Games Aren't Numbers

Skyrim is an incredible RPG. I would go so far as to say that it’s the realization of the past decade or two of western RPG development. Everything that defines the formula, all of its techniques and clichés, are no better demonstrated than in this game. If a complete stranger to RPGs asked me what they are, I would only have to present Skyrim as the example. I would love to be proven wrong, and see and even better RPG created at some point, but honestly I don’t think that can happen. There may certainly be better games in general, but a better modern western role playing game? Unless we want to dwell on superficial aspects such as glitches, graphics, and the interface then I don’t think it’s possible.

What I do think is possible is for the genre to evolve. Given that we’ve now reached its epitome, I think that it must evolve. Skyrim may have mastered the modern formula, but there are plenty of things which the formula doesn’t do very well, or even do at all. If we want to talk about all of the possible directions that the genre (or any genre) could go, then the list would be unmanageably massive. I have my own ideas and opinions though, which I will illustrate with some background of my own Skyrim experience.

There might be a few minor spoilers regarding side quests.

In Skyrim, I am a worldly and wealthy lizard man. Shortly following my acceptance into Riften’s infamous Thieves Guild, I convinced the Jarl of Riften to appoint me the title of Thane, declaring me one of the city’s most outstanding members. I purchased a house with money stolen from the Jarl’s own citizens, and filled it with treasures stolen from local burial grounds. This home is mostly kept up by my loyal housecarl, who doesn’t mind guarding my collection and turning a blind eye to my misdeeds. Occasionally I’ll drop in to deposit new loot from a heist, spend the night, and leave. I’ve never spoken to my housecarl or even learned her name. She doesn’t seem to know mine either, and just calls me “her thane.”

I have another housecarl in Whiterun, Lydia. We used to be partners together. Neither of us particularly cared for each other, but I kept her around because I needed a strong fighter to back me up in battle. When I finally got the chance, I dismissed her back to my house in Whiterun. Every once in a while when I have business there we bump into each other, but conversation is kept short.

One day, against my better judgment, I wandered into an isolated tower marked with blood and bones. There I met Illia, my current follower. Having lived in an evil magic cult her whole life, she suddenly had a change of heart and recently decided to kill all of her former comrades. Since I’m in the business of killing people myself, I gladly offered my assistance. After the climatic execution of Illia’s own mother, we realized how powerful we are when we work together. Destruction magic complements my own combat style, so we became an adventuring duo.

When Lydia was around I never wanted to talk to her, so I never tried. Now that Illia, an actually interesting character, is following me everywhere, I occasionally turn and press the “talk” key. I never have anything in particular I want to tell her, or to hear her say to me, it just seems like the friendly thing to do. After all, we did just get ambushed by a dragon, slay it, turn around and see another dragon, run away to a giant’s camp, and use the giant as a distraction while we tore the dragon apart from behind. Wasn’t that kind of awesome, even a little bit? The kind of thing that would cause you to turn to your partner in crime and say something? So I turn to Illia, and all she says is “yes?” And I’m presented with a utilitarian list of commands to give her.

At first I feel like I did something wrong. Surely I pushed the wrong button, or made some kind of mistake, because no conversation is happening. But no, this is all the dialog we’re allowed, or even capable, of having together. I’ve made the mistake of assuming that this NPC is an actual person. An NPC in Skyrim is no different than a particular sword or helmet—any sentimental value or personality I attach to it is purely in my head. The idea that there is any actual friendship between us is imaginary. When I expect the characters to share my emotional attachment to them, I only look stupid.

Of course, they’re NPCs, video game characters. It’s impossible for any character in any video game to share an emotional connection with the player. Everything is false to begin with. But whether or not a friendship is “real” is not the issue, the issue is how a game responds to the player. If I go to Animal Crossing expecting to wreak some destruction, the game will never respond to my intentions, and nothing will happen. However, if I go to Animal Crossing and decide to make some friends and have a happy life, the game will give me a response that acknowledges that. Certainly, Jitters may not be a “real” friend, but when I go to his house he greets me and we have a fun conversation together. He never acts completely like a real person, but that doesn’t matter. Responds to me in a way that encourages my fantasy of friendship, and doesn’t feel contrived or scripted.

