreck whose impulsive killing actually did cause the party (hilarious) trouble on many an occasion.

I think it should happen more often, though. I think that rather than suggesting a cap on how skillful and powerful a character can be in the world, games should encourage characters to take their flaws more seriously. The meticulous, gamist approach has more or less tactical value alone, and tends to generate enough distrust and perhaps animosity between GM and players that a lot of the potential is lost for characters like Jin and Mugen who make all of their own trouble. It isn't that these kinds of characters are never seen, but the expected state of affairs is that the GM's job is to make up the challenges, and to (within reason) shut down some of the players' more powerful abilities so that they have to think creatively to solve their problems. For example, disarming players is a (tricky) but effective way to make them scared, because weapons are incredibly central to characters in D&D. In Samurai Champloo, both Mugen and Jin are more or less as dangerous unarmed as they are with their swords (and not even much less lethal, one imagines). They are robust enough as not to be a sort of jenga tower of dependent chains of feats and magic items and spells, and yet have layers of vulnerability which make them interesting in the narrative, and indeed forces the writers to challenge them in ways which I would argue must be more creative than the kind of threats one is liable to face on a dungeon crawl.

* For the uninitiated: Rule 0 is that the Game Master is always right
the GM screen blocks the players view of what numbers the GM has rolled, which denies them information about the threats they face, and also allows the GM to fake dice rolls if he or she feels that the rolled result would have too negative an effect on the game. The existence of such power is a big part of the reason why a good game master is crucial to having a good game.

Loud!

PS. "Extra" U in title is intentional

Let that be your last playing field

Goodness knows I should know better than to make absolute statements, but I'm relatively sure that one is unlikely to make friends by, for example, tripping folk as they pass by you in the hallway. It's a bit of a cliché, but I'm equally certain that helping people, say, the ones who just got tripped by some douchebag, is a better bet if you want to endear yourself to them. So far, so obvious. Try helping someone in a game, though, and you'll presently find yourself knee deep in resentment. Those of you who have ever played a game will probably not find this hard to believe. Games are competitive in nature, and there's something about accomplishing a task all by yourself. On the flipside, gamers tolerate and encourage selfish action, and antagonism up and until the point of griefing. In short, games instill in us a certain objectivist ethic. Even if a game allows for non-adversarial interactions between players, they are never altruistic actions. You help other players in Munchkin for treasure and/or levels, you help other survivors in Left 4 Dead because a) if you don't they will be angry, and b) more people with more health means a greater chance of success. You help (trade with, generally) other players in Settlers of Catan because they tend to be helping you in return (I can also imagine unintentionally helping other players, but it would be a side effect of doing something beneficial for yourself).

To a certain extent, the taboo makes sense, even if I'm having fun by playing kingmaker in a game of Settlers of Catan that I'm losing, that's effectively griefing; I am denying the “rightful” winner his or her satisfaction because I resent their success. Personally, I think it might be interesting if the leading players had to make losing players the best offer to buy goodwill, thus making all players at the very least important to the endgame. It's not unprecedented for a weaker power to throw its chips in with whoever looks like a winner, or play mercenary. Either way it's not altruism, but what I'm trying to illustrate here is that games tend not to offer a trailing player much consolation. You're told to 'be a good sport' about losing, and I respect that, and in primarily skill-based games there's no great reason to reward those who haven't spent time learning the ropes. But in games whose outcome depends a great deal on luck (I'm looking at you, Munchkin), it really does stop being fun playing to win when you aren't going to.

Now, in the case that inspired this post, my housemates and I were playing a game of Humans! With our next-door neighbours, and I was not having a lot of luck. It really doesn't help that the game is balanced such that the odds are initially quite against your success, but I also had the worst character of any player at the table. To be fair, the worse characters need fewer points to win, but Etarran's had the same victory condition as mine with identical stats, except one of them was a single point higher. No, I'm really not sure where the devs were going with this. Another player at the table was spending his do-over chits on trying to break down a door, so I decided that I would play the instant-unlock card I had in my hand, basically because it would make something happen. His character would succeed, and perhaps his enjoyment of the game would increase. First, he himself refused to accept that I had played the card, and the whole table followed in agreement. It isn't right, I was told, to help one other player preferentially. It isn't proper, they said, to play cards for anyone's benefit but your own. Now, disregarding the letter/spirit of the law debate, the card did not say that it could only apply to me. Other cards did say “you do x”, but this one just said that I could place a “no barricade” token on the board. It did not say “you automatically succeed at breaching a door”, or whatever. I was not attempting to patronize this other player, I had very little agenda in mind. The game had frustrated me with its mechanic of requiring the player to succeed at three or four successive challenges, most with a success rate of 50% or below, and I guess a part of me felt like I would beat the game itself by making it just a little easier for one player to succeed. 

