New reviews: Nintendo Land, Hotline Miami

I just put two new reviews up over on GamerCheese.com - Nintendo Land and Hotline Miami. I know what you are thinking - "Sol, these are very similar games! However did you manage to keep them straight in your head?" Suddenly the idea of Mario Chase involving all of the Toads wielding lead pipes popped into my head, and I'm a little bit sad. Anyway, check out the reviews - both games are excellent and worth a look.

Humble Bundle announces Humble THQ Bundle!

I wrote a bit about this at GamerCheese.com - you can find the full piece here.

Gaming, and Cheese

Hi, all,

I am going to be writing posts for GamerCheese starting yesterday! My first post, on whether to get a Wii U, is already up. I'll be trying to post for GamerCheese more frequently - every weekday, if I can manage it, and Monday-Wednesday-Friday if not. That probably means fewer original posts for this blog, though; I'm going to have to balance my time between doing even more writing and other things, like work and the game. I'll always post links to new articles here and on my Twitter, though.

Thanks as always for following along, and I hope you'll keep up with me at the new site!

Wii U: Impressions

On Sunday, my girlfriend and I made a decision about how long we would be willing to wait outside our local Target for a Wii U, and ended up in line about five minutes before the tickets were handed out, and we ended up a ticket good for the second-to-last deluxe model. I won't call our timing anything other than fabulous luck, but it does mean that I get to come to you all the day after release with my first impressions of the device and a couple of its games.

The Deluxe one is also prettier.

First: There is a system update at the beginning that takes in the neighborhood of an hour. This is a very frustrating thing to deal with out-of-the-box, and I've heard reports that if you shut the system off during that update, you can brick it. So, don't do that.

This was the least fun part.

Once our update finished we played a bit of Nintendo Land, by which I mean several hours' worth. This game itself is reason enough to spring for the deluxe model, and does a fabulous job of displaying some of the new capabilities and possibilities the console offers. In case you haven't heard of it, it's a virtual theme park-styled game that offers "attractions" (mini-games) based on various Nintendo properties from Game-And-Watch to Metroid to F-Zero to Animal Crossing. Some are single-player, but many offer some form of multiplayer that makes some use of the WiiU GamePad and the traditional Wii remotes. There are a few things we noticed about how the experience played out:

-The graphics are gorgeous. The game itself doesn't push too many boundaries technologically, but the technology amply supports the game's art style, which is beautiful. Each attraction has its own theme, but they share common style elements; in most, the scenery looks constructed, so even though the robotic goblins in the Zelda-themed attraction and the quiltwork backgrounds in the Balloon Trip Breeze attraction look substantially different they feel thematically similar. In all the attractions, too, you'll be controlling Miis dressed up like characters from the games. In one you might be dressed as Mario, or as a Pikmin. Every attraction feels like it captures a little bit of the essence of the game it's based on while still blending into the theme park aesthetic. It's a great feel.

It's just so fun to look at!

-The GamePad feels good. The screen looks great, and is responsive to touch. It's very lightweight, and holding it with both hands I found it rarely got too heavy (in some attractions where you hold it with one hand, it can start to be a little heavy). I never had any technical difficulty with the screen being unresponsive. More importantly, the GamePad is getting used in interesting ways; it's fun throwing stars with it in the ninja attraction, it's fun using it to evade your captors in the hide-and-seek-like Mario attraction, and it's fun using it as a kind of 360-degree viewfinder in the Zelda attraction, where you'll be firing at enemies on all sides. It makes me very, very optimistic about what might be possible with this in the future.

-It's really fun to watch. In general, I do like watching people play video games, but only occasionally can I convince my girlfriend to watch me play. With Nintendo Land, we both had a lot of fun both playing and watching. For a number of the events, the camera on the game pad is used to highlight whoever's playing, and it's a lot of fun to see the silly faces people make as they play. It doesn't hurt at all that the game itself is fun to look at, either. The idea of games as a spectator sport has been explored before, but in this case it's just fun to watch your friends and family play. It definitely reminds me of some of what was cool about Wii Sports when it first came out.

We've still got a lot of playing around with the Wii U itself to do - we haven't yet explored much of the online functionality, including the Miiverse - but in general it's hard not to love it. We've been mostly playing Nintendo Land and New Super Mario Bros. U, and they do feel very casual. Both have drop-in, drop-out multiplayer that's incredibly easy to do, and switching roles can keep things exciting, too. As busy as we often feel, it's really nice to feel like we can get ten or fifteen minutes of gameplay in and really still experience a meaningful chunk of the game; when you're used to playing games like Starcraft 2 or Skyrim, which unfold a lot more slowly, it's nice to have a slightly more casual option.

I should also mention that we picked up Assassin's Creed 3, in part at least because we live in Boston and we've always wanted to climb on Faneuil Hall and jump on people and all that. (You know, just startle the people coming out of the Urban Outfitters and then blend in with the performance artists and stuff and maybe have some clam chowder. I'm pretty sure that's in the game.) I haven't played AC3 on any other platform so I'm not really in a good place to make comparisons, but I can say that it looks stunning - leaps and bounds above what the Wii could do, obviously. Shimmering polygons flying around the loading screens reflecting everything are more than I think my brain knows how to handle. And it looks every bit as beautiful on the GamePad screen, too. Nothing about how the game uses the GamePad makes me think the experience is any better on the Wii U than it would be on another console. But for someone like me, who doesn't have another HD gaming console, it's a really nice claim for the Wii U to be able to make - though especially since HD consoles are so common, it's more of a prerequisite than a selling point. It seems as though it'll be able to hold its own in the high-end, AAA gaming market for a few years at least, though, which is an important step up over its predecessor.

If you're not sold on the Wii U, I might say wait until you see something that really catches your eye before you buy one. But I'd also say to try out some of the games that might not have immediately impressed you. I didn't really think Nintendo Land or New Super Mario Bros. U would hook me as much as they did, but the uses of the GamePad and the technology are really clever and fun, and hold a lot of promise. For me, the eventual purchase was inevitable; there will almost certainly be a Zelda or a Metroid for this console, and I will have them. If there's a similar inevitability for you right now, then you probably won't regret picking one up as soon as you can; there will be plenty to hold your interest. If not, then try one out and see how it feels to you; you might find there's something more than you expected there.

Heritage of a Gamer

If you aren't familiar with Extra Credits, I can't recommend it highly enough; it's hosted on the Penny Arcade site and has weekly animated shorts discussing some aspect of games from a very academic, intelligent perspective. They have more and better critiques of games, from an artistic or a social perspective, than anything similar I've seen. Their most recent episode addressed the difficulty of maintaining access to games after the technologies they run on have gone away. This I thought tied in nicely with my post from earlier in the week about how technology guides our games.

The show addressed the question of what we stand to gain if we have access to older games, and what we lose in contrast to other media when an old game is lost. A question invited by that one, though, is: What does the heritage of gaming look like now?

If you're anything like me, when you think about how games used to be you probably think about what games were like when you first started playing. I remember the Super Nintendo of my youth, the N64, and so on. If I encountered games that were older than those, it was usually because I was seeking out an earlier entry in a franchise I loved - hunting down Metroid after I beat Super Metroid, trying to crawl through the original Zelda, and so on. I don't think this experience is unique to me; I think people sometimes inherit systems and games from friends and family, but I'd expect that, except in rare cases, that will be from people their age or a little older, so likely they're not reaching that far back. If it's the case that most gamers haven't really inherited much themselves - they've only picked up the new, observed what's happened in their lifetime or just before - then the task of themselves becoming caretakers of the medium seems more challenging. When you yourself have been the recipient of a particular kind of cultural knowledge, you know better how to pass it down; without that experience, it's harder.