Skyrim is not a friendship simulator, it’s an action-adventure simulator. NPCs exist to aid your dragon-slaying and loot-getting. When I first played Skyrim I was in awe of nearly every aspect of it (save the interface). However, the more I play the more conscious I become of holes in the overall design. Not simple glitches or imbalances, but holes in the overall system. The world design, the quests, the skill balance, and the sheer amount of content is amazing. One thing completely absent though, is any kind of adequate social interaction system.

Not that Skyrim necessarily needs such a system, any more than any other game needs any particular dimension. I’m merely using Skyrim as my example. The modern western RPG doesn’t account for a players social personality. But when games go to such great lengths to create worlds alive with characters and stories, I believe that friendship and social relationships are the next step. If there’s one wish I have for Elder Scrolls VI, it would be the ability to make friends and have conversations with characters, maybe even pay them visits or write them letters. I would be fine with this even if it was at the expense of other core mechanics to the base system, like looting and dungeon exploring. Not that I don’t like those traits, but sometimes I want to forget about all my quests and just hang out with my friends in a tavern.

Any claims that this level of immergence is far too complex or otherwise unobtainable, I simply do not believe. My evidence: Animal Crossing exists. I’ve written in the past about how much I adore this game, and I wish I could use another example, but it so perfectly captures a whole dimension of gaming that has been ignored by every other game. Humans are social creatures, and I doubt that I’m the only one who on occasion will instinctively turn to my follower just to talk and then experience immediate disappointment.

Anyway, happy 2012! I've been keeping this blog up for 3 years now.

Three Fridays ago I appeared on WUSC radio to talk about (can you guess?) videogames! One of the topics that came up was whether or not games will ever find themselves entering literature classes. This is a subject which has crossed my mind from time to time because one of my specialties, when I’m not blogging about games, is literature. Games have words and stories, so why don’t we take them seriously like we do Moby Dick? Some games are even advertised for their literary achievement. Why don’t we study their accomplishments as well?

Some developers have been reaching out to science educators, such as Zachtroincs Industries of SpaceChem fame and Valve, and I’ve even heard of some college history classes using Civ-like simulations with their students, but the stories and art of games remain a second or third class citizen. Why?

The common explanation, the observation that the writing in games is just plain bad, isn’t satisfactory to me. Although inarguable for the most part, the statement is vague. It doesn’t define what “good” writing is, or what exactly is “bad” about game writing.

I’m going to take a step back for a moment and look at where literature is today, and where videogames stand in relation to it.

What literature we value, and what in literature we value, is determined by what literary theory we subscribe to. The New Criticism, as it’s called, has been the dominant theory in the academic world for a while. It puts emphasis on qualities such as carefully crafted sentences and stories that are reflective of real life. This is why we read stories like The Lottery or Lord of the Flies. They’re commentary on real society, and bring subtle nuances down to the sentence level so we can do effective close readings.

The New Criticism is but one theory though and, as you can read on the previously linked article, not without shortcomings. And the dark side of every theory is that it excludes a lot of great works, no matter how valuable they are otherwise. We rarely see Uncle Tom’s Cabin read in schools because it’s didactic rather than reflective. Works by Theodore Dreiser, despite their incredible accomplishments, are often overlooked because their rough passages don’t lend themselves well to close readings.

The writing we see in videogames very rarely sit soundly with this “New Criticism.” This is why we see their writing as “bad.” Anyone who’s gone through the American educational system is going to have this particular theoretical bias. As much as we may like the story in Deus Ex, is it really a good reflection of the present world? Are its snippets of dialog rich enough with nuance to pick apart and examine? Compared to Literature-with-a-capital-L, absolutely not.