 

Sure, if I had been hindering everyone else's progress up until that point, it would be more than a little unfair to change tack so abruptly. But the game had not empowered me to do so, the cards I had weren't all that great. We were new to the game, we were playing slowly, and I didn't feel all that engaged because it would be my turn, I'd succeed in my attempt to convert humans into zombies, only to have another player arm the human and roll successfully to have them wound me and flee instead. So I wanted to have an effect on the game, and I wanted other players to have an effect on the game as well, rather than just sit pointlessly as our zombies got stuck in buildings and failed to consume yet another puny human. It didn't even feel particularly at odds with the concept of the game; after all, the point of the game was to zombify humanity, and I think part of the fun comes not from being the one to amass enough points doing so, but to cackle wildly at the puny humans' demise. Why not help it along?

This is rapidly turning into a long-form defense of my actions, but I was honestly a little annoyed by just how negative a reaction I got. At very worst it was a sign that the game had sort of lost my interest and that I might be interested in doing something new (true), but I don't believe it was so antagonistic towards the other players as to warrant a stern talking-to about how games are supposed to be about beating your friends at something. I accept that someone would not want my help, and that's legitimate, but I'm not sure I'm ok with how we define someone who is trying to have their own fun with the hand he or she was dealt some kind of “sore loser”. Maybe, just maybe, we're trying to make the game fun for us, too.

-Loud!

PS. Possible expansion on this topic later.

"I don't want to set the world on fire..."

A day or so before Fallout 3 was released, I took a gander at the copy of the game manual that STEAM provided. It was part of my vetting process, along with watching and re-watching the five gameplay videos, as I decided whether or not I would make a purchase in the end. The introduction to the manual proposes that we find the idea of a nuclear aftermath compelling because history has no analogous situation for us to reflect on. I think that while this may be so, the real reason that we find stories set in the armageddon's aftermath is easy to discern when you observe who the characters are...or rather, what they are: Human (or something like it). With the exception of something like On the Beach, the moment you see a human form wandering the irradiated wastelands you know that no matter how terrifying you find the idea of a nuclear holocaust there is, at least in this fictional universe, hope for the future of our kind. Self-evident in the term “post-apocalypse” is the concept of something after The End of all Things. It's not a perfect analogue to “afterlife” - more like “afterdeath” but we could take that to mean the same thing anyway - nevertheless the idea behind both terms is the same: they exist to comfort us with the hope that after we, and others pass on (whether one by one or en masse), there will be something, more accurately someone to carry on thereafter.

As you have probably surmised by now, I am now a proud Fallout 3 owner. I have yet to finish the game, but I decided to offer a compilation of my first, second, and third impressions (in plain terms, I've played I would guess about 10 hours of the game so far. The time counter seems to be bugged here under Linux, but I will edit this post with the exact information sometime later today EDIT: Steam's time counter is messed up in Windows as well. Fortunately the game keeps count and tells me that as of the time I was writing this my playtime was 15:14:08). I'm not a huge consumer of post-apocalyptic fiction, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for the stuff. I have not played either Fallout 1, nor Fallout 2. I think this is a valuable perspective to have when considering a game, as are those of a diehard Fallout fan, and a Mad-Max junkie as well. What I want to address is whether or not Fallout 3 is a good game on its own merits.

The narrative structure of the initial character creation phase (which begins with your birth) is very linear, but also very compelling. I don't want to give away the details, but suffice it to say Bethesda did a very clever job of integrating character creation into the setting, and into the game. From almost the get-go, you can be a sappy, golly-gee-whiz good guy, or a right prick to everyone. There are about three options for any dialogue (sound familiar, anyone?), with the moderate response representing a range from neutral-good to lawful neutral (in D&D terms). While it is nice to have a legitimate alternative to ridiculous altruism (for reference, my play style tends to be “I'll be really nice about doing stuff for you, but I'm not going to say no to payment. Energy cells for my Laser pistol don't grow on trees, dammit!), I think that the game could stand to alter your options as you establish a character to give the player a greater range of options from his or her chosen moral stance. Even while playing a very-good “Ranger of the Wastes”, I still have the option in many dialogues to say what amounts to “time to die, punk!”. While this does help if you like to play schizophrenic characters (see previous posts on gaming), I'm not sure if it helps most gamers. The way I hear it, a lot of gamers tend to play through once as the good guy (to complete the game), and then once they're sick to death of getting missions from every NPC from here to Beijing, they roll up the good 'ol Hitler-Skeletor hybrid and CRUSH THE PUNY PLEBES WHERE THEY STAND. So the utility of an evil response for a player who is being good (or vice versa) isn't really apparent. They could at least replace it with something more polite that wouldn't cost you Karma if slaying someone could be justified, ie. “I am forced to purge the wasteland of your malevolence forever!”. I think that such an approach wouldn't require rewriting much dialogue, and it would be helpful to players who want to feel very heroic when they declare that it is time for a villainous cretin to MEET HIS TIMELY END.