One of the biggest considerations, though, is that there isn't really a strong structure for passing down video games yet. You can find a college offering a degree in Engilsh literature almost anywhere; art or art history degrees, and cinema/filmography/film history degrees aren't much harder to find. It's certainly not impossible to find courses in video game development, but video game history? Almost impossible. Imagine taking a class on first-person shooters, on shifting views of race and social structures in the GTA series, on femininity in games. The idea of this would be insane to many (most?) people who don't play games, and probably a high percentage of those who do. And that right there is a serious consideration. If games aren't treated as art, as being vessels of important cultural information worthy of study, they will not be preserved. The same goes for the craft as well as the art: if we don't appreciate design choices in older games that used more limited technology, we're going to miss some important lessons. You may scoff at Super Metroid's outdated graphics, but you can learn a lot by watching how the controls work, or how the camera follows you, that you'd otherwise have to figure out on your own. Seeing good - and bad - choices made by earlier games, seeing how those games evolved as new technologies appeared, can help us make choices that will help our games survive longer. The more we as gamers think about games in this way, the more likely others will find that kind of value in them. When there's a need perceived to preserve these games, the ability to do so will follow.

If you're not the kind of person who has much patience for literature as an academic pursuit, this argument may not hold water for you. I've met a number of people who think that dedicating any amount of time or energy to the study of films or novels or video games is a waste of time because these aren't necessarily practical skills. And from a vocational perspective, that might be reasonable. But we have to remember that as historical objects, works of fiction can contain pretty densely packed information about the society they exist in. These objects are worthy of study because of what they tell us about ourselves; if we don't want to let that information ever last more than a few hardware life cycles, the medium is going to lose a lot of continuity, and our games will suffer for it.

Besides - I don't want to wake up one day, any day, and realize I won't ever be able to play the original Katamari Damacy again. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Elements of Design: Technology

The last few times I've sat down to work on the game, I've been wrangling the same problem. I set my protagonists next to one another . . .

It was very gracious of them to pose for this shot.

 . . . push a couple buttons . . .

up up down down left right left right b a start

 . . . and watch as the girl drifts off the top of the level, never to be seen again.

The sense of abandonment is sobering but not exactly what was intended

Now, this is not ENTIRELY inconsistent with the behavior I'm going for, but it's still something of a problem.  If you are the sort of person who has messed with code in a game context or otherwise, you probably know about putting on your Code Gloves (like gardening gloves but smellier) and getting mussy up to your elbow in brackets and semicolons. It's fun and rewarding when you find an elegant solution to a problem, but as one concern starts to dominate your time you can begin to panic at the amount of resources you're pouring into solving a problem you never considered might exist.

One of the major differences between my esteemed co-developer and myself is that if I could magic the game and physics and behavior into existence with a nod of my head, without any of the mucking about in Javascript, I would do so. My partner wouldn't have it so; to him, the code itself is something beautiful and a lovely process, and on days when it's going right I can be impressed by our accomplishments too - but on other days, I wish I were making a board game. Whichever pole you gravitate towards - and if you're a dev, you probably bounce between them - your game is going to be supported by some kind of technology, so I want to examine some of the considerations of technology. Since I'm mainly interested in video games, I'll be talking mostly about code, but remember that your "technology" could just as easily be a board, or some cards, or a stack of books and some dice.

One of the things that's really cool about code is that it is one of the most tactile, controllable aspects of a game's design. In a medium that's really fuzzy and lacks a lot of precision or definition, this is an advantage we should cling to for dear life. Like the art, or the balance, or the story, code can be tweaked, code can bloat, code can be missing crucial elements or weighed down with unnecessary elements. The advantage is that code is more strict than the other parts of the game. If you're doing something critically wrong with your script, it won't compile, and you will know immediately; if you're doing something critically wrong with your art, it'll suck, and you probably won't know why or how to fix it for awhile. When you are rightfully kicking yourself in the head for the typo during the villain's grand speech just before the final confrontation, you will wish that the person typing your story up could be as strict as your compiler. Your code can still suffer from vagueness or lack of clarity, and can still have corner-cases you can't always see, but its representation is at least concrete and responsive.

Semicolons are the lucky ones. It's null pointers you must beware.

Technology, of course, offers a lot of limitations. You can't do better than the system you're working on or the tools you're using for implementation. For our own game, we're more limited right now by what we don't know how to do than what our computers or Unity can pull off, but think about the kinds of experiences that weren't possible until recently. Would Minecraft have been doable before it was possible to generate worlds of that magnitude? Could we have the experience of World of Warcraft before the infrastructure existed to support so many characters in the same world? Still, I'm going to assume the majority of my audience is limited not by the available technology, but by their ability to use it - in terms of time, resources, skill, etc. If I were a master of Unity and Illustrator and Blender my game would be a lot prettier, but since I'm not, we make do; maybe our game could be using more of the available technology, or using it more efficiently, but we have to work with the skills we have.

Sometimes, though, that isn't a bad thing. Part of what appealed to us about a shadow puppet-style game is that it was within our abilities. Our characters can look pretty static, and have simple animations, and still adhere to the aesthetic. It can even be charming. Similarly, though I'm certain there was no lack of skill that limited Mike Bithell to rectangular characters and platforms in Thomas Was Alone, the simplest uses of Unity suggest those kinds of shapes; starting with very basic uses of technology and using that as a stylistic theme helps direct the art of the game. Benjamin Rivers of Home imposed similar limitations on himself, to the betterment of the game. Pushing technology to its limits can produce something really wonderful if your vision is well-planned out, provided that vision isn't visibly handicapped by its execution. But when a game is visibly aware of its technology, and plays on the limitations of that technology in an elegant way, it can serve to unify the experience, as Thomas Was Alone demonstrated so successfully. If your technology doesn't get in your way, that's good; but careful understanding of it is what makes it not just an enabler of your game, but an active agent working towards whatever single purpose unites the disparate elements of your game.

Thinking about technology in this way gives us some interesting lenses for examining games. Is this game making full use of its technology? Is it handicapped by its technology? Is it playing off the strengths and limitations of that technology to achieve its purpose? Looking at technology is a way of examining our tools, and deciding whether those tools are sufficient for our vision, and whether we are using them in a way that makes our game as beautiful as it can be.

Review - Thomas Was Alone

When I first started playing around with Unity while beginning work on Candlelight, I made the simplest level I could. It had rectangles for characters, rectangles for walls, very simple physics, and a very simple aesthetic. A few people said "You know, this could almost work as a game." And the people who made Thomas Was Alone proved them right.

I've felt this way about the world sometimes.

Thomas Was Alone is a Unity-based platformer by Mike Bithell that follows the adventures of fledgling AIs as they slowly gain awareness of themselves, their environment, and one another. You begin play as Thomas, an orange, rectangular AI, and gradually add more AI friends with different abilities to your fold, with the goal of each level to get all of your rectangles to their respective end portal. You can switch between the characters as you please, and their abilities range from simple (John's great jump distance) to more specific (Claire's ability to survive the game's toxic water) to outright detrimental (Chris's slow speed and low jump). The levels are about using the character's abilities to compensate for one another's shortcomings.

You, too, will come to find stairs difficult. Consider yourself warned.

Every element of the game has a refined simplicity: the characters are just little rectangles, but they wobble and bend when they jump; the backgrounds are unobtrusive, but pulse with little symbols and pixels like the inside of a computer program; there is no dialogue, but the story is expertly narrated and brings just the right amount of emotion and humor. The game enjoys a straightforward, no-(some)-nonsense style, but it doesn't use that as an excuse to slouch when bringing life and activity to the details.

They're a festive bunch, and assembling the team feels kind of cool. Like The Avengers only the characters are, somehow, less two-dimensional.

