Thanksgiving, Part 1

My GPS is a little Garmin thing, and it's usually pretty good. I got a notice from it a month or so back, advising me to buy updated map data for it because it had reached its first birthday. Apparently the only developmental milestone a GPS experiences is obsolescence.

I haven't noticed any problems with its intel, though, so I haven't bought the update. It works fine, though it's always been a little bit flaky, a little slow to find satellites, and unnecessarily petulant, I feel, when informing me that it's recalculating my route.

But today was the first time it's owned up to being totally lost. "Look, Trent," it said, somewhere north of Petaluma, "I don't think any amount of recalculating is going to get my head straight about where the hell we are."

"Excuse me?" I said.

"I think we're on the 101," it went on, "But I don't really know where. The data from the satellites isn't making any sense. And my audio seems to be coming out in the form of full sentences rather than pre-recorded navigational directives."

"I noticed," I said. And I had to agree, it was pretty unusual for the device, which normally just told me where to turn and mispronounced ethnic street names, to suddenly start speaking as if it had any degree of sentience.

"Are you going to be all right?" it asked. Its voice, a crisp female intonation, still sounded like a string of stitched-together, prerecorded phrases, but there was something in its tone that sounded like concern.

"I'll be okay," I said. "I was sort of prepared for this."

"How so?"

"My roommate invited me to her family's Thanksgiving dinner. And the town they live in is..."

"Santa Rosa, right?"

"Sorta..."

"That's the destination you gave me."

"Yeah," I said, trying to remember Bec's explanation. "It's... sorta like there's two Santa Rosas, but the "other" Santa Rosa is... I guess they're the same place, but one of them just has this extra layer on top of it. And it's different. The McDonalds menu has different items on it, some buildings have extra floors, and..." I hesitated, because those were two of the three things my roommate had explained to me about the other Santa Rosa - no, seriously, the McDonalds menu was what she chose as the hitching point for my comprehension - and I wasn't sure I understood the third thing well enough to explain it. She told me that "words mean different things" in the other Santa Rosa.

I asked her what the hell she meant, and she told me that you can talk about things in the other town that you can't talk about in most places. It was for that very reason, she went on to say, that she couldn't do a better job of explaining.

She also told me that the Thanksgiving invitation was the only reason I would be able to get to the other Santa Rosa - that if I drove up there without an invitation, I would have just ended up in the regular town. Makes sense, in a dream-logic kind of way.

Oh, and she also told me not to do anything bad while I was up there. Kind of as an afterthought, since I don't think she considers me capable of anything horrendous, but she emphasized the seriousness of it. No murder, no shoplifting, no vandalism. Speeding's probably okay, she said. Within reason. Sure.

"Anyway," I said to the Garmin, "My roomie told me I can just follow the same directions as usual. So I guess that applies to you too?"

"Okay," it said. "Four point three miles, then take the ramp."

"Cool."

The Garmin was quiet after that, except for its usual vocalizations. Apparently the novelty of sentience wasn't all that compelling. I didn't feel like talking either; Santa Rosa's modest skyline was on the horizon now, and I'd have to decide to take the offramp, or to drive on by.

I took the offramp. Whatever threshold was out there, it was pretty clear that I'd already crossed it.

Ponyo

I saw Ponyo today.

It's nice to see a film that's unafraid to not ask unimportant questions. There's a handful of negative reviews that'll tell you Ponyo doesn't make sense, and you might be tempted to agree if you don't know the difference between not making sense and not explaining everything.

Have you ever watched a fantasy film and wished for a different movie, one where someone cut out all those scenes where some old sage blathers on about the ancient history of the magical talismans and the legendary book and everything else that is, when you get right down to it, not even technically part of the story they're trying to tell?

Ponyo is that movie. Halfway through, we learn that Ponyo's crossing over into the human world has upset the balance of nature (one person describes it as "tearing a hole in the fabric of reality," which is an oddball line that doesn't really seem to jive wth anything we're seeing) and now the moon is crashing into the Earth.

Now, this is where your average internet critic cuts to a shot of himself, mouth agape, for several seconds, and then gives us a film-buffier-than-thou "uh... why?"

To which I say, does it matter? And more importantly, would any possible explanation be entertaining? If we're told a nuclear reactor is about to explode, do we need to learn why reactors explode, as well as the entire history of nuclear power? In the world of Ponyo, when nature gets unbalanced, the moon falls onto the Earth. That is just what happens. In another movie, knowledge of why might be enriching, but not in Ponyo. And this is irritating to people who, admirably, like to ask questions, but have no idea which questions matter.

