Finals are done and extended family is yelling at me over the phone: the holidays are here, and this is Fried Flounder, my vaguely-scheduled attempts at critical writing.

This past week my brother and I had our first foray into virtual reality, chipping in together on PSVR, wondering what all this virtual hullabaloo was about. I had originally intended this to be a write-up on my initial impressions of the system, and of VR as a whole, but as tends to happen, a more interesting subject revealed itself while writing.

After some hours in the headset, something among my impressions of VR, following the initial jitters and hyperbole, was unfortunately familiar: a lack of compelling software. Quality VR games at decent prices can be difficult to find, and while I suspect this problem is somewhat alleviated on more-open PC platforms like the Rift or Vive, low player counts in online multiplayer experiences like EVE: Valkyrie (2016) paint a worrying picture. For the record, I don’t think VR is going the way of the Kinect (i.e. extinction), but that doesn’t mean it’s bound for success, either. If hopes- corporate or otherwise- of world-changing sales are to be fulfilled, current marketing of virtual reality has to change.

As said marketing currently stands, “VR...has to be experienced to impress.” Oculus’ multiple demo stations at Best Buys across the US seem to agree, not to mention the similar deal Sony signed to showcase their own PSVR peripheral in those very same stores. Compare this push for demo headsets across the country with the relative dearth of advertising from all three major headset developers- HTC, Oculus, and Sony. Now, I understand the “VR...has to be experienced to impress” angle; we’re talking about a revolutionary technology, the kind whose software potential hasn’t nearly been met, and whose actual strengths are mired in a public perception of virtual reality that could be decades-old and far less impressive. The lack of traditional advertising of VR platforms astounds me, nonetheless, despite the above arguments by which VR headset retailers are presenting their product.

Put plainly, VR isn’t being advertised enough to financially live up to the ambitions of its greatest champions, in part because it seems these champions, including Oculus CEO and political disappearing-act Palmer Luckey, seem to think “Virtual Reality is inevitable.” It’s a romantic notion, to say that your tech is so good that it won’t need advertisements, or broader marketing, to be successful. Really the only ones at fault for VR not changing the world are the ones who haven’t bothered to try a headset on. Yeah, I think VR is damn cool (I get rabidly excited every time Windlands (2016) boots up), but to think a platform will be invariably successful with enough time is awfully naive. VR isn’t above a television slot or Youtube ads.

The long game thankfully isn’t so dire, with Oculus’s efforts in wireless HMDs (Head-mounted displays), as well as their recent partnership with Insomniac, giving a glimpse of what the next generation of virtual reality might look like. Personally, I’d like to see greater exposure for VR through asynchronous cooperative play between VR and TV players; imagine something akin to Titanfall, TV players as pilots and VR players as titans. It’s reaching into fanciful conjecture, I know, but the possible breadth of exposure such a game could offer VR is compelling nonetheless.

What do you guys think, though? Will Rifts and Vives crash as a gimmick, or will virtual reality permeate lives in the ways we’ve been told to imagine? I’m taken to think the latter, but not without some course correction.

**This, for reference, is discussing high-grade VR headsets: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PSVR. More affordable products like Google Daydream and Samsung’s Gear VR, made in partnership with Oculus, were deemed different enough from the above to be excluded.

Well, it’s been a while. A month, I think? In an unsurprising turn of events, life got in the way of this whole “blog” thing, but Waypoint Radio today reminded me to keep writing and stay focused. So welcome to Fried Flounder, my vaguely-scheduled attempts at critical writing.

A few weeks ago my game development club had the opportunity to speak with a resident doctoral student on the subject of her dissertation- “the effect of serious games on player behaviour regarding environmental consciousness and climate change.” I’m not going to name this student, though, because while I have a problem with her analyses as a whole, this isn’t a review of still-developing research, nor is it an evaluation of games about climate change. The strange part is the idea of “serious games,” a perspective I had seen as obsolete, not unlike the games-as-art questions that seemed contemporary to releases like Limbo (2010) and certain Bioshock (2007) critiques.

For context, the introduction to her thesis was asking examples of serious games from the others present. Killbox, a game about drone warfare in Northern Pakistan, was referred to multiple times. With that introduction out of the way we carried on into the bulk of her actual research, but the discussion of so-called serious games has been lingering on me far more. What was the operational definition of Serious Game? Does that definition render all other games Unserious? The questions have been pestering, and telling of a divide between games criticism and development that I had assumed but never personally experienced.