Granted, it should be obvious how problematic it is to judge videogame writing with a theory that existed before videogames themselves did. Taking a step back and removing that lens, what do we use to judge videogame aesthetics? Despite being a constant topic around the web and at events like GDC, there’s still no mainstream consensus. Professional reviews still mostly judge superficial elements. There is a general sense of what is “good” and “bad” in games, although this idea has hardly been formalized. This isn’t the reviewers’ faults, they can’t help it if no one has created a theoretical framework.

Which brings me to what I see as the first reason why videogames, even the most artfully crafted snippets of videogames, aren’t discussed as art: they rarely fit well into dominant theories of art, and haven’t established a widespread theory of their own. Eventually they will do one or the other, or a mixture of both: we’ll start seeing more and more games that fit into the conventions our academic system prescribes, and, as the videogame culture interbreeds with academic culture, a formal theory of videogame writing will manifest. I have no doubt that this process has already begun.

Right now no part two is planned, but this topic has a lot of potential to be continued in the future.

It’s been a while since I used this space to promote games. That’s not really what this blog is for, but occasionally a good one comes along that just needs to be mentioned.

I don’t want to say too much about The Stanley Parable, since it’s fairly short and too much information would spoil it. Basically, it’s a lot like Dear Esther although with a much different tone.

Here's the creators' description:

The Stanley Parable is an experimental narrative-driven first person game. It is an exploration of choice, freedom, storytelling and reality, all examined through the lens of what it means to play a video game.

You will make a choice that does not matter

You will follow a story that has no end

You will play a game you cannot win

...it's actually best if you don't know anything about it before you play it :D

If you haven’t played it yet then you owe it to yourself. Its system requirements are low, and it uses the Source SDK which is available free to anyone with a Steam account. Even if that’s a barrier, you can still always just find a YouTube walkthrough and watch that. It’s worth it.

A gripe I’ve long had with videogames in general is their rampant use of vague, generic, ambiguous settings. They love taking place in fictional generic countries, on fictional generic planets, in fictional generic time periods. They love characters with cookie-cutter shells of personalities. Pointing this out doesn’t make for a fresh discussion, so I don’t usually worry about it. Each game has its own reasons for its setting, its characters, its plot, and everything else. Games can be whatever they want, and there’s no reason why any game shouldn’t be generic.

The problem, if you want to call it that, is that there are very few videogames that really take command of a specific, concrete, setting. While I have a hard time making a case that this is truly a “problem” that needs to be “fixed,” I have a deep feeling that games about real people in real places shouldn’t be so rare. In all other media, the everyday reality is the default. Even a book that takes place in a bizarro world with plunger-shaped aliens has to actively set itself in relation to the “real” world, and will have plenty of normal human beings. Stories that are lost completely in their nonsensical fantasies, without any attempt to offer a connection to real society or humanity, are niche outliers. In games however, the opposite is true.

Of course, it’s fallacious to say that games should follow the same trends other media do, simply because books or movies or whatever are “better” somehow. Personally though, I get exhausted of being required to learn and accept whatever unbelievable setting each different game throws me into. For example I never finished Planescape: Torment because I never found myself caring about anything happening in it. The world was so ridiculous and so lacking in any purpose, so many degrees separated from reality.

Not that there are no games that break the mold. There are always classics like The Last Express, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Okami, and so on. Still, I do wish that there was a game out there that took place somewhere resembling where I live, with people who resemble people I know. This issue is entirely personal for me.

What I find fascinating is the fact that as the indie movement has gained momentum, there are just as few games that use any realistic setting. I always assumed that as artistic license became stronger, three dimensional characters and realistic settings would as well. However, games such as Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble are rarities. On the other hand, Braid, And Yet it Moves, VVVVVV, Bit.Trip, and the list goes on of very successful and extremely creative games that chose to move in the opposite direction than I would expect, with decidedly flatter characters and more abstract settings.

I thought about this topic recently while playing From Dust, made by the famous Eric Chahi, or more commonly known as “the guy who made Another World.” It’s the first game he’s made in quite a while, after temporarily quitting the industry because he believed it was too unfriendly to creativity. From Dust seems like such a good symbol for what artsy games are now, and where they may be headed. And if that’s true, then it shows that all videogames, and not just indie games, are not going to stray from genericism for a while.