So, once you leave the vault (again, play the game if you want story/details), the game opens up and presents you with a substantial map, your first main quest goal, and a whole lot of autonomy. Sure you can go to the nearby town to make some inquieries, but you don't really have to. I suppose it would be a little hard for a character using primarily ranged weapons to forego the first opportunity to stock up on ammunition, but I digress. Like its sibling Oblivion, Fallout 3 has fast-travel, but with the caveat that you must first “discover” a destination by hoofing it there. I find this an ideal balance, because it makes questing quite painless without removing the need for exploration. It's also awesome when you're low on health, although this is a mixed blessing. It seems that your fast-travelling and even naps in potentially-hostile territory aren't ever interrupted by baddies along the way. While this will prevent a lot of irritating deaths for characters who are low on stimpacks and various irradiated foods, it makes the world feel less dangerous than it should, in a way. If I sleep in the ramshackle base of some bandits I just killed, I almost expect to be dragged awake by some punk or super mutant who wants to bag my carcass. It could be that this is a feature of higher difficulties (I am on the default in this game, I will report back with further information when I have it), but reserving an immersive feature from the default experience of the game I would find a questionable design choice.

If you've seen any reviews of Fallout 3 thus far, you've probably heard two constants: 1) V.A.T.S. Is the S.H.I.T., and there are some animation/AI glitches. Both are true. The Vaultec-Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) is not only the coolest, but the most excellent solution I have ever seen to the whole stats-versus-twitch accuracy problem in RPG shooters. Too much reliance on stats will make good shooter players feel like something isn't right in the engine as their perfectly-aimed shots fly wide due to behind the scenes dice rolls, and too much reliance on a player's FPS sk1llz will alienate less-dextrous folk who want to roleplay a straight-shootin' badass. Fallout 3 in its real-time mode is a little too stat-based for my tastes, I think (although it could just be that my utterly wrecked post-apocalyptic 10mm sidearm or laser pistol isn't all that precise). V.A.T.S. Does two important things: it pauses the game, and it tells you what % chance you have of hitting your intended body part/ target (you can shoot their weapon, if you like, and once you deal it enough damage it flies out of their hands!). You queue up attacks based on your Action Points (AP), which regenerate at a decent pace in real-time combat. Once you've set up all your attacks, you tap the use key, and watch as they are carried out in slow-motion from the obligatory DRAMATIC CAMERA ANGLES. While the game occasionally shows you a nonsensical view for watching what you just did (ie, missed), it's pretty awesome about letting you see just how incredibly dead you shot that guy when you score that critical hit. Squeamish? DO NOT PLAY FALLOUT 3. I must confess that I'm one of those weird dudes who takes it kind of personally when things (even AI-controlled ones) are trying to kill me in games, so it's pretty incredibly gratifying to watch in slow-mo as they are blasted asunder (often literally so) by my laser beams, bullets, or whatever. I've just taken the “Bloody Mess” perk at level 8 which increases the intensity of carnage you cause (AND grants you +5% damage with EVERYTHING), so I'll report back on just how brutal it gets. As for the AI and animation glitches, I'm hoping that Bethesda can patch these, as it tends to detract from immersion when that badass super mutant with the chaingun can't or won't turn to face you when you strafe him, allowing you to blast him repeatedly without reprisal, or when characters try to walk into walls before the game helpfully shunts them free of the obstacle. For a company that brags about having the most lifelike AI engine out there, they have a bit of 'splainin' to do.

There is a lot more that I want to say about Fallout 3, but since I really have to get some sleep or risk dozing through morning class will leave for tomorrow or a final review. If you want a recommendation, it's a qualified yes. It's a pretty fantastic experience so far, but if you've got a problem with contemporary RPGs, it won't change your mind. Despite its unique flavour and setting, there's something about the way Fallout 3 feels that makes it not so different from, say, Mass Effect. The dialogue is less cinematic, the combat moreso, and Fallout is on the whole better-executed, but pausable combat? The same “Yes-Maybe-No” dialogue options? Excruciatingly pretty graphics? A less-than-stellar inventory management system as a console-ation to those people playing with an utterly WRONG input device (although at least Fallout 3 doesn't force you to reduce surplus stock into useless omni-gel, and it organizes your items alphabetically)? It's all there! This isn't so much to say that Fallout 3 = a better Mass Effect*, so much as to impress upon people that you're still a glorified errand boy or girl (or mass murderer[ess], if that's how you roll) with some real kickass toys and a whole lot of terrain to explore. The wheel remains steadfastly un-re-invented (while this particular phrasing of the old idiom is clunky to be sure, keep the idea in mind, it will be relevant to an impending post when I tackle some non-videogame-related material. Stay tuned!)

-LOUD!

*although it's definitely true that Fallout 3 is just better than Mass Effect.

