You know, it starts to get annoying, ads all over the place, the constant encroachment of other marketing opportunities on entertainment. It's twelve minutes of previews before a film, preceded by a slide-show sponsored by Coke. It's DVDs where you can't skip past all of that with a simple tap of the menu button. It's constant and everywhere and very hard to escape, even in a world which includes TiVo and its brethren.

I hear about in-roads being made to place advertising in games. There was a story up on GamaSutra just this past week or so, two companies joining together to provide ads in future games. And since I've begun writing this piece, Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford has shown up on GamaSutra to discuss the benefits of ads in games. Pitchford identified three reasons for in-game ad placement: authenticity, budget, and cross-promotion. Although I have some thoughts about those last two, I want to focus on ads and authenticity.

Authenticity is an interesting beast. I haven't played Gearbox Software's games, except for a little bit of that multiplayer Wolfenstein game, but on the face of it, authenticity seems like a fairly reasonable argument. Pitchford cites specific examples of real-world corporations that participated in the Nazi war effort⁴, such as Philips and Opel. Not having agreements with these companies, says Pitchford, would mean leaving out authentic details like the Philips and Opel logos.

Now, I'm not going to claim that there aren't any players out there that would miss such details, but I have to say, I suspect their numbers are relatively few. And as soon as advertising money starts getting in there, I start to wonder about things. I'm not asserting that there was or has ever been any impropriety at Gearbox -- Pitchford is in the industry news a fair amount and he seems like he has integrity. But when I read Philips is giving them money and at the same time hearing that one of their levels "happens to take place in" the Philips factory in Eindhoven (in the Netherlands), I see the potential for the whiff of impropriety.

It's my feeling that when you deal with corporations about issues like this, you need to question their motives. In the case of Philips, are they hoping to get a fair shake from history about their involvement with the Nazis? I gather (from Wikipedia) that some would call Philips' actions during the war collaboration. Are they simply looking to get the brand out there, assuming brand growth simply from recognition? After all, most people don't associate Tylenol with poison despite the Tylenol killings (still unsolved!) back in the 1980s. Wouldn't it be better to associate the Philips name with a pleasant series of scheduled rewards, make the consumer associate heroism with the Philips brand. Are they going further, suggesting that a helpful supplier of intelligence might be a Philips manager, wearing a Philips cap?

Honestly, I don't know. But I wonder how I would be able to determine authentic from ad-driven in Brothers in Arms. I doubt we'll get information about what Philips paid for, and how much they paid, as most companies would consider those to be trade secrets. We have Pitchford's reassurances, but once money enters the equation, it's hard to know where the authenticity line is. The point is not that I think Gearbox's games will be less authentic as a result; the point is that I won't know what's authentic and what's not, despite being a fairly well-read and literate consumer of games. It's distracting not knowing while I play.

I'd like to see Gearbox be able to just use the material, since it was clearly present in photographs of the period; then at least I'd know that it was coming from their own point-of-view, and I could read their attempts at authenticity as genuine, as a selling point, or as a creative drive. But I know that lawsuits, with their immense expense, have had a hugely chilling effect of the use of such materials. I look around at some of the threats of lawsuits and such and wonder what brought us this far. It's crazy to me that the Anglican church would threaten to sue a video game maker for the portrayal of Manchester Cathedral, a long-standing public building. I realize that England's protection of speech is likely different from the Constitutional protections we enjoy here; even so, it seems that it would be covered by the freedom of expression article in the European Convention on Human Rights. I almost wish Sony had just stood up and said, "You know what? Sue us, we'll defend under freedom of expression" to set a precedent, particularly given one impression I've read of the deeper meaning of the Cathedral gameplay. They have the deep pockets to do so, and thus, they can and should act as a vanguard -- if only to prevent such chilling effects on the industry in the future, and therefore help to ensure their long-term business.

I've been playing co-op games of Rainbox Six Vegas for quite some time now, and it's been interesting to see the advertising at work in that game. From what I've seen, the ads tend to be on the billboards outside the missions, in the helicopter-ride cutscenes. One night in particular I noticed an Axe ad on the billboard, which might fit in perfectly in Vegas, I have no idea, having never been. But I'm fairly certain that it wasn't the same ad that had been there the last time we had played; the art stood out like a sore thumb, since it was easily twice the resolution of the rest of the level (which gets all blurred out due to post-processing effects).

In cases like these, where the cutscene occurs at a particular time in the story, the changing of these ads is remarkably distracting. I mean, that's sort of the point, in a way... if I hardly even noticed the ad, or didn't notice it all, it wouldn't be doing its advertising job. But it works directly against the grain of the game, which is, of course, the thing I purchased. I am distracted from the game I'm playing by the sudden lack of realism in the environment -- the inconstancy (in time) and the inconsistency (in visuals) of it.

I expect advertising in magazines; they're set apart, though I don't like the ones that mask themselves as if they were articles (with a discreet "Advertisement" across the top or bottom). I expect previews before movies⁵; I can at least attempt to ignore them. But I don't expect ads in books. I don't expect them in the midst of television shows or movies, as product placements. And I certainly don't expect them in games. In these latter three examples, they almost always distract and detract. Advertising, even when well done and even in the service of authenticity, pulls me out of the game; it's an unwelcome incursion.

¹Cage does the occasional quirky performance, in things like Bringing Out the Dead, but oddly enough, it turned out to be directed by Gore Verbinski, recent headliner at DICE and director of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, the first of which I really enjoyed. (back)

²Until recently, the best show on television, but it recently finished up after 5 seasons. I can't wait until it turns up on DVD. (back)

³I was thinking of Battlestar Galactica as I jotted that down, which doesn't have any of that, but of course, Blade Runner featured an early, particularly egregious example of in-film advertising, which might have fit the setting but still came off as garish. (back)

⁴I had assumed that Philips was a German company, but as it turns out, it is headquartered in the Netherlands. (back)

⁵Even though there, too, they work against my needs -- watching most previews is usually enough to fill me in on the plot details. I'll never forgive Warner Bros. for the detail of Richard Kimble jumping... well, if you've seen it, you know. Of course, Chris Corry won't forgive me for giving away Half-Life 2, Episode 2, so who am I to throw stones? (back)

I'd be prouder of that, I suppose, if not for the aforementioned review inflation.