To start from the beginning, though, what is a Serious Game? Based on the games floated in the introduction, I’d first say that a better term is Political Game- a game with a specific, primary intent to provoke political thought. Not necessarily to manipulate opinions or behaviour, mind you, just provoke thought. Unfortunately, the term used wasn’t Political Game; it was Serious Game. And furthermore, Serious Games spent the duration of the talk on a pedestal- helping to better the world while “other games” serve primarily to distract from or “escape” the world. This dichotomy may very well be true for the researcher, but personal anecdotes are scarcely fact. The capacity for players, the audience, to extrapolate social or political commentary from Unserious Games. Yes, some games, like Killbox, are more explicit about worldly concerns. But does that mean a (admittedly heavy-handed) game like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided discusses the essence of humanity in the pursuit of escape? Is Deus Ex a Serious Game? A question like this could have spent our talks spiraling, with dissenters using too many anecdotes to debate the Seriousness of Deus Ex. A similar argument over the seriousness of Flower (2009) actually did happen. Every one of them was profoundly missing the point: Who cares? Who cares if Flower and Deus Ex are Serious? What does that accolade do for anyone? Nothing.

It became painfully clear to me that the budding game developers I work with are just that- developers. When we talk together we talk about lerping and why Player 2 loses three lives when they die. Every discussion is about problem-solving and systems. I later told the group that the quality of games is a measure of their seriousness, regardless of what the developers are taking seriously, be it the morality of drone warfare or how good it feels to run on a wall. They halfheartedly agreed, before one argued that Killbox and Titanfall 2 (2016) “are still different.” I asked how they were different, and received “I mean…” and a shrug. The rest of the day was devoted to getting a main menu’s camera’s lerping feeling good.

I get the feeling that this series of events has weighed on me more than my compatriots, but I strongly believe that excellence in game development mandates a capacity to discuss games and game development critically, and, at least in my circles, this capacity seems lacking. As I’ve said above, though, personal anecdotes alone aren’t enough. Am I overreacting? Do game developers interact with and participate in games criticism enough (and vice versa)? I’d greatly appreciate responses.

Welcome back to my weekly attempts at being a decent writer, where I’m trying to get some beginner games-analysis under my belt, one idea at a time, when I nab the time. I haven't been posting for a few weeks due to midterms/work/life, but I'm back and searching for the reason behind the lasting power of TRON.

Those of you that read my last blog entry know that, for the past few weeks and for the remainder of the semester (if things go according to plan), I am and will be working with some other students on a remaster of the original TRON Arcade cabinet, now tentatively renamed TRON: Championship Edition. What has gone on since the project’s start has, to be honest, inundated me in all things TRON: re-watching TRON: Legacy (2010); watching the original movie for the first time; listening to both’s soundtracks; and wondering to myself just why a B-side Disney franchise still has its cult following, as well as quick pass over the only TRON game I’ve actually played yet...critical darling TRON: Evolution.

Movie Time

On the persistence of the franchise as a whole, though, I figured it best to try and find some analogs to TRON in other films, primarily, and while I know I’m missing something, TRON seems unique. Not unique for the “state-of-the-art graphics” that were primarily cited when complimenting the original (and sequel)- plenty of movies have broken technical boundaries, and CGI accomplishments probably aren’t even pertinent here. Secondly, a movie simply taking place on The Grid doesn’t really warrant decades-long fandom, either. So looking at TRON I have to find comparisons, other movies that deal with physical representations of computing, or just computing seen in a cinematic sense, really, and those comparisons brought me some answers.

The first comparison that came to mind actually ended up being influencer as well as influenced. I’m talking about The Matrix (1999), which had as much say as the first TRON film did in the aesthetic design of TRON: Legacy. Others that came to mind include WarGames (1983), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), The Terminator (1984), etc. There is a tonal distance TRON sets from a lot of modern movies when it comes to representations of computers and code that is critical to what makes TRON different. The Matrix is a place of distortion and uncertainty, that dwarfs those who reside in it; the world is a place seemingly beyond our control, in the hands of “hackers” as Die Hard 4 sees it, and both Terminator’s and WarGames’ story of computer’s seizing power from Us, manipulating the world in dangerously high degrees. The canvas of impressions towards computer science for as long as the science has existed has been one of lost understanding- code is an apocryphal art to people that don’t live it, and if you understand it, you live it, too.

