And any way you choose me, it won't be wrong

I have just completed Mass Effect this morning and I have to say that the game was awesome. I have disliked almost all of the other Bioware games for various reasons, but Mass Effect refines the formula into something I truely enjoyed.

I can confirm that textures pop in a lot and your 360 DVD-Drive is going to be dancing for the duration of the game, but these issues are more the fault of Microsoft for using slow as hell media in a system designed for high definition content. I hope future versions on the 360 have a hard drive cache option or something. The pop-in doesn't really hurt the game at all, until the last few cutscenes where the textures just NEVER CAME. I think they should have caught that one. Really though, the game is awesome.
So awesome sometimes that I just keep playing, trying to get to what happens next. For the crime of becoming engrossed in the game, though, Bioware punishes you harshly. You see, even if you tell the game to AUTOSAVE, it chooses to checkpoint only when it damn well feels like it and not at every key part of a mission. This means that if you are on a roll and totally into the game, forgetting to exit to the damn menu to save your progess, you can sometimes have to play entire sections of the game over again. In my case, the game took about 16 hours to complete, but I played for probably closer to 18-19 hours to get to the end. To provide an example, there is a part a the very end where you trigger a cutscene and when the scene ends you are presented with a timed sequence, which I promptly failed on my first try. Now there was no warning I would be entering a cutscene, during which I could not save, nor that after I would be going into a timed sequence in which I could not save. In fact, I had not saved in quite a while. When I died there I had to go back probably 5-10 minutes in the game, watch the cutscene again and then complete the timed sequence. THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. The scene at the completion of the timed event was pretty awesome, but I was just sitting there thinking, thank god I don't have to do that again. They have created a damn fine game, with an fun story, but I would have been saved much cursing and anger if they just PUT IN SOME REAL CHECKPOINTS. They don't need to change the save system at all, being able to save at any time is great for the game, but fricking hell, make sure every objective/cutscene updates the autosave, at least when the user selects to have the game AUTOMATICALLY SAVE.
Also, the items you pick up are so often repeats and nothing special, there should be a "simple loot" mode where you can just get upgraded guns between missions and you don't have to manage 10 copies of the same mostly useless shield mods. For me at least, the loot system they have was just an annoying distraction from the important part of the game.
Finally, if you play this game, note that it does not have a tutorial. What is there basically says to use the cover system, which is mostly useless as you can just stand behind walls and sidestep, which makes things faster anyway. At least on normal. Read a guide online or something to learn how the who Biotics system and stats work.

Really, I complain, but it was great.

PS: I totally failed to sleep with anyone in the game, even the alien girl who most people have to fight off with a stick. This is must be indicitive of something.

PPS: I demand Tali is a romance option in ME2, logic be DAMNED! Tali and Wrex are the best.

And you can tell, it's just as well

So I have been doing some work on Jimson and the Jazz Crabs again.
Outside the Temple of Jazz
In the lair of Cooke, master cookie chef of the Elder Gods.
Hopefully I will have more to show tomorrow.

Love, it's who you know

Speaking of love in games, there is an awesome little demo that was shown at GDC for a game called Love. Rock Paper Shotgun has some impressions up, but, really, just look at the screen shots. I fully support any effort to create unqiue visuals in gaming. Creating renders which draw 3d worlds as if they were painted has been possible for some time, see NPRQuake for an example. Once I was talking with my mother about art and she mentioned that in school she was facinated with strange 3d shapes, as reflected by most of her pottery. This, of course, lead to me ranting about how within games we have very few restrictions on what games worlds are made of, and yet spend all this time making boring realisic visuals. I told her, imagine we took one of these pots and you could run around the surface solving a puzzle or exploring a small world (Think Super Mario Galaxy), and I think she actually thought that was pretty cool. Anyway, go look at the pretty pictures and join me in hoping this sees release and is awesome.

Here is no why (Part 1)

I have been trying to get a good rant going on character development in games going all day, but things are just not working out. Part of the problem lies in the different role a consumer plays in experiencing a game rather than traditional character driven media. This is just an a bit of my notes from today that should be the first in a series of smaller thoughts on characters in games.