The characters are the stars of the game, and their story is delightful and adorable. Despite having no voices, faces, or curves, the characters are some of the best I've seen this year; the narrator explores each of their internal monologues and insecurities and aspirations, all of which extend naturally into those characters' abilities. The humor is sometimes deprecating, but not as spiteful or unrelenting as that of, say, Portal; Chris is meaner than he needs to be to Thomas, but is lonely when they are separated. Portal's humor works because GLaDOS is a sociopath, where Thomas Was Alone's humor works because the characters are all believable  and likable. The story has a couple neat turns but isn't overly complicated, and like the rest of the rest of the game it succeeds not by doing anything enormously groundbreaking but by weaving its charm and style into every aspect of the experience.

It might feel hard to write a lot of emotional significance into rectangles, but you will.

Thomas Was Alone isn't an especially long game, and the difficulty never ramps up out of control. Though the story and its ending feel complete, it's a little sad to put those characters away when you get through the last level. But at its end, the game is like a little peek into a beautiful world, and too much more might spoil the illusion. Bithell's creation is an excellent platforming experience, and remarkably fun, but in addition, it's a case study in common purpose uniting a design: every aspect of the story, the visuals, the sound, the level design, and most importantly the characters is in alignment, and all feel deliberate, targeted, and successful. This is what makes Thomas Was Alone a good game; that all of those elements, and the game they serve, happen to be so vital and enjoyable is what makes it a great game.

Website: http://www.thomaswasalone.com/
Mike Bithell's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikeBithell

What are we looking for?

Whatever game you're playing, you can almost always find some aspect of that game that is about acquisition of stuff. This "stuff" can be of a few kinds: things with a physical representation in the game world (coins, ammo, helmets, new levels), things that have value within the mechanics of the games but no physical representation (extra hearts, level-ups, skill points), or things that have no inherent gameplay value but some other kind of worth to the player (achievements, special endings, easter eggs).

I guess when you play the Song of Time all this stuff gets recycled back into grass?

What this Stuff does for players varies by game and by type of Stuff - we've explored already how feedback  can be used to guide players along certain paths, and Stuff is both a kind of feedback and a mechanism for giving feedback. You learn that cutting grass gets you rupees, so you cut all the grass; you learn that the blue goo makes walls and floors bouncy, so you experiment with finding new ways to direct and redirect the blue goo so you can get to new areas. But why do we want the rupees, or the new area? Usually the answer to this is: so that we can do more things. We like new powers, new challenges, new places, new things to do. Implicit in each fabulous new weapon you pick up in Diablo 2 (marginally better than the fabulous new weapon you picked up 3 hours earlier) is the feeling: "Awesome, now I'm gonna be able to kill ten more of those little goblin things every minute!" When you beat a level, you get pumped and excited about the next level and all the things you get to do there.

But I don't want the idea of more-things-to-do to undercut the feedback power of getting Stuff, because using Stuff as a feedback mechanism is one of the sharpest tools in addictive game design - for better or for worse. MMORPGs give you tiny incremental gains, Tetris gives you line-clearing, Facebooks game gives you little points and stats and notifications.

Yay! I got a new, um, eggplant? I never played FarmVille.

The games that are often the most addictive are the ones with the most rapid rewards structures. In general, if you can give out lots of little rewards, you can keep players' interest piqued. You'll just want to turn the next corner, to meet the next character, to gain one last skill point.

This is how weekends are lost.

This isn't as easy as it seems. Coming up with a game that can perpetually give you rewards while still keeping those rewards meaningful is really, really hard. Add more stuff, and you can run into balance or complexity problems. Throughout World of Warcraft, balance is maintained so that the little boosts you get gradually draw new challenges into the realm of possibility. And the fact that they can keep players doing this for as long as they can is what makes the game so addictive (and why, I'd argue, the game is borderline amoral; "addictive" isn't a word I'm using with any hyperbole here). For any game you hear described as "addictive," think of the things players get in that game, and how frequently they get them; this is very likely a big part of why the game is addictive.

There are plenty of more benign examples of how a fast-paced rewards structure can be used to keep a game exciting. A good one is Katamari Damacy, which gives you the satisfaction of picking up all those little items, of sizing up and suddenly being able to go new places or pick up new things, of going from not being able to pick up a banana to lifting buildings out of the ground in a 10-minute span.

It's only a matter of time for that mountain, too.

Katamari certainly feels addictive a lot of the time, and this is a big part of why; you always want to do just a little better, to get that ball of weird stuff just a little bigger. Moreover, the frequent incremental gains keep things moving at a quick pace, and as you build momentum you want to maintain it as best you can. At the same time, there are upper limits on this, and eventually you will wear yourself out on the game or complete it. That's because games like this one are designed to be a finite experience. You can continue to improve and collect, but there's a last level you can beat, and a limited number of secret items to find. But throughout that finite experience, the rapid affirmation of your progress by way of Stuff - new levels, bigger Katamari, less traumatic derision from the main character's father - is key to enjoyment of the game. 

A lot of games do very well with a slower-paced rewards structure - Shadow of the Colossus comes to mind - because the games themselves are slower paced. In SotC, the rewards you get aren't always overt; you grow a little more powerful with each monster you kill, and you get the satisfaction of watching a cutscene of the monster's death, but sometimes it's just as enjoyable to be riding through the silent landscape towards your next encounter. Having the game's major rewards be more spread out heightens the anticipation. Slower reward pacing helps players appreciate rewards; faster reward pacing helps increase momentum and excitement; and incredibly high pacing can either burn players out or become addictive, depending on how it's implemented. Try watching, as a player, for the rewards that the game gives you, and think about what reaction they're seeking from you by giving you those rewards.

E-Sports

It's been true for awhile now that I enjoy watching high-level games of Starcraft 2 almost as much as I enjoy playing the game itself, and I think in most circles that statement would still earn me funny looks. But the idea of video games as having inherent entertainment value for people watching them is something that's starting to gain more traction; Starcraft has been a very established e-sport for some time, and Blizzard has been considering making Starcraft 2 free to play so that it can compete more easily with free-to-play e-sports like League of Legends. I spent an hour or so last night sitting on my couch, eating nachos and watching Day[9] (a Starcraft enthusiast and commentator) analyzing games between high-level players, and in order to keep that admission from being really embarrassing I thought I'd break down a bit of what I think is really cool about that activity, and about e-sports in general.

Actually, "Day[9] is really attractive" might be enough of an explanation.

I was never very physically active in my youth, and never pursued any competitive sport for very long. Maybe for that reason, I've never been taken with watching sports in general; I haven't been to many games of any sport in my life, and I don't know if I've ever watched a game of any sport start-to-finish on TV. Part of that is not understanding the sport, and part of that is not having any point of context for what's occurring; I don't know whether to be impressed, or how impressed, by any feat of any athlete because I don't have any benchmarks to compare it against. I haven't tried to do it myself, and I haven't seen enough talented players try and fail, so the accomplishment is lost on me.

From that perspective, I enjoy e-sports because I understand how complicated some of the things that are happening are. When watching a Starcraft 2 game, I'm impressed when a player correctly infers what army his foe is amassing by seeing what resources that foe is focusing on collecting. I'm impressed when a player commits the barest resources necessary to respond to a threat, so that her production doesn't slow. Hell, it's not an e-sport example, but I used to love watching Metroid Prime speedruns, and seeing people abuse the game in strange ways in order to get through it as quickly as possible. When you know enough about any activity - sports, dance, singing - to be impressed by someone who's good at it, it can become really fun to watch people do it at a high level because you can appreciate the subtleties of what they're doing. When that's dynamic and competitive, as sports are, watching two players who are both very skilled face off, and knowing only one can win, is exciting as hell, even if they're just moving little bugs and spaceships around a digital map.

If this makes sense to you, you might think it looks pretty cool. I do, anyway.