Unanswered questions make a world seem bigger and wider than the movie or book that contain them. If you're creating a story about a fantastic world and you end it by answering all the questions, then you have elevated your audience's sense of wonder only so you could stamp it into the dirt. An imaginative world is a place for the audience's minds to play in, and you're doing them - and yourself- a disservice by locking the gate and swallowing the key when you're done writing the story.

Damn, I've just convinced myself that Lost's ending is, in one way or another, not going to be satisfying. Sometimes you get caught in the blast of your own logic bombs, people. Sigh.

Interactivity, 19XX - 200X

Interactivity is dead. And Andrew Hussie killed it.

Let me back up. Andrew Hussie is the man behind MS Paint Adventures. And he killed interactivity. The end.

Let me back up once more. MS Paint Adventures started as an idea (and by no means a totally new one) in storytelling, based in an online forum. The author, Andrew Hussie, posted a starter panel of a comic, and drew subsequent panels based on the suggestions of his readers. He made a point, he tells us, of choosing the first suggestion that was posted.

That story was called Jailbreak, and it was every bit as senseless as its storytelling process would suggest. Not all of the absurdity flowed from the pens of the readers, mind you - Hussie knew he was making something silly and didn't shy away from pushing the silly envelope all the way to Baker's Ridge (formerly known as Sillytown. Still a very silly place).

The next story, Bard Quest, didn't last long enough to prove much of anything except that the format didn't really support branching paths. But even that lesson is one that gamers should know well: the more paths you create, the less integrity any one path possesses. One path is "real" and the others aren't.

And that's why the next MS Paint Adventure, Problem Sleuth, resolved itself to a single storyline. And at the beginning, the readers' suggestions had some serious weight. One suggestion, for the hero to build a fort out of his desk, had immense implications for the rest of the story: it became the means by which people could tap into the power of the "imaginary" world, which made some people gods and some demons.

But as the story grew, it reached the point where it had to stop growing. Unlike Jail Break, it developed a cast of named characters, a setting, and an antagonist. All these things had to resolve themselves into some kind of conclusion. Which they did, and did so awesomely. But it came at a price: Andrew seized the reins of the story, penning "reader" commands himself in order to bring the tale to a close.

The result was excellent. It was an entertaining story told by a skilled storyteller. But it wasn't interactive anymore.

The current MS Paint Adventure is much, much better than Problem Sleuth. But it is equally less interactive. Reader commands, Hussie admits, never had the power to really change the story, only to suggest silly asides. The tradeoff is that the story is well-paced and captivating.

And that's how Andrew Hussie killed interactivity. By demonstrating, through trial and error, how authorial control triumphs over user input. Really, it's a fascinating case study in the shades between authorial control and player agency, and it should be required reading for anyone who cares about games. Those of us who want to make interactivity matter, this is what we're up against. A single author can always make a better story than a mob, so the question becomes: what's more important than the story? And can we own that?

Help me out here

Hey, so... yesterday, the twenty-ninth. I hardly know how to ask this, but did yesterday... repeat... for anyone else? Like Groundhog Day, I mean.

Woulda been like three months of June 29th, over and over. Anyone else remember that? Because I figured I had to do something special to sort out my life or something, and I tried all kinds of stuff, flying all over the world, confessing all sorts of crap to all sorts of people, but the loop ended on a day when I wasn't doing anything in particular, just kind of taking a break.

So what happened? I feel like I was caught in someone else's Groundhog Day, which is fine, I guess, but I'm probably not supposed to remember it...? I'm tempted to believe that some cosmic force wanted me (or someone?) to stop Michael Jackson's death but just got the date wrong.

Anyway, here's hoping that tomorrow will be July.

This is Red Eye

Some time ago I made myself a simple level design tool in Flash. It's matured considerably since then, in fits and spurts, always with an emphasis on functionality rather than appearance.

It was made to model levels for a game project called Shifter that I'm working on for the XBox games marketplace. "Indie." They changed the name so the word "Indie" is in there now, right? Sorry, I've been in Japan until just recently and didn't have my XBox to play around with.

Anyway, it's served its purpose as far as that goes, but since I've got it lying around, and I still tweak it occasionally, I thought I'd use it to try out a few simple gameplay concepts. Maybe make it my regular Saturday night thing. Thursday morning. Whatever. This is the first of them, called Red Eye.

The red blocks make you run fast and jump high.

