Gaming Vulture

What Makes Video Games Uniquely First Person?

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:00:00 -0400

Some time ago, Alexa Corriea reported on some of Rami Ismail’s thoughts on the first-person in video games. Ismail is one of the co-founders of Vlambeer, a Dutch studio that focuses on creating indie retro games. At IndieCade East in February, Ismail explained to Corriea that he believes all games are essentially first-person experiences, no matter where the cameras are places and who we’re playing as,

“The way you discuss, the way you play, the way you think about games is in terms of ‘I,’ ‘I learned or failed or succeeded.’ That direct link is something no other medium can offer. Books and movies will always have distance between the media and the person [reading or watching]. You don’t read books with ‘I’ as being about you.”

All of which raises an interesting point: what determines the distance between the media and the person? Why do I identify with game avatars in ways that I don’t with the protagonist of say, Moby Dick?

I’m always skeptical of arguments that involve the claim “no other medium.” Rarely, in fact, is there a quality or phenomenon that’s unique to one form. Video games depend on interactivity more than other media, but everything from books to movies still require some amount of it. From the basic interaction of stimuli and senses, to how one interacts on a mental level—it’s not exactly obvious that video games are interactive in fundamentally different ways than other media (i.e. that it’s a difference of kind, rather than just degree).

And what about the “direct link” that Ismail posits? While it’s not common for other mediums to elicit the “I did X” in the way most games do, I can certainly imagine a book wherein the conceit is that I, the reader, am the one who is also being written about, and the acts it chronicles are therefore mine (like Never Ending Story, just less fantastical and more postmodern).

In general though, I think this is a much stronger point than the one about interactivity that’s made more often. Because video games constantly react to me, the player, they feel like first person experiences in ways books and movies do not. After all, the experience of watching a movie is certainly first person in the basic sense that I’m the one watching the movie and I’m the one reading the book.

But movies and books rely more on how I react to them than on trying to create an experience based around how they react to me. The asymmetry is completely reversed in games. Whereas traditionally the creator is given precedence, either because they chose which exact words would be read in what order, or which sequence of images would flicker and what each one would consist of, video games give precedence to the player.

Often they succeed or fail by whether or not they’re able to negotiate control of the game in interesting ways. On one level of Mario I can go backwards if I’ve decided I’ve missed something, whereas on another level I’m forced to continue forward as the screen slowly scrolls from left to right. Negotiating control is even more evident in one of the basic elements of any game: powering up.

The more the player powers up their on-screen representation (Mario, Dante, Master Chief), by eating a mushroom, learning a new combo, or finding a better gun, the more control he or she gains over the game. Enemies become easier, the levels go faster, etc. Games like Prototype take this to the extreme by creating an environment precisely for a player whose character can do almost anything; in effect asking the question: what will you do now that we’ve allowed you to break the game?

Hands On with Nvidia's Shield at PAX East

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:03:00 -0400

PAX East happened last weekend in Boston, and while there I had the chance not only to hear a lot of interesting panel discussions, but also demo some new games and hardware.

When I first heard about the Nvidia Shield I was kind of dumbfounded. It looked like a handheld screen had been strapped to an old Xbox controller. It was and remains unclear who exactly will be creating software for the Shield. And its two big selling points made it feel too much like a piece of boutique gaming tech rather than an independent handheld like the 3DS or PS Vita.

The Nvidia rep’s explanation at the company’s PAX booth did nothing to alter that impression. He noted, as I already knew, that the device allows you to stream PC games to it as well as play them on an HDTV, but as Grant Hatchimonji writes,

“Yes, that’s a nice feature and all, but it needs to be connected to a PC to do so, and all of the work is handled by that machine before it’s spit out on Project Shield. At that point, it’s little more than a controller with which to play your PC games, and we all know those have existed for quite some time…and for far less money.”

Now we don’t know yet how much the Shield will cost. It could be as low as $99, which would make it an extremely interesting option. That’s also extremely unlikely though.

Holding the Shield in my hand I quickly forgot its lackluster design. The slick edges actually feel slightly more immersive than less ergonomic surfaces. Post-iPhone, everyone has been chasing smooth, flat, and light-weight, and while it’s not exactly heavy, the Shield is still none of those things. Even if the hardware feels nice to hold however, I’m still not sure what Nvidia’s plan for marketing it will be, which matters if it’s ever going to become a platform that people develop for—not just an expensive device for streaming and porting games everyone can already play on their phone and PC.

The analog sticks are concave and satisfyingly springy and the screen renders games cleanly and crisply (having played a lot of my 3DS recently, I was more than a little jealous). The games themselves though were somewhere below unimpressive. Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II is available on just about every platform, and though it looks pretty and plays off Genesis nostalgia, wasn’t good when it first came out and isn’t any better today.

Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin THD and Dead Trigger 2 border on intentional caricatures, their names alone necessitating a prolonged scratch of the head. While the latter looks like what a computer might create if it were tasked with making a clone of a FPS clone (and plays much the same), the former is an action heavy isometric RPG where the action is slow and the actual RPG elements are few and far between (in addition to lacking any clear sense of its own aesthetic or narrative premise).

In many ways, Nvidia’s Shield is a directionless attempt to haphazardly fuse old gaming ideas with new platform interfaces. Eventually, Nvidia promises, the Shield will stream games directly from the “Cloud!” But what those games are, and the conventional, if not completely backwards looking device they’re played on, still feels unreconcilably at odds with the rest of Nvidia’s forward-looking agenda. The Shield is more Steampunk than Cyberpunk, more tactile friction than seamless integration, without a clear vision for who will buy it or why.

How One Simple Idea Makes FLT One of a Kind

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:20:00 -0400

I’ve spent over 75 hours playing Faster than Light—more than any other game I played last year. And I still haven’t beaten it! So I’ve often puzzled over why exactly it is that I keep coming back. Something one of the game’s co-creators told Polygon’s Tracey Lien in a recent feature helped explain why,

“All we cared about was making the player feel like they were Captain Picard yelling at engineers to get the shields back online.”