Wednesday

I arrived for 10:30 on Wednesday, not expecting there to be much that would interest me; what I didn't realize was that that would also be the time of the Microsoft keynote, which didn't interest me enough to have me pile into the big hall in which it was held. So, I ended up bumming around the West Hall expo, running into friends and generally getting a handle on what I was going to do that day. Onward to the talks...

Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design

This was a solid, practical talk by a VP at Blizzard, Rob Pardo. While I haven't myself spent a lot of time worrying about multiplayer game design¹, I appreciate the issues involved. While there were several good points that came out of this talk, the big one for me was to Overpower everything, at least at first. There are several reasons for doing this:

• Every strategy seems unbeatable, until it's beaten. The idea is, people feel really powerful with overpowered strategies, tactics, and all that, and what you need to do rather than super-balancing things and thereby making everything equally bland is making sure there are appropriate counters in place.
• It makes things get tested in beta. If you overpower things by a little bit, it will focus your beta testers on that strategy because they're competitive and want to win. If you simply bring something up to be on par with other strategies, it won't likely get the test time it really needs. Giving the impression that it's overpowered will cause more people to experiment with it, which will help you find the balance more quickly.

Design Reboot

I'm a huge Jonathan Blow fan, I'll go ahead and admit that right up front. I had listened to his Montreal Game Summit talk some time after it was given and was looking forward to seeing his further thoughts on that topic at GDC. Of course, since he was already happy with the talk and it had gotten plenty of press, he decided to give another talk, which turned out to be about ten ways of looking at games.

I didn't have a particular takeaway from this talk except that we should continue to re-examine our assumptions about what games can be. Jon gave ten different ways of looking at games, and only the first two were the common ways we look at games, as consumer products and as escapist entertainments. He presented eight more, and there are almost certainly others. Instead of attaching those two viewpoints to our heads as a pair of nicely matched blinders, we should only put those on when they're appropriate.

Structure vs. Style

Chris Hecker gave an interesting talk² about how to view programming problems, and AI problems, as a differentiation between structure and style. (His canonical example was that the programmatic data structure encapsulating a polygon or a triangle is structure, whereas the actual model data is style). He thinks AI is the big problem for games coming up and for the near future, and he thinks that this is largely because we haven't found the structure/style distinctions in AI yet. I'm sympathetic to the view, but I need to think about it more before I can say I think he's right or not. Anyway, interesting food for thought.

Thursday

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

I largely went to this talk because this product is what I would have been working on had I decided to stay with LucasArts several years back and not moved to Maryland. I still have a lot of friends at LucasArts, and it was nice to finally see a bit of the game running. The takeaway: you can't afford to build a game, a team, a studio, and a technology pipeline at the same time unless you have the backing of someone like George Lucas.

I-fi: Immersive Fidelity in Game Design

Clint Hocking is another one of those guys who I have lots of respect for -- I've made it to his talk each of the last three years and always find them interesting. Clint talked about two types of immersion, sensual and formal, and how they work in games -- taking Trespasser as a touchstone for much of his discussion. While I had some minor quibbles with some of his specific non-Trespasser examples (in particular, Guitar Hero), I thought his final points about how being able to explore things like emotions through formal systems could allow us to reach out and touch people by presenting games and other interactive experiences which actually explore the human condition. Look for his talk to be posted on on his site in the not-too-distant future.

Experimental Gameplay Sessions

This was another Jonathan Blow session, though he's primarily there as the organizer in this case. This year, I actually almost sent something in for these, but I don't think I would have had enough time to get either of my ideas finished for the show. There's always next year, I suppose. In any case, about a dozen interesting games were shown, mostly small web- or downloadable games, around a few different topics, such as Obfuscation or Two Worlds. I'm hopeful that Jon will put up the full list and links over on his site.

The Game Design Challenge

Hmmm... this is another one I go to every year. Perhaps I'm getting into a rut. In any case, this year, returning champion Alexei Pajitnov faced Brenda Brathwaite and Steve Meretzky with the challenge of designing a game for humans and one other species. Personally, I found Brenda's superior, though Meretzky's delivery was hard to beat.

The IGF Awards/Game Developers' Choice Awards

The IGF Awards remain great largely due to the energy and eccentricity of the indie developers themselves. Lots of good titles were shown up on the big screen, and some truly interesting games won.

Regrettably, the Choice Awards were presented by Jason Rubin. Admittedly, it would have been difficult for anyone to top Tim Schafer. And perhaps, in their desire to be "presentable" for a G4 audience or something, perhaps the writers of the show simply stayed away from anything... funny or meaningful or really of any substance whatsoever. Message to CMP and IGDA: Bring back Tim Schafer, let him do his shtick. He almost certainly won't have a crab or octopus or other form of marine life in his chest next year.

Friday

Treat Me Like A Lover

BEST OF SHOW

I dragged myself out of bed Friday morning both to be there in time to meet someone and to attend this talk, about which I knew nothing but the title. I am so glad I got there in time to see it -- it was a presentation by British journalist Margaret Robertson (whose blog, Lookspring, has been added to the sidebar). The hook of the talk was looking at games (and designing them) through the lens of a romantic relationship with the player. Though this was useful, what was particularly great was the specificity of her examples -- she pulled out little bits of games that did things right and wrong for each point, and her analysis seemed spot on. An absolutely terrific talk; I hope she'll come back next year.

What's Next for God Games

I generally really enjoy Ernest Adams' talks, much as I generally enjoy his GamaSutra column. But this year's talk, which was essentially the God game Adams pitched to EA years ago (and which was never built, though it was prototyped), fell entirely flat with me. While I agree with his main thrust, that exploring different areas such as actually addressing religion in a God game is interesting, telling me so would have taken about the 5 minutes it took me to write out this sentence. I have high hopes for the return of a more interesting talk next year. Perhaps it was simply that he didn't have his usual top hat.