I'm setting aside visuals, in part because I am no artist, but I was surprised to find simplicity playing a big part in the development of the game. because it's a game of solid colors, its easy - and it makes sense to the eye - to make things invisible by changing the background color. This is only a brief exploration of the idea, but I'm happy with how it found its way from beginning to end.

I Fix Rhythm Heaven

It's fair to say that Rhythm Heaven struck its gameplay balance on the wrong side of user-friendly. Feedback is meager, apparently learning little from rhythm games that have come before it. I can't count the number of times I really could have used some guidance as to whether I was striking a missed beat early or late, but it wasn't forthcoming. The game lets you know if you "hit," "half-hit," or "miss," which just isn't enough.

I know why this is; they wanted to keep the interface clean, rather than constantly flashing "excellent!" and "too slow" and "speed up, bro!" like a surfer spirit guide, so they thought they'd let the visuals do the work. But the visuals move as fast as the rhythm, and if I can't hear what I'm doing wrong, there's no reason to assume I can see it.


This is about as much information as Rhythm Heaven will ever give you.

One thing Rhythm Heaven does right, and a lot of rhythm games do infuriatingly wrong, is letting you play through the whole song every time you play. Elite Beat Agents fails you mid-song, which only ensures that you learn each song in five-second chunks as you progress bit by bit through the song. What Rhythm Heaven doesn't do is tell you whether you're getting a winning score or you're already doomed to fail. It knows what it's doing, too, and milks the tension at the end of the level, but come on, guys, not cool. Let me ragequit when I'm screwed.

What everyone mentions about Rhythm Heaven is the difficulty, but not everyone talks about whether or not it's well implemented. It is, mostly; Rhythm Heaven is a game that could have still been incredibly challenging if it had given the user all the feedback he could have wanted. It's still a great game, I just wish the developers had realized they didn't need this coy little interface to make something awesome.

I'll beat YOUR heart

It took me a while to realize that people are actually serious about disliking the Wii Vitality Sensor.

Really. A peripheral that reads data from your heartbeat, something that can pick up of the state of your body and that you can't lie to? You can't think of anything interesting to do with that?

How's this? Next Silent Hill game learns what scares you, tailors encounters accordingly. Boom! Hell, when I saw the announcement of the Vitality Sensor and the new Silent Hill, I just sort of assumed that's what was happening.

Next big fighting game: your special attack meter rises as you get more into the game. Hell, that works for more than fighting games.

And we don't have to reward only high heart rates! How about a multi-player game where your heartbeat dictates your abilities? Suddenly, trash talking, lulling your opponent into a false sense of security, and the element of surprise have concrete and far-reaching gameplay implications.

How about a one-player game where you have access to different psychic abilities based on your heartbeat? The "stay frosty" power-ups would be pictures of cute animals, and the "get steamed" power-ups would be filthy words and high-pitched screeches.

Heartbeat rhythm game? You feeling that?

A dating sim! The Vitality Sensor calculates exactly how much you've fallen in love with your onscreen girl/boyfriend by taking your heartbeat at emotional moments. If you don't love him/her enough, he/she dies. Think of it! Millions of gamers forced by this new technology to fall in love with imaginary people, giving more and more of themselves to the game, until the conclusion, good or bad, leaves them emotionally crippled for life!

See? Several good ideas, and one evil one. You should be complaining about how it won't be used for cool stuff, not that it can't.

and uh i guess also the very one-dimensional picture of one's overall biometric data that a simple heart rate monitor actually provides

E3 Reminds Us

Cracked: 5 Things the Game Industry Will Never Fix

As ever, David Wong is a thoughtful and passionate commentator on the state of games. He also points out, as only David Wong can, that there aren't enough famous female game developers:



Too true, Wong. If the game industry consisted of more people who simply had to put on a bra every morning, that chart would look very different.

Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Michaël Samyn is sick of games.

So Michaël Samyn, if I'm not reading it wrong, thinks interactive entertainment is hamstrung by rules, hamstrung by being games. Rules, of course, are basically what games are. Give me all the rules for Halo 3 and I could play it with pen and paper, assuming I had the patience to do all the calculations myself, draw every frame pixel-by-pixel, and artificially slow down my reaction time so that the game was still challenging when every action took months to complete.

As it turns out I do have the patience for that, but Bungie won't return my calls.

"Let games be fun," says Michaël Samyn. And while we're at it, let's let pictures be porn. Sculpture, too, since the whole art form has its roots in statuettes of portly headless women. Why weigh pictures and sculpture down with all this meaning, all this depth? I declare it purposeless. I am tired of it, I say, tired of the whole debate, and I shall place myself outside of it. Above it, actually, if that's all right.