A simple idea but a powerful one. Unlike most space games where players are put in the shoes of the pilot rather than the captain, FTL’s Justin Ma and Matthew Davis wanted players to take the role of commander instead. The result is that rather than overcome obstacles through skill alone, players overcome them through a range of possible tactics and underlying strategies.

This helps you own your mistakes. Instead of feeling frustrated when the odds against your survival mount you feel fully engaged and accountable. Where ever you end up in FTL, the choices that get you there are yours and yours alone.

Creators Justin Ma and Matthew Davis (via Polygon)

While the inspiration for the game’s premise came from shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Battlestar Galactica, its gameplay systems were inspired from simple board games. As Ma explains to Lien, he and Davis were fascinated by how exciting and enthralling games based around tokens and painted cardboard could be,

“There are tons of games that are able to elicit those sorts of feelings without too much fancy hardware. We could be playing Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game and it’s just a board and some pieces of cardboard, but it feels super intense and everyone is sweating and breathing quickly.”

The game not only captures that feeling extremely well, it also allows the imagination plenty of freedom to fill in the gaps. One of FTL’s virtues (and it has so many) is how well it strikes a balance between rendering and describing events for the player and allowing the player to fill in the rest on their own. You feel like you’re co-authoring your adventure, and co-creating the world it takes place in, rather than just playing a script someone else wrote and programmed for you.

At bottom though what makes FTL so successful is how precisely its tied to a specific concept. You’re Picard (or Kirk, or Janeway, or Adama) trying to exploit every aspect of your ship in order just to get to the next jump point. It’s thrilling and awesome, and even if that particular feeling isn’t for you, developers would do well to keep their game designs just as ultimately basic.

You should read the rest of Lien’s profile of the FTL creators—it’s really great stuff.

Reflecting on How We Get Our Kicks

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:53:00 -0400

Nate Ferra lives in Arizona and loves arcade claw games. Not only that, he’s also extremely good at them. Until he encountered one that involved live Lobsters rather than plush toys. The novelty of it got him interested but eventually clawing after a living creature who struggled to remain free was just too much. He gave the game up and was relieved that he failed.

Conor Friedersdorf writes about Ferra’s experience, as well as his own, at the Atlantic. This is how he describes the games unsettling allure,

“It’s hard to articulate. If you came upon a BB gun in a field, then spied a tree stump 20 yards away with a tin can atop it, would you feel compelled to shoot? Can people skip stones in your presence without your wanting to join? Does something about the game Hungry Hungry Hippos delight you? Do you have a desire to hunt that is totally divorced from a desire to kill animals? Either you understand the impulses I’m grasping to explain or you don’t possess them.

So I stood at the machine, trying my best to guide the claw over a lobster… but as it descended harmlessly, grasping nothing (I am nowhere near as adept at the claw as our friend from Arizona) I felt… relief. This despite the fact that I would experience no discomfort eating a lobster burrito right now, and that I would much rather kill a lobster than a swordfish (blackened on nachos they’re divine) let alone the cows made into my In N Out burgers or the pigs in my bacon.”

Friedersdorf draws on David Foster Wallace’s famous essay “Consider the Lobster” to explore why we react so differently depending on the details of an encounter. Why would many of us refuse to slaughter a pig but have no problem eating bacon the next day for breakfast?

The whole experience leads Friedersdorf to conclude,

“It may be no coincidence that Ferra, who was more disturbed by the lobster game than any other player I’ve encountered, is also the man who is most invested in and delighted by claw games generally as amusement. Perhaps it isn’t the notion of catching a reluctant lobster that bothers us so much as the notion of doing so for kicks.”

Which leads me to wonder about all the digital behaviors we engage in, like slaughtering enemy soldiers or carrying out hits on anonymous targets, and whether we shouldn’t give more thought to why we enjoy those things so much.

The problem not being that we engage in horrendous acts in video games that we would never commit in real life, but that we seem to enjoy them so much. Killing to save a loved one or prevent catastrophe is one thing, yet so many games encourage us to do it for no reason at all—and we love it.

Why Mindful XP is a Model Proving Ground for Video Games

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:52:00 -0500

Three students at Carnegie Mellon University have been putting together a gaming anthology in which each title seeks to express a different thought, emotion, or experience.

As Emily Gera reports for Polygon Mindful XP,

“[B]egan as the collective effort of Felix Park, Dan Lin and Michael Lee, three students from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center who worked together during their Spring semester at the school to complete 10 standalone games that would be as mechanically and stylistically diverse as they could make them. The idea, they say, was to use games as a medium for communication; to portray meaning through specific attributes that can only be found there.”

Unlike most video game developers, these students are working out something fundamental to the medium as a fledgling new form for art: how to communicate meaning.

Just looking at the the triple A games slated to release this March makes the merits of experimenting with the form in concise and discrete ways clear. The new Tomb Raider has already received a wealth of criticism for the dissonance between the character portrait Crystal Dynamics attempted to depict and the gamified violence and exploration around which the game is centered.

And despite the best efforts of those involved, I’m skeptical that the upcoming Gears of War: Judgement will be any more successful. Indeed, even Bioshock Infinite, a game pressumably built from the ground up around a central creator’s ambitious narrative vision, might not be able to blend its gameplay and narrative as well as it claims. In each case the core gameplay remains surprisingly similar, and in each case the creators are trying to force meaning through a pre-set system of conventions hoping to achieve something more.