Hell, there’s an entire cliché built around the unapproachable nature of the machine: our hero is the good one, the one with feelings, the one we’re supposed to root for, but to navigate the modern world he probably has a cold, mildly-greasy friend that translates the Net for him/her. The entire vibe I get is that all these flicks are made by people that don’t enjoy the possibilities offered by computers for people who don’t want to understand computers. The difference is that I don’t get that vibe with TRON. The technobabble- the Users, Programs, I/O towers, corrupted data- there’s always a visual equivalent to break down the language barrier (even if the metaphor isn’t necessarily accurate). Programs are essentially people on the Grid. I/O Towers are how you communicate with the Grid. Corrupted or unreadable data is the wasteland around and defining the size of the Grid. Our heroes are programs doing recognizable things, with feelings, and inside the computer is a literal world of imagination. TRON makes one of the most compelling arguments for pseudoscience in media because the point of the computer operating essentially like magic isn’t to help you learn computer systems- it’s to help you understand others’ fascination with those systems and with the Grid representing them.

Game Time

Alrighty, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the TRON cabinet and TRON: Evolution...but mostly Evolution. As I stated above, I haven’t played the original game, and I would LOVE to hear from you guys in the comments about it- how it played, what you considered the best parts, or the most enjoyable ones- but I can’t very well discuss what I haven’t tried, can I? So what did I think of Evolution? It’s alright.

If you meander over to the Steam review page, scrolling past the (totally valid) complaints of a shitty PC port, you’ll learn something similar to my experiences: the campaign is poorly paced and a little uninspired, but the combat and visual effects mostly get the job done. Seems like they did a good job of faithfully representing TRON: Legacy, then. The real gem in the rough is Evolution’s multiplayer, which, when not a barren wasteland, is an exhilarating snapshot of what TRON can be in a modern game. The multiplayer is a match-based arena fighter with the typical DM, TDM, etc. modes, but allows for interaction between players on foot, on light-cycles (which can be summoned like a mount in an MMO), and in tanks. The worst crime of Evolution’s multiplayer, really, is a feeling a bit like Dan’s conflict over the latest Paper Mario, because while so much of Evolution is drab and uninteresting, there are minutes where everything comes together, where I leap onto a still-generating cycle and rocket out of danger, feeling the same kind of giddy feeling I got when first watching The Avengers (2012)- someone’s realizing what I imagined.

TLDR

I’m still discovering what makes a Tron game tick, in game feel and tone (there have been a surprising number of debates over the formatting of the title screen). While I do that, though, I want to know why you like TRON. Or hate it.

Man...Games are hard. That’s right, my first game-jam- whose theme was “Educational”- has come and passed, along with it a startlingly-fast twelve hours of my life. I figured, though, that I could waste another hour or so looking back on it, for my learning as well as your amusement.

Dolphin Murder Simulator

Yeah, uhm, this was educational, I suppose. The thing is a typing game alla Typing of the Dead, but with adorable animals to decimate. Not my idea, though: I was just the sound guy. Sound effects for the shotgun (which may or may not have been photoshopped out of Doom), dying animal squishes, and a soundtrack written in MuseScore2 that can only be described as “Inspired by Carnival Games.” The Kinect one. We’re all still humming that damn tune, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

My first takeaway was just the sheer volume of music I was writing, and how maybe a little less than a third of it never got used. The problem was that I started composing as soon as we had talked out an extremely rough outline. My decision following “dolphin murder simulator,” was, naturally, something extremely dark. The opening few measures go like a SNES victory jingle, but from there on it’s synthesized bass thumping angry like a misunderstood teenager. I got quite a good ways in, realized I should check in with the others...and everyone decided this was too dark. It was also about 40 minutes down the drain, and far from the first bit to get scrapped.

I am super happy with my contribution, though- as soon as my jolly bit kicked in with the Doom super shotgun blasting away, other teams were in stitches. Mission Accomplished.

*(I don't actually have the sound files from DMS yet, as they were made on the same computer that was exporting game builds...and that computer was not my computer)*

First2Learn Pro- Rehabilitation Edition!