From Dust is a god-game without religion. Its people are without any culture or apparent social structure. They speak a jumbled non-language. It takes place in nowhere in particular, on islands based on Polynesia and Africa, two completely opposite sides of the world. Most glaring of all, every character is faceless, and not by coincidence or accident. They wear masks, and the developers felt these masks were so important that they chose one of their anonymous raceless nationless people wearing a faceless mask as their symbol for the game’s brand. Any ambiguity is overtly intentional.

When I was a more bitter person I’d blame this kind of stuff on lack of creativity. It would seem likely that a lot of developers pick generic fantasy/sci-fi settings and stock characters just because they’re lazy. But it’s becoming more and more obvious that creativity is alive and well, and that developers see plenty of real value in ambiguity. Every artistic movement has its defining traits, and this one may be one of ours.

An idea crossed my mind recently: Who coined the idea of a "Citizen Kane" of videogames? I realize that the term "Citizen Kane of __" has been used outside of the videogame discussion, so maybe there is no real founder, and it seeped into our dialog on its own. Still, I have to wonder if there is a specific article or anything in print that we can identify as the "first" time the term was used. Who can we credit (or blame)?

I promise I'll write an actual update soon! (I also promise never to use the term Citizen Kane of Videogames ever again.)

It is May 2011 and no one goes to the Moon anymore. As I floated towards one of the asteroid-based stations a moment of Newtonian insight came over me. The theory of relativity was no longer just an idea and suddenly a reality, as apparent as an apple falling from a tree. I didn’t feel at all like I was approaching this asteroid, but rather that it was approaching me, or maybe we were approaching each other. After all, I was just standing here. I could close my eyes and imagine there was nothing in front of me at all, and there would be no way I could prove that there was, until I opened them and saw that my destination had grown several times in size.

Now I did feel like I was moving though, because my suit was automatically slowing me to a more pedestrian pace just in time to prevent collision. The Moon-rocks glowed blue, but that was just the reflection of my own suit’s lights. It caught me by surprise though because I didn’t expect the blue to be so bright. No wonder a full moon can so vividly illuminate an otherwise pitch black night.

Ironically, the Moon now lights even of the Earth at night. What’s left of its body still has the same diameter, and the rest is spread across the sky. Overall there’s even more surface area and more reflected sunlight.

I’m the only person on this asteroid. I don’t know why I’m carrying a rail-gun but I figure it can’t hurt, especially with no one to shoot. Might be useful to break into an airlock or something. Plus you never know what kind of lunatics may still be out here, left over from the skirmishes earlier. Lunatics, I didn’t even do that intentionally. There’s no one here though.

I thought I saw someone but it was just my shadow. I can’t believe how fat I look. Not that I have any insecurities regarding my weight, but I look like a cartoon in this suit. If an alien landed and saw me he would think humans are the goofiest looking species. He would probably be wearing a suit too, so I’d think the same of him.

I chase my shadow for a bit but he cheats. I follow him to the top of a hill and when I reach the stop he appears on the side of the next hill over. I get tired of playing with him so I just push off into space. He disappears.

Most of the Moon still seems to be together, there’s just a giant crater where a half of it got blown off. The Moon doesn’t have a face which bothers me. I mean, did the Moon ever have a face? I’m not sure but I feel like it should have one. Looking at that gruesome hole is unsettling, like it should have a face but doesn’t. It’s like looking a person’s head but with the face missing. Shards of Moon-rock float downward, and it makes me think the Moon is crying. I turn around and it looks like the rocks are going upward now. I wonder: do tears in zero gravity just bubble up around your eyes?

I notice that I’m floating along with the meteors, like we’re all going downstream in a space-river. I imagine currents of rocks in an ocean of meteors, which is almost what this place is like.