Of course, it’s worthwhile that the developers behind these games are at least trying to overcome the problems which plague most games which want to be about something. I enjoy titles that have settled for just being fun, but there have been and continue to be so many games which satisfy that need that I’m more interested at this point in the ones that are trying to push for something weirder and stranger. This is exactly what the Mindful XP project seeks to do,

“In our case, we were striving to communicate some sort of meaning through our games, whether that meaning might be a specific experience and designed for the player to discover, or something more generalized that a player could interpret through their own personal lens. We tried to convey meaning specifically using the medium’s unique strengths of mechanics, interactions and systems, but we still felt that providing context through aspects like narrative or visuals was pretty necessary for almost all of the things we were trying to communicate.”

By starting so small and working with few resources, Park, Lin, and Lee have the space to explore and really grapple with these conundrums in ways that most commercial developers, especially big ones, do not. The risks are smaller but the breakthroughs can be just as important and helpful to designers everywhere. Per Gera’s reporting,

“One difficulty we encountered throughout our project was creating a game that was personally satisfying for each of us,” he says. “With each game we had a particular meaning, but during development we would often encounter a point where we felt that meaning was not being properly communicated. We would spend many hours revamping, refining, and often scrapping mechanics that we felt didn’t work. In addition we wanted to make sure that the message we were communicating wasn’t a shallow or overly-simplistic message, we wanted a message that struck a sliver of truth for people and created a moment of introspection and personal reflection.”

All the while the team also wanted to maintain the balance between “meaning and engagement.” And this is perhaps the Achilles heel of most other developers. In needing to be profitable and compete with other titles for your time and attention, most games have to by economic necessity prioritize engagement over meaning. Even a title like Journey, I would argue, sacrifices the opportunity to delve deeper into its thematic subject matter in favor of remaining lighter, more accessible, and more instantly rewarding.

The creators of the Mindful XP Volume have avoided needing to make those decisions though, being allowed by the size and context of their project to focus exclusively on whether the interactive experience is achieving what they want it to in each case.

The post image at the top is taken from the most recent game, “Get Closer.” All of them are playable here.

Hey Fire Emblem: Awakening, Why Does Everyone Like You so Much?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:27:00 -0500

Right now Fire Emblem: Awakening is sitting at 92 on Metacritic. That’s extremely good for any game a month out from release, but especially a JRPG that’s tactics-based and sports dragons, magic, and mystical prophesies.

But I don’t understand why. After playing the game for a solid 25 hours I was no more impressed with it then why I started (and in fact a lot less impressed by some aspects of the game I had initially found quite compelling).

Not so for Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton though. Kirk, whose work I admire and whose opinions I respect, recently wrote about how gripped he was by Awakening’s conclusion,

“It took me about 27 hours to complete the game. If, about halfway through, you had told me that the ending was going to make me feel proud and sad and thrilled and bittersweet, I wouldn’t have believed you. That’s because halfway through, the story seemed like total nonsense. It was a mess of warring kingdoms with gobbledegook names, prophecies that didn’t make sense, mysterious doppelgängers and all sorts of time-traveling nonsense, all hinging on—you guessed it!—an ancient evil, poised to awake.

But somehow, over the course of the final three or four chapters, Awakening pulled it all together and delivered one of the most cathartic conclusions of any game I’ve recently played.”

The reasons for this are many, but Kirk boils them down into how the relationship building mechanic between characters reinforces the ultimate sacrifice at the heart of the game’s finale.

“As I fought, that music was playing, and what a piece of music it was. I’ve written before about how Hiroki Morishita and Rei Kendoh’s score is great, and the wonderfully shifting musical milieu of combat, but this final piece of music goes above and beyond. Like the story at this point, it ties together several of the score’s motifs into something that’s at once rousing, melancholy, romantic and energizing, and oddly sad. It’s a play on the accordion riff that plays when you first meet Chrom and his shepards at the start of the game. The accordion represents so much in this game: friendship, unity, teamwork, sacrifice. ”

As the battle unfolds characters are lost, lovers are separated, until finally Kirk’s avatar strikes down the evil Grima and the built up tension finds its release in the following prologue,”

If you’d told me at the outset that I’d get this emotionally invested in Fire Emblem: Awakening, I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s fantasy malarky, I would’ve said. It’s just dragons and spells, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. That was true, after all: I hadn’t seen it before, this was my first Fire Emblem game. I’d yet to experience the series’ unique brand of emotional attachment.”

So that’s what everyone’s been feeling when they play Awakening! I on the other hand got none of that, and in fact posted a longish meditation on why the game didn’t connect with me, exploring how it compares with similar title, Final Fantasy Tactics, which did. A taste,

“This pinpoints one of the game’s biggest shortcoming: its incomplete attempt at fostering believable and unique camaraderie between the troops. Character downtime can be observed in the barracks, and conversations can be overheard after a battle has brought them closer together, but this intimacy has its limits, failing to extend to the actual battlefield itself, or the tragedies that occur on it. The issue of marriage is poorly served in the game as well, not just because it precludes the possibility of romantic same-sex relationships, but because too often Awakening chooses to focus on the moments of quirky serenity in-between fights rather than exploring how characters true personalities are exposed in the crucible of war.

…

On the one hand, these emergent entities are less clearly defined and less emotive than their counterparts in a game like Awakening. On the other though, the range of identities units in Final Fantasy Tactics can take on, and the variety of ways for them to interact with the battlefield, lead to sub-narratives that enrich the player’s experience without undermining the main storyline. This subtle difference is why a fallen warrior in Tactics can be silently mourned while the silence in Awakening necessarily comes off as disturbingly dissonant.”

I still wonder though why exactly the games strike me differently in this way. I’ve talked to a fair number of people who simply love the game, and like Kirk, were completely pulled by its dating-sim and how that gameplay affects combat.

For me though, that was never enough to get past the cookie-cutter characters and predictable plot. See, in a tactical JRPG you either need a great story or awesome battles. Disgaea’s story is at times clever, but never engrossing. It’s combat and leveling systems make it irresistible for anyone into that type of game though. Tactics has both that and a great story, whereas I don’t see Awakening as having either.