As for me, I finished my part on DMS with half the jam left, so I decided to download Twine and become a Video Game Master™. My plan: a fake education software that was supposed to appear like an education tool for prison convicts. Then, I added a bunch of pseudo-hacking prompts because it turns out sitting at a white screen answering arithmetic questions isn’t too fun. From there I spiraled, adding puzzle mechanics and half-baked #content whenever it came to mind. My thoughts generally ranged from “This is gonna be awesome” to “This is inane” as the evening progressed, and in the end, not one of my puzzle mechanics was actually working. I had a whole bunch of lore and multiplication problems crammed in there, though, and there was technically a way to win, so I suppose I ought to consider it a success conceptually.

All those stories you hear from developers, about how loads of work gets cut, and how it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew, seem obvious while listening, but BOY is it easy to make all those mistakes no matter how prepared you are. Good thing the jam was fun or I would be supremely cross with myself.

Where Now?

Well, I’m writing a new text-based adventure that is more in the vain of Zork than my harebrained scheme, and it’s called Penultima. The music is coming together a lot like 16bit JRPG stuff, and I’m very excited to keep working on this mess without heavy time constraints. The thing that’s stood out to me the most as I bang this one out is the interesting constraints of text-based adventures- text isn’t inherently fun, nor is it always attention-grabbing. As I’ve had friends play through segments, long passages between player interactions have almost all been scrapped, and the tone has become far less serious, now bordering on an Alice in Wonderland vibe that focuses on interesting scenarios over heavy meaning or deep characters.

On a larger scale, though, I befriended the other guys who worked on DMS, and we’re currently drawing up some design documents for a semester-long reimagining of the Tron arcade cabinet, inspired by Pac-Man Championship Edition (they’ve actually developed a cabinet before...I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited). I’ve been working in Audacity to get some sound bites from old cabinets shown on Youtube up to snuff, as well as compressing/distorting sections of the 2010 Daft Punk soundtrack, to make a collection of effects and tunes that combines old and new in a way that’s cool without sounding forced. I don’t just want to work in music and narrative, though, and the rest of the team sounds more than happy to teach me some basics in Unity while I’m building the Unity3d tutorials like Tilt-a-Ball, UFO, and the "Space Shooter" thing. Life is exciting, duders.

Well this week I know I won’t be having time to be writing about any specific games, but that’s because I write on Saturdays, and this upcoming Saturday is actually my first game jam! There’s no name or brand attached, just a decent chunk of people from school are getting together for what will invariably be a long twelve hours. Hopefully next week or the week after next I’ll have a post-mortem to throw up here. Lastly, the theme has just been announced- educational games- any duders with a grand idea? (I'm wondering whether a "school" setting would fulfill the theme and enable me to make something that isn't MathBlaster)

Welcome back to my weekly attempts at being a decent writer, where I’m trying to get some beginner games-analysis under my belt, one idea at a time, when I nab the time. This week I talk about one of Gaming's masterclasses in tone, as well as the construction of a good in-narrative mythology.

The only clean way to preface this is that I love Dark Souls. One reason for my pursuit of a career in game design is Dark Souls. For my first blog entry I had pretty strongly intended to write about Dark Souls. I met one of my best friends in part through Dark Souls. Well today I capitulated to myself, cause it's time for Dark Souls.

**When a game really lands with players one can usually ask “Why?” and get a whole host of anecdotes about all the cool/amazing stuff in said game. So in the spirit of precision, I’m going to attempt not to fall into that jam.**

The much famed series of studio From Software is often lauded for its brutal difficulty (Intelligent difficulty is probably more accurate, though), not to mention superb enemy designs, a clever, multifaceted multiplayer system, and the notable side not that every game since the release of Dark Souls is like Dark Souls, but [words]. My favorite praise for the Miyazaki joint, though, was Rafael Montero’s discussion not directly of Dark Souls, but of the series’ similarities in the GBA title Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand (A Kojima joint, if you were curious). If you don’t want to read his article- which you should, cause it’s pretty great- the shorthand is that Boktai is “one of the very few series outside of Souls to effectively convey the feeling of traveling through a dying world, of standing on the precipice of the end of all things.” High praise.

While I agree that the inevitable ruin in these two series is a very ballsy move, especially in Dark Souls’ AAA (?) context, I also think that while this tone is apparently most critical to Boktai (I admit I haven’t played it), it is only adjacent to the central tone of Souls: Myth.

