Reading into the Future

As a child, videogames were always a significant part of my life, and sat next to reading novels as my favorite pastimes. I was never too much a fan of action and shooting games as a kid, even though they practically dominate my diet now. Instead I was more attracted to adventure games and platformers. Classics like ‘Broken Sword’ and ‘Rayman 2: The Great Escape’ captivated me, devouring many hours of my childhood and satisfying my lust for adventure. They complimented the books I read, works like ‘The Faraway Tree’ and ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’. My head was always buzzing with imagination, with strange worlds, impossible characters and a compulsion with exploring the unknown, something I like to think has stayed with me ever since.

Coincidentally, both the adventure and platformer genres are significantly weaker now than they were in the 90’s, deemed no longer financially viable in a medium more addicted to explosive thrills and blood spills. At the same time, videogames have grown increasingly popular since my introduction to them, while the act of reading has dropped substantially in return. And so it concerns me when I read figures of how over a third of children in the UK spend over three hours playing videogames, and that casual reading has reduced to a matter of minutes. This is a pattern immerging in most territories where videogames have a strong market. I shouldn’t need to be concerned, as my parents surely weren’t either when looking at the content of what I used to play, but these days where games like ‘Halo’ or ‘Burnout’ are always sure to provide a more attractive choice than a book, I begin to feel unsure with whether they can provide a suitable replacement.

Classic children’s literature can provide creative experience to children, and can teach them about the world in ways that modern videogames just refuse to match. If games are to become such an integral part of a child’s upbringing, then they have a responsibility to fill the shoes of literature. Children’s games should therefore be an important market, not to be engulfed by the latest Pixar or Disney movie tie-ins, but to provide opportunities for children to truly explore and create, and learn about the world, to make up for the lost tales of the greatest children’s novels. Games like ‘Okami’ and ‘Ico’ are existing proof that such works can be made possible. They just need to reach the audience. Stories like ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Treasure Island’ could make brilliant game conversions without loosing their underlying messages, as long as they are approached with good talent and appropriate production values. As the young playbase continues to expand, helped by the ever increasing successes of Nintendo, I hope the industry chooses not to exploit the young minds that now sit in their hands, but feed them with images, stories and ideas that will help develop them, and hopefully stay with them for many years to come.

Refinement is Futile

With the recent release of No More Heroes, a reoccurring thought entered my mind yet again. In general, the game faired well critically, if not so well financially, but there are still a number of journalists and gamers who found too much fault with the game to properly appreciate and enjoy it. The same can be said of the reception of Killer7. As stylistically powerful as the games was, it suffered somewhat when it came to the gameplay which put a lot of people off. It got me thinking, when a developer makes something new and unique, creating gameplay mechanics that are dissimilar to anything released before it, does it really stand a chance of holding up quality wise to games that follow in the tradition of the well trodden path?

Take the first-person shooter genre for example. It’s gone through minimal design changes in over fifteen years, yet is perhaps the most popular genre of videogame today, and has provided us with some of last years greatest games, including Halo 3, BioShock, The Orange Box and Call of Duty 4. It’s down to refinement. There may not be too much structural difference between Doom and Half-Life 2, but to gamers they’re opposite ends of the spectrum. If Doom was the blueprint, then HL2 is the finished construction. Fifteen years of tweaking and small scale innovation to get to what most people cite as some of the best games on the market.

So how is a No More Heroes, a Psychonauts, an Indigo Prophesy or a Shadow of the Colossus meant to compete in terms of quality? The focus of those games is unique and fresh from the developer’s mind, but they’re essentially just laying the foundations for others to take the idea and refine it over years and years of development, game after game. But the initial idea never sells, and the foundations are abandoned due to the lack of an audience. How will anything new truly take off if it’s never built upon from the original blueprint?

One recent success story would be that of the music rhythm genre, more precisely the success of Harmonix. Since their debut in 2001 with the well received FreQuency, Harmonix had repeatedly tackled the music rhythm genre to no avail, from titles such as Amplitude in 2003 through to Karaoke Revolution Party in 2005. Yet eventually they hit upon the idea of Guitar Hero, and have since gone on to become one of the most popular studios around as can be seen in the continuous success of the Guitar Hero franchise and the more recent Rock Band. It took four years worth of development time to finally get to something high in quality, and it was rewarded substantially in sales.