Because of this, I think this offers gaming a way to break into a kind of market that regular gaming doesn't always provide: watching, in addition to playing. And where there are eyes there are advertisers; this is an incredibly profitable avenue for some kinds of games. Which, though interesting, isn't the most interesting thing about e-sports to me. I'm personally just excited about the opportunity to enjoy these games in a new way. It's fun being a couch-critic, to whine with the benefit of hindsight about bad decisions made by great gamers. It's fun sitting with friends and eating nachos and watching a game. If you can get invested in one side or another, there's a lot of tension and entertainment to be had in watching a match. (Granted, team loyalty isn't something that I think is as easily built in fans of e-sports, but that could change as e-sports become more popular.) It's great being able to feel like you can participate in a game even if you aren't great at playing the game yourself. And as I mentioned before when talking about strategy and asymmetry in competitive games, these games lend themselves by virtue of their complexity to a complex metagame, and the more that metagame is examined and discussed and refined - by the grinding of thousands of players on the servers as well as the careful experimentation of masters at the tops of the ladders - the more engrossing it becomes not just to play, but to watch and discuss. It's a new way to engage with games, and more importantly to me it's a new way for people to come together around games. Games are a lot of things to different people, and sometimes they're social and sometimes not. But when they are social, it's really cool to see the roles they can take in social groups starting to expand; it's another indicator, of many, of how many more ways there are to look at this medium, and how much is yet to be done with it.

Interview: Benjamin Rivers of Home

Today, we are fortunate enough to receive the wisdom of Benjamin Rivers, who kindly answered a few questions I had for him regarding his experience with game development, particularly Home. His answers are reprinted verbatim.


What would you say was the biggest technological impediment/problem/question you faced while creating Home? The biggest stylistic one? The biggest design one?

The entire design was the big question, because that's how I approached the project. The goal of the game was to create a lo-fi horror game that genuinely creeped people out and was engaging. So, really, just coming with all the elements I felt I needed to do that was the biggest challenge. Also, my relative lack of experience in programming. :-)


What are some major differences between how you initially envisioned this game and how it ended up?

The only major difference is the visual fidelity of the game; originally it was going to be an almost Atari VCS kind of quality. After much convincing by my wife, I decided to increase the visual complexity.


Home's focus is almost entirely on its narrative. Did you ever envision having more other mechanics, like combat, at play? If so, what steered you towards its finished form instead?

Initial sketches were much more traditional, yes--I had monsters skittering away from the flashlight beam, and things like that. But as soon as I reviewed these ideas, I realized I didn't want to make a shoot-the-monsters game. Sure, it's much harder to do so, but that wasn't my only concern; I just thought there was a better opportunity that hadn't been explored yet.


I noticed by way of your website and Wikipedia page that you've produced a long list of graphic novels as well as games, which makes me think visual and narrative art are closely linked for you. What do you like/dislike about working with both of those at the same time?

Yes, I routinely bounce back and forth, to keep me interested. I like hopping back into comics because it means less time in front of the computer, which I sorely need. But making games is a much more realistic business. :-) Comics are a really expensive hobby for me right now.


How do you feel Home compares to other games focused on choice in narrative? Did you set out trying to emulate or improve on anything specific that another game had done?
The creation of Home and its narrative style was really simple. I know a lot of folks like to put words in my mouth about why I did what I did--because I am a shitty artist, or a lazy programmer, or totally full of myself, etc.--but the reasoning was simple. I just look at games that I like and kind of feel them out--would I want to make a Silent Hill game? No, I'm not interested in a shoot-the-monsters scenario. Would I want to make a classic adventure game? No, they're too clunky with too many elements that get in the way of personal storytelling (inventories, cutscenes, etc.). I do think Home is pretty unique--I really don't know of another game that handles its narrative quite the way that it does, though I can think of a lot--Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 2, etc.--that all contain elements of game-based narrative from which I drew inspiration. So I didn't try to emulate anything, but rather feel my way around until I found what felt right for me, personally--what was the game I wanted to play up until now, but wasn't available.


Without presuming to know a lot about the technology that went into Home, it seems like the sort of thing that could have been implemented many years ago, but to my knowledge no game quite like it really exists. Do you think it would have been possible to make a game like Home five or ten years ago? Why do you think it took so long for a game like this to emerge?

I think someone with better programming skills than me (i.e. everyone) could have certainly pulled something like this off. But the goal of my company and personal ethos isn't to focus on tech, but to create games that (hopefully) don't exist yet, and give people an experience that maybe they've been thinking about for some time. Perhaps Home couldn't have existed 10 years ago, because I wasn't as disinterested in certain genres or series back then--or my exposure to them wasn't there yet. So no, I think it is a product of its time--certainly because the tools I had to create the game are only available now, really.


Gaming is still a pretty young medium. What direction do you see it taking in the next few years?

That's a big question! I see the big games getting bigger and more lost, the indie games gaining much more traction as new, unique endeavours become their domain, and those wonderful middle-of-the-road titles being gutted altogether. I wouldn't even blink if there was a severe market crash or implosion, with budgets being what they are, companies living and dying off single titles and franchises, and studios closing left and right. In a weird way, I feel it might get worse before it gets better.


Where do you want to take your own game development next? What ideas do you see working on?

Oh, I'm afraid I can't say much about that! I haven't prototyped anything new yet--Home is very much still an ongoing thing--but I have some concepts stewing in my brain that I intend to check in on in a few months. I would love to do something more modern and 3D with Unity, which I'm looking into now, but that feels like an epic climb, and I've just put on my boots.


What are a few of your favorite games, books, and/or movies, recent or ever? I'd like to know not just what inspired you for Home or as a developer, but what inspires you in general.
I can say concisely that major influences on everything I do or create, which includes Home, are: Silent Hill 2 (obvious), the book House of Leaves, and quiet, emotional drama films (I can't even think of any right now!). But that's not to try to make me sound smart--these days I read a lot of trashy 90s comic reprints for yuks.
:-)


So there you have it! If you want to know more about Benjamin, you can out lots on his website:
http://www.benjaminrivers.com/
And I have also enjoyed his Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BenjaminRivers
Definitely look at his games and stories if you haven't. I quite enjoyed Home (and I've got a review up), and in general Benjamin has great ideas about narrative that are readily apparent in his artwork - so go check it out!

How Do We Talk About Games?

Something I've seen come up in a number of places recently is the question of what the best way to talk about games is. This is a question that takes a lot of forms depending on the scope of the conversation. One group of people might be focusing on the language that exists around game development and consumption, the words for particular techniques employed by developers or for particular styles of play. Another group of people might be questioning whether games are art at all, and whether they have the same merit as other media considered art, like film and written fiction. And still another group might be so convinced of video games as a frivolous pastime that the concept of games as an artform, or as being complex enough to need their own lexicon, might seem really bizarre. So, rephrased, the question is: how do we want to talk about games? If you've read any of my other posts and are choosing to read this one, I'm going to guess that your appreciation for games is such that you're at least comfortable with the idea of them being artistic, or at least requiring complex and artful construction, so this post will mostly be aimed at you folk. If you don't think you match that description, though, I hope you'll keep reading anyway, and maybe get a sense of how people who immerse themselves in the gaming culture, industry, and experience see those things.

Why we think of games as art is its own post at least, so I'll slide over it for now. Suffice to say, we find that occasionally a game comes along that evokes emotion in us that feels authentic, that shows us a perspective that's new to us. This is a crappy definition of "art," but it's a reasonable criterion for good art. Like all art, then, we try to explore the boundaries between two things: what we can communicate about both the technique and experience of art (for the sake of better producing/experiencing it), and what is beautiful to us because it is not communicable, because we can only experience it through the medium. We want to talk about how to make good games, but if we could get the experience of the game by talking about it, we'd never have to make them. This is why good writers read a lot of books and good filmmakers watch a lot of movies: part of what's great about the medium is what we don't know how to describe.

But the post about "why games are art" will fumble with what we can't say. This post is for fumbling with what we can say.