One of the key elements of any worthwhile story is character development. In some form or another every story will have a protagonist and the growth they experience during the course of the narrative forms the value in the story. I may be showing my ignorance of plot construction here, but it seems to me this is the case for most traditional media. If a book or a movie leaves the consumer with a feeling of “going nowhere” at the end they will be dissatisfied. (Watch Marie Antoinette and you will understand.) On the other hand, most gamers do not expect character growth within games and so would not be disappointed by a game where the main characters are essentially static. What I am interested in is why we have these differing expectations and if they should be changed.

One issue games run into is simple general lack of character. Gordon Freeman has been through at lot, I have personally seen him fight through research labs overrun with monsters, alien home world and a dystopia, but no matter what challenge thrown at him he remains silent. Even as Alyx reaches out to him with obvious affection he does not respond. This total lack of character would be fatal in any other setting but in the context of Half-Life it is considered a brilliant design decision. By removing all character from Gordon we are allowed to fill his place, investing ourselves within the world. So perhaps one of the reasons we see such weak main characters in games is because they distract from the player immersion in the game world. As you might surmise from my little illustration above, I feel there are some issues with this approach.

This isn't enough to convince me we should expect as little as we do from gaming narratives. Next time I will look at some games with strong main characters that were still capable of immersing me.

In your sad machines, you’ll forever stay

I will frequently refer to Chris Crawford on this blog, so it is probably important I explain that before things go too far. A few years ago it occurred to me that most of the games I loved as a child were essentially books which you had to work to get to the next page. I fell in love with these games because of the well defined worlds and characters, the humor or wit of the writing, and the thrill of unlocking something new. Even after I knew all the answers I could still replay them over and over simply because I enjoyed being in the worlds depicted so much. I suppose examples would be good here, so I am talking specifically about 1990’s LucasArts adventure games as well as Gabriel Knight, Quest for Glory, and Thief (Only the story of Thief is linear, and it hurts me even imply it may be lacking somehow). Other games which I have noted others having similar experiences with are FF7 and Chrono Trigger. Games with higher levels of interactivity, such as Morrowind and (I had said GTA here but I just can’t bring myself to do it, explaining why will be the subject of a post soon.) I have found I never complete. Left unscripted, current games can only allow for a very small range of actions. Most of these involve killing things in various ways. More interesting interactions requires following a script as we cannot fully simulate things like character conflict without over simplification. The more involved the story, the characters, and setting, the more linear the game becomes until you reach a slide show with some rest stops in puzzle land.

Just as a note, here I am talking about interactivity related to the actual narrative. Creating deep levels of interactivity in gameplay and throwing in awesome cutscenes between levels which have no direct relation to the actions of the player does not count as having interactive narrative.

Now I have not gotten around to Mr. Crawford yet, but I wanted to lead up to how I came about reading some of his books. After this revelation about the linear nature of games I began to wonder about a game which held a truly interactive narrative, one where the player was inserted in as a character in what was essentially a virtual world. This, it seemed to me, should be the ultimate goal of gaming and I felt I had been very clever in figuring this out. Then I began to look around online for any research on such an interactive world and came across the idea of interactive storytelling. As anyone who has read a few articles on the subject knows, Chris Crawford comes up a lot. It seems my great idea had already occurred to him, somewhere around the time I was learning the letters of the Alphabet. I refer you now to Wikipedia for an overview of what he has done and some links to current projects. (Link)

He essentially looked at gaming in the late 80’s and predicted the industry would end up where it pretty much has, in an endless stream of games providing the same basic forms of interaction. I recommend reading over what he has to say to anyone interested in game design as he has been thinking about questions the general industry is just beginning to ask for over a decade. The problem, though, is there are few solid answers to these questions. As he has noted, games today are about things, and stories are about people. For us to create interactive stories we don’t need complex physics engines but personality engines. What holds us back here became apparent to me a few weeks into my first A.I. class in college; even our most complex A.I. systems today are really just nested if/else conditions. There are tricks to make the conditions more nature, the product of heuristics or multiple values, but this just makes a binary conditional seem less so to the user, it paints the tunnel on the rock on the train tracks, but a painting has no depth. The other challenge facing interactive storytelling is the lack of natural language parsers. Until we can speak to the characters and they can understand us, there cannot be a truly interactive story, at least in my opinion. People have been trying for sure, the best example I have found is Façade.