Combat is pretty simple. If you play without permadeath, the game is fairly easy. If you play with it, the game is much more difficult, but forces you to just play more conservatively rather than come up with more innovative strategies or unit load-outs. And the story is, well, about people who are all inexplicably loyal to one another, threatened by inherently evil forces, fated to put destroying that evil above their own lives or happiness.

Been there done that, and although many great stories could also be reduced to such banal terms, they do something Awakening doesn’t, which is to dress up the intermediate moments and spaces with interesting sub-plots, complex character motivations, and the feeling of a full-realized world.

There’s plenty in Awakening that I think is worthwhile, and I’m definitely curious to give Fire Emblem games a try in the future, but I need something a little more serious, or a little more complex. As Adam Harshberger noted, something like Fire Emblem: House of Cards. Better characters and a crueler world—less “all you need is love.”

Photo

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:25:26 -0500

Final Fantasy Tactics in six images.

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:40:00 -0500

Ramah summon is kickass and not possible in FE:A.

Tactics battles are smaller, but beautifully rendered.

Who needs cutscenes when you've got animations like these?

Look at all them abilities.

That's what choice looks like.

Elegant materialism.

Final Fantasy Tactics in six images.

Fire Emblem: Awakening in six images.

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:39:00 -0500

The extent of the possibilities.

Do I attack this guy, or that guy?

Battles are big, but diluted.

These characters are for real.

Look at that item!

This is the extent of what a level up gives you.

Fire Emblem: Awakening in six images.

I checked numerous other gaming outlets who ran the same piece...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:47:54 -0500

I checked numerous other gaming outlets who ran the same piece of news, and none that I came across used a pic of a bikini-busting woman to do it.

There's no Way Around it, Shooting People is Violent

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:43:00 -0500

Penny Arcade Report has published quite a few stories about the upcoming FPS for PC: ShootMania Storm. Using their most recent preview of the game as am example, I try to make the distinction between gore, violence, and less-violence,

“Calling a game non-violent doesn’t make it so, which makes it dissapointing that Prell doesn’t really take the time to spell out what she think’s violence is, and thus why this game is so much less so that it might even qualify as “virtuous.” I understand that the developer PAR is talking to wants consumers to think that, and has gone to great lenghts to take out the “objectional content,” like blood and gore, in order to make them feel like ShootMania Storm really isn’t violent.

There are plenty of violent games that I love, and some of them that I love precisely because they are violent. We just need to be clear-minded when we talk about these things though, and not get trapped by our rhetoric, or get lored into contradictions simply because a game’s marketing and branding tells us otherwise.”

Why is Video Game Violence Less Harmful Than Video Game Sexism?

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:29:23 -0500

I recently read Michelle Ealey’s “Blaming [INSERT CHOICE OF ENTERTAINMENT HERE] Solves Nothing.”

It was at once a somewhat refreshing defense of violence in video games and still representative of most other people’s sentiments inside the gaming community. It also puts forth an argument that could just as easily (with some caveats) be applied to sexism in video games, leaving me to wonder why so many people address the topics so differently.

To make the rhetorical parallel (and conceptual juxtaposition) clear, I took several excerpts from Ealey’s piece and inserted sexism/sexist for violence/violent.

You can see the results here.

When it Comes to Video Game Companies and Consumers, Fairness Never Enters Into it

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:33:00 -0500

At IGN, Audrey Drake lays out five reasons why having to rebuy virtual console games to get full Wii U functionality is entirely fair,

“Look, I know all about being a petulant gamer who just wants all gaming companies to give me exactly what I want the moment I want it and totally free of charge. Having those thoughts is inevitable, especially for people who devote a large part of their free time to a singular hobby. But don’t confuse what you want with what you’re entitled to. Nintendo has the right to charge for the goods and services it offers. It’s called the free market, and it’s a beautiful thing. As a company (read: a business out to make money, not a magical, game-making fairy machine only out to give you free happiness) Nintendo has every right to charge consumers for a new service they’ve conceived. And consumers have every right to elect to buy into that service, or to make the personal call that the cost isn’t worth the return. It’s all really simple. And all very fair.”

On the one hand I’m not that concerned with throwing a few more bucks in order to get Wii U functionality. Should I desire to, I could still play all my virtual console games from my Wii on the Wii U using a special mode (I just wouldn’t be able to play them on the GamePad or interact with the Miiverse).

On the other, however, I think Drake commits a common mistake when she employs the “free market” as an explanation for why companies should be allowed to do as they wish, without recognizing that the same principle leaves consumers free to react however they see fit.

You can see my full rebuttal over IGN, but here’s the main thrust,

“What some people often forget when discussing the business of video games is that the free market logic cuts both ways. Businesses have a right to sell whatever they want for however much they want. And consumers have a right to go elsewhere if their expectations aren’t met, and/or tell others that they should do so as well. Nintendo is entitled to not offer Cross-Buy, and consumers are entitled to punish their brand or their bottom-line for not doing so. That’s the free market.

You only get what you fight for and if Drake is satisfied with Nintendo’s current offering, than she’ll get just that. But if others aren’t, and remain unconvinced by the points she makes, that doesn’t make them entitled or unreasonable. It just means they have different expectations; a different breaking-point. I’m sure Drake has one as well. If the Wii U required you to not only rebuy old content in order to play it on the GamePad and with Miiverse, but also required a monthly fee for the on-going service, she might decide that that is her breaking-point—the point at which she as a consumer decides it’s just not enough, not because she’s entitled, but because she’s a consumer, and that’s how consumers in a free market act.”