Video games, like other media, require formula and precision. The tools of our craft aren't really comparable with those of other media, however. If an author wants to adjust pace, he can change the length of sentences, choose words that flow together, cut dialogue. A filmmaker can examine where his cuts are and which scenes can be combined, expanded, or removed. A game maker may have to do similar things, but also needs to adjust game balance and difficulty, must tune puzzles so that they remain enjoyably complex without slowing things down, change up their level design so that new areas are interesting, must adjust a monster's difficulty so that they seem legitimately scary but don't frustrate the player by killing her constantly. As I've just demonstrated, games already have some language particular to them; balance, level design, and difficulty are all established terms with a particular meaning for game developers and players. And as I've just demonstrated, a language particular to games is necessary because there are a lot of concepts particular to games, like these. If you compare the language to film to that of novels, you'll find similarities simply because they're both vehicles for narrative, but you'll also find a lot of differences because movies can do things books can't (and of course, vice versa). If you're going to have meaningful conversations about movies, you'll need to have some words and phrases that mean something particular to the medium. So, too, with video games.

So then the question is: why do we want to talk about games like this? And the answer is really about quality. If we want to have higher quality games - whether that's higher quality visuals, design, play, story, execution - we need to be able to talk about them, we need our own language, and theory, and criticism. Ours is a very complicated medium. We have a lot of rules about narrative to obey, and many more to learn if we want to tell really compelling stories. We have rules about how character's abilities interact with one another. We have code. We have bug testing. We have to account for an audience whose personal skill at our kind of game affects whether they enjoy the experience, or even encounter all of it. We have a lot of rules about balance and pacing and level design, and even if they're not written in stone, they are (much like rules of film or writing) essential to know if you want to experiment in a meaningful way. The better able we are to communicate about these things, the firmer the foundation of the medium will be - developers will have more to work with, and gamers will be better able to think critically about what they're playing.

This may come off as kind of elitist, but it isn't meant to be.  A lot of movies, books, and games are pretty frivolous, and their creators didn't intend them to be particularly deep, and that's fine. Great, even; sometimes I don't want a complicated narrative, I just want something to occupy my attention and help me zone out a little. But for those of us who have genuinely felt moved by a game, that won't be enough all the time. Without that language to communicate about and refine our games, without being able to talk with one another (as well as storytellers of other kinds!), we're not going to find that spark. Sometimes, somebody jots something down in a notebook without thinking about it too hard or ever revising it, and it's brilliant. But talk to most writers or artists of any kind and they'll tell you that more often, success comes from studying what works well, alone and with others, and using that as a starting point for experimentation. The more we pursue a language that lets us do that, the better our games will be.

Managing Complexity

As we introduce more mechanics into the game we're working on, a danger we're continuously up against is unnecessary complexity. When I described to a new person on the project the extent of some of our plans for mechanics and art, she was surprised and a little skeptical to hear about the potential complexity of the game, and worried that the abilities we were thinking of implementing would distract, confuse, or overwhelm the players. The danger of having too much in a game is always looming, but I can think of a great many other games that somehow managed a great deal more complexity than what we're planning. So, in the interest of considering ways to manage our own complexity I thought I'd investigate some of the tactics used by other games to keep them from becoming too cumbersome to be fun.

Have a good curve
This is basic but worth mentioning. Pacing must be kept carefully with new mechanics to ensure the player has time to grasp the mechanic and grow comfortable with it before being asked to use it in more complicated ways. In games that offer players a lot of different abilities - think Banjo-Kazooie - these are often unlocked one at a time, with more and more available later in the game.

Otherwise, people might get confused by something like this.

Counter to this, games like Super Mario 64 gave players most of their abilities up-front, and taught them how to use them as needed. So even if you don't get how to wall jump right at the beginning of the game, you'll have time before they ask you to use it to beat a level - and even if you can't figure it out then, you can always come back to it when it makes more sense. If your game is going to have a lot of abilities, it helps to isolate mastery of them in different spaces of the game so players are aware of them as available tools and can identify the appropriate one when the time comes. Which leads into our next topic...

Cues

If you've played a 3d Zelda game, this probably looks familiar:

Take a moment to appreciate how ordinary this looks for how weird it is.

That object Link's using is called a Clawshot (Hookshot in earlier games) and that thing he's launching it at is a target. When the Clawshot hits the target, it'll pull Link to it. That is what those targets are for. That is the only thing those targets are for. And when Link needs to use the Clawshot, you'd best believe something somewhere is going to look like one of those targets. Even if you're supposed to hit an enemy with it, chances are the part of the enemy you're supposed to hit will, somehow, look a little like that. Similarly, in Super Metroid:

ok maybe I play too much nintendo

The pink things on either side of the screen are doors, and they will open when you shoot missiles at them. Green doors, super missiles. Orange doors, power bombs. Blue doors, any weapon. The game teaches you early on what kind of weapon you need to access these spaces, and then sticks with it. So when you get your first set of power bombs and blast open your first orange door, you might think "Oh, I remember seeing an orange door awhile back. Now that I can get in, maybe I should go back there." That's critical, especially in a nonlinear game; without that cue, the player might get power bombs and not have a very clear idea of where to go next. Even if exploring a certain area of Super Metroid doesn't reveal where to go next, it does fill in a mental map full of cues that will help you later when you understand how to bypass those obstacles. (These are also great sometimes for making a game feel bigger than it is; when you get the magic ability to bypass these obstacles, you might have inexact memories of where the obstacles are and that can give you the feeling that there's still more to explore). These kinds of cues are really important to help keep players from getting frustrated, so they don't get stuck wondering which of their abilities will work on an obstacle, or with a new ability but no idea where to use it. And when "cue" becomes "necessary counterpart," we have...

Situationally-useful abilities
Late in Twilight Princess, Link gets a staff capable of controlling big statues and moving them around. They have to be a specific kind of statue (statues with a hole in the chest are our "cue"), and they can't jump, so they're bounded near their starting point by terrain. This tool is only useful for controlling these statues; it has no effect, of any kind, on anything else, and no other tool can be used to interact with these statues. In this case, the item is situationally-useful; it is specifically restricted to only one kind of use. Combined with cues, figuring out which tool to use is no longer part of the puzzle; the puzzle is figuring out how to use each tool effectively. This is also how games like Braid divide up types of puzzles; some mechanics, like the shadow copy of Tim or the time-slowing ring, only appear in certain areas. The game allows for variety by having these mechanics, but only applies them in certain situations, so the player isn't confused about which mechanic to use.

Redundancy
At first glance the idea of redundant mechanics may seem like a design flaw, and in some cases it is. Sticking with Zelda, though, think of how enemies work in Skyward Sword. For the most part, they require more sophistication than simply smashing them with your sword, but often there are several different ways to combat them. For example, a Beamos can be defeated by using horizontal slashes to cut it down to your size before stabbing it in the eye - but it can also be killed with a well-timed (and well-aimed) arrow to the eye. When you encounter several of these enemies over the course of the game, it adds to the fun to be able to mix up how you deal with them. Moreover, the arrow strategy is a little easier and safer, but you get the bow long after encountering your first Beamos, and when you do it's a nice upgrade for dealing with this kind of enemy. Redundancy is most common for combat purposes; you have a few different abilities, and one might be more efficient than the others for taking out your foe, but it doesn't really matter which one you use. There's no hard and fast limit to the places where you can offer players multiple solutions to a single problem. You could do this in a puzzle game (though at the risk of reducing the difficulty of the puzzles), and it's common to see it in RPGs, where it might be possible either to fight or talk your way out of a dangerous situation.  Redundancy either requires careful balance of all the available options or demands that newer, better options render old ones obsolete, and so must be used carefully. When implemented well, however, it can give players a sense of accomplishment when they acquire a new tool that renders old challenges much easier, or give them a sense of ownership of the story when they can solve problems on terms of their choosing.