Game Designers' Rant

Hmmm... yes, another I attend every year. I was particularly moved and motivated by Jane McGonigal's talk, and to a lesser extent, by Clint's. I suspect Jonathan Mak has simply always wanted to get a huge room of people playing with balloons, so I'm glad he got his wish here. McGonigal pointed out that game designers are the smartest people on the planet at making people happy -- it's time to get out there and solve reality, since in her view, "reality is broken". A terrific talk, well presented, and thought-provoking, although the problem is probably just that game designers looking to fix reality just haven't met up with the right programmers... :)

Three 20 Minute Sessions

I attended an hour comprised of three 20 minute sessions. One was by my friend and former co-worker Tim Longo, who tried to present 10 keys to working with an established IP in 20 minutes... which was about half an hour too short. I worked on most of the projects whose examples he cited and still had a hard time following him -- perhaps you can bring it back next year as a full hour, buddy? I think it would work that way. How to Create the Greatest Boss Battle (and Why Not to Do It!) and How to Pick a Lock: Creating Intuitive, Immersive Minigames were a bit better-suited to the time allotted, and presented good examinations of those topics. If you're working on either minigames or boss battles, I recommend tracking down those slides to see what those guys had to say.

Dynamic Cinematic Gameplay

This was a talk addressing the specifics of issues the speaker had in creating Stranglehold's "Tequila Bombs", which were cinematic moments in the midst of gameplay. While I think the idea of the topic was a good one, I felt like the presentation got mired in details about the specific elements in that game, which I haven't played. A slightly higher-level talk would have almost certainly been more helpful to the audience; I think there are lessons there that can be more globally applied. As an example, it's probably worth saying "Plan to have multiple camera views of your character during each shot... and schedule plenty of time for them" rather than going into the minutiae of what kind of cameras you had and what bugs each exposed in your engine.

Thanks!

I got to see lots of friends while I was out, both during the week and on Saturday. Great to see you, Andrew, Jen, Evan, Tim, Harley, John, Jamie, Bill, Nathan, Greg, Daron, Reed, Chris, Susan, Hal, Pat, Jeremy, Matt, Riley, Morgan, Charlie, Troy, Tim M., John S., Haden, Chris, Rich, Ric, Geoff, Jeff, and anyone else I ran into but who I've forgotten in this mad list. I'm looking forward to next year already.

¹Though each of the games I've shipped had some sort of multiplayer component, and I worked on an MMO for a couple of years, I haven't been terribly involved in the design of the multiplayer aspects to any great degree. I do contemplate multiplayer issues for my own game designs, but that isn't my particular focus. (back)
²And one I admit I hadn't planned on attending -- the creator of Heroes was supposed to be on at that time. I'm a big fan of the show and so I decided to take that in... but Jesse Alexander was a no-show. Bummer. (back)

There are a few games I'd much rather see them make though. The fact that they have not made a sequel to Republic Commando is fucking criminal. That's not a joke either. I mean that someone over there should be put in jail for the rest of their life. RepCom was an incredible squad based shooter, and unlike most games in that genre it was packed with awesome characters. This games deserves a next gen sequel.

Coming right on the heels of that, there's this on Kotaku.

Coincidence? I think not!

Yes, I know I haven't posted in a while. Soon. Really!

Jouko Ahola is not your typical actor. Ahola was a professional strongman in the late nineties, he's Finnish and holds world records in things like how far one can carry a car, which is something for which I didn't even know one could hold a world record¹. Needless to say, he's a bit on the built side, but not in a purely flashy sense. He looks strong, not merely toned or defined, but seriously strong. I gather he's retired from strongman competitions now and focusing more on his acting career, as far as that goes, but he still serves as a judge in strongest man competitions in Europe as well.

Hollywood knows exactly what to do with people like these, and I'd argue that so would the gaming industry, if we used live actors, but we'll get to that in a bit. Hollywood has had several folks like Ahola come along, but the most well-known is almost certainly Arnold Schwarzeneggar. As Arnold Strong, Schwarzeneggar played to type in his first film, Hercules in New York². He went off and did a few character roles in TV and in B movies, and also starred in a couple of bodybuilding-related movies, one a documentary. Beyond that, I suppose his English improved enough to give him an opportunity to be a star, so he returned five years later in Conan the Barbarian. You see the pattern. Lou Ferrigno was similar (though I gather a speech impediment limited his opportunities) and certainly since then there have been others.

Ahola's case was a bit different from the general Hollywood vein. He was cast in a movie by Werner Herzog, the iconoclastic German director of such famous films as Stroszek, Aguirre: Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo, amongst many others (e.g. the documentary Grizzly Man), this list primarily taken from those I've seen in the last couple of years. When Invincible turned up in my queue I remembered having added it primarily on the recommendation of Netflix, which suggests films for me based on patterns in the hundreds or thousands of films I've rated on their site. I knew pretty much nothing about it, except that it featured Tim Roth on the DVD cover art.

In the film, Ahola portrays a blacksmith's son who, by virtue of his immense strength, is recruited into the entertainment industry. This is all well and good except that Ahola lives in a Jewish shtetl in Poland and will be performing feats of strength disguised as an Aryan for Nazi party members early in their rise to power. The role is stunningly against type, and yet absolutely requires someone of immense build and strength to portray convincingly³. The character, Zishe Breitbart, goes on to attempt to unite the shtetls of Poland against the coming conflict based on a vision he has, and fails; how and why I won't reveal.

I'm certainly not going to claim that men of certain types should play against those types all of the time; indeed, if they did, I'd probably be writing a different article in which I ask if it wouldn't be refreshing for a strong man to occasionally play a barbarian or something. But it takes someone like Herzog to come along and take someone with huge physical gifts, such as Ahola, and find an entirely different kind of story to tell with him. Herzog is someone outside of the system, someone with a unique vision, and he is always telling stories about men like that.