Far Cry 2: (if) Anything Goes (wrong with SecuROM, you're fucked)

Today's title is a not-so-clever play upon the title of one in a series of trailers for the inexplicably-named Far Cry 2. Inexplicably named?, you wonder, whatever could he mean? Put simply, Far Cry 2 has, besides being a shooter which takes place mostly out of doors with fairly remarkable human AI and semi-realistic weapon handling dynamics, nothing to do with Far Cry. Neither the game engine, nor the development team itself are constant between games. The closest analogue to the situation that exists with Far Cry, Far Cry 2, and Crysis was that of the Age of Empires series compared to the first Empire Earth. The latter was the far more audacious brainchild of original AoE developer Bruce Shelley, who split with Ensemble studios, whose plan for Age of Empires 2 was simply more of the same. Crysis in relation to Far Cry is very much like AoE 2 versus 1. Certainly some aspects of the design have been improved, but along the way the developers seemed to lose sight of what we all found so charming in the original. Where Crysis is essentially a punishing benchmark for the PC hardware elite, it looked to me as though FC2 was shaping up to be a little more innovative, a little less stale. I was (the operative word) looking forward to the ability to roam 50-odd square kilometers of map at my leisure, to experimenting with different approaches to combat, and to interacting with the various in-game factions.

Well, what really separates Far Cry from its successor in my mind is that I cannot, in good conscience, buy FC2. Even on Steam it is saddled with a 3-computer 5-time semi-refundable secuROM-based DRM solution. Let's break this down, shall we? Even if I buy the game on a platform with tough, integrated DRM, a platform that requires me to be connected to the internet, a platform that knows my name, a platform that TRACKS MY GAME-PLAYING HABITS...UbiSoft still doesn't think their IP is safe enough. For the record, if I'm going to go into the kind of trouble it must take to crack a Steam game, do they really think I'll stop there? SecuROM, like every other kind of DRM, has attracted the usual posse of gamer-hackers and pirate-hackers who for reasons ranging from legitimate (secuROM is notorious for butchering system performance and flat-out not working, or so I hear) to the morally ambiguous (they do it for the lulz) to the nefarious (read: piratical). So, what they are asking me to do is to potentially devalue the money I spent on the kind of kick-ass hardware one uses to play current games by chaining me to a stupid activation system that doesn't seem to offer any more practical security than Steam already does (you know, locks and honest folk and that...). Oh, but it DOES limit how much I can use their game. To me, this represents the height of irony. Game developers are going out of their way to create the potential for what they call “emergent gameplay”, they are trying to give the player more control over the interactive experience. At the same time, game publishers are working round-the-clock to limit the number of times you can install the games that YOU pay to use with YOUR money, and piracy continues unabated. In fact, piracy was marketed as ACTIVISM when Spore was released with unreasonable activation limits. “Make Spore the most pirated game in history,” was the rallying cry “show EA that this DRM shit does not fly with gamers”. I didn't pirate Spore, though. I can't say that after seeing gameplay past the cell stage that I really felt I even wanted to play it. Everywhere you see people variously toasting and lamenting the so-called decline of the PC as a platform for games. Everywhere you see developers blaming piracy, but I don't think for a moment that we should be so naïve. Games are getting bigger, prettier, louder....but shorter and costlier, in general. This has been a recognized pattern long before people started whining about piracy as they have in recent months. If you read the newsposts on Penny Arcade (I only read it for the articles, I swear!), you'll see that Tycho always says the same thing about PC gaming: people – not counting the small but vocal minority of hardware aficionados, ie. Yours truly – just want to play. They don't want to worry about the kind of issues that will necessarily cause problems on a platform so variable and diverse as the PC. Consoles are cheap, their games tend to sell better than PC titles, and for the most part they are idiot-proof. While the move towards hard drives and firmware updates and downloadable content may complicate the gaming console experience, I doubt that the “insert disc and play” functionality is going to go anywhere. Well, at least until game cartriges make their inevitable return to prominence, but even so maintenance will still be as simple as “blow on the contacts”. Truly, what would make the most sense for people who want a thriving market for games with the kind of complexity and indie content that only PC gaming can provide as present, the 90% of gamers who don't have a hard-on for their hardware should just buy Macs, thereby creating enough of a market to make development worthwhile. Macs, with their (generally) standardized hardware, could then move into direct competition with gaming consoles, and proceed to beat the stuffing right out of them. The power of Steve Jobs to make relatively unremarkable products look like Yaweh's own gadget collection, combined with the kind of market share that would allow Apple to exert serious power over hardware manufacturers (hell, they somehow have Intel half in their pocket already!) would combine to form a super-gaming entity that could somehow convince consumers to pay three times as much for a piece of hardware with identical capabilities and upgrade options to a gaming console. Of course, Apple's record of having pretty strict control over media (the plan not to allow third-party iPhone apps, anyone) might antagonize indie developers for a while, I think that the larger problem would be in the long term. The few of us who love to tinker with hardware would just suck it up and hack MacOS onto a gaming PC...but the supply of hardware would eventually dry up. The mac platform would, due to its homogeneous nature, be a potential coup for DRM, which could be encoded into ALL HARDWARE.

Where I'm going with this is that PC gaming would have to sacrifice the strengths of our platform in order to achieve mainstream success. It would lead to a momentary renaissance of gaming, but we would be effectively signing away our last vestiges of control over digital content in the process. The other extreme is the abandonment of DRM, making the PC attractive as a platform through an unofficial “try-before-you-buy” culture (for the honest folk, at least). The lifting of DRM restrictions would create a lot of good will in gamers, and it might even lead to a momentary jump in sales...but big-budget games would inevitably disappear from PC, which would become a sort of starting point for would-be game developers, releasing freeware and shareware content in a bid to land spots at a major label.