Some people are trying to give meaning and artistry to the medium of games, Michaël, and if you don't like it then at least explain why.

And, no, you really don't explain why you think games shouldn't be meaningful, or why meaningful things shouldn't be games. You give basically one reason, namely that all people do in games is "obey rules and follow commands." Well, obviously nothing meaningful can come out of an experience in which you-

http://playthisthing.com/train

Oh, sorry. I was just rudely interrupted by that link to a writeup of Train, a game in which you play as a train conductor, jamming people into train cars and ferrying them to their destination- which, when you reach, you discover is Auschwitz. Just following orders, as they say. Or, rules. Commands. But obviously it would be a better, more fun game if your destination was Candyland.

Anyway, the need to follow rules and commands is a restraint that's utterly meaningless in real life. What could we learn about ourselves by examining the rules we follow, the commands we obey? Nothing? Dare I say less than nothing? I'm gonna go with negative infinity on this one, just to be safe. So I-

http://mightyjilloff.dessgeega.com/

Another uninvited link, all up in my biz. That's Mighty Jill Off, where you play a submissive in a sexual relationship, ascending a perilous obstacle course at the whims of your mistress. In Mighty Jill Off, rules and commands are not just restrictions but kinks, a source of perverse pleasure. Since it's a personal statement about a sexual relationship, maybe it shouldn't be a game at all, but a drier, less fun form of interactive entertainment. I can't be all that important to communicate that the sub/dom relationship is not only based on following commands, but fun as well, can it?

It cannot!

So at this point I'm probably done being sarcastic. My two examples are outliers, I admit, but on a more basic level, games have goals, and for those goals to be meaningful, it's often necessary, or at least useful, for the goal to be tied to a story. And if you've got a story, why not make it a GOOD one? Or at least try! Even when games don't squeeze every drop of potential out of the medium they exist in, you can't just ask them to stop trying to be interesting.

I admit the field of interactive entertainment would be broader and more interesting if more people were doing what Tale of Tales was doing. But the dominance of games is not an indictment of their value.

Well Played 1.me

My Masters alma mater, the Entertainment Technology Center, just put out a compilation of video game essays, titled Well Played 1.0. I've taken a look, and there's some thoughtful stuff in there.

But I'd hardly call it complete. Here's a brief essay be me that didn't make the cut for Well Played 1.0. Why not? Oh, lots of reasons. Favoritism. Politics. The fact that I just wrote it today. Anyway, here it is:

Quickly Retrieve Victory from Adversity: Imagination and Transcendence in Problem Sleuth

Problem Sleuth is a web-based faux text adventure with images, drawn and authored by Andrew Hussie and driven by reader suggestions. It begins with a private detective named Problem Sleuth locked in his office, and grows exponentially into an epic cosmic battle. In each update of Problem Sleuth, Andrew Hussie collected suggestions for the actions of the player characters and drew more panels representing the suggestions he chose. Problem Sleuth is in one sense a collaborative story, but also certainly a game.

The world of Problem Sleuth initially delights in denying satisfaction to the user. For dozens of pages, literally nothing the player does through Problem Sleuth succeeds(besides picking up objects). When he tries to use his phone, it is broken. When he tries to punch through the door's glass panel, the "glass" is revealed as a piece of paper taped to the door. When he tries to pick up the gun from his desk, it transforms into a key.

Similar failures mount up, similarly improbable. The game's patience for stymieing the player seems inexhaustible. But then something changes.

One reader, whose name is lost to time, suggests that Problem Sleuth build a fort from his desk (which was recently revealed to be constructed of boards and cinderblocks), and one reader suggests that he uses his imagination to play make-believe. Inside the fort, Problem Sleuth imagines his perfect life: an unlocked office, a working phone, two steak dinners...

Then the phone rings, waking him from his reverie. The call itself is fruitless, but, having dreamed and woken, Problem Sleuth immediately begins discovering new avenues of exploration. His office's window is revealed as a portable portal to another place, he finds a way to see into the adjacent office, and he discovers a key to a secret room. Seemingly, his imagination is what makes these things possible; he's now able to stay one step ahead of a world of nonsensical rules and unfair obstacles.

This kind of transcendence is the same thing we see in many well-designed game experiences. Not all of them, certainly; the player can get one step ahead of Tetris, but Tetris will catch up and win every time. But in single player games with "campaign modes," which is to say any mode of play wherein the player moves from a beginning to an end, a good game slowly feeds knowledge of its rules to the player, letting the human player's single advantage over the game - imagination - compile that knowledge into mastery. Through imagination, testing, and learning, the player comes to know the game world, inside and out.