Putting Final Fantasy's Recent Struggles in Perspective

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:51:00 -0500

Last week, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier proceeded to morn the once prestigious JRPG franchise’s continued demise. Specifically, Schreier condemed the latest game to carry the Final Fantasy name, All The Bravest for iOS, and the growing trend of mediocre and heartless JRPG titles coming out of Square he feels it exemplifies,

“But Final Fantasy All The Bravest is not an anomaly. This betrayal is nothing new. Square has spent the past half-decade picking away at our passion for their ubiquitous, once-beloved series. All The Bravest is just another limb rotting off the bloated, mangled corpse that was once Final Fantasy.

As someone who grew up with the adventures of Cecil and Terra, I find it depressing to even write, but here we are. It’s 2013, and Final Fantasy is on its last legs. The 25-year-old RPG series is a shell of its former self. When we see a new Final Fantasy game, our first reaction is no longer “awesome!”—it is “shit, how are they going to ruin my childhood next?” I’ve written before about some of the problems facing Final Fantasy, and even drawn up wish lists of things I’d like to see Square Enix try to do, but All The Bravest is yet another piece of disturbing evidence that this company no longer cares about its fans.”

All the Bravest is by all accounts a train-wreck (though some have rightly pointed out that their are potentially creative ideas seemingly lingering ever so faintly at its core). The App Store cash-grab demonstrates a near total lack of understanding when it comes to: bite-sized gameplay, simplistic touchscreen controls, positive and satisfying feedback loops. The fact that this abomination of game design is skinned in Final Fantasy sprites makes the tortuous enterprise sting all the more.

But I’m less convinced that this particular instance, and even some of the company’s controversial decisions this console generation, are in any way indicative of the franchise’s overall decline. In a piece at Gaming Vulture proper, I make the case in full,

“Since that time we’ve passed through several generations of new gaming hardware and witnessed Final Fantasy undergo many transformations and permutations. In looking back over the franchise’s long history, then, it’s not easy to locate a defining moment in its evolution. Is there one period of time during which Final Fantasy was more authentic than in any other? Are the games from the SNES era more “true” to the series’ essence than those from the Playstation one?

…

All this is to say that we need to look at the tangible changes taking place and try to judge them beyond our own preferences and personal histories. All the Bravest is a misstep that few will dispute, but Final Fantasy’s greater legacy is far from being in its last throes. Rather, it’s continuing to evolve and change, explore and experiment—which is as it should be. We can’t fault Square Enix for not trying to re-capture the magic of Final Fantasys past by delivering simple variations on them.

Schreier “grew up with the adventures of Cecil and Terra.” Both were interesting and conflicted 16-bit characters. Young gamers of this generation grew up with Basch and Lightning, two different but no less complex characters. I can recall spending the Christmas after Final Fantasy XII came out roaming its Ogir-Yensa Sandsea as vividly as any time I spent adventuring through the deserts surrounding Figaro. My respect, admiration, and sadness for Final Fantasy X’s Auron rival that of any of the franchise’s previous tragic heroes. And the final string of boss battles in Final Fantasy XIII are no less baroque and incomprehensible than fighting Zeromus, the “Wellspring of Darkness,” on the moon in Final Fantasy IV, or fighting Necron, the “Eternal Darkness,” at the end of Final Fantasy IX.”

I’ll be the first to criticize Final Fantasy XIII, as well as XIII-2, though I do think the sequel goes a long way toward rectifying what I saw as the mistakes of the first (I’m also quite bullish on Lighting Returns). I thought XIII’s story, while interesting in theory, was horrendously realized in the actual game. One-dimensional voice acting and the lack of a strong thematic thread to tie every particular and arbitrary character melodrama together resulted in a dazzling but overall shallow experience.

However, I still appreciate a lot of what Square tried to do with XIII, and think that its continued willingness to take risks and toy with the JRPG formula, as well as try to negotiate with fans’ expectations rather than just appease them, bodes well for the next numbered installment in the series.

One Question Faces Nintendo After Today's Announcements

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:52:00 -0500

Twitter exploded today during and after Nintendo Direct’s live stream in which the company’s President, Satoru Iwata, announced new updates and teased upcoming software for the Wii U.

On the console side, Nintendo will be expanding access to the Wii U’s Miiverse to smartphones come this spring. In addition, the company will work on reducing system load times through incremental firmware updates. And to help players deal with the Wii U’s sparse release schedule, Nintendo is going to make a new virtual console title available each month for $.30 through June.

But the biggest news was about upcoming Wii U games.

We knew that titles like Game and Wario, Pikmin 3, and Lego City Undercover would be coming out in the second quarter, but Nintendo also gave us a better look at Platinum Games’ The Wonderful 101, which looks like it’ll be one of the console’s more solid third-party games.

Bayonetta 2 also looks like its shaping up well. In a short development video, Platinum Games discusses the design philosophy guiding its development as a Wii U exclusive sequel. Even as someone who’s never been particularly taken by third-person action games like Darksiders or God of War, many of the monster assets and environments the team showed off started to get me interested in it, especially because of how well it seems to be blending the dark gothic feel of the IP with the brighter, more fantastical sensibility of its host console.

And then Iwata moved on to previously unannounced games. We learned for one that Nintendo is working on a new 3D Mario game, and a Mario Kart game, both of which should be playable at this year’s E3 (where Nintendo will also show off the first screens of the upcoming Super Smash Bros. game). Furthermore, there’s a new Yoshi game on the horizon that borrows heavily from Kirby’s Epic Yarn in both gameplay and aesthetic, and a mash-up of Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem that could prove to be an example of more collaborations with third party IPs in the future.

However, none of these titles have release dates yet. The closest thing Nintendo offered to a firm date on any of its software was fall release of the HD remake of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. It’s not the remake I would have chosen (I’d have preferred an HD Majora’s Mask), but what they were able to show looked really impressive.