Those game mechanics of Souls I mentioned earlier...they aren’t all critical to a sense of ruin. Ambiguous stories and desolate castles and sharp difficulty all speak to ruin, but it’s not the impending ruin, the relighting of the flame, that we’re on the brink of, as Montero suggests; the Lordran and Drangleic everyone knows is, to be honest, already ruined. The First Flame is symbolic more than anything else (except for the finality of Dark Souls 3). And as players walk through these faded lands their minds are not on the nihilistic future, but the awe of the past. Go watch any Vaatividya video- again, do this- and you’ll know the stories of Dark Souls can cover the withering survivors of the present, but far more often are engrossed in ancient legends- the end of the reign of Grey Dragons, the humiliation of the Lord of Fire’s sons, Man’s conflicted struggle for freedom from the yoke of its creator.

So what does From do to create this focus on mythology? Let’s get listing.

1. Difficulty

Ever heard that Dark Souls’ combat is hard? Shocking, I know. Speaking of combat, though, let’s talk about why the combat is hard, and more importantly, how the combat actually feels. It feels slow, weighty. Players’ health bars are dwarfed by their enemies’. Defenses can almost never be shored solely by skillful blocking and heavy armour; no, players have to move, even a little, to win, because a lot of bad guys just aren’t stopping for no shield [that isn’t Havel’s]. The combined effect is one of differentiation and acute smallness, where enemies not only have better ‘stats’ that most games, but have them in a way that forces players to keep distance even in harsh melees, and master gameplay not by surviving onslaughts of frantic button inputs, but by evaluating giants from below

.

2. Character Designs

Speaking of giants...boss fights! Well, not just boss fights. The difference between regular baddies and boss fights. If I may be so bold as to grab from Vaati once again, Dark Souls has a very clear delineation of power as size. Big people are more powerful, more important, and more complex. Not all bosses are Dragon-God sized, but gods like Gwyn and Alonne, while built to battle similarly to humans, are still taller than you. And when they aren’t? The grand final encounter of Demons Souls, King Allant, has the size of a mid-sized sedan while his illusions still hold the kingdom in his clutch, but once the truth of Allant is found, and his artificial power wrenched away, he becomes a little Slime that you may have accidentally stepped on. The Goddess Gwynevere, whose perceived power seems to hold the home of the gods together, is enormous, while her little-known brother, while just as important, is not seen as such and hence is almost human-sized. The result is a primal concept of power as something observed, not possessed, that makes players feel unimportant even though their time of power is now and the time of the gods is dead or dying.

3. Narrative

The Player Character (or PC) of a Souls title is a usurper, a disruption, a champion of Humanity, a slayer of gods. Notably, he/she is also an extreme cypher with no face, story, or personality of impact on most anything beyond endgame decision-making. The story of the Soulsverse is ripped straight from mythology. Before life there was darkness (the difference with Souls is that unlike many religions the universe starts as calm and gods make it chaos, not the other way around). The different gods are indicative of many cultures’ impressions of gods, from the Mesopotamian impression of the divine as cruel personalities deeply disconnected from Earth, such as the wicked dragon Seath, to the post-Plato belief in divine “force” beyond comprehension, as in the force of the Undead curse that is the true decider of fate in the world. I haven’t even started on why the PC is a little cypher against literally massive odds. It’s because the PC is the quintessential Hero: someone who is born or created with a great capacity for power, whose life is preordained by fate, the Darksign, and whose great successes against the greater powers are derived not only from sheer power, but from understanding and outwitting those who stand taller (this calls back to the style of combat discussed earlier).

4. Ambiguity

One of the best things about Dark Souls for ‘hardcore’ fans is the debatable nature of multilayered lore. A professor of mine told me that there is a key difference between skillful application of mystery and wanton ambiguity, and I think From Software nails this right on the head. The stories of the games aren’t confusing if you search thoroughly (or are a normal person and looked online), and there isn’t ambiguity from a lack of critical information. What there is ambiguity of is a story’s veracity: Rumours of the parentage of Solaire of Astora swirled online for years, and even what seems like a definitive answer one can find in Dark Souls 3 never actually writes it out for you. In this way there is this crazy recreation of oral tradition because we simply can’t rely on written texts to know Souls’ history. What is used in Writing’s place is a fascinating combination of investigation, imagination, and faith, and after playing through what was hopefully the series’ end this year I’ve decided that I never want another lick of truth about the Souls universe, because what’s true doesn’t really matter, not there. What matters is what you believe, what you feel; and that is what matters most in mythology.