There are a lot of great games that have few mechanics and never give the players new abilities; simplicity is a beautiful thing, and some games would have their elegance diminished by overcomplicating the mechanics. But variety can be fun, and it's neat as a player to see that you have a lot of options or that you gain new skills over time. A good way to summarize the points I talked about might be to ask of any mechanic:

When was this mechanic introduced?
What lets me know I should use this ability/mechanic?
Are there places where I'm forced to use this ability, or where this ability does not work?
Can this ability complement, be used instead of, or replace altogether another ability?

Hopefully the above will give you something to think on next time you get a cool new toy in a game, or the next time you're thinking about implementing one in your own game.

Symmetry, Asymmetry and Strategy

There's no review this week, and one reason is that I've gotten pulled back into StarCraft 2, as well as Pokemon Black Version (for which I make no apologies). I tend to not review more mainstream games, for reasons I've addressed previously, but when I was thinking about what draws me to these games (aside from  the fact that they're tailor made to be hideously addictive) I started thinking a lot about the symmetry and asymmetry in play. For both, I'll be addressing primarily the multiplayer element, since that's where this is most visible.

The symmetry in the games is about options. In all cases, all players have the same options. For Starcraft, that's at the start of the match, when you select your race and begin building units. The choices you make limit your later choices, but all players have the same choices at the start of the match. For Pokemon, this starts way earlier, in the metagame. When you're playing, either side COULD have any given Pokemon with any given move set. Depending on the level of play it's rare that two teams be exactly identical, just as in Starcraft  2 the players likely won't have exactly the same build order and army composition.

It's important that you have the same options, but also important that you likely won't make the same decisions as your enemies. Given that, solid asymmetrical gameplay relies on being able to make different choices and still have numerous different viable strategies - that is, asymmetrical gameplay must be balanced to be fun, and it turns out balance is really hard to do in asymmetrical games.

For SC2, the game is presumably balanced at the start of each match; the metagame is about which strategies are possible, effective, and therefore likely, and how they might be combated. Like chess, you can bring in a lot of knowledge about what's possible or not, but the starting pieces are always the same: one base, six workers. The balance is built into the game, even down to matchmaking pitting you against players of similar skill. Each of the three races you can choose is balanced; though you can certainly make choices after picking a race that are worse than other choices you might have made, no race is dominant over either of the others, and there's no dominant (best) strategy for any race over any other.

For Pokemon, you absolutely cannot presume balance at the start of a match. At the beginning of a match, each player's understanding about the metagame and patience in constructing a solid team is already evident. A game of Pokemon could begin with one player with a full team of six all at the highest possible level versus a team of one at the lowest possible level. This is unbalanced asymmetry. Pokemon provides a few tools for balance, like scaling teams to the same level, but because some moves, stat distributions, team compositions, and even Pokemon are categorically worse than others, this only partially addresses the problem. Magikarp simply has fewer move options and worse stats than Gyarados; Slash is in almost every way a better move than Scratch. Imbalance is built into the game, and arguably the multiplayer metagame suffers for it. Players have attempted to solve this themselves through a number of means, notably limiting the use of certain Pokemon in certain competitions. Pokemon are often divided into "tiers," where battles of a certain tier preclude the use of Pokemon from higher (but usually not lower) tiers. However, these tiers are not official and participation in them is voluntary. Friends tend to have to agree on whether their teams are balanced enough that a fight can be considered fair. If combat were the only social aspect of Pokemon this might be a serious downside; however, trading and various minigames are other strong reasons to play with friends. Though the metagame can be quite exacting and strenuous, the game is geared towards a more casual audience.

In looking at how these games achieve balance in their asymmetry, I started asking myself: why? Why are so many games, from Mortal Kombat to Mario Kart, asymmetrical in their competition? Why do we want asymmetrical challenges in our multiplayer? Symmetrical games like chess can still have an insane amount of variation between games, so why seek asymmetry when it's substantially more difficult to balance?

Asymmetrical games can have a lot of room for unexpected scenarios and outcomes. In Starcraft, that's realizing as you're at the enemy's front gates with your whole army that he's got a raiding party back at you base too small and fast to be worth sending your army back for, but too big for the defenses you've got set up. In Pokemon, it's getting surprised when an enemy your Pokemon is strong against has an unexpected move that knocks you out in one hit. In a symmetrical game, there's usually one starting position, or only a handful; in asymmetrical games, there's usually a number of them, sometimes an inexhaustible number. Even when that number is quite finite, as in Starcraft, negotiating the strengths and weaknesses of each unit against the others, or making a plan when an opponent has gained more resources and a larger army, means individual encounters are rarely identical. What all this amounts to, and what's often great about such games, are the kinds of stories people can tell out of them. Super Smash Bros. may be a game with a lot of asymmetry and randomness, and questionable balance, but it's fun talking about that time when you got a hammer and knocked your enemy directly into a bomb that had just appeared in the sky. Maybe the 30% accuracy, one-hit kill move Fissure in Pokemon isn't considered practical in the metagame, but if you kill half your opponent's team with three consecutive hits you'll be proud of it. Asymmetry creates complicated metagames and complex strategies, it creates probabilities and expectations, and it creates excellent, memorable moments when those expectations are upset by a new strategy or random chance. Carefully examined and balanced, asymmetry creates a fantastic amount of diverse game experiences within a single system; it's an incredibly powerful tool, and it's worth thinking about how it's used in the games you love - or how it might be used in the games you create.

Feedback

Effective feedback is something I think we don't notice in a game until it's missing, and even then sometimes we don't recognize it as the source of our dissatisfaction. With any game, though, we want to feel like our actions have reasonable consequences. On some level, that's about ensuring that the game makes logical sense and doesn't have too many elements of randomness to be completely out of the player's hands. But at a much more basic level, we want to feel when we press the B button like Link is swinging a sharp sword. We want the camera to rock and the sound to fade to ringing when a grenade goes off next to us. Good feedback tightens the connection between the player and the game across the controls. Bad feedback (as well as bad controls) makes you feel muddied in the interface, and keeps you out of the experience.

Two big things feedback can do are 1) tell the player that the action they're taking is appropriate (that is, accounted for by the game and potentially helpful to the player) and 2) immerse the player in the world they're exploring. Number 1 can come in a few forms. Say you're playing a game where you pieces of equipment, each mapped to a button, and some are available only in certain locations - say you can only draw/use your sword outside. When you're outside, you want to be able to draw and swing that sword merrily by pressing the button it's attached to - the feedback is simple enough, we see the sword swinging and possibly enemies dying. When you're inside, if the sword is disabled, it's easy enough for the dev just to not let you draw it. However, it's helpful to have some indication that the button still works even it doesn't let you draw; flashing a little warning or playing a noise (like a low buzzer) can let you know that your message was received, your interface is working, and the game says no. Another good example are the places in Closure where you can't drop objects; when you press the drop button, the wall lights up behind you and an angry buzzer plays. If a button is supposed to be used in the game, it's nice to know that it's working even if it doesn't do what you want it to right now. Feedback can also be used to tell the player they're doing something correctly. In the Pokemon games, you may use an attack on the enemy that is more or less effective against that enemy than normal. When a not-very-effective attack lands, the sound is duller and lower-pitched than a regularly-effective attack. When a super-effective attack lands, the sound is higher-pitched and lasts longer. The attacks are even punctuated differently, with the phrases "It's not very effective..." and "It's super effective!" reflecting the excitement of the moment.

For a certain generation of gamers, this phrase is an adequate substitute for paternal affirmation.

Using feedback in this way reinforces player successes - it helps them learn how to play the game well, and it comes to be a small, but perceptible, reward for doing so.