I mention this in the blog because of course, we in the games industry more or less always play to type. Consider Kratos.

Let me say right off the bat that I loved the God of War games. Loved them both. I thought that the second improved on the first considerably, and that the storyline of each was wonderful⁴, though I also admit that the storyline of the second one is sticking with me less than the first. Great fun. A blast. Just like one of Schwarzeneggar's best movies -- packed with action, wall-to-wall fun. Kratos is clearly built from the ground up to be some kind of mythic superhero -- incomparably strong, muscles rippling as he moves, able to convincingly rip mythological beasts in half or limb from limb. It wouldn't work if he looked like Guybrush; form should follow function. Since our character-based games are primarily action games, our characters are built around that. This is certainly fair, and I'm not arguing against that. Kratos absolutely should look like the ultimate bad-ass, as the fiction which surrounds his game play requires it. Additionally, we are lucky in that we don't have to find actors to do these things; we get to build them and have them do whatever we want.

However, the tales we tell about characters as strong as Kratos are not the only tales we should be telling. I'd still like to see us have the potential to build games around physically strong characters that aren't simply there for the violence route. In Invincible, there's a kind of poignancy that develops because as physically strong as Zishe Breitbart is, dozens or hundreds of him couldn't have stopped the Nazi juggernaut that was to follow, and in fact, his greatest strengths originate in his love for his family, which is tenderly portrayed, and which ultimately leads to the downfall of Roth's character. In a way, Herzog is hinting that perhaps that kind of strength amongst the German population as a whole might have been enough to stop the horrors that were to follow, in a sort of cinematic echo of Martin Niemöller's famous poem, "First they came...". Zishe's strength is enough to open the door to get others to listen to him; his bulk is enough to make people take notice of him. His doomed heroism comes from the fact that he uses that notice to try to affect change, to mount a defense against what he sees is coming.

We build our characters to fill roles based on the stories we are trying to tell. It would be nice if, on occasion, we could find new functions for the forms we use again and again.

Here's hoping you'll soon see me in this space talking about Rod Humble's The Marriage.

¹If anyone can turn up information about what kind of car and such, I admit I'm curious. I can't find any pictures of him doing it, but it's listed on his official site. (back)

² Apparently, this is abysmal. I've never seen it, even knowing I was going to be writing this article, I didn't try and track it down. There are some lengths to which I will not go even for my blog :) (back)

³A little research turns up the fact that Ahola did all of his own lifts in the movie, which were prodigious. (back)

⁴Actually, I felt the first one had such great stuff in it that I even blogged about it. (back)

Additional thoughts

Several other thoughts occurred to me while I was writing this, and not all of them fit in cleanly (or diluted what I had to say). Here are a few of those thoughts:

• Characters are expensive. I realize that building and animating a character in this day and age is an expensive proposition. Modeling times are up, skeletons are more complex, and therefore building and animating takes longer and longer. Fewer people would play games that explored stories like that of Zishe Breitbart, just as fewer people have seen Invincible than have seen the Bourne movies. These are market facts. Any team looking to pursue something more fulfilling narratively would have to budget accordingly. As a player, I'm willing to let my mind fill in the gaps in the animation and modeling, if you give me a story which demands it of me, which could be a whole post all of its own.
• Narratology vs. ludology. I recently read over in Brenda Braithwaite's blog about her switch from narratology to ludology. And I've recently played Rod Humble's game, The Marriage, and will be posting about that separately. My feeling is that to get at deeper emotional issues through gameplay alone may be doomed for a long time to come; at the very least, some cultural signifiers may be required to put the player in the frame of mind to get your message. This is relevant to the discussion at hand because I remain primarily a "story guy" when it comes to games; I agree with Tadgh Kelly that fiction is important. I just want to see more fictions.
• An example of form. All of this above speaks particularly of one type of body; I'm working from a specific movie to talk about a particular type of body and how it's generally used or portrayed. That said, it's clear that developers have already taken this lesson to heart in one other area... Clearly the women in games are mainly designed as strippers, and yet fill any number of roles in our games.
• Herzog and Herakles. In thinking about this topic and digging into Herzog a little bit, I discovered that he made a short film at the very beginning of his career entitled Herakles. I point this out because I find it ironic; the title for this article was set long before I checked out all of Herzog's filmography. It's interesting too, in that the short film portrays bodybuilders alongside various shots of wreckage set in the modern day (with intertitles asking about the Herculean Labors). I haven't seen the film, so I can't comment on it directly, but I couldn't let that go unremarked.

I think this is happening to a certain degree, just not in the 3D space -- admittedly, there's room for improvement. Apparently folks are still making money with text (see Skotos Tech, which has been around for quite a while now) and as Gaynor mentions, 2D abounds. It may be that 3D just hasn't hit the 'cheap enough' mark; it may be that the casual/downloadable game space represents this market to some degree. But it's worth reading and thinking about.

So, a few weeks ago I found myself in San Francisco, happily at the same time that the Jeff Wall exhibit was at SFMOMA. I first read about Wall's work in the New York Times magazine some time ago -- probably around the same time that this exhibit opened in New York, though I didn't make the connection at the time.

Wall works in large-format photography; he takes photographs that he then blows up to fit inside of lightboxes, you know, those advertising boxes that you find in places like bus stops and in airports. Typically, his photographs might occupy a sizeable spot on the wall, up to 12 by 12 feet, though I guess they are mostly six by six. The diffuse, rear lighting accomplished by fluorescence enlivens the photographs and enables the viewer to spend a lot of time discovering the photograph.