Welcome back to my weekly attempts at being a decent writer, where I’m trying to get some beginner games-analysis under my belt, one idea at a time, when I nab the time. This week, I'm talking a bit about morality as a game system over the last decade, and why morality bars aren't quite so bad.

This is gonna age me a bit, here- The first role-playing game I ever owned was Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic (2003). My gaming days before that were primarily filled with my favorite trequels (?), Heroes of Might & Magic III and Civilization III, games that do have RPG *elements* from hero progression to the more literal role-playing as a nation, but that aren’t conventionally loped into the RPG genre. Neither focus on characters’ morality bars or intricate dialogue systems or heavily character-driven stories. Now that’s not to say one can’t play Civ with an eye on ethics, or dive into the emotional drive behind why Catherine Gryphonheart is murdering throngs of Troglodytes. What I can say is that one can’t not interact with ethics and characters’ ambitions in a game like KotOR, where the game mechanics intrinsically affect and are affected by players’ moral decision making.

Those who’ve spoken with me about game design know that I place extreme stress on the importance of game systems and mechanics above all else; art design should be influenced by and work in concert with mechanics; story and writing should be derived from and inspired by mechanics; game mechanics- the core ways by which players interact with games, from character locomotion to leveling systems- are the axle from which a holistic design is built. With morality in gaming, though, there comes a bit of a snag. Quality game systems are clear to the player, allow for intuitive learning and mastery, and operate within the confines of what the player has been taught (or are being taught). Morality is rarely this precise.

This problem has been addressed when Bioware’s Star Wars epic is discussed these days: A meter of numerical values is a poorly simple method of representing a character’s ethical bend. In reality, too, the problem has been addressed in many developers’ games of the past decade, such as Bioware’s own novel solution in their follow-up space opera, Mass Effect (2007). Here, players’ morality is set by the highly crafted narrative of Commander Shepherd; player agency is instead diverted to how Shepherd operates to achieve preset goals. Paragon for a pure hero, Renegade for a violent operator.

Fast forward another five years to Telltale’s episodic first season of The Walking Dead (2012), where morality systems were completely eschewed in favor of a greater focus on characters’ relationships, as well as how player character Lee’s actions are viewed by other people. What makes this system so interesting is that, since KotOR in 2003, game systems have been steadily backing away from detailing morality as a set code of guidelines, what’s evil and what’s not. This understanding- that in reality ethics are a lens by which actions are judged by other people, not a preeminent law ordaining what can and can’t be done- feels like the most substantial evolution of ethics in gaming in my (admittedly short) lifetime. And yet in spite of this, I get the feeling that something isn’t quite right.

That feeling derives from a dichotomy of thought I have over the evolution of morality systems: specifically, that by improving morality in games, developers are removing morality systems, and for some reason this is bothering me. I suppose the feeling isn’t entirely dissimilar from the upsetting realization that a faulty component of one’s work shouldn’t be fixed, but scrapped in its entirety. It’s the feeling of a loss that is more than warranted, but is a loss all the same.

Or maybe loss is the wrong word. More like a decline in popularity, an obsolescence. So why are morality bars harder to find today? The answer probably comes back to (surprise!) the significance of game mechanics. Stories that want to run realistically, in shades of grey and emotionally moral choices, simply do not come out of games with morality bars. Yes, there are examples to counter this belief- KotOR’s own sequel dealt heavily in the relatively rare neutrality of the Star Wars universe- but these games likely implemented to morally abstract problems purposely to contrast with simple ‘Lightside meters,’ not support or emphasize them.

All that word-junk above is why more modern games with highly polar morality systems like Infamous can get a bad rap**, why line graphs from one to evil are a bit of a joke in the industry. Yes, defining Good as “blue” is a dumb way to signify the nuances behind why player characters perform their allotted actions. But dumb can most certainly also be fun, and I know giving homeless people money for more blue Good points in order to improve this dope Master Heal power is a hilariously fun experience. Maybe then, morality bars get a bad rap not because they make roleplaying unrealistic or trivial, but because poor implementation of this system can fail to do what the morality bar does best: make role-playing fun.