The reason I'm not going to buy Far Cry 2 is because I am following the third path, which I believe has the potential to lead us toward victory in our fight to remain a viable, free environment for gaming. Of course, it is marked as a “top seller” on Steam, so the fight may already be lost, but I object to the DRM enough that this won't change my decision. If gamers don't buy games that come with unreasonable terms of use (ie. The retail version of Bioshock at launch), game companies WON'T MAKE MONEY. When they decide to treat their customers like vermin. Pirating games may feel good, but it's not the answer. I contemplated buying FC2 and then pirating a version with the DRM removed, but UbiSoft would only see my money if I did that. They would not see the gamer, fighting to preserve his favourite hobby by any means necessary. They would only learn that they can get away with bullying us, and everyone who went to school knows that if you don't let the bully use you for his or her personal entertainment, if you refuse to react to their provocations, they will (hopefully) stop trying. If you continue to react, they'll only come back more and more often.

So if you're listening UbiSoft, you just LOST A SALE of Far Cry 2. I sincerely hope it's not the only one you lose.

In the interests of striking an emotional balance in this post, I shall now shift gears entirely.

To be succinct, I've got love on my mind. Stop. Did you click the link before continuing? If not, open it in a new tab and keep going. It is thematically consistent with what I am going to say, and it will also make the experience of reading this blog 100% more FUNKY.

DDR players who own Supernova 2 are excused now, although they're likely to have reached for their dance mat upon hearing the first strains of music after clicking the link.

Now that we're all groovin', I can continue. This thanksgiving marked for me an entire year of being single, possibly barring an incredibly mishandled affair around the holidays. You know who you are and in retrospect I'm really really really sorry, even though I'm pretty sure you're not holding a grudge. One year of being single has taught me that, well, I don't really like being single. It has also taught me that I don't hate being single either. If I were surrounded by happy relationships, or incredible-yet-too-intimidating prospects, I think I might be a wreck, but neither is the case. Being single is totally stable, and relatively functional. The impending visit of my Ex-girlfriend does, however, have me in a bit of a rush. I'd love to have a date for next weekend, not only for purposes of escaping the house, but as a show of strength, a defensive maneuver of sorts. Unfortunately, dating someone for those reasons is a violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative – the long way of saying I am uncomfortable with using people. Relationships being organic as they are develop at uncertain rates, and with a week's notice I really don't have the highest of hopes. It's not as though I haven't been considering the issue since much earlier in the year, it's that I have yet to really find an individual of the female persuasion with whom I have the right kind of rapport, ie. The kind I can talk to naturally, without watching my words to make sure I'm not geeking out too hard. As you probably know, this would already be PRETTY RARE even if I wasn't beset with a terminal case of shy.

So boo-hoo, I don't really talk to girls. At least I don't pop my collars.

What I have at the moment are prospects, but nothing more. In each case there are too many unknowns to allow for a solid plan. Missing first year university here has been academically painless (although I think I'd be better off having taken FYP, that's another story), but it has the unfortunate side effect of alienating me from the social dynamics which have sprung up. All I know is that if people like my housemates they tend to be ok with me. This would be awesome if girls visited this place more than once or twice in EVER. The only other constant that I have become aware of is that if I meet someone at Dal, chances are it turns out they're a King's student anyhow. Some have voiced an opinion to the effect that this just goes to show that I attend the wrong school. I guess at least that when I meet girls at Dal my housemates will invariably know something about her.

Fifty bucks says that no matter who she is, it's always:

“Oh, her. She's dating a guy in my tutorial”

(or something to this effect)

• Loud!

PS. My heartache is over and indeed I can live without you.

PPS. Have you listened to Holy Fuck? That shit is bangin'!

PPPS. Maybe I should just take the hint* and get a haircut?

*assumption that there was a hint to be had? ASSUMED!

I search for traps!

Yesterday, I got over a minor hurdle. Nothing life-changing but hey, this is a blog; trivial stuff like this is pretty much the name of the game (however much I have tried to avoid it, for the most part). So, what did I do? I GM-ed a one-shot RPG. For the (likely few, but you never know) confused members of the audience, no I did not destroy an American-made car with ex-Soviet antitank weaponry, or anything like that. People who know what I'm talking about just skip the rest of this paragraph to save time. GM = Game Master, a more generic term for the Dungeon Master of Dungeons and Dragons fame/infamy. Effectively the narrator and puppetmaster of all characters not directly controlled by the players, the GM is tasked with turning graph paper and polyhedral dice into interactive fiction. In this case, however, the game was a lot faster and looser than I have described thus far. This is where “one-shot” comes in; a one-shot Role Playing Game (RPG) is the tabletop gaming equivalent of a one-night stand. A one-shot RPG is spur-of-the-moment, it is not a bastion of great originality, and well, ok so you don't usually wake up in bed with a stranger when you play one-shot RPGs, but you get the idea: they're fast, fun, then over & done.