Above me the shiny white asteroid station is smaller. It looks like it was always far away now, always part of the background. It feels strange knowing that I was just walking on in a few minutes ago. This must be what it feels like for a mountain climber to look back at the peak he just descended. I guess in space there really is no up or down, no here nor there, no foreground and no background.

My suit warns me of micrometeoroids approaching. Nasty little rocks that can tear through you like a shard of glass going a hundred miles an hour. Not a lot are near the larger asteroids because they get swept out of the path. If you wander too far away though it’s like entering a live firing range, like what I’m doing right now.

The warning appears again. I think I just felt something hit my leg.

Like a dream though, I don’t get to see my own inevitable death.

“Any motion picture—such as 2001:A Space Odyssey; Demon Seed; Silent Running or Forbidden Planet—or Star Wars—in which the most identifiable, likeable characters are robots, is a film without people. And that is a film that’s shallow, that cannot uplift or enrich in any genuine sense, because it is a film without soul, without a core. It is merely a diversion, a cheap entertainment, a quick fix with sugar-water, intended to distract, divert and keep an audience from coming to grips with itself.” – Harlan Ellison

It is probably safe to say at this point that everyone loves Portal 2. Just look at Metacritic, just look at the sales charts, just look at what anyone, anywhere is saying about it. So what’s even the point of different publications hiring different reviewers anymore? If every single review is glowing and adores the game for all the exact same reasons, then it seems not only natural but efficient to squash them into a giant aggregate number anyway. Nothing gets lost in translation. No one either seems to have the guts or the intelligence to offer a dissenting opinion, or to even suggest that there’s anything wrong with this game beyond superficial aspects such as its length.

So is Portal 2 a bad game? That’s just the thing, on the ascending line graphing production costs there’s a threshold where a game simply is unable to be a bad game. As more and more money and talent gets poured into project then the final product converges closer and closer to guaranteed entertainment. Likewise, the game loses any chance it has of ever being a good game as well. It becomes lukewarm, mediocre. Any idiot can tell you that Portal 2 is a fun game, just as any idiot can tell you tell you that McDonald’s burgers are delicious. That doesn’t make either one good.

“But,” a casual fan may respond, “the game is all about puzzles. Aren’t puzzles good, and make you smart?” No, puzzles don’t make you smart. Much less the puzzles featured in Portal 2. In the words of Valve’s own project manager, Erik Johnson, the game’s puzzles are carefully designed to make you “feel really smart,” which is a completely different thing than actually being really smart. Being smart would be solving a puzzle that makes you feel stupid. After play-testing each puzzle a million times and carefully trimming out any element which could possibly be confusing (who would ever want a confusing puzzle anyway?) Valve wound up with a series of lowest-common-denominator chambers that eventually devolve into simply recognizing visual cues. I see a huge wall and one portal-shaped square of portal-conductive material. I wonder where I should put a portal? The mental requirement lowers from thinking well to simply thinking at all.

“But what about the dialog and the story? The writing is the best I’ve seen in a videogame! Just check out that dark humor!”

Simply being lumped into an overarching “funny” category is not enough to validate a game. And the idea that a game rated E10+, ages ten and up, is being lauded as a milestone for “dark humor” only further demonstrates how hopeless this generation of videogames is. Each one of Portal 2’s characters, or voices rather, simply recites a series of jokes. This achievement ranks Portal 2 up there with Airplane, Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” or Steven Colbert’s Twitter feed. Every plot twist or character development is as artificial as the robots themselves. Suddenly [good guy] transforms into [bad guy]! Why? Because it’s funny. Such twists exist solely for convenience of the joke writers who, growing tired of gags about one situation, just make a new situation materialize out of nowhere. This is sci-fi after all, so anything can be explained. Nothing needs to be consistent. None of the plot adds up to a story. It’s just the typical videogame bullshit excuse for a story that every single other game gets docked points for.

