Game Design Advance

Today on the Dispatches, we review the second act of Ken Levine’s underwater dystopian saga. How do we know that it’s the second act of the game, however?

Very simple– because he told us so.

Let’s have Sherman set the Way-Back machine back to about a little less than a year ago, to a time when BioShock still hadn’t yet come out on the PlayStation 3 and I was sitting around wondering exactly what everybody else was talking about. One Friday morning, Ken Levine came over the NYU to speak to a small, but rapt audience about his game’s creation, and for the life of me, I believe that I was the only person in the crowd who hadn’t yet gotten a chance to actually play the damn thing. Plenty of fellow students and more than a handful of teachers were there, and while just about all of them probably got more out of the experience than I did, it was helpful for me to sit through it and learn as much as I could about this game’s background and structure, in hopes that it might help me better understand the game once it came out on a system I was able to play it on.

Fast-forward to last week, when I first popped BioShock into my PS3 and sat through the slow-jazz and advert-propaganda waiting room of the game’s install screens. Thanks to my time at Levine’s lecture, I had some pretty good expectations of what the game would be like, before it even got underway. For example, I knew that it would begin with a plane crash in which a trail of fire leads the player to the Rapture lighthouse (but not, however, that it included a sly crib from Another World, submerging the player underwater until swimming to the surface), I knew that the Atlas character was originally hoped to be voiced by Morgan Freeman, which would’ve made him sound as trustworthy as possible (therefore meaning he wasn’t to be trusted), and I knew that the game was going to follow a basic three act structure, which was outlined for us as a set of three main goals:

(1) Find Atlas’s family (check)

(2) Kill Andrew Ryan (check)

(3) Escape from Rapture

You’ll notice that only the first two objectives have been checked off that list, because that’s as far as I’ve gotten in the game, and so far, it’s all pretty much living up to the impressions that I had from listening to Levine’s talk– rich, atmospheric first-person shooting overlayed with some pretty interesting expository narration from multiple perspectives, interspersed with genuinely unsettling, bombastic, interactive theatricality and occasional trips to vending machines.

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It seems reasonable to expect that a game which allows users to create their own levels for a 2D platformer should be made by people who can create a pretty good platformer themselves. This is definitely not the case with Media Molecule, the developers of LittleBigPlanet.

The problem stems from a misunderstanding about what makes a good platformer in the first place. Media Molecule seems to believe that the secret is a set of levels with lots of things to do; switches to pull, stuff to knock over, etc. However, a great platformer usually isn’t just in its level design, it’s in the game’s avatar.

In truly great platformers, like Super Mario Bros., or Sonic the Hedgehog, manipulating the player-character is really the main event. The level design is important, of course, but is often there simply to present challenging opportunities for improvisation and experimentation.

Unfortunately Sackboy, the only avatar in LittleBigPlanet, is sluggish and limited. The range of motion offered by the avatar is surprisingly constrained. Even the perennial ‘double-jump’ isn’t available. The physics of LittleBigPlanet also serve to make controlling Sackboy inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll land on a platform and float on the edge. Other times you’ll simply fall to your death.

Combine these factors with the very poor decision to have 3 layers of depth and you have a game where you never feel sure of what your avatar is actually going to do in any given situation.

LittleBigPlanet, of course, is more about making levels than it is about playing them, with the single player game really just meant to spark the imagination of the user. In the end though, as anyone who’s ever designed a platformer can tell you, a level can only ever be as good as the avatar that’s going to be navigating it.

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Today on the Dispatches, we follow a time-honored Dispatch tradition– when it comes to reviewing games that aren’t Metal Gear, better late than never.

It’s been over a year now since Ken Levine’s much talked-about FPS BioShock debuted for PC’s and the XBox 360, and in that year, a lot has changed. Back when it first arrived, it was the talk of the gaming-town, and I can’t tell you how many times people in my game-design classes– students and teachers alike– waxed rhapsodic about it as a game to change storytelling in games forever. Most of the time, this hyperbole was followed by a kind of awed disbelief that I hadn’t already played the game, and a fervent insistence that I rush out and purchase it now, to experience it for myself.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t own a 360, or that my PC wasn’t advanced enough to run a high-end game like BioShock– that only meant that I was obligated to go out and buy Microsoft’s console, or get sufficient upgrades to run the game on my laptop, already slowed down by such harddrive consuming software such as word processors and Power Point. In the end, I decided to be patient, and simply wait for it to come out on the next-gen system I already owned, the PS3, to which the response was almost universal– “BioShock will never come out on PlayStation!”