I had refrained from GM-ing a campaign in the past for the simple reason that I wasn't sure I would be any good at it. Pen and paper games are vastly open-ended compared to their computerized brethren, and the GM needs to be able to keep up with as many options as he or she is giving his or her players – nominally lots. The GM has to improvise dialogue, make up setting information if the players ask unanticipated questions (or make up everything if you're doing what we did and built a world as we went). This requires a skillset probably not all that different from improvisational theatre, and goodness knows I am not known for a strong acting aptitude! I lack the inclination to play characters, on stage or in life, and hence I see myself as having something of a limited dramatic range – a serious boon for a GM. Yesterday, though, I decided that I'd take the plunge and see what happened.

Turns out that fun happened. It wasn't perfect, but I was constrained by both a time limit, and by my choice of roleplaying system. A perennial favourite of ours for one-shot campaigns is Risus, a simple humour-focused game in which characters are built entirely of cliches. While simple to the point of elegance, Risus is in need of a more interesting action resolution system. I'm always sort of dissatisfied with the “roll dice to accomplish an action” model for RPGs, because you'll take your freshly-created badass into the game, and you'll miss. You'll fail to knock down the odd door, you'll fall down a flight of slippery stairs...sure you may be a wimpy level one, but who wants to go into a campaign with that kind of mindset about a character? No, you're a fucking monster badass space-ranger, no matter what the rulebook says! This is where I like the (also flawed) Wushu model, called the Principle of Narrative Truth (PoNT). What the players say happened happened just like they said. Of course, certain things are not allowed (players and the GM all have veto power in case a player gets out of line), but what the dice tell you is never “you fell on your ass lol”, but instead just how much closer to solving the conflict at hand based on your actions. So you can do epic flying leap-cuts to dice your foes, or make that ridiculously improbable death sta—I mean generic space battlestation trench run without fear of getting impaled on your own sword or proton torpedoes when you roll a 1. What CAN happen if you “fail” the roll are complications. Sure you chopped those demons to bits, but now the bits are all scurrying after you, each having formed into a miniature-scale demon of its own. Maybe that exhaust port was a red herring? Maybe that battlestation blows up, and you're face to face with an imperial battlefleet? But no matter what you roll, your character is still a proper badass. If and when I do run further one-shot campaigns, I believe I will likely employ the PoNT/ Veto system for narration, with a corresponding rewrite of the dice results table. If you're wondering why I wouldn't just go whole-hog and use Wushu, it's because the number of dice you roll under said rules is based on how much detail you describe in your actions, leading to gameplay slower than retarded glaciers. That being said, detail will be encouraged in any system using the PoNT, but mechanically rewarding excessive detail with invincibility...not so cool.

If you're wondering, the game we played involved a pair of rebels attempting to overthrow a pan-galactic hybrid of monarchy and anarchy using a stolen prototype stealth ship and an awful lot of advanced nanotechnology. Player characters included a sociopathic deposed nobleman, a psychopathic mad scientist, and later a wandering space minstrel (who entered too close to the end of the session/game to be leveraged for anything sufficiently awesome, but that's just another thing to improve upon next time).

The moral of the story is, sometimes you should just do stuff and you won't suck at it. Really!

-Loud!

Tragic Post-Script: Even though you're never supposed to continue a one-shot campaign, I now have all kinds of sweet ideas for where the narrative could have gone!

EDIT: There is another reason why I prefer Wushu's method to that of Risus which I forgot to cover in the original post. Determining the difficulty of an action where the dice separate success and failure feels too abstract to me. An easy action for one character could prove very difficult to another based on skillset, personality, etc. The issue is, those variables are supposed to be encoded in the characters themselves, leaving the poor GM to figure out an objective difficulty of an action, which is absolutely fine in a prepared campaign, but a little much when I have to keep the action moving and make up the world simultaneously. Rolling degrees of success streamlines the process, although I'm not certain we're out of the woods yet. The thing about Risus is that it's very likely someone will have a particular attribute which they can only roll one die. Primary attributes tend to be more like 4 dice. Since 5 is the target number in basic Risus for an easy action, you can see that one die isn't really all that useful. In the same way, no matter how cool an action the player concocts based on the little trait that could, it's not going to get them very far when they can only roll as high as 6 on a scale that goes up to about 30 (5 dice in an attribute is not generally given to starting heroes, but it will happen eventually). Perhaps one-die traits could be treated as drawbacks, with 2, or even 3 dice representing the proficiency of an average individual. 3-18 on a scale of 1-30 is about perfect for most actions, with the most common rolls being 10 and 11. Certainly, this system would allow for somewhat less variety in character proficiency, but the idea of a one-shot campaign is to have fun. Any game that can be sabotaged by a round of bad luck (I'm looking at you, Munchkin) is too much of a risk to justify the time investment when you're looking for a quick laugh and a silly narrative in which you stomp all kinds of intergalactic ass with your massive laser space boots.