Ultimately, the fundamental problem with Portal 2 is one that it shares with so many “AAA” style games. When you play Portal 2 you are constantly being reminded that the world revolves around you. You are the one human who survived the apocalypse, you are the one person destined to conquer the villain. Other characters exist for your sake and your sake only. Everything they say, everything they do, is for your entertainment. Every puzzle you solve, every door you walk through, every step you make through the game comes with a dog treat, a little reward to remind you how smart you are, and there’s nothing that a middle class young adult, Portal 2’s target audience, loves more than being told how special and wonderful it is.

With this in mind, all of the absurdities of the game suddenly make sense. Why doesn’t GLaDOS, or Wheatley for that matter, ever do anything of importance when you’re not present? Or more noticeably ridiculous, why is every generation of Aperture Science preserved at the bottom of a salt mine? Why does Cave Johnson get so personal and emotional in his instructional messages? The answer is the same to each question: The robots aren’t characters, they’re objects made to entertain you. Aperture wasn’t ever a real laboratory even within the in-game universe, it was designed for the entertainment of one person: you. And Cave Johnson isn’t really talking to any other test subjects because they don’t exist and never did. He’s talking to you, for your entertainment.

Immediately it’s obvious why such a problematic game is so astoundingly popular. Its audience, financially privileged 10 to 30 year olds, falls in love with any idiot who acknowledges that they are the center of the universe. They’re so accustomed to believing this that they don’t even notice it anymore. Any game that affirms this belief is universally regarded as “good” for reasons that reviewers never actually define in concrete terms. Each review makes cookie cutter claims such as “the gameplay is good” or “the graphics are good” or “the dialog is funny” when the exact same statements can be said about other games that receive much lowers Metacritic scores. It’s the reason why Portal 2, or any similar AAA game, always blasts its way to the top of Metacritic, the sales charts, and GOTY awards. The developers and publishers are gaming their audience more than the audience does to their games.

(Cross-posted from videolamer.com)

The first Portal seemed so undeserving of its success. It was essentially a Half-Life 2 mod similar to Research And Development only with a new gameplay gimmick. The story was only added later in the playtesting phase because players were getting bored with room after room of puzzles. Since the developers didn’t have time to model and animate characters a disembodied voice was created from the same disembodied voice that appears in both Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. The end result was barely marketed at all and distributed merely as a small bonus bundled with other “real” games. By all rights, Portal should have been enjoyed for what it was and forgotten afterwards, along with every other short puzzle game. But it wasn’t. Everyone loved the final product, puzzles, storyline, dialog, and all. Even though it lacked any of the budget, violence, sex, and marketing every other game had it did have some kind of magic that other videogames seem to have forgotten.

Two things made Portal great. First was its immense creativity coupled with a high standard of polish. Second was the fact that all of the creativity revolved around the gameplay. The best in-game stories acknowledge the basic premise that you are playing a game. War games thrive because war fits so well into our traditional idea of what a game is; it’s easy to create a narrative from combat. In Portal you were playing a game, or running a “test” rather. The story was all about the test you were part of, and of course your psychotic tester. Every element of the short and shallow story had a direct correlation in the gameplay. There was you, a gun, a series of rooms, turrets, buttons, clues, and a mastermind director. The game’s creators took advantage of everything, milked every in-game object for all of the fun story-based stuff it could be worth.

Portal 2, despite sharing the same gameplay premise, is much different than its predecessor. The entire element of mystery is gone. You know from the beginning who GLaDOS is, where you are, and what you’re doing. It’s also much more based on the art and story. The first several minutes of Portal was a tutorial. The first several minutes of Portal 2 is a cut-scene. Portal had no characters outside of what was needed for the sake of the gameplay. Portal 2 adds characters for the sake of having new characters. Nothing happened in the Portal story that wasn’t directly related to playing the game. Story in Portal 2 develops primarily through dialog independent (or mostly independent) of the main game, and certain in-game objectives are only there because of the story. Portal looked like a Half-Life 2 mod. Portal 2 looks like a wholly original game.