The immersion factor of feedback can't be overstated, and it's important in every way your character/player can interact with the world. Going back to Zelda again (it just does this so well!), pick any game in the franchise and think of what happens when you hit an enemy with your sword. For 2d games, a little sound will play, and the enemy will flash different colors and sometimes shrink back or bounce away, giving you the impression of combat and simulating damage - after all, in real life enemies DO change color when you hit them with a sword. In more recent entries, there's sometimes a rumble (tactile feedback) and a flash of light/enemy changing color or flinching (visual), and sometimes there's even a brief slowdown at the moment of impact that emphasizes it. The sound has a big effect too: Link's sword usually makes a swishing sound as it passes through empty air, but when it hits an enemy it makes a shearing sound like it's passing through something, and sometimes a triumphant note plays in the music.

Aesthetic feedback doesn't even need to be this overt. Little things - dust clouds under the characters' feet, the ice crystals that form on Samus' gun arm when she uses her Ice Beam, or Myst IV's delightful ability to tap objects and hear a sound - can be used to make the game feel like it's reacting to the player. Of course little artistic flourishes of any kind can help make a game memorable, but in the next game you play try to focus on what feedback is a specific result of your actions. Pay attention to what behavior is encouraged and what behavior is discouraged, and how, and why. I've heard it said of table-top role-playing games that the goal of the person leading the game to get the players to do what he wants them to while thinking it was their idea. The same concept applies in video games: we want players to think they've figured something out on their own, to be proud of their accomplishment - but we want to guide that learning, sometimes quite subtly. Feedback is one of the best tools developers have for that.

Review: Closure

When a friend of mine first said "Hey, have you seen this? It looks like your game," I was pretty angry at first that someone was already selling a game that kind of looked like mine and used similar mechanics, not least of which because that game looked awesome. When people at BostonFIG looked at our game, they'd say, "It reminds me of something, um, it's a recent game..." and I'd say "Closure." And usually I was right.

Together, the protagonists in our game even have the same number of legs.

Closure is a 2d puzzle-platformer that takes a number of cues from games like Braid and Limbo. Like Braid, the emphasis is on the "puzzle" part (Limbo emphasizes the "platformer" part), and like Limbo, it reveals its narrative silently, preferring to evoke emotion rather than tell a story. It's not wholly clear who your character is; you play as a strange creature that adopts personas for each of the different environments you explore. The chief mechanic in the game is light; much of the screen is dark, and light is only produced by a few objects, usually fragile glass spheres that you can carry with you. If an object isn't visible, it doesn't exist, so you can make obstacles vanish by shining spotlights away from them, but you can also fall through a floor to your death if you forget to bring a light with you. There are a few other mechanics introduced later, but all of them revolve around this one, and all are simple enough - though the puzzles that involve them usually aren't.

It's not uncommon for a level to be mostly this dark throughout.

The puzzles themselves will always be at the forefront of your attention - each one is self-contained in its own room, with your objective always to get through a door so you can proceed to the next level. This construction means you'll never loose sight of the fact that you're playing a game; the puzzles aren't especially organic, so it always feels like you're solving for solving's sake (as opposed to games like Riven or Limbo, where forward progress is about learning how to make do with the tools the environment gives you). Still, they're incredibly fun, and some quite devious. The pacing is excellent; you'll walk into a new room with no sense of the puzzle, but after a few minutes of exploring and lighting up the room, you'll come to understand the objective and how best to carry it out. Usually figuring it out is the hard part, though there are a few, especially towards the end, that demand precise execution and punish you for small mistakes. It's a little frustrating sometimes, but not to the point of distraction or disappointment.

Some of the background art is gorgeous, when the game chooses to show it.

Despite being a 2d black-and-white puzzle platformer, the art style in Closure is quite different from Limbo's. Both make great use of light and shadow, but Closure has fewer grays, and much more scenic; you'll really feel like you're meant to stop and look at the backgrounds, and doing so is essential to piecing together the narrative. The audio is fabulous. Sound effects are used sparsely but to great effect, from the glassy shattering of light-producing globes to the little clown-honk made when you shoot a target in later levels. The music is grand and intense, and does almost as much work setting the mood as the visuals do.

And mood-building is critical to the success of the game. As mentioned earlier, the story isn't told explicitly. You're given impressions, and those impressions are enough to evoke feelings that are, at times, quite powerful. By the end, the story itself feels like a puzzle that can be solved, and though some players may find that attractive it may seem frustrating or unnecessary to others. At the end of the day, Closure is part of a tradition, alongside games like Braid and Limbo, that has only begun to develop recently. This tradition takes simple game templates and finds ways to develop them so that the gameplay is fresh despite being a variation on a relatively played-out style - it's kind of a "platformer-with-a-gimmick" model, and it's how a lot of indie devs are making games because it's easy to execute and there's a large player base already familiar with it. Importantly, these games try to use their mechanics to tell their stories, and they're often looking to tell stories that are more complex and thoughtful than video games are usually credited with. The trend that worries me is that these stories sometimes grow too obtuse or vague to really understand - it's easy to spend as many hours trying to solve Braid's story as its puzzles, and the muteness in Limbo and Closure made me wonder whether I'd missed something or whether the games were meant to be vague. It's great if games tell more thoughtful stories; it's less great if those stories alienate parts of their audience by being obtuse or overly intellectual.

That never feels like the point in Closure, though. The story is light and sometimes confusing, but the melancholy it evokes is powerful, and the way it uses its mechanics of illumination and illusion to create that melancholy is spot-on. If you like trying to piece together the narrative, collecting all the game's secrets, do; if not, enjoy the puzzles and the art, and let the mood carry you through. Whichever you prefer, Closure is delightful and memorable, and definitely worth exploring.

Site: http://closuregame.com
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/72000/

What do we want from our AI?

We've been working on implementing our first enemies (if that's the correct word for it) in Candlelight, and one thing we have been considering is how we'll do the AI. Our problems so far haven't been behavioral so much as technical (we're still trying to find the best way to implement what we want to do in Unity), but I got to thinking about AI in games this morning and thought I'd talk a little bit about what role it can play.

It's sometimes helpful to think of characters controlled by some kind of AI - I'm just going to group them collectively as Non-Player Characters, or NPCs - as analogues to characters in books or movies. Characters in a well-crafted book behave in a way that makes some kind of sense; we might not always agree with their choices or find them to be rational, but ideally we can understand  why they might make them. We expect them to behave in some way that seems reasoned, consistent, or meaningful. The Pac-Man ghosts chase us; we're not really sure why, but there it is. If one of them went into the corner and sat there, or only ever circled around one brick, we'd wonder what it was doing.

We wouldn't want our brightly-colored ghosts to not be believable.

The thing is, in a book or movie any action of a character is something carefully sculpted by the writer in response to a particular set of circumstances, all known beforehand to the writer. When Iago tells Othello a lie about Othello's wife Desdemona, Othello's reaction is based on a few very exact, very particular circumstances, including his feelings of self-worth, his perceived friendship with Iago, and his relationship with Desdemona. To say it's easy to come up with his reaction is a ridiculous overstatement, but in part that's because the reaction Shakespeare wrote was fine and nuanced (if crazy and violent), and that's what makes the characters in the play so intriguing.

Yup.

As game developers, we don't get those exact sets of known circumstances. We can specify conditions for an event, but when the number of unknowns start to pile up, it's hard to create a believable reaction for every set of circumstances.

Take Skyrim, which is actually quite good at AI in a lot of ways. Characters eat and sleep, run and hide when they're scared or fight when they're threatened, talk among each other, comment on quests you've accomplished or pants you aren't wearing, and so forth. That said, there are so many variables that for any given interaction with AI the devs couldn't hope to have accounted for all of them. If you approach the leader of a city after saving the city from a dragon, he'll praise and reward you, as might be expected. He won't, however, change his speech based on how many years it's been since you killed that dragon, on whether "somebody" quietly killed every person in his city, on whether the emperor has been murdered, on whether you're wearing pants, on whether he's wearing pants, or on whether you're wearing his stolen pants.

On whether you're violating his personal space, etc.

