Game Design Advance

Gamasutra has posted a short piece by Brandon Sheffield on the state and future of ‘games journalism’. Reading it over the weekend, so soon after Frank’s recent lament that the best and brightest of the enthusiast press seem to be moving quickly on to greener pastures, got me thinking about what could be done to improve the situation. Sheffield points out that almost no critics in the industry have any formal training.  While I think some education in some form of criticism is better than none, I’m not one to say that training in the critique of film or television prepares you very well for analyzing games.

As someone who’s been studying and making games for a few years now, I’m deeply invested in the critical culture surrounding games. Sheffield points out that critics, especially popular ones, serve as valuable translators for the general public to understand the sometimes arcane workings of a given artform. I would add that good critics are also invaluable to artists themselves, constantly pushing them forward, keeping them from getting lazy. As much as artist are often their own worst critics, they can also have enormous blind spots when it comes to their own work; it’s these blind spots that critics can fill in.

It seems obvious then that a healthy culture of criticism is vital to the health of the games industry as a whole.

With this in mind I came up with a few guidelines that I think all aspiring game critics should follow:

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A specter is haunting the world: the specter of my newest game!

However, there’s another old ghost that’s been haunting my mind, lately. When the news of the Fed’s proposed plan to bail out Wall Street was announced last week, I was reminded of an old line I always attributed to Ronald Reagan, though I’m not sure he was the one who said it. “The problem with communism,” as the Gipper might’ve said, “is that it takes away your freedom to fail.”

Now, I’m no fan of Reagan (warning to anybody else who watches TMC regularly: “Knute Rockne, All-American” sucks) and I’m smart enough not to consider myself a Marxist-Leninist (at least not openly; more on that later) but there’s always been something about that line that struck me as interesting, from a purely non-political angle. Since this is a game design blog, it stands to reason that the freedom to fail must have some relevance to how we design games, particularly when it comes to the losing.

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First there was Erik Wolpaw. Erik was not just the funniest person to write about videogames, he was possibly the funniest writer of all time. I’m not kidding. Back when Erik was writing about games on Old Man Murray the only reason he wasn’t the answer to the question “where is the Lester Bangs of videogame journalism?” is that his stuff was smarter, funnier, and better written than Bangs’. What’s more he was writing about an emerging form of culture during this critically important time when we were (and still are) coming to terms with what it is, what it means, and how we should be thinking about it.

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Here are a couple of interesting pieces I came across that you all might want to check out if you have an extra ten minutes:

First, a quick write-up of a conversation between GameSetWatch’s Simon Carless and our friend Frank Lantz, about his hit Facbook game Parking Wars. I wish the post was either longer or an actual interview, as they briefly touch on a couple of pretty big subjects, but it’s still always nice to see good work get some attention.

Secondly, something that I know will be of interest to a couple of people who read the site, is a page (that I gather has been up for a while) explaining David Sirlin’s oft-spoken of new collectible card game, Yomi. A few of us gave Kongai a real shot and for some reason it couldn’t hold our interest, hopefully a game that’s a little more intimate will be a little more compelling. Apparently he’s going to take it down soon due to copyright violation, so get it while it’s hot!

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There’s an interesting article over on Boardgame News discussing the role of meta-gaming in what the author, Tom Lehmann, refers to as conflict/diplomacy games. His argument goes that often in games of this type, such as Twilight Imperium or, well, Diplomacy, the meta-game is often seperate in some important ways from the mechanics of the game itself, and too often becomes the only game that matters. In his opinion this is less common in ‘Euro games’ that emphasize economics over conflict, as the predominant strategies are more closely linked to actual mechanics in the game design.

Lehmann brings up an interesting question that comes up in board gaming a lot: how legitimate are manuevers that are outside the ruleset of the game, such as alliances or emotional manipulation? By extension, what do we lose as games, even board games, move online and meta-gaming becomes more rare?