Given how much time and resources they’ve apparently sunk into modernizing it, I’m extremely hopeful, as naive as it may sound, that Nintendo will try to make some additional content for the game. Even a few extra dungeons, or a new DLC quest that takes place at the end of the game would 1.) give us more Zelda, which is never a bad thing, and 2.) be a good way for Nintendo to experiment with offering more bite sized content that supplements their main releases.

When it comes to a new Zelda for the Wii U, producer Eiji Aonuma basically said, in so many words, that Nintendo is trying to get back to basics and liberate itself from many of the franchise’s conventions. He suggested a non-linear structure for completing dungeons and trying to distill the game back to its original essence. With any luck this will mean a Legend of Zelda that blends old and new; something that plays somewhat like Skyrim or Dark Souls, but based around core Zelda mechanics like collecting special items, exploring fields and forests, and solving dungeon puzzles.

Finally, we caught a glimpse of what Monolith Soft has burn working on. It looks to be some sort of follow up to Xenoblade or Xenosaga. Whatever it ends up being, it’s clear from the footage that the game will be, if nothing else, gorgeous. But beyond that it also looks to continue a lot of the themes of older Xeno games, including the tension between humans and mechs.

In looking over all of the announcements then, my first question was: when will this stuff be coming out? Are we looking at second and third quarter of 2014 (if not later), or fourth quarter of this year, and the first quarter of next? For now, both are quite a ways off, but with both Microsoft and Sony releasing next-gen systems toward the end of this year, and all of the new players entering the hardware market, including Nvidia and Valve, timing could be crucial from saving the under-powered Wii U from its over-powered rivals.

If Nintendo is able to offer a handful more first and third party exclusives by the launch of the other consoles, its own robust pricing and growing library of software could make it the decisive choice come next Christmas and even after. Sony’s Vita was a great handheld, even at the price it released at. But due to a timely price-cut and strategic release of killer software by its rival (Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 3D, and Monster Hunter 3 in Japan), the Vita got buried.

Whether Nintendo is able to make a similar showing with a similarly under-powered piece of hardware this time around remains to be seen. Even if they Wii U does fail to break out of the niche market though, it’s clear that those who already bought one, and those who still might, will have a lot to look forward in the next year or two.

Lightning Returns Aims to be More Than Just Another Final Fantasy Game

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:09:00 -0500

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII will be Square Enix’s second attempt to atone for the missteps of the original game three years ago. After Final Fantasy XIII made its controversial debut back in 2010, producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama were left to pick up the pieces and figure out went wrong.

With the game’s newest spin-off due out late next fall, both designers have one last chance to win back old fans, and find some new ones, before the console generation and the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythology upon which FFXIII was based come to an end. I’m usually extremely skeptical of all the buzz and positive spin that new video game previews generate, but the information that’s recently come out about Lightning Returns has even me thinking it might be a success, both critically and among hardcore Final Fantasy fans (I’m less bullish on the title’s capacity to spark interest in gamers previously unaware of the series).

Unlike past installments, what is effectively XIII-3 will border on being a third-person action game that resembles Kingdom Hearts meets Devil May Cry. Players will control Lighting, the titular character who is on a quest to save as many people in the world as possible from an approaching doomsday she herself is responsible for.

Exploration will take place on four continents which, as Destructoid’s Dale North explains, are each connected by train. The religious port city of Luxerion, the forested and mountainous region of the Wildlands, the arid Dead Dunes, and a mysterious fourth area yet to be revealed, will be the main environments that drive the game. In this way, it might not be too dissimilar from a game like Assassin’s Creed, a title where players spend most of their time in a few individual cities.

In fact, the similarities to the Assassin’s Creed may well run even deeper. As Jeremy Parish of 1up noted, the map designs recently demoed at a Square Enix event point toward the same kind of “organic, fully-integrated landscapes that made ACIII’s take on colonial America so engrossing.”

This is welcome news, especially since FFXIII and FFXIII-2 both failed to conjure an interesting, compelling, and immersive space to play in that felt both populated and genuine. With Lightning Returns it looks like Toriyama et al. have decided to take some real risks and actually create a living, breathing world with its own problems and which runs on its own schedule.

Which brings us to perhaps the most interesting design choice made with FFXIII-3. Despite many comparison’s to Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Lighting Returns will be based around a slightly different system. As Phillip Kollar reported for Polygon,

“[C]ausing specific changes within the world of Lightning Returns will delay your countdown to the end of the world. Even with that mechanic in place, Toriyama says time will be limited. It won’t be possible to do everything in a single run, and the team is encouraging multiple playthroughs with several ways to solve quests and a new-game-plus system that will allow some progress to be carried over.”

One of my top games of 2012 was Faster Than Light. In addition to being a rogue-like, which alone made it immensely fun to replay, FTL utilized a system of limited fuel and mass enemy movement that forced players to continue forward, even if they hadn’t yet managed to do everything they wanted to in a particular sector. The effect of a system like this is that it forces consequences on the player in a way that feels both natural and believable. I can only wonder how much less stilted Mass Effect 3 would have played if it actually mattered how long you took to face the Reapers.

Like Parish, I think Lightning Returns’ countdown mechanic seems more in line with something like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, a game built around the idea that people will have to replay several times in order to really experience it, as oppose to Mass Effect, which though it can be played differently each time, is not predicated upon a narrative that emerges *only* via multiple playthroughs.

And then there’s the combat, probably Lightning Returns’ main selling point. There will still be and ATB bar that fills up, but rather than work as a meter that regulates the number of times you can attack, the bar will work more like a stamina gauge, with a certain amount necessary to execute certain attacks (which isn’t too different from Dark Souls or The Witcher 2).

More importantly, the paradigm system has been reworked. Instead of switching between attack patterns players will be able to switch between different pre-customized costumes while in the middle of battle—X-2’s Dressphere system but with a twist.

Prior to combat situations, players will be able to collect different outfits, many of which correspond to paradigms from the other two games (for instance there is a Commando outfit). Not only can the aesthetic of each outfit be tweaked, but players will also get to choose three total to take with them into battle, each customized to offer different abilities and stat bonuses.