Exclusivity’s a tricky thing in the gaming world. I bought a PS3 because I knew Metal Gear Solid 4 was unlikely to ever be released on anything else, and so far I’ve been proven right. And here, a year later, BioShock has, indeed, enjoyed a belated release on Solid Snake’s favorite gaming system, just this Tuesday, and despite the spendthrift obligations of our iceberg of an economy, I was able to finally purchase this game, in order to experience it for myself, the way everybody said I should. Yet in that time, something else has happened, something that makes this experience just a little bittersweet.

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Great game/art that I just “came” across:

Dark Room Sex Game

The game has zero visuals. It’s all based on sound and, well, rhythm if you’ve got it. And the best part: there’s a Wii-mote version. The game was made by students at the IT University of Copenhagen.

And yes, there’s even multiplayer orgy mode.

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You may enjoy this write-up of a panel I was on at Austin GDC.

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If any of you all find yourself in New York City this Friday you might want to drop by The New Museum around 7:30pm. It’ll be hosting a talk with Mark ‘messhof’ Essen, Jason Rohrer, and Greg Costikyan. The entry fee is $8 for the general public and $6 dollars if you happen to be a member of the museum.

Both Essen and Rohrer are the creators of two of my favorite independent games (Flywrench and Passage, respectively) and Greg Costikyan is a vetran game designer who started indie game publisher Manifesto Games. I’ve been to a talk with Costikyan before and he’s always entertainingly misanthropic. I’ve never heard either Essen or Rohrer speak, so I’m looking forward to this very much.

I hope to see some of you there!

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In light of the World Mind Games Championships, I thought it would be fun to host a hypothetical debate as to which ten games would do the best job as to determining the ultimate player. Feel free to post your ten in the comments section.

First of all, notice that I want to determine the ultimate player, and not gamer. What I mean by that is, I’m not looking for someone who has the most experience with these ten games and can clearly outperform others, rather I’d like to use the games to pinpoint the most versatile player in terms of strategy, cunning, perception, reaction, athleticism, and owning great heuristics and, of course, luck.

Without further adieu, my ten games:

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Sometimes you have to look real hard for anything interesting on the internet, and sometimes the internet just decides to throw things in your lap. Here’s a couple of links that you all might want to check out if you have a few free moments over the weekend.

As it seems only few people know, the first World Mind Sports Games opened today in China. Not only does it have an inelegant name, but also one of the worst logos I have ever seen, for anything. Nonetheless, it’s pretty cool that there’s a big international tournament that centers around such classic games. One last problem though, where’s Backgammon?

Iroquois Pliskin, who actually dropped by the site this week, has a review of PixelJunk Monsters up on Versus CluCluLand. This is a great game that does some really interesting things with the normal Tower Defense formula. As Iroquois rightly points out it’s the addition of an avatar that really makes the game. It does for Tower Defense what Harvest Moon did for farm sims.

Finally, as a little bonus, there’s a great post on the electoral projection site FiveThirtyEight.com on one of John McCain’s tells, known now as the ‘tongue jut‘. Some pretty good off-the-cuff analysis from the author Sean Quinn, who is apparently a Poker player.

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I started watching the Speed Racer movie last night. And fell asleep in the middle. But it still kind of triggered a cascade of thoughts about games and movies and narrative and such. Maybe nothing terribly new — but, like a clean pre-owned car, new to me.

So.

I’ve been reading Jim Rossignol‘s new book, This Gaming Life. (Awesome cover, by the way.) It’s good as a kind of well-written overview of the state of computer gaming in 2007, not incredibly deep, but fun to read and with a fun travelogue feel. In one chapter he writes about Will Wright’s notion of ‘the model’ — which Wright speaks of in this Seed conversation I found:

Well, when kids … play a game there’s a model in the computer that they’re playing against. And when they play they’re reverse-engineering that model. As they get better at the game, they get a more accurate representation of that computer model.

And that’s quite satisfying, the feeling of discovering how the game works. Again, nothing shockingly new, but I liked the way he put it and while I’ve added ‘game mechanic’ to my vocabulary over the past few years, thinking in terms of a game being a combination of a mechanic and a model seems useful. Maybe they’re really one-in-the-same, but there seems to be some subtle distinction.

Okay.

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