Case in point: A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947 was a photograph I looked at for a long time. In particular, after a bit of time, I was looking at the shadows on the ceiling cast by the balloons. When I finally connected the shadow of the balloon in the left center of the photograph with the orange balloon perhaps held by the little girl seated at left, and then to the light to the ventriloquist's right, the room came alive for me in an extraordinary way, perhaps because it suddenly felt like a very, very real place and time to me. The effect of the golden light gave it a warmth that I could almost feel, even though I was in the far starker setting of the white-walled exhibit at the SF MOMA. It was simultaneously like occupying a place in that room and at the same time feeling like I was looking at someone's photo album, perhaps a grandparent or something, telling me about the time when she was a young child and a ventriloquist came for her brother's birthday.

As I mentioned, I had read not too long ago about Wall's work in The New York Times Magazine¹, where it described his process as an artist, something which was apparently discussed in a documentary/interview at the MOMA, though I was so interested in the photographs I didn't take time to learn more about their construction at the time². He uses a technique which he describes as cinematographic; he carefully stages his photographs and particularly the people in them, giving them directions as to what they should be doing, but then fades back behind his lens to wait for the picture to arrange itself. (He also uses digital techniques to merge several images together at times, though not always, and his pioneering use of digital apparently caused some backlash way back when.) It's almost as if Wall himself is taking a long, long look at his subject matter and awaiting the photograph he wants, waiting until just such time as he understands all the elements at play.

I felt this way about several of the photos, such as Steves Farm, Steveston, which is a wide-format landscape incorporating a decaying farm (nonetheless bursting with life) set side-by-side with soulless tract housing arranged geometrically beyond a barren scrubby area populated with dead trees. Wall generally stages his photographs, and no doubt some of that was going on here (particularly with the man walking towards us not far from the center of the image, and perhaps with some of the animals), but this image is of a real landscape, a real place, and it must have taken quite some time to find the correct vantage point to capture this image. But what an image! I stared at this photo for probably ten minutes alone, walking up closer, discovering the human figure, moving slowly past it from left to right, trying to puzzle out its meaning. Or at the very least, coming up with some meaning for it from within myself.

The rewards that come from the long look at Wall's work come up elsewhere as well, from the connections you draw, once you've spent a lot of time with a medium or a couple of media. With regards to film, I've been watching (and re-watching) V for Vendetta over the last couple of days, and while of course I've been interested in the connections (and changes) from the graphic novel, I also look at John Hurt as the authoritarian High Chancellor Sutler and think, "Did they choose him because he was Winston Smith?" Great casting in any case, but when your despot can call up echoes of that greatest of dystopian novels, it's brilliant.

When I started this article/essay/ramble, I didn't expect to end up discussing Lucky Wander Boy, D. B. Weiss' novel about one man's obsessive quest to find meaning in old videogames, and particularly in the meaning of the titular arcade machine. But it fits so perfectly. In the novel, the protagonist is driven to compile a "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments", in which he discusses the deep inner meaning of various classic videogames, and several of these articles are reprinted in the book³. When he writes, "It is difficult to ignore the similarities between Donkey Kong and the demiurge of the Gnostic heresies" it's completely believable -- not necessarily believable that such an association exists, but that someone who takes a long look at early videogames might come up with such a connection.

In the case of our intrepid hero, he is particularly obsessed with Lucky Wander Boy, the imagined unemulatable arcade game which gives the book its title, but also reflects this same sort of long look. In the game, a player who spends enough time exploring the game is ultimately rewarded by entering the third level -- no one can agree on how this happens, but picking up items in the appropriate order might have something to do with it, as might the order of traversal of the landscape of the second level. It's bizarrely described, but I think we're meant to understand that the game makes a model of the human playing the game and tailors the third level specially for him. Lucky Wander Boy is therefore not just the name of the game, but role of a player who explores the game long enough, who wanders about in the empty second level aimlessly until the third level reveals itself.

One interesting statement made in the "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments" and one that long-time readers will be unsurprised resonated with me was the following, which appears early in the book.

< Game > showed and showed well that video games can traverse the entire range of imagined experience, and resonate effectively with the wider world of which they are a part.

Lately, of course, there's been a bit in the gaming news about Jon Blow's talk at the Montreal Game Summit in which he decries what he feels is a lazy game design. He spoke, of course, of industry darling World of Warcraft, which boasts something north of nine million subscribers and climbing. Having played it entirely too much myself, I can understand what he's getting at -- WoW presents a constant but ultimately meaningless chain of rewards, much in the same way Diablo did. I've not listened to the full talk yet, and so won't comment on Blow's talk at length either, but it seems that Jon's trying to get us to make games that reward a long look at the lessons they teach⁴, rather than those that simply spoonfeed sugary snacks to our audience.

I know what he means. Although I thoroughly loved Half-Life 2, I recently played through the episodes and found the second one to be especially forced in its storytelling. Clearly, the fine folks at Valve are reaching for something here, trying to tell a story with more resonance than your typical first-person shooter. But in making NPCs who act primarily as vehicles to tell you the next bit of story while they (frustratingly slowly) open a door between bits of excitement fails to deliver on the promise of the title they extend. Half-Life 2 was very memorable to me -- so much so that I recently played through a whole bunch of it again -- and I think that the opening of that game tells a story in a much more compelling way through knowing how to draw the player's attention, through prodding the player just enough so that he gets the correct impressions but not so much that he feels the prod.

Instead Episode 2, while still enjoyable as a pure shooter, relies on thin Hollywood tropes and such blatant manipulation to attempt to deliver an emotional punch in the death of Eli Vance that I ended up feeling more annoyed than saddened. Eli constantly telling Gordon how he's as proud of Gordon as if he were his own son. Alyx making more frequent contact with him. Eli looking at old photographs and worrying over Judith. Eli telling his daughter to look away, to close her eyes, as he died. Alyx' tearful voice over a black screen as we await the credits. I was meant to feel sorrow and empathy, but the manipulation was so unsubtle as to leave me feeling merely hollow and uncaring.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad someone's trying it; even if the result didn't work for me, perhaps it's working right now for someone else. But I look forward to subtler storytelling, something that rewards deep thinking about the result. Something that rewards a longer look.