Mass(ively) (In)Effect(ive)

Last month I played Bioware's flawed-but-cool Sci-Fi/Roleplaying epic Mass Effect, and I cannot say that I didn't enjoy the experience. However, as with essentially any game, the longer I spent thinking about, the more potential improvements (both for the game itself and for games in general) came to mind. A great many of these ideas are likely infeasible with present game technology, and as a non-programmer (until such a time as I decide that I have the time and ambition to learn), it's likely that I don't know the half of it. What I do know is that there are some ostensibly easy ways that general gameplay could be improved in a lot of titles. I am certain that there are a lot of ways that this could be done, in fact, but for the sake of brevity and focus I will here discuss the one that I have given the most thought since playing Mass Effect: in-game dialogue.

Dialogue hasn't come very far in games, really. Even in terms of the writing, I expect you'll find legions of Lucasarts fans to tell you that games ain't written like they used to be, citing the Monkey Island franchise and so forth (sheepish admission: all the Monkey Island games are still on my “to-play” list). In any given modern title with interactive dialogue (we'll leave out the Sims for now, but it will make an appearance), the player gets to chose from a set number of pre-worded responses. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R, there tends to be about one option, except for the odd occasion where you can chose whether or not to give a dude a medkit, or whether or not to accept a quest. In games with actual choices, the dialogue options tend to be as follows:

NPC: “I have lost my, um, glasses...in that, um, dungeo—I mean, my basement which happens to have a...er...slight....goblin....problem.”

YOUR OPTIONS:

A)“Good sir, I will be happy to purge your basement of those foul beasts and recover your spectacles. Also, may I shine your shoes?”

B)“Uh, sure. I guess I could do that. Depending on the amount of work done I might or might not accept some recompense”

C)“Seriously, what the fuck kind of peasant farmer is enough of a tool to let GOBLINS stage a coup of his basement?!?!? NO. If you want your glasses so damn much, just park your heavy ass on the door until the goblins (or you) starve to death!”

Which can really be boiled down to an unequivocal “yes”, a conditional or apprehensive “yes”, or a rather petulant “no”. In terms of non yes-or-no conversations, the general pattern of chosing to sound optimistic and altruistic to the point of naïvité, like a rational but otherwise boring human being, or an incredible misanthrope holds. There tend not to be dialogue options along the lines of “wait, how the hell did you get a basement-dungeon under your farmhouse?*” “what in hell do the orcs/goblins/whatever think is so valuable down there?*” “why is everything in this universe pre-fab, and why is it mostly interstellar camper vans and bunkers?**”. Mass Effect actually fixes one huge problem with this system, which is that you don't have to read every single word that your character is about to say. Instead, you choose from a set of short phrases which encapsulate the spirit of what you are about to hear. In many ways this is joyous on a first play-through, as you have all kinds of fun when you click on “you can't take me” and discover gems like “you won't look so smug with a hole in your head” in the dialogue (notable: “you can't bludgeon your way through bureaucracy” “I can bludgeon pretty hard”). Still, some problems, such as the ability to have the same exchange occur twice if you accidentally click before you mean to, persist. While it's nice to have the option to re-listen to something you missed, accidental invocations of this “feature” really do tend to break immersion. Especially frustrating is when a conversation loops when you expect there to be more to say on a topic, but there is not. I would propose a dedicated “replay” button be placed somewhere else in the user interface in case the player misses something, such that conversations could all play out in a non-repeating fashion.

Another problem I have with in-game conversations is that you are forced to choose from available wording, which tends to limit the scope of characters you can play in a game, unless you count various gradations of schizophrenics and/or bipolar characters. While socially-challenged characters probably fit more with the incredibly violent, gamist style of the munchkin, it's no consolation to those people who want to be able to create a character defined by more than one of two ideological extremes. I played Mass Effect in conjunction with a cousin who wanted to play renegade, and the result was a character who would chose to grant life or death arbitrarily, and inconsistently. The alternative to alternating between extremes would have granted us no points in either direction, thereby removing any sort of feedback from the Paragon/Renegade system. The limitations of a purely good-evil ranking system are akin to that of the linear political spectrum, which cannot really denote positions such as libertarianism, or anarcho-socialism because it does not accept the possibility of non-tyrannical government systems outside the centrist mainstream. A multi-axis moral rating system would provide a more fully realized expression of character, and also hopefully remove from the game the possibility of a dialogue option or decision that does not in some way help to define the character. At its most basic, the game could offer dialogue responses and morality ratings based loosely upon the alignments of Dungeons and Dragons. One axis could be a measure of good-evil, and the other a measure of lawfulness. On this chart could be found all the D&D alignments, but also any various gradation thereof. One could roleplay an ostensibly upstanding Lawful Good warrior or paladin who has a singular, crippling vice (illicit gambling, we'll say), or perhaps a nominally Chaotic Lord of Destruction who just cannot help but abide by the city building codes when creating his or her den of ultimate nefariousness. I dunno if these are the most plausible of characters, but I would appreciate the greater variety in dialogue options that would accompany this sort of system.