**this is debatable, of course; an exploration of any modern concept of a "good" conventional morality system would have to be relegated to future posts due to time-constraints, unfortunately

Welcome back to my weekly attempts at being a decent writer, where I’m trying to get some beginner games-analysis under my belt, one idea at a time, when I nab the time. This week, I’ve started playing Jonathan Blow’s fantastic puzzler The Witness, and while its extraordinary puzzle design and peculiar atmosphere have been thudding in my head for days, I thought something more interesting to look into was the way the game differentiates content, how different parts of the game play and reward the player.

As some preface, though, I wanted to bring this up because I’ve also been dawdling through the follow up to Indie Game: The Movie (subtitled Life After), and fond memories of Fez have bubbled back up; I think my enjoyment of The Witness is coming from a *very* similar place; again, it’s not just puzzle design or atmosphere. Rather, I’ve been playing Mr. Blow’s most recent work the same way I played Fez years ago- piece by piece, maybe a puzzle per sitting, with days in between stints of free time. Yes, my schedule then was as similarly cramped as it is now, but my constraints aren’t what put these games together for me as much as how the two deal with those constraints. Neither one is the worse for segmenting game sessions so aggressively, because both treat *all* of their playable content with equal respect.

This train of thought brought up Mark Brown's excellent "Game Maker's Toolkit" episode on Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and Burnout: Paradise, a video that, to be reductive, suggests that one reason the Mirror’s Edge sequel fell flat was because it did not successfully incorporate its mission structure into the game world: While single player missions take place in structured areas set up around the level, side missions and a large fraction of player movement take place in a relegated “Open World” hub that doesn’t intuitively allow for engaging play given how the side missions are actually designed.

Now, we’re not gonna jump into the specifics of what precisely makes for the disconnect between map/level design and mission structure. In fact, the rest of this write-up will work with the assumption that Brown is correct that Mirror’s Edge’s side content is simply lacking. But we don’t really use the term “side content” when talking about Criterion’s open world Burnout, do we. Again this is covered ground (I’m sad to say I can’t think of any sources, though), of how Burnout: Paradise succeeds because all of its content seems to have heart and purpose; it all seems equal. Everything one does Paradise City contributes to eventually beating the game, because there’s no Big levels to dwarf everything else.

If you’ve played a videogame with Towers in the past couple years you probably know Catalyst is far from the only game that has less than satisfactory side content. But I hear a lot of people that trash the hyper-dense open world formula because there’s all this filler content that just isn’t appealing without smart progression mechanics built behind it. I think the sentiment comes from a valid place, but in some ways games like Fez and The Witness and Burnout are quite a bit like open world collect-a-thons such as the more recent Far Crys and Assassin’s Creeds. Once I finished Far Cry 3 and AC: Syndicate, at least, those games became essentially what Fez and The Witness are for me: short-form interactions with game mechanics on their own. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with lots of side content in games, nor with there being a coexistence of set-piece story levels and emergent gameplay. The only thing wrong is how lots of developers look at side content: as *side* content.

Done with story developments and interesting, varied gameplay for today? We put this Shiny on the ground if you want to go pick it up. Side content doesn’t even have to be this hyperbolic in its simplicity. There are the tower defenses of AC: Revelations, or the variety of same-y NPC quests in Sleeping Dogs. And I would argue both of these could have been great additions to their respective games (yes, Revelations tower defense). Where these examples screw up is that they feel restricted from letting cool things happen in the bounds of already-designed game mechanics and interactions. I love climbing like an Assassin, and a good mix personal drama and wild fight scenes makes Wei Shen’s action-adventure shine. Instead, the tower defense is constrained to a conventional stand-still and watch perspective. Wei never gets into massive problems or danger (tonally or gameplay-wise) outside of main missions. Newer Far Cry never feels like it’s trying to disrupt player expectations at all, as a focus on outposts on making tiger-wallets becomes more and more critical with each installment. Exciting stuff is for story missions.

Not all games fall into this pit trap: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt did a fantastic job of giving its *side* content emotional weight, memorable stories, and most importantly, a wide variety of approaches and experiences within a strong base of gameplay that shows CD Projekt Red obviously was confident in the core product. For that matter, let’s wrap back to Fez and The Witness, because different Worlds or sections of the Island, respectively, aren’t afraid to throw wrenches into player assumptions and learned strategies from earlier play. And so when I sit down to play just a few panels in Jonathan Blow’s hellish treehouses I know that I’m not going to get *side* content, even if the panels lead to an audio file, not further progress towards the End.