Also, since each ATB gauge fills independently of the others, battles will move fast and encourage finding unique ways to switch between different tactics and strategies. So while guarding and dodging with one outfit, the gauge for a more offense oriented outfit will be restocking in the background. However, unlike in more recent Final Fantasys, players won’t gain new abilities by gaining experience and exploring some variation on a skill tree. Instead, most skills will be bought at different stores. Which could become an interesting mini-game in itself if certain vendors won’t share their wares with you until you’ve helped them with their own troubles, most likely in the form of one of the game’s many side quests.

On the whole, I think Square Enix has chosen a good overall design philosophy to guide Lighting Returns’ development. Focusing mostly on one character could help players relate better to the game by giving them one single avenue through which to interact with it, rather than trying to deal with the complexities of an ensemble. According to what Toriyama told IGN’s Luke Karmali, Lighting’s character arc will be a big part of the next game,

“You might be a little bit surprised to see her at the beginning of Lightning Returns because you’re going to find her even more distant and more closed than before, but throughout the story you’re going to find out more about her real emotions, and what goes through her mind. She will be getting more and more human and vulnerable, even as you play.”

And then there’s the commitment to making Lightning Returns “world-driven.” This is a key part of what has made many Western games so successful in the current console generation. Games like Infamous, Assassin’s Creed, and Skyrim gained immensely from being situated in one or a few places. Empire City starts to take on a life of its own because we spend so much time running around it as Cole. Renaissance Italy comes to life because time was taken to make the environments detailed, accurate, and heavily populated. And Skyrim is named after the very place you spend all of your time exploring. In each the gameplay feels less arbitrary and repetitive because it feels tied to a living, breathing place with its own problems and issues.

It’s clear that Square Enix is trying not just to make a Final Fantasy game, but to make a great game that succeeds on its own merits, regardless of its namesake. According to PAR’s Sophie Prell, the new game won’t even feature the iconic artwork of Yoshitaka Amano. It’s a questionable marketing move (in my opinion), but certainly shows that Kitase and the rest of the development team aren’t satisfied with what they’ve produced so far this generation. Hopefully with Lightning Returns their hard work will have finally paid off.

One Reason Why Some RPG Narratives Hold Up

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:54:00 -0500

Content degradation: the “diminishing capacity to view the objects in the game independently of the system for which they signify.”

That’s how the concept was explained to Joseph Leray by Kirk Battle. In an essay at Bit Creature from a couple weeks ago, Leray explored how certain RPGs deliver a powerful narrative punch in part because they pin battle and exploration systems to the plot,

“Junctioning a Guardian Force in Final Fantasy VIII; summoning a sky-dragon in IX and X; buying a license from a government-approved vendor in XII’s Ivalice — all of these complex, Byzantine systems are pinned into their respective game’s plots, taken as literal parts of their worlds. These mechanics are only possible in the context created by each game’s narrative foundation. The content — the story, the characters, the setpieces — serve as the foundation on which the systems are built.

In other words, the content in, say, most Final Fantasy games doesn’t degrade quickly. Even in the midst of a boss fight, when the game is almost purely mechanical, players are dealing with tiny pieces of the plot and gameworld. When content is inescapable, it remains relevant.”

Leray goes further and points out some specific instances in which RPGs are able to make a plot development more compelling by integrating it directly into certain gameplay systems.

In Final Fantasy VII, Aeris’ death cuts even more sharply because of the void it later leaves in both character dialogue and battle situations,

“Her death, both mechanically and narratively, is profoundly traumatic, and any viable team composition has to account for her absence. Part of the reason Final Fantasy VII’s Materia system is so flexible is to compensate, mechanically speaking, for her loss. She haunts the rest of the game like a phantom limb.”

In Final Fantasy IX, Garnet becomes a mute after certain devastating events take place. Again, the result is that what the character is going through on paper is reinforced by its consequences in other aspects of the game,

“Like Aeris, Garnet is her team’s white mage and primary healer. Because Final Fantasy IX is more mechanically restrictive than VII, there are actually fewer ways for the player to compensate for Garnet’s absence during this part of the game. The trade-off is that she eventually recovers and re-joins the team in a mechanically significant way. Again, Final Fantasy IX’s content is doubly effective because it changes the way players model the game. It is relevant to the system, therefore it doesn’t degrade.”

This got me thinking of another game which also fits neatly into this scheme: Chrono Trigger. In that beloved 16-bit JRPG, players lead their party with the game’s spiky haired protagonist out in front for the first half of the game. He deals the most damage, has the highest speed, and is integral to most of the dual and triple techniques you obtain up to that point (attacks which require a specific combination of characters to perform).

But after Chrono dies, players are forced into the end-game without the leading hero. You can choose any combination of the remaining characters to constitute your party from there on, which also has the effect of opening up different triple techniques since Chrono can be replaced. His speed and power are sorely missed, and the techniques to which he’s integral to can no longer be used.

The result is that a character which had hitherto been little more than a voiceless token to represent the player becomes more fully appreciated for his nonverbal role in the gameplay and story. Losing him, and even more importantly getting him back again, is that much more compelling.

More interesting still would probably be taking the concept and applying it to non-RPGs to see where content degrades when it could have otherwise been preserved. One example that comes to mind immediately is Max Payne 3. Throughout the game Max undergoes a series of emotional shifts. It could even be argued that there are different moments of revelation which occur for his character.

But the gameplay never changes in any meaningful way. The same combination of assault weapons and bullet time that’s used at the start of the game is used throughout. Eventually players become efficient killing machines, prodigiously managing bullets and hallucination allotments so as to take out enemies in the most effective way possible. The static gameplay directly undermines whatever transformative narrative arcs the game is otherwise aiming for, leading to an ultimately less fulfilling result.