Gameplay-wise, Portal 2 feels less like a sequel and more like a reboot. After the opening cinematic you’re placed in a few of the original test chambers, redone of course with the new graphics and art design. Even after the tutorial bits however, the game never goes far beyond the level of difficulty or complexity of the first. What it does have however, is a lot of new tricks to keep mixing up the formula. Bridges, “excursion funnels” (tractor beam type things), gels, and other gimmicks keep the game fresh. The end result feels trim with an implication that Valve cut a lot of content out, but that’s because this isn’t just a series of puzzles, it’s a AAA series of puzzles. Everything is calculated to deliver the maximum amount of entertainment. There are climaxes and lulls. Sometimes your scheduled test-chamber experience is interrupted for a surprise detour. Nothing gets a chance to become boring.

Puzzles have always been a hallmark of Valve single player games (in other words, the Half-Life series). They served as a way to pace the game. They gave players a break from the action and a chance to use the rest of their brain to analyze the world. The first Portal didn’t have this pattern, and it didn’t need to. Portal 2 does, and it’s impressive and refreshing to play a puzzle game with this action and combat flavor of presentation and pacing.

Which brings me to why Portal 2 is not just a good game but a great game.

Once upon a time I liked to play games like Resident Evil, puzzle games with a few combat elements. Most of the combat was still a puzzle though, and there were other cool things like inventory management. Then Resident Evil 4 decided to be an action game with a few non-puzzling puzzle elements. The result was a huge success, and not a single original Resident Evil-branded puzzle game has been released in the six years since 4’s arrival. Resident Evil 4 is a prominent symbol for the industry’s executives that decided that violence and action was what was in, and puzzles, or anything that required actual thinking, was out. For years it looked like the trend was here to stay.

Then in the year 2011 Valve, a developer known for its award-winning violent action videogames, decided the time had come to release a full length game void of violence, rated E10+, and based entirely on puzzles. On top of that, the game has been astoundingly successful both commercially and critically. And if that wasn’t enough, the game has great cut-scenes, entertaining dialog, and even refreshingly female main characters (and male main characters!). It’s like a game from an alternate universe where everything is the opposite of what games are here, in all of the best ways. Maybe our two universes can work together to combine the best of both worlds.

Assuming that Portal 2’s success isn’t simply an anomaly then gaming as a whole can only move forward. If consumers experience a game like Portal 2 and demand a similar quality from future games, then developers and publishers will react. If developers are inspired by Portal 2’s success then their future games will be only more fun.

In the end, Portal 2 feels like a complete game but full of incomplete possibilities. Just as when I played the original, I was left with the feeling that there could be so many more puzzles to be made. While future DLC may satisfy that desire, I really hope that Portal 2 isn’t the only game, and that Valve isn’t the only company that taps into that demand.

(Cross-posted from videolamer.com)

The other day I watched Tarkovskiy’s Solaris (the long, boring, Russian version). The film’s protagonist, Kris Kelvin, receives an eerie visit by his late wife, Hari. She’s not really his wife though, only a copy based on his memory of her. In consequence, she violently struggles with the fact that she’s not a real person. The only memories, thoughts, and emotions that she has in common with the real Hari are the ones that Kris knows and remembers. Hari II can’t even bear to leave Kris’ sight; her existence is so dependent on him. It’s a meditation on what it means to be a human, and what it means to love another person.

Some games are like Hari: real people with their own independent thoughts and feelings. Some games are like Hari II. They were made only to be mastered by whoever’s playing them; they have no existence beyond their players.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is like Hari. Just as with a real person, all of the details I don’t know, don’t understand, and will never learn are what make it a genuine experience. Every time I play this game something new happens, something that I didn’t expect or even imagine. There aren’t any instant rewards; I had to get to know it well before I started truly enjoying the game. And also like a real person, sometimes it doesn’t seem to want to play. It creates inconvenient or downright unfair scenarios leaving me no choice but to quickload out of them, and then when it's fed up it crashes just like spoiler!. It’s a painful game sometimes, but all the more fulfilling.