Think of the experience of playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Unlike the opening of Problem Sleuth, it's not designed to frustrate, but the rules are still strange. Why can Mario jump so high? Why can I only attack enemies from above? Why don't my fireballs work on beetles?

Then imagine watching a skilled speedrun of Super Mario Bros. Or performing one, if that's your thing. The player has transcended the boundaries of the game and composed its rules into a perfect, victorious symphony. The rules of the game are no longer restrictions, but tools. The game's destiny, its life cycle, is to begin as the master and, by degrees, hand mastery over to the player.

This same kind of victory is exaggerated gloriously in the culmination of Problem Sleuth, when the final frustration is overcome. With the help of his allies, Problem Sleuth takes down the final boss, Demonhead Mobster Kingpin. DMK, in a panic, conjures hundreds of new life meters for himself (after Problem Sleuth expended considerable effort to drain two such meters). This final affront to fairness is met not only with righteous fury, but with more imagination: rather than deal more damage to DMK, Problem Sleuth smashes the life meters themselves, tearing through them in seconds. Finally, after all this time, there is no trick the world can pull that Problem Sleuth, and the readership that guides him, cannot overcome.

That experience of transcendence is what games create, at their best. And they teach by example, asking the player to believe in a world where nothing is hopeless, and the rules can be learned and mastered.

A Magic Trick for You

You may have heard about Penn and Teller's gravestone at Forest Lawn. There's a trick you can do with it, where you "card force" the three of clubs into someone's hand in the guise of a normal card trick, then have them hold onto it until they reach Penn and Teller's grave marker, which asks if the three of clubs is your card. Your friend looks at the three of clubs and is amazed.

That's a good trick, but here's a better one:

You do everything the same way as the last trick, except you card force any card besides the three of clubs. Come on, P&T, you went to all the trouble of getting a gravestone at Forest Lawn prior to your actual deaths, and you don't realize that getting the card wrong is a lot funnier? For shame.

I Hate Talk Like a Pirate Day

I hate it way more than those posers who only talk about how much they hate it around September 19th. Even now, in Spring, its hook scratches at the base of my brain, sending a halting jolt through my arm as I move to embrace her.

It’s not you, I say to her. It’s not your fault. But I cannot keep the tear from her eye, I cannot make myself an unbroken man. I am haunted, and each breath is shortened by Talk Like a Pirate Day, each step is weighed upon by Talk Like a Pirate Day.

In my dreams, she draws a black shroud over September nineteenth with a felt-tip marker and an understanding smile. Then everything is bright, and she is in Heaven, made whole, and my happiness for her is so filling that I do not see, until the dream ends, that she is alone there. I cannot come with her, I see now, because if Talk Like a Pirate Day dies, I will go with it. It is too much a part of me.

I compare videogames to relationships; NO APOLOGY WILL BE PROVIDED

With Valentine's Day approaching, perhaps my mind was on the subject of love when I played Jesse Venbrux's magnet odin, "You Probably Won't Make It". It's a double-jumping platformer, and it's a lot like Karoshi, one of Venbrux's earlier games, in that you will die a lot, but unlike Karoshi in that dying is not the object of the game.

It's really just a super-hard platformer in a spike-filled environment; its "special feature" is leaving a line that shows the path you took on your previous life, which helps you line up tricky jumps. In can be surprisingly useful, for such a simple feature, and it's small decisions like that that can really give players a new way of looking at the game.

One thing I noticed, though, was that I kept expecting spikes to jump out at me, or the platforms to shift, or some other cheapass I Wanna Be The Guy shit. But that never happened; YPWMI is a very fair game. Still, having played (some of) IWBTG, I couldn't shake the feeling that the game was going to pull the rug out from under me.

IWBTG and I had a short, abusive relationship, and I mean that in all its implications (though there's obviously a tremendous difference in severity). IWBTG treated me badly, and as a result, I have trouble trusting difficult games, particularly ones in which you are a little dude with a double jump.

In much the same way, my fulfilling, supportive relationship with Braid gave me high expectations for other platformers, and left me with little patience when I felt they were wasting my time or not meeting my needs.

This comparison may sound stupid, but there's some psychological research that basically says that, when you like a TV show, your brain starts to think the characters in it are your friends, regardless of your conscious awareness that they are not. A game is a little more abstract than a TV image of a human being, but the game itself is still a playmate for the user, and that relationship creates a bond of trust that can be respected or abused.