I think in the short term we must look to something between the raw action of Space Invaders and the golden dream of a true People Game. Portal proved to the industry that a game without proper guns and a focus on atmosphere could win the hearts of the gaming public. Now we need to move beyond the physical puzzles of Aperture Science start trying to create games about ideas and thought. I am liking my inside the girl’s mind game idea from yesterday right now, but if you want a older example, see Chris Crawford’s own game, Gossip. We have our violence machines, our physics machines; we need to create emotion machines, engines of ideas and feeling.

The Beginning of the Descent

I frequently am overwhelmed by the possibilities of the world. In any one day, in any one place, there are so many things which could be done that I just end up doing nothing. Right here, I could be starting a blog about anything, writing anything, but I just don’t know what to do. What I have decided this will all be about is capturing ideas. Through every day I envision more exciting things than I have ever actually created in my life. Most of these images, ideas, and half-formed stories are soon forgotten. In most cases, this is probably a good thing, it would take quiet an ego to think all my idle musings were small nuggets of genius, but there are some that stay with me, some that have a slight power over me. I hope I will be able to capture some of these rogue dreams that plague me here in some concrete form for examination. First, I hope laying out my ideas for the perusal of others will help weed out the weaker ones and help me develop the stronger. Secondly, I simply need practice communicating my thoughts outside of my head. The power of the mind is such that in a few minutes I can see and experience things which would take years and thousands or millions of dollars to create for others. Even single images, single ideas I have, often seem impossible for me to show to others. This is something I have to overcome. Why? It is hard for me to say directly. There are a few products, creations, whatever you want to call them, which have had a great impact on me. These creations come to me uncalled for throughout the normal course of life and I am amazed at little bits of them. At some time I hope to explore more specifics here, but for the moment I provide you with this example because it is easy to embed in this post.

In every scene of that video I see a small little story, an image in someone’s mind and I just love it so much. I don’t even know what Yelena Yemchuk and Billy Corgan were thinking when they created each scene, other than a few shots of the band, but around each I have been able to create a whole world that captivates me. What I have decided to do is create something that has that gives someone else this feeling. Ultimately, this blog, and I hope my course of life, will be about reaching that goal.

So far I have not even mentioned games at all, but really this has all been about them and their impact on me. There are forms of other media which make me want to burst with awe, as evidenced by the video above, but by far games have entranced me the most. Well, to be more precise, the potential of games as a path to interactive works. Art has had the potential to be interactive forever. Elements of theatre are interactive; installation art can be interactive. These forms are all limited by physical constrains in time, energy, space, and basic Newtonian physics. An author or a painter is not limited by these things, but also creates a static work. The reader or viewer cannot interact with the work in any way but consumption. With the technology that powers games today we could create works in an environment with all the freedom of painting, but with the ability for the user to enter and explore the world created. There are many challenges, both technical and artistic, which must be overcome before we have fully established interactive digital art as a valid form of expression. Think back on the video above, specifically to the image of the girl kissing but looking away, where the camera pans out to show her limp hand hanging down. There is a story there, I do not know what, but if we could pan around them as they are frozen in time, zoom in so close we can enter into each characters thoughts, looking at a maze of connected ideas within their heads, perhaps we could discover why she feels as she does. What if initially their heads were filled with memories that did not form a full vision of how they came to that moment, and the player was to enter their thoughts, relive experiences, and draw the connections for themselves and the apathetic girl. Connecting the thoughts into one logical whole could be the game. What if the way the player interpreted the memories, and in turn made connections, changed the ending revelation the girl would have, thus creating their own take on the narrative with the narrative itself. What if this were some multi-user social networking system where users created memories and connections as a group, forming this girls life? Perhaps this last one as gone too far, but I hope by now I have at least shown there is something to be excited about here. This wasn’t meant to turn into an exploration of thought as a game mechanic, but it is just how I see things. Again, the possibilities of the world are overwhelming.