¹Every time I mention the NYT Magazine to one of my friends I assume that he mentally rolls his eyes, since it seems so much of my view of the outside world comes from there. I've been reading the magazine religiously since about 1997, week in, week out, and have missed only a small handful of issues. This is far longer than any other periodical has been able to hold my attention. Which I guess is another long look... (back)
²I did, however, purchase a coffee table book of Wall's work, which incorporates a lot of interview material, and have been reading bits and pieces of it. I've never bought a coffee table book before, though I've always had books on my coffee table. :) (back)
³As someone who himself discourses at length in his blog, I found these to be the most interesting element of the book, which is not all that surprising, I suppose. (back)
⁴Braid has jumped through its first hoop with XBox Live Arcade certifiication, so it looks like I'll have something else I'll want to play on XBox Live when I finally buy one some time next year -- I mean, in addition to Schizoid. (back)

In the last few months, I've had the opportunity to read some new novels by favorite authors. The differences are legion: Lethem is an American writer whose musical tastes tend towards the distinctly American, Murakami is a Japanese author with an interest in jazz; Murakami writes in a strange landscape of the unexplained supernatural, where there's apparently a universe right next door that touches our own in unusual and distinct ways¹, whereas Lethem writes with an approach to his supernatural that while no more explained, somehow feels more rational in its approach. Lethem's leads are out at the extremes, unusual and quirky, with Tourette's or the ability to fly, whereas Murakami's main characters are often almost bland, fairly ordinary people who are nonetheless a little cut-off from their fellow man², almost unknowable, though often they touch on more interesting characters.

But one thing they have in common is that both have released rather slim and relatively uninteresting follow-ups to their best novels.

In Murakami's case, that means after dark, a novella-length story encompassing a single night which I was able to read in a single sitting. Compared to last year's Kafka on the Shore, it's a bit of fluff, sort of like a four-star chef preparing an amazing meal for you one day, and then making you cotton candy the next. Kafka was so inspired that I spent hours and hours with it last year while on vacation, sitting, racing through to the end at the water's edge in New Hampshire, and spending the next few days wishing I had more of it. The ending, in particular, worked on so many levels, and left you supremely satisfied by the work. After that, after dark's confections are startlingly minor, like a marathon runner being too tired out from his latest race to do anything but follow it up with a 3K. I can't fault him for it, but I can't help feel a little disappointment, and hope that the next has more substance to it.

So it is, too, with Lethem. His astonishing 2003 Fortress of Solitude explored race relations among school-age Brooklynites in the 1970s (along with family turmoil), and paired that with a supernatural ring that granted his protagonist the power of flight. The book completely caught me by surprise: I had read a good hundred pages before the story took off, quite literally. To think that this was the follow-up to the very solid Motherless Brooklyn of 2000 or so was pretty incredible.

And then comes You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel, which seems to have that subtitle just to make you think it's not a slightly inflated novella. I wasn't fooled. The characters never completely worked for me -- the shorter length necessarily meant less depth, especially considering how many characters we're introduced to so quickly. Four band members, a conceptual artist, and a guy who calls on the phone; a subplot involving a kidnapped kangaroo³; the main storyline being a girl-meets-boy that tries to tie several of these elements together. Probably the only thing worth reading in the book was the scene where the band makes a great debut at a party hosted by the conceptual artist, who brands it as an "Aparty", where attendees are supposed to wear individual headsets and listen to Walkmen separate from everyone else -- indeed, that character is probably the most interesting, and I don't even recall his name.

These short novels particularly disappoint because of Cormac McCarthy's excellent The Road, a very short and spare novel that nonetheless may be McCarthy's best. It's certainly the most interesting of these three novels by far, and maybe the comparison is unfair. But I just want to point out that slender needn't mean shallow.

The only analogue to games I can think of in recent memory is of the example of David Jaffe, who is most well-known for his design work on God of War. After God of War, Jaffe turned to do something a little smaller in two different ways: one was a handheld project that was cancelled (called Heartland, I believe), whereas the other was his PlayStation Network title Calling All Cars. Jaffe was famously (and understandably) fed up with making epic linear story games, and ready for a challenge of a different sort.

The nice thing about games, of course, is that in this case we got to have our cake and eat it too -- even though Jaffe had moved on from the God of War series, the team was still there and able to put all that great work to use again in a very compelling sequel, much in the way that Naughty Dog continued without Jason Rubin, for example, or the Halo folks continued without Alex Seropian. The nature of games as being such a huge collaborative effort makes this possible, allowing those that follow to have a good chance to deliver on the promise of a first title, or even a second⁴. Indeed, God of War II, in the hands of another project lead is arguably a superior title, much like Star Wars was followed by the best film in the franchise under the able hands of another director, Irvin Kershner helming The Empire Strikes Back.

I don't particularly mind that gaming doesn't have its rock stars, in that sense, those named folks who are very visible to the mainstream. The mainstream knows Steven Spielberg, but it doesn't know Jaffe. Perhaps Wil Wright has penetrated the public consciousness a little more now, with appearances in venues like Newsweek and Time, but I suspect that Spore won't cross over like The Sims did largely due to the alien weirdness that will be on its front cover. Until we have a much larger audience, designers' names will rarely mean anything to the public -- it will continue to be brand-based, title-based, rather than individual-based. I think this is fitting; hobbyists and fans will continue to know more than the public at large, and may make buying decisions along those lines -- I know I'm interested in anything Jonathan Blow has to say (or sell), or Wil Wright, or Meier, or Seropian, or even Jonathan Mak (creator of Everyday Shooter and immensely entertaining indie figure), or for that matter Clint Hocking or any of those designer folks you see on my sidebar (yes, even Longo).

Some day we'll get there, I think, but it's going to take a long while. And that's okay.