I know this write-up probably comes across as rambling- because it is- but the point I want to make is that at some point I guess it became okay to have a weirdly clear line of demarcation between “the good stuff’ and “everything else” in games? Yeah, there’s the argument for solidarity of a franchise, continuity of design as well as story that ensures more mainstream game players aren’t going to be disappointed when buying the latest installment of their favorite brand. But you know what? I don’t think a lot of AAA developers respect the entirety of their games the way people like Jonathan Blow or CD Projekt do, as much as they should, because for all the awesome new story levels there is a hell of a lot of “everything else” in AAA gaming now, and maybe having disrespected side content isn’t as integral to the Brand as it may first appear.

(Foreword: I'm, ah, new at this whole "blog" thing...figured the only way not to be was to jump in and start. That said, I'll hopefully be posting these one-page posts on Fridays as practice for a university game design application this fall, hence the short length. Thanks!)

We’re coming up on nine years since Infinity Ward’s seminal Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Nov. 7, 2007) thundered onto the market, lugging with it what most would likely call a “new generation” of gaming- the inescapable zenith of short-form online multiplayer first popularized by Microsoft’s flagship Halo series. Today, the annual Call of Duty releases churn ever-onward, with their 13th entry soon approaching, and while *this* juggernaut is far from gone, a newer design philosophy, a new generation, of class-based strategy- perhaps best likened to Blizzard’s recent blockbuster Overwatch- seems to be taking over. In lieu of this change-of-command, there seems like no better time to look back on what made Modern Warfare multiplayer great.

The “secret sauce,” if you will, was what will be referred to as strategic variance- the presence of a variety of strategies and counterstrategies, from equipment to playstyles. For example, a submachine gun like the P90 has very poor accuracy at range, but players may combine its close-quarters power with a safer method of advancing via a smoke grenade. The opposition, free to edit classes in match, is free to counter this, maybe by changing their gear to include a form of area-of-effect explosives to damage enemies that can’t be precisely pinned down. Alternatively, a stun grenade may be equipped to freeze the opponents until their smoke clears. On-the-fly strategy adjustment like this, when combined with a variety of tools to respond with- different maps, guns, gun attachments, grenades, and attribute-changing “perks”- provide for an extremely high level of replayability that both gives personality to consecutive games and imparts a very real degree of player agency in how challenges are presented, analyzed, and overcome. The resulting strategic variance, working alongside fast gameplay and a now-conventional system of “XP Challenges” that reward literally all successful actions, are a potent combination of mental stimulation and affecting satisfaction.

Activision and the Call of Duty developers at Infinity Ward and Treyarch knew what they had, too; subsequent editions of the franchise ratcheted up the number of tools and equipment to unlock to staggering heights; XP rewards were given for *failing* some actions, too, followed by ever-increasingly bombastic sound and visual effects. Looking at the meta-progress of the series, Call of Duty can seem like a pinnacle of game design. Yet recent entries, still adhering to Modern Warfare’s school of thought, don’t have the quite same cultural ‘punch.’ The simple write-off for this phenomenon is just the age of the annualized franchise...everything comes to an end. The uniformity of the new generation is certainly noteworthy, though, as (in what is another essay in itself) the popularity of the colossal MOBA industry has injected a hefty dose of “character-action” into first-person shooters. Overwatch isn’t the only series to eschew individualized customization for unique, preset characters to select- one Call of Duty: Black Ops III, released last year, did relatively the same. The best I can make out of this trend is that a desire for idiosyncrasy and personality in a (FPS) game as a whole has overtaken players’ desire for personal customization themselves; to be reductive, this desire for highly unique macro-changes over adjustable minutiae may stem from an oversupply of “COD clones,” not to mention the volumetric presence of Call of Duty itself.

With all the changes in the shooter industry, one could look at Overwatch as a completely different beast from Call of Duty. A more apt description would be simply progression, though, because what is the hallmark of Overwatch, and the MOBAs that partially inspired it? An extremely large base of characters to choose from, with wildly different tool-sets. In other words- strategic variance.