Rez arguably provides a good exception to this argument. Mizuguchi hadn’t really tackled anything along the lines of Rez before in his career, yet finished up with a product that cannot be faulted in its design, despite the poor sales it received, though these ‘nailed it first time’ instances are rare. Killer7 was met with control issues, Shadow of the Colossus with camera problems, Indigo Prophesy with a story that trailed off into confusion at the end, Psychonauts with erratic changes in difficulty. All had a great idea as its central vision, but all left much room for improvement, room that publishers now see as too risky to fill.

It’s an issue that will rarely be resolved. When a team makes something new, they have no previous examples to build off from, unlike the FPS world where innovative features (such as Halo’s recharging health system) can be widely adopted as the new standard, meaning improvements in all future similar titles. Goichi Suda didn’t have that comfort when writing up Killer7, and nor did Shinji Mikami when building P.N.03, or Fumito Ueda when conceptualizing Ico. Some designers get lucky enough to repeatedly tackle their vision – I’m sure Suda 51 will one day get his gameplay mechanics to the same level as his visual execution, but until then, he and everybody similar will just have to hope that publishers keep their faith, and give them the opportunity to evolve their vision into something that stands up to the same high standards found elsewhere in accomplished ground.

The Gates of Lucidium

One thing that videogames will always be able to do better than any other medium is exploration, giving the player full control in a world built for their interactivity. It’s one of the things I enjoy most in games, the feeling of walking into the unknown, anticipating what’s waiting for you around the next corner. However I think it’s a rare occurrence, and I often get the impression that designers don’t think the act of exploration in itself is enough to base a game around. Hence it becomes a single, smaller element to a game, with the likes of combat and puzzle solving interrupting to mix things up and give the player some more purpose. I often believe the game could be improved if it did away with these extra elements. Take Ico for example. Exploring and guiding Yorda through the game’s beautiful castle is considered one of the mediums most memorable and touching experiences. However I felt a growing annoyance every time the shadow monsters emerged from the ground to take Yorda away from me, not least because it occasionally became frustratingly hard to fend the shadows off, but for me it ruined the peaceful and isolated atmosphere of the castle and led to repetition. I think the castle itself would have provided enough on its own to make the game great. Take away the comfort of combat and designers will have to carve a more compelling game world to keep the player engrossed. I struggle to find examples of games that have taken this approach, but I really want there to be one.

Perhaps one solid reason why designers don’t seem to think this approach would be a good idea is down to how unoriginal game worlds are these days. Imagination always seems to be constrained, and in the end every game environment tends to be not too dissimilar from the real world. This just isn’t making the most of videogames potential and its freedom of design. Take some of the most loved environments in recent years, Half-Life 2’s City 17, BioShock’s Rapture, Ico’s castle, and notice how all of them choose to follow similar rules that apply to reality. I’ve never understood why designers can’t break away and do something truly unique. Take a look at Stage 5 in Rez. It’s a visually stunning experience, with gameplay incomparable with anything else, and almost nothing in its world sharing any resemberlance to our own. There’s no gravity, environments shift from one opposite to the next, pulsing around you before morphing and collapsing in on themselves, enemies who are incomparable to any of Earth’s creatures, and a continually shifting pace. Designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi put no limits on his imagination, and came up with something that nobody else would have thought of before. In contrast, there’s almost nothing in The Elder Scrolls IV that I couldn’t have predicted from the box art.

A source of inspiration I’ve always thought overlooked is that of lucid dreams. For those who don’t know, I suggest you take a quick peak at the wiki page, which proberbly explains it a lot better than I could, but essentially they’re dreams where you’re aware of them being so, and have total control over what happens within them. It’s virtually impossible to build a game that gives the player total control over what the game is about, but I think the kind of individual environments and unique situations found in dreams provides great source material for building an original world intended to be explored. Psychonauts was marginally inspired by this concept, and it shows in how each level shared no environmental similarities to the previous and adopted a completely different set of gameplay rules each time. If this unpredictability can be expanded and shaped into a large, possibly open world game, things can start to get interesting. The unreleased indie MMO Lila Dreams is set inside the head of an eleven year old girl. From that one fact I’m already ten times interested in its world than I would be in the locations of a World of Warcraft sequel. It’s new, it’s completely unpredictable as to what it might contain, and it makes for a damn intriguing setting that I’m already dying to explore.