¹These are themselves interesting due to the themes they sometimes take. Glass is interesting to him; this latest features a television that somehow is involved in the endless sleep of a young woman, and I recall a mirror in one of the short stories in a collection this year. There are also animals: a missing cat in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and a sheep figures prominently in A Wild Sheep Chase, and they occasionally sprinkle . (back)

²This is, of course, a large part of why I enjoy and identify so strongly with Murakami's work, particularly in the last couple of years. (back)

³What is it with him and kangaroos? I seem to remember them figuring somewhat prominently in Gun, With Occasional Music, though the overall plot of that novel is fairly lost to me now. (back)

⁴This can, of course, backfire entirely. Sometimes people run with a series for too long and it needs to be sent off to a whole fresh team to do it justice. Tomb Raider is probably the most notable example of this. I continue to be interested in what those folks will bring out next with Lara, they've done so well with the recent titles. Although it certainly doesn't hurt that I have friends at Crystal Dynamics either. (back)

My sons each play baseball in little league here in Olney, Maryland. This fall, my elder son Luc graduated from the machine-pitch leagues that he's played in for the last couple of years into the first kid-pitch league. The first kid-pitch league shares some similarities with the earlier leagues -- a five-run limit per inning (except the sixth) -- but mostly it's real ball, with a live ball and stealing (except for home, there you have to be batted in), and of course, the kids have to pitch.

Now pitching is not an easy thing. Many many years ago I did it myself, and though I don't remember being particularly bad, I don't remember being particularly good, either. It takes a lot of practice to be a good pitcher -- my father always said that hitting a baseball is the toughest thing to learn to do in sports, but I think for me, pitching comes in a close second. Especially when you're nine years old.

Luc's team is pretty lucky in that they have a fairly deep bench when it comes to pitching. In the first game, a little over a week ago, we fielded five pitchers for an inning each, and they all did pretty well -- in fact, they won that game largely on the strength of their pitching. Luc didn't pitch that game, though; due to the league actually being a little larger this year and some scheduling issues, we were only able to get in one official practice before the season began.

But we knew he was going to have to pitch. So, last Sunday we went over to his elementary school so he could start to get the feel for pitching. He did alright -- nothing spectacular, to be sure, just getting one or two out of every five pitches over the plate, with another one or two being fairly wild. But he kept at it, and by the end of an hour he had both a sore arm and the beginnings of a fast ball.

Tuesday we were able to get out again, this time after karate. His arms were probably tired, but he was pitching decently, probably around 50% strikes or so, and with fewer wild pitches. By the end of the hour, I think he was probably pitching wild less than 10% of the time -- not great, but good enough that I felt like he would be okay to pitch in a game, not hitting kids left and right or having bases constantly stolen out from under him. I even kept a count to give him a sense of that, and while he had quite a few walks, he also had a few strike-outs -- well, counts where he had three strikes before he had four balls.

Wednesday night, Jordan had a game, and Luc's coach turned up to deliver baseball caps and things to the coaches. (I help out with the coaching on both teams, even though my knowledge of baseball could barely fill a thimble. Mostly, I'm there to keep the kids focused on the task at hand and try to leave the deep lessons of the game to the head coaches.) His head coach, Jim, and I talked about whether Luc could pitch on Sunday, and I said that I felt like while he wasn't going to be the best they had, he certainly wasn't in a position where he was going to be hitting batters or anything.

So Jim called Luc over and asked whether he'd be okay to pitch on Sunday, and Luc, who is ever the serious child, said, "Yes, I think I'm ready." Jim said, "What do you think about pitching the first inning?" and Luc said, "I think that'd be okay."

So, it was set. I knew I wanted to get Luc out on the mound again to give him a little more time and see if we couldn't get the most egregious wild pitches out of his system. Friday, we hit the field again.

It was like a different kid entirely out there, and not in a good way. He was finding it more or less impossible to find the plate -- I'm talking less than 10% strikes. That may be charitable. There were certainly a lot more wild pitches, balls which even this adult catcher couldn't get to and in some cases, I didn't bother to try, they were so far off. And of course, the more he pitched and was throwing wild, the more frustrated he would get. In this way, I think the apple has not fallen too far from the tree.

We threw a few sets of balls and I went out and talked to him, and he was a mess. He was getting very worked up about the whole thing, and I was starting to really worry about him. I told him to take a little walk out to the outfield and back, just to rest his arm a bit and give himself a little time to cool down and find his center again or something. Jordan and I tossed a ball around for ten minutes until Luc came back and started pitching again.

But the balls were still completely wild; in fact, they may have been worse than before his little walk. So I walked back out to him and I could see he was starting to tear up a bit, the frustration was so extreme.

I had been telling him a lot about letting go of each pitch, just worrying about the next one that you're going to throw. We had a kid on his team in the spring who would get really really mad at himself if he botched a play -- and you have to remember, we're talking about eight-year-olds, botched plays are pretty much the norm. I reminded Luc of what I used to say to D: "Baseball isn't about the past. It's about the future. It's about what you're going to do now, when he hits the ball, not about anything that happened to get you there. Worry about right now, not about what you think you ever did wrong." I had been telling Luc to breathe before each pitch, and to not worry about the count, and to just relax and throw the pitches we both knew he could throw.

But that wasn't working, even though it had worked before the pressure of pitching in Sunday's game. Here was a kid who was completely strung out and upset about pitching.

First, I told him he didn't have to worry about pitching on Sunday. As soon as I got home, I said, I'd email Coach Jim and straighten that out. Luc, courageous young man that he is, said, "Maybe I could pitch in the third or fourth inning," and I felt such love for that bravery, in the face of what he was going through.

Having gotten the pressure off at least a little, I started talking about things I've been doing lately in karate to improve¹. I talked about visualization, imagining in your mind the steps of what you're going to do before you do it. I talked about how I would think about a front kick before I threw it in training, and went through those steps for him, lifting my knee high, extending the foot, pulling the toes back, all the things I did. I talked about side kicks too, which are quite a bit trickier, and all the things that I would think about before throwing a side kick. I told him that Master Roberts had actually complimented me on my kicks since I had started doing that, and so I knew it was having some effect.