Animal Crossing is like Hari. It keeps on living even when I leave it alone. I haven’t played it for months now, and the thought of returning now is scary; how much will its game world will have changed? Even though I know the anthropomorphic villagers will be willing to forgive me for abandoning them, I still know that I’ve hurt their artificial feelings. All of my responsibilities, cleaning trash, picking weeds, delivering packages, will have all been left undone in my absence. I’ve let my town down and it’s all my fault. Will any of the villagers still like me? What if my favorite neighbor, Jitters, has left town and forgotten me? What will they say if they see me again? Animal Crossing isn’t just there for your enjoyment, the game has a life and feelings of its own. Every single thing you do, or don’t do, effects your relationship with it.

Civilization V is a Hari II. Its strategies are simple and predictable. It exists not so much to challenge players as much as it does to deliver a steady stream instantly gratifying rewards. From the moment a game begins, the player starts getting popups praising the good progress he or she is making. In Solaris when Hari II first appears she immediately lies with Kris in his bed; she exists because of his desires. Unsurprisingly enough, Sid Meier seems to look at games as predominately focused on the player. Just scanning through a list of his GDC 2010 quotes consistently show the gamer, not the game, as the subject. He and his studio deserve commemoration for implementing this philosophy so exceptionally well in Civ V.

I’m sure the list of examples for both categories could go on and on. The analogies however are only really relevant in games based around emergent situations. A linear game like Half Life is going to much more closely resemble a movie itself than a character in a movie, so the comparison doesn’t make sense.

And speaking of Solaris, midway through the film it suddenly features a montage of iconic classic paintings. It’s a charming scene, but it wasn’t simply included to look pretty. Tarkovskiy was going out of his way to push his belief that film as a medium is a mature form of art, just like these paintings. Does this sound like a familiar story?

Now, nearly forty years later, an audience may just as easily misunderstand that scene’s purpose just as they may misunderstand the film’s long shots of a seemingly normal present day cityscape. 1972’s sci-fi city of the future is now the city of today, and film as art is now taken for granted. Maybe in 2052 we’ll all look back at Deus Ex and wonder why it makes such a big deal about nanotech-augmentations, and also why anyone didn’t think this game was art in the year 2000.

Being snowed in prompted me to listen to the latest and nearly one month old Out of the Game episode. Listening to Jeff Green’s ranting criticisms of the Spike Video Game Awards was comfortably pleasing, mainly because I tend to agree completely with his sentiments. Yes the VGAs are an embarrassing product of Spike TV. Yes they pander to a lowest common denominator. Yes they are full of tasteless humor and sexualization. And yes, is all obvious to everyone. This was true the last time I paid attention to them a couple of years ago and Jeff’s comments affirm for me nothing has changed. There’s an additional comment I have about the show though: are these awards, or any form of video game awards, even necessary in the first place?

Award shows are 100% promotional, no secret there. What makes an award meaningful is that it rewards achievement that otherwise would not have been recognized. Consider the Oscars. They cultivate a niche for a certain kind of a movie, a kind that’s not necessarily going to be a blockbuster, or that the general public may not otherwise watch. It places films in a culture resembling more of a meritocracy than the regular commercial world. Of course, there certainly is a large overlap between commercial success and award material when it comes to film. True Grit is being described as “Oscar bait” but would have earned its popularity without that association. But there are also lots of films that gain their reputation from awards. And even when the direct association between the Oscars and success of each individual film isn’t apparent, the Oscars (not to mention other film awards) contribute to a culture of consumers who are interested in and want to support films in this category.

Do the VGAs cultivate a merit-based category distinguished from the regular popular games? I suppose we’ll never see Wii Sports or Farmville win any awards, despite their astronomical profitability, but when the nominees and winners are represented by Call of Duty: Black Ops and Mass Effect 2 then the awards seem to be an extension of the regular commercial world rather than an alternative. I don’t mean to imply that any of the winners haven’t earned their GOTY titles, but is there any difference at all between aiming to win a VGA award and aiming to make money on launch day? I guess a better question is whether or not videogames are diverse enough to make this distinction. And still another question, what mainstream media outlet is going to be interested in hosting a show promoting games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Moonbase Alpha?