*These first two things I would have loved to ask the farmers in Dungeon Siege

** This is a question I want to ask the developers of Mass Effect.

Taking the problem of limited responses, and applying a different sort of thinking, I arrived at another response: bring back the text parsers that adventure games used to use. Let the player write whatever they please, and respond based on key words. Of course, this doesn't really increase the number of possible conversations available in game if the responses are still sorted by whether you put a “yes”, a “maybe”, or a “no” in your answer (and there is only one reply to each of those three answers), but supposing the parser looks for more than just one or two or three keywords, and responses are pieced together from a number of optional snippets, depending on whether the player used correct grammar/spelling, or based upon the politeness of their language (harder to do, but the idea is to add functionality and depth that was not present before)? I'm not exactly sure how well computers can be said to extract meaning from written text (I believe the answer is still “not very well”), but the system I propose does not have to be perfect. It just has to be better (even just incrementally), it has to offer more freedom to the player, and it should offer a greater range of potential characters to the gamer. If you want a best guess on the mechanics of such a system, I guess you could make up huge lists of words which sort them based on what they say about the speaker's intent (ie.”Beseech” is more formal and respectful than say, “ask for”). It would be ridiculously hard to get irony to work in any case, and I don't really see a way around that. For bonus points, though, include a speech-to-text converter in the game code so a player can talk to the game. While early implementations would be primitive at best, I think the very experience of talking to a character in a game and having him or her respond to your words in any way at all would be a revolutionary experience for gamers. Well, ok; it would only be a positive experience if there was a useful correlation between what the gamer said and how the NPC(s) responded, but I guess it's kind of assumed that such a feature would be extensively beta-tested before it was allowed onto the market?

There is one more problem that is not quite resolved, even if a greater granularity of roleplaying options is introduced to a game: non-violent problem solving, particularly but not exclusively in Mass Effect can generally be accomplished by dumping points into the “Charm” bar. My cousin and I went the route of intimidation, which offers what can only loosely be called “nonviolent” solutions, because when you don't fight someone, it's because you've made them too afraid to engage you in combat. I digress; basically all one must do to solve a problem without violence (where it is possible, and it isn't always – a good thing) is poke the blue conversation option. PRESTO! Supposing your charm stat is high enough to use the response, the would-be adversary presumably sees the light of reason and backs down (I'm guessing, based on the success of every intimidate line my cousin and I used...). While all gaming is pushing buttons, it seems a little sad that while the combat sections of the game seem to be of escalating difficulty (the insta-kill-everyone-and-everything gun on the Mako makes it hard to tell in the vehicle sections), I can only remember one occasion on which there was some information that we would have had to gather in order to persuade a character to do a certain something. For that matter, it could have been that we hadn't enough persuasion points to do it, I'm not sure. It seems to me that in a game such as Mass Effect - where there has clearly been a great investiture of time and thought into composing the backstory – the developers could have made learning the lore and politics of Citadel space*** more a part of the game than simply flavour. A great many of the conversations you can have with aliens involves asking about their culture, biology, place in galactic society, and so on...and yet a) you'd expect the captain of humanity's flagship to know something about the aliens he or she is liable to be dealing with, no? And b) you're never challenged – as far as I recall – to put the knowledge you acquire to use. You don't have to consider what you would say to, for example, a Turian**** to motivate him. Actually, when you DO have to motivate a Turian in-game, it's an entirely accessible problem, and he responds to you as a warrior. You don't have to understand his culture to solve the problem, and on the part of Bioware that's pretty fuckin' lazy. A game should respect the path of the diplomat, the Star-Trek captain style (“force if necessary, but not necessarily force”, if you will accept my perversion of the timeless Mackenzie-King-ism). Games in which stealth is an option or an imperative count for a bit, but it's really just another weapon in your arsenal. True non-violent solutions are about going beyond avoiding combat by hiding in shadows; they're about addressing the root causes of the violence, eliminating those things which give rise to hate and malice and arms races. Mass Effect presents you with an opportunity to charm your way out of a fight, but the chief antagonistic force is presented as being rather...shall we say...not really the sort to be negotiated with? In light of this, the diplomatic path seems almost tacked-on to the game, which is meant to be fundamentally about fighting things. It seems like an opportunity was lost here: Mass Effect is set in a galaxy with a rather thoroughly flawed form of government (oh man don't get me started on this, I could probably write paragraphs more), hence the potential for a central struggle based on internal political strife is present. Such a central conflict could have lent itself to solutions based on either combat or diplomacy. Granted, it would have been less epic and (as I have been told by both Etarran and the PC Gamer review of Jade Empire) subtlety is hardly Bioware's strong suit, but the overall challenge of the game could have been evened out for both styles of gameplay if a diplomatic character were ever forced to think about anything other than the colour of the dialogue options while attempting diplomacy!

*** Citadel station is the hub of galactic government in Mass Effect, and the regions of space that participate or respect the authority of that government are known as “Citadel space”

**** “Aliens” in Mass Effect. They look like people of a slightly not-human fleshtone and with funky masks on. A warrior race, but not the most warlike of the fightin' types.

That's that for this particular entry. An entry of more general interest on Halifax life and whatnot is forthcoming.

-LOUD!