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Was just reading the latest issue of Seed while doing my laundry on this lazy Saturday… a great issue dedicated to all things evolving. There’s three articles related to Spore, including a one-on-one with Will Wright about the future (not the future of games, but THE future). Just as I was thinking I should write a post about this enjoyable magazine and the gaming related content, along comes Frank Lantz and his take on Spore:

“Here’s a game — supposedly about evolution — in which sexual reproduction is tastefully absent… and then as soon as the [Spore] editor comes out, there’s this enormous Cambrian Explosion, a Burgess Shale of digital erotica. And then those images were realy good at reproducing themselves as players sent links and images around to each other. So, it turns out that sex is good at reproducing itself. How funny and ironic is that?”

Not as ironic as the fact this article/quote appeared in a magazine called Seed.

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Leigh Alexander, over on her blog Sexy Videogameland, struck on something in her latest post about Spore that I thought was interesting, and is something that I’ve been considering for a little while now. Namely, the seemingly widespread (and I believe mistaken) impression that ‘complexity’ in games necessarily leads to ‘depth’.

Now, it’s important not to get wrapped up in arguments about definition, so just let me say what I mean by these two words, ‘complexity’ and ‘depth’.

By complexity I simply mean the number of elements that a player has to manipulate. In other words, is there a lot that the player has to/gets to do? This could be as simple as knowing if a certain mushroom will make you grow or kill you instantly, and as complicated as the handling of a Mitsubishi Evo.

Depth is a little more complicated a concept.

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I’ve been meaning to post something about this for awhile but have been a bit busy. So here, finally, is a post dedicated to a moment that happen this summer in the fifth finest borough of New York: a young, ambidextrous man helped break a 150+ year old game in Staten Island. The game was Baseball, which is perhaps the most scrutinized game ever and commands a rule book as thick as War and Peace (not really, but close). One would think if there was a moment left  that could literally break the game, it would have happened by now. But leave it to players looking for a gaming advantage to exploit a weakness in the rules. What happened? Well, an ambidextrous pitcher faced off against a switch hitting batter. Batting against the opposite arm in baseball gives the hitter a significant advantage as it buys a few extra milliseconds for the batter to recognize the baseball. That may not sound like much of an advantage, but trust me, it’s one of the key strategies behind the game. So when both pitcher and batter are looking for the same advantage, you can probably guess what happens: a stalemate. And since baseball has no clock… well…

Baseball Stalemate

The NY Times wrote up a piece about this shortly after it happened. It’s interesting to read across baseball blogs about how the rules should be interpreted and which player — hitter or batter — should be forced to commit to a side first. The whole situation just goes to show: there’s always room for players to explore the boundaries of a game — and players will always do just that as long as there is motivation to find a strategic edge (I suppose one could apply this same adage to politics).

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Flywrench is a beautiful game.

In Flywrench everything can kill you, but every time you die it’s your own fault. The game is shot through with a strong belief in the ‘virtuosity’ of the player, something that its creator, Mark Essen or ‘messhof’, has experimented with before in his Punishment games. However, unlike those two games, where the mechanics of the player character follow the normal rules of a platformer, Essen created a set of unique controls for the avatar in Flywrench.

The result is that completing the game is not simply a matter of navigating its obstacles, but of deftly controlling the player character, the ‘flywrench’, itself. Not only is it an effort to just maintain stasis in Flywrench, but it is extraordinarily easy to over-correct when you do move. On top of that, once you get into the meat of the game it is impossible to succeed without making quick, decisive, and sometimes very precise movements.

The question is, of course, why would someone want to play a game that fights being played well?

Because when it is played well, it is beautiful.

Flywrench captures something that is typified in the early Mario games and recently exemplified in Super Mario Galaxy: that movement can be the most compelling thing in a game. When controlling the avatar is some of the challenge, and when that challenge is ever-present, then obstacles cease to be arbitrary and begin to be opportunities for performance.

Every run you make in Flywrench will be completely different. Sometimes they will fail, sometimes you will stumble but still succeed through luck. Sometimes though, you will manage to send your colorful avatar flailing through the air exactly as you planned. In those moments you understand not just why Flywrench is beautiful, but what is beautiful about games.

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One of the most recent additions to the PSN library, Sony’s “The Last Guy” is the latest in a long line of video games about zombies.

Sort of.

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