Of course it isn’t necessary that every game be conceived in a world unlike anything we’ve dreamed of before, as exciting as that would be. Sometimes a world just needs a little twist to make it worthy of a player’s time. I recently commented on the world of Paradise City in the latest Burnout game, concluding that the setting just doesn’t make for an interesting automotive playground because it’s too hooked on realism. The Burnout ideology is anything but realistic, and it would have helped if the world had been inspired by this attitude, of which I provided some ideas at the end of the original comment. But instead of making something unique and outrageous, the designers played it safe and built a lifeless clone of a typical American city. I cannot understand why they’d choose this when it’s such a juxtaposition to everything their franchise stands for. In the end, this is a post asking for a little more imagination. Unlike building a film set, a game set has virtually no limits in what shape it can take, so why settle for something so standard and familiar when near infinite possibilities and ideas remain virtually untapped inside our own minds.

The Art of Downsizing

‘Bigger is better’ could be an unwritten law of videogame design. When a sequel is announced it’s expected to improve on its predecessor, and along with gameplay refinements and a higher texture count, a larger world is always expected. Modern videogames are set in substantially bigger worlds than they ever used to be, at least in terms of the three dimensional era. An open-world game will often brag on the back of the box of how many square-kilometres it gives you. The term ‘open-world game’ has almost become a genre in its own right. The possibilities the player can have inside these sprawling cities or kingdoms is often daunting, promising to provide the illusion of a living world, enabling the player to interact as freely as they want. But I often get the feeling that the greater the game space is in scale, the more at risk it is of being diluted of entertainment.

I like the appeal of a small game. I think they can lead to a greater sense of involvement, and require more innovative gameplay design from the developers to keep them interesting. One of the best examples of what I’m hinting at is LucasArt’s ‘The Day of the Tentacle’, released in 1993 from the untamed minds of Tim Schafer and David Grossman. For those unfamiliar, the game is a classic point-and-click adventure title set in a single hotel-mansion, albeit a mansion crossing three different time periods you flick back and forth from at will. Still, the game space was small, but the possibilities were huge. I spent countless hours wondering through and around the building, and it remains amongst my favourite ‘game places’ to this day. What made it work? The characters within it were exceptional, from George Washington to Green the talking teenage tentacle. It’s collection of freaks, manic-depressants, slackers and inventors made the place completely believable.

It was also in the details. For a world to feel ‘living’ it needs to feel ‘lived in’, and posters on walls, pancakes stuck on ceilings, quarters left in broken telephone boxes and stains left on carpets accomplish this far more than a legion of nameless NPC’s walking around aimlessly ever will. The more packed with smaller details an environment is, the greater we should be able to identify with it, and the more satisfaction we’ll proberbly receive from exploring it. There is more back-story in the things scattered around my computer desk than there is to be found in the entirety of ‘Saint’s Row’s’ city of Stilwater. Another name given to these games is ‘sandbox’, a term made to describe a game where the player has access to a number of ‘toys’ in a confined space, but actually these game worlds could often be better compared to playing paintball in a desert.

Another good example would be ‘The Sims’. The hours upon hours I would spend tending to a single sim living in a tiny three-room bungalow is testament to what a real ‘sandbox’ game should be. Why was ‘The Sims’ so captivating and addictive to so many? Maybe it was down to the fact that everything in the environment was built, bought, chosen and placed there by you. Objects had a history, like the big TV you bought when Dave finally got that promotion bonus, that cheap cooker in the corner of the kitchen that set fire and burnt to death the woman you had him commit to marrying for so long, or the gravestone amongst the trees outside where her body now lay. Will Wright proved to designers that size really doesn’t matter when creating a world of depth and belonging.

So I ask for a change of environmental approach. ‘The Elder Scrolls IV’ was a brilliant game, but I found ‘Psychonaut’s’ Psychic Summer Camp far more memorable than Cyrodiil, a trashy house in ‘The Sims’ far more captivating than the triple cities within ‘Assassin’s Creed’, as beautiful as they were. Technology is always advancing, making possible the likes of ‘Mass Effect’ and ‘Crackdown’, but why jump to the large when there’s so much left to explore in the small?