One Study Shows Counter-Strike's Influence on Perceptions of Foreigners

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 16:05:00 -0500

“Playing violent video games about terrorism strengthens negative stereotypes about Arabs, even when Arabs are not portrayed in the games.”

That’s from a post by the University of Michigan highlighting a study from the January issue of Psychology of Violence. The article, co authored by Muniba Saleem and Craig Anderson, looked at the effect of having 204 participants play one of three games for 30 minutes. Two of the games were Counter-Strike, one with Arab terrorists and the other sporting Russian ones, while the third game was version of golf.

“After playing the games, the researchers assessed participants’ levels of prejudice against Arabs using direct measures such as attitude questionnaires as well as indirect measures such as drawings.

They gave participants paper and colored pencils, and asked them to draw four people: a “typical” Arab and Caucasian man and woman. Then raters coded the drawings based on the emotions depicted, stereotypical appearance and presence or absence of a weapon.

The standard tests showed that playing violent video games, even those featuring Russians as terrorists, increased anti-Arab attitudes. And the drawing test showed the same effect. Participants who played a terrorism-themed video game were more likely than those who played the golf game to draw Arabs with stereotypical traits and Arab men with weapons and angry expressions on their face.”

As the study’s authors admit, more research is needed in this area to more accurately gauge just how video game depictions can affect people’s attitudes toward “outgroups.” But it’s work like this that tries to explore the subtle and nuanced ways in which media can affect us that I think we need a lot more of.

The President has called for more research into the link between video games, media images, and violence. I hope though that the search for how they affect our attitudes and preconceptions won’t be too overshadowed by the hunt for a causal link between the digital massacres that take place in our living rooms and the ones that take place out in the real world.

(Hat/tip: Joe Bernstein)

Some Libyans Use Competitive Video Games to Connect Internationally

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:48:00 -0500

At the Atlantic, journalist John Thorne reports on how some Libyans are using video games to reconnect to the world,

“There are many ways to help bring countries like Libya out of isolation: trade, educational exchanges, and tourism, for example. There is the world of fine arts. And there is competitive online gaming. This notion is being pushed by two young Libyan gamers named Alameen A. Layas and Hassan Drebika, who founded TESCA and organized the tournament. “Most young people here don’t have the opportunity to interact with other nationalities,” says Layas, who is also a medical student. “Gaming can be a bridge.”

He spent his boyhood in Tours, France, where his father was studying surgery, before returning to Libya when he was 12. He taught himself how to use a computer and began frequenting cybercafés. In time he became adept at games including Half-Life, Counterstrike, Soldier of Fortune, Wolfenstein, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Quake, Doom, and World of Warcraft.

“Each café had a team, and they played one another at weekends,” he says. “There were skilled players. But what they didn’t realize was that, in Europe and America, gaming had been taken to the professional level.”

In 2007, a Libyan expat in Greece — whose name Layas and Drebika say they don’t know — arranged for Libyan gamers to compete in the ESWC. Invite-only qualifier matches were held in Tripoli, and Drebika was among those selected. Then the Libyans went to France and got clobbered. Their opponents were seasoned competitors, and many had sponsors, Drebika says. “They had much better internet connections in their countries, and much more experience. After what happened in France, I thought, ‘We need to be a part of this’.”

Video Games, Stop Using Violence as a Creative Crutch

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:43:00 -0500

You might remember back in June of last year when E3 2012 elicited a wave of backlash against the gaming expo’s emphasis on virtual violence. But video games once again came under fire following gun massacres in the summer and late autumn and this sentiment appeared to have quickly dissipated. Under siege from without, the gaming community for the most part banded together to denounce unfair characterizations by parents’ groups and the NRA.

So I thought I would be a lone voice in calling out critics and consumers for turning a blind eye to the parts of the industry that continue to be dominated by digital carnage and adolescent power fantasies. Over at GamesBeat I wrote,

“The fact remains that video games have a rep for being adolescent bastions of digital sadism because many of them still are. Maybe that doesn’t have the negative effect of inspiring troubled youth to be violent in real life—and all the best preliminary data says it doesn’t. It does, however, mean that most of the time and money invested in video games revolves around uninspired yet addictive feedback loops predicated on repetitive digital slaughter. Which is to say a waste of time, and an especially brutal one at that.”

Harsh words, I know.

But I was encouraged to see that many others are voicing similar concerns about the degree to which gaming companies have made a cottage industry out of in-game murder.

Another community writer at GamesBeat wrote about his experience as a developer trying to create a new survival horror game in light of all of the real violence he’s seen in his lifetime. Dene Waring argues,

“If we ‘push the same buttons’ by manipulating the boundless and uniquely human resource of imagination, we can allow our players to scare themselves to whatever level they wish to attain. As soon as we replace the literal and graphic representation of violent conflict with nervously anticipated unknowable threats, we discover that what we imagine and anticipate on a personal level when confronted with these suggested threats can be as strong as or stronger than the fear of the known.”

His game, Huntsman: The Orphanage “relies upon simple, basic human psychology in order to create the tingles of fear and excitement we all enjoy.” It’s currently in Steam’s Greenlight top ten despite his desire to eschew cheap thrills and easy violence.

In addition, Dean Takahashi brought up the same subject today in his GamesBeat column. He holds up Journey as an alternative to Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and proposes that we try to re-focus attention away from the latter and toward the former,

“[W]e as critics could do more to inspire game artists to do the best possible work they can. We don’t have to draw attention to experiences that appeal to the lowest common denominator when it comes to sex or violence. Those games will do well on their own. But we can do a lot more to encourage developers to create the most consequential works of art — games that inspire us with great stories, animations, gameplay, and simple fun. If the administration wants to get involved in that, I would welcome it. President Barack Obama could host the creators of the most imaginative games at the White House.”

I couldn’t agree more.