What's lost by this absence of pants-related dialogue is open to interpretation, though arguably if this is how you're playing Skyrim, you may not that interested in the authenticity of the NPC's reactions. What it means, though, is that there are limits to how realistic the gameplay feels, and those limits are tested when you go outside the bounds of what the game is centrally about - that is, slaying dragons, and doing a number of other, smaller quests along the way. (The fact that Bethesda actually did include a number of dialogue lines that characters will sometimes throw out when you're mostly nude probably says that a lot of players enjoyed doing this in Oblivion and Morrowind). There's a lot you can do in Skyrim, and the AI feels pretty good because NPCs react in a reasonable way to most of what you do.

And in general, that's what we ask for in a video game. When we turn up the difficulty in StarCraft 2 and see that our computer opponent is making units in a clever way (as opposed to making one of everything before building an army), is focusing on your weak points, and is changing its army compositions to counter yours, we think that's good AI. When that same computer marches its giant army to your unprotected front, only to turn that entire army around and waltz slowly across the map back to its own base because you've threatened with a pitiful force, we (rightly) think that's bad AI. The Turing test is useful here - would a person behave that way? not a skilled one - but we don't always need an AI that sophisticated. Sometimes, we barely need anything we'd call an AI at all; we don't need the goombas in Mario to make clever decisions, we need them to walk forward. They're more an obstacle than an enemy. And sometimes, that's fine. Mario isn't about believable character interaction. We're a little disappointed in the AI when that very first goomba walks itself right off a cliff without our intervention, but we get over it when we do likewise. We usually accept the idea of enemies as obstacles rather than rational actors (otherwise we'd expect the Bob-ombs to rush us all at once instead of in single-file), provided it still feels like they're trying to impede us. If the Hammer Bros. always threw hammers away from Mario, we would probably feel like the game was showing us a challenge (we can see the hammers) but not actually confronting us with it, and that would quickly kill any sense of achievement.

If your game, and your game world, is to feel like a believable world where the point is at least partly exploration and the gameplay is at least partly about feeling like you're an influence, you'll likely want the AI of the game to reflect that - you want characters and enemies that treat your character seriously, that respond to you. If, on the other hand, your game is more focused on the "game" side, then we want enemies that act to inhibit you, that change what they're doing based on what you're doing so that our players continue to feel challenged. In all cases, if our players feel like their choices and their skills matter, or they're going to question whether they have any agency at all. Sometimes that reaction can net you a cool emotional experience (this is in line a bit with what I said about horror last week). Unless you're going for it, though, take care to avoid it. People often come to games because they want a little more control than other media afford, and it's frustrating to be denied that - especially in a way that doesn't feel artful or deliberate.

Genre and Games - Horror

I went on this weird kick recently where I played several horror games in rapid succession and reviewed them for this site, and before that fled too far from my mind I wanted to write a little about what I think video games do with horror that seems unique to the medium. If this one goes well, I might try to look at other genres from a similar perspective.

(I should start with the disclaimer that I'm not an expert on horror in either films or video games; most of what I'll be talking about is based observations from a few games and a few assumptions about what people find scary. If I say something that seems incorrect, correct me!)

One of the things that has a significant impact specifically on horror games is the fact that games are about control. Games as stories are often differentiated from other modes of storytelling by the fact that you have some form of agency, but this gets interesting in horror games because, often, horror is specifically about not having agency. Most horror movies I can think of include, as a major element, the helplessness of the protagonist. Alien leave the protagonists in space with few weapons and an enemy they can barely track that's as dangerous to kill as to leave alive. Trapping the protagonists, disarming them, subjecting them to an enemy that is stronger than they are and too incomprehensible to fight - this is how horror movies like to play. (Unless they're just throwing gore at you, but I find those movies less frightening and more viscerally repulsive).

Historically, video games have taken a different tack. Think about Doom:

I think the walls frighten me the most, maybe because they're the most like something you'd see in Alien.

The monsters are scary, but you've got weapons to kill them with. You get lots of stress in the game - monsters can always come out of nowhere at you, and when they do you get a jump-scare, but then you get the immediate catharsis of blowing it to bits. And you can do that all the way to the end of the game, until you blow away the last enemy, at which point you win.

And that might be at the bottom of why it's hard to make games scary: the "You Win" part. Part of the tension in horror movies is that often you don't know who will make it to the end, and often nobody does. At no point do you have any kind of security in the protagonist's safety. In games, on the other hand, you know that you'll survive until the end, or at least that if you die you'll be able to pick up near where you left off and continue. Games have toyed with taking this security away, but it's difficult to do without making the play seem meaningless. The ensuing catch-22 - make it possible for the player to have a happy ending, or take away the player's satisfaction at having succeeded - kills the horror at best and kills the game at worst. Even games I love, like Amnesia, had a tough time working out how to end the game in a way that felt satisfying and consistent with the narrative without reducing the suspense throughout the game.

So, how do games work with what they've got to give you a compelling horror experience?

The best way to turn the potential disadvantage of control into something that works for horror games is to limit that control in a frightening way. I've never been an especially big fan of the Resident Evil series (the walking-around controls were horrifying enough for me), but in the one I played - I think it was Zero - I was really impressed by how limited the items were. It was in a lot of ways not unlike Doom - there are enemies, you shoot them, they die - but the fact that you had an extremely limited amount of ammunition, health, gasoline (for incinerating downed zombies), and so on really brought the "survival" aspect of survival horror to the forefront for me. The horror games I've reviewed previously all got a lot of mileage out of limiting control as well. Amnesia took away your ability to fight back, and to look at monsters. Limbo made your character so frail that barest survival - sometimes requiring terrifying measures - became a triumph. And Home played so many brilliant tricks on the narrative that by the end it was really hard to say what you had in the way of control.

Home was June 2012. A game as recent as 2012 did something really cool and freaky and innovative with the genre, to the extent that it belongs in the genre at all. By comparison, I just watched Cabin in the Woods a week ago, and while it did some clever things in relation to the horror genre, it didn't feel like it did much that was interesting in the horror genre. A lot of what I've read about the film talks about praises it as inverting/critiquing the horror formula that has gotten so predictable, and while I don't think that's unfair I think it says more about horror movies in general than it says about Cabin in the Woods. Horror is far from being a dead genre in film, and people are still finding new ways to explore it. But the innovations in film itself have been relatively few in recent years, and that's what makes it so exciting to see games like Slender or Home do so well. I would say in general that there's a little more flexibility in what a game can be than in what a movie can be, and certainly there's been a lot less ground covered in games than in film - but that's making a more general statement about video games and other media than I'd like to focus on in this post.

At the core of it, I think the best thing video games have to offer to the body of entertainment that we call "horror" is the way the game mechanics - especially control or lack thereof - can be used to generate tension.  This isn't just about adjusting difficulty, it's about specifying the means you have for interacting with the game world. The level of interactivity in Amnesia is almost perfect; you can pick up and throw objects, click and drag to swing open doors, and so on. The fact that these motions are all pretty imprecise - sometimes it's hard to open doors, sometimes turning a crank is tricky - actually helps the tone. The seconds spent fumbling at a door are often the difference between life and death, and when you're being chased by a monster can remind you of the terrifying nightmares where you everything goes wrong at the instant you imagine it going wrong. Home's matter-of-fact past-tense leaves you feeling helpless even as you make all the decisions that determine the story, because the story has already happened. And Slender's refusal to let you pause or tab out of the game force the pace so that you don't have a chance to recover from the panic it induces.

I wanted to use this post to tie off the string of horror games I reviewed, and I think at the bottom of it is this: Horror is about a number of emotions, but fear - arguably the core emotion - is evoked mainly through feelings of helplessness. When you put your audience in a position of control, as when they are playing a game, it's your job to balance that control, to find a way to keep that control from being arbitrary while at the same time giving them the sense of oppression and powerlessness that is so critical to evoking fear.