Then I talked about major league pitchers, and how every time they're up on the mound, before every pitch, they take a moment to think about the pitch they're going to throw. They stop, they take a deep breath, and they work through the motions in their minds. This may not be true of all pitchers, but I know certainly some of them do, and all of them are at least thinking about something up there.

So I told him, "You know what to do out here. Just think about what you're going to do before you do it, and you'll do fine. I know from the other days we've been out here that you know how to pitch the ball. Take a little time, and throw each pitch the way you know how to throw it."

I went back down behind the plate, and I'll be damned if that little man didn't throw nine out of the next ten right over the plate, and even that odd one might have caught someone swinging. I could see him out there, talking himself through the pitch each time (literally -- his mouth was moving, though he wasn't talking loud enough for me to hear), pointing his arm all the way back to second base and letting fly at just the right point in the arc.

I already felt like a million bucks, and I felt so glad for him that he'd found his way through, and hadn't even let that one ball phase him (it was the third pitch -- plenty of time to get in his head). There he was, my little nine-year-old boy, suddenly a pitcher.

But the real capper came right after we finished out the last few balls (I have thirteen we practice with -- I guess I'm not superstitious). He turned to me from the mound and said (and this is a direct quote from my serious boy), "Thank you, Daddy. What you said really helped me. I don't think you need to send Coach Jim any email." One's heart bursts with pride. I know what that means now. My kids have always made me proud, but this just took the cake.

You know, it doesn't even really matter how he pitched today -- the end of the story was really on Friday, when he made a mental move from frustration to confidence, when he learned not to give up when the chips were down, when he found a way through the difficulties that physical endeavors present.

But I'll tell you anyway.

Luc pitched his first inning of baseball today, the second inning -- Coach Jim had forgotten that he had already promised the first to another pitcher. He gave up two runs (comfortably below the five run inning limit). He had two strike-outs. He threw a total of three balls to seven batters, and only one of them got past the catcher.

I guess it's good he learned how. Because I have a feeling he's going to be pitching again.

¹It's only fair to note at this point that I had gotten these pointers from a book recommended by Jamie, Mastery by George Leonard. (back)

What is it with the Zelda economy?

I recently finished The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The dungeons were exciting and interesting and puzzling, and because I spent a significant time doing side quests, travel times didn't bother me as much as they did in Wind Waker¹. Sure, it had the same structure as every other Zelda game -- run around finding the three pieces of this, so that you can then go find the four pieces of that, which will mean you need to go and get the eight pieces of the other thing, and then you'll open the portal to that place, so that you can go and fight Ganondorf. It's a series of locked doors, each with its own key, most of which have to do with some new object you can equip and use in an interesting way.

Money, of course, is every which where. While it's not technically true that it grows on trees, it's frequently in barrels, boxes, blades of grass, urns, under rocks, and of course, jumping out of the puffs of smoke from the disappearing bodies of your vanquished foes. You are frequently maxed out on money, even when you go from the kiddie wallet to the adult wallet, even when you go from the adult wallet to the ultimate wallet (a quest which was a significant contributor to the running all over Hyrule).

In past Zelda games, I never found anything to spend all that cash on; but then, I was generally focused only on the main storyline, and not running around finding golden spiders or Poes or whatever the Wind Waker equivalent was (undersea treasures, I seem to vaguely recall, but I may be confusing things there). And indeed, in Twilight Princess there was only a couple of times that I can recall having to actually purchase something necessary to continue: bombs of a couple different varieties. It was actually kind of shocking, returning to play it after some months away, to have to buy something I'm used to finding in Zelda games under bushes and such.

But aside from these two necessary items, I didn't have to spend money on anything. And yet, there was a significant side quest to be able to carry more of it. There's a young woman in the city who collects bugs, and she's trying to collect enough to have some sort of bug ball. There are twelve pairs of bugs out in the world, which you can spot reasonably easy with your wolf sense, once you're able to transform into a wolf at will. A few of them are off the beaten path, but in general, you can find them, and as I recall, there's even a bit of an audio cue to let you know one's around. The male and female of each pair are generally found fairly near to one another, and so you can track them down with a bit of comparing the map to places you've already found bugs. The bug collection screen is fairly helpful in this respect.

You get the adult wallet, moving your maximum funds from 200 to 600, when you first turn in a bug; after that, Agatha gives you 50 rupees for every bug you bring her, unless it completes a pair, in which case you get 50 rupees for the bug and 50 rupees for finding a match². I brought her bugs all the time even with my wallet maxed out, just losing the money to finish the collection quest. After bringing her every pair, I was granted the "ultimate" wallet, which allows for holding 1000 rupees at a time. Let me tell you, a thousand rupees takes a long time to find, unless you find some of the special little hideaways with chests containing 100 rupee gems.

Around this same time, other side quests opened up around the Zelda economy. MaioMart wanted to open a branch in the city, but to do this, there were two separate things going on. On the one hand, you had to buy enough stuff from the store (and keep in mind, this is generally stuff you can just find out in the world, like bullets for the slingshot or whatever) to make Maio have enough money to purchase the existing store in the city. And a beggar appeared in MaioMart asking for donations to repair some bridge to make commerce between the towns and the city possible. The need for this wasn't entirely clear, as Link had no trouble getting to the city, but hey, given the already bizarre nature of the Zelda economy, who was I to quibble?

Having donated enough to those causes to open up the city branch of MaioMart³, you could now purchase the Magic Armor, which cost 600 rupees -- the complete contents of your adult wallet (though not of the ultimate wallet, which you received from Agatha). And what's the magic ability of the Magic Armor?

To consume rupees. The Magic Armor converts damage to a loss of money, and slowly burns through money whenever you're wearing it besides.

That's right, the whole exercise of spending something like 2600 rupees (easily found, slow to amass unless you're thinking about it) was to be able to convert money to health. Something that you could do basically the first time you got an empty bottle -- by buying red potions to fill that bottle from a local vendor.

Now, I didn't feel gypped -- it more felt like some sort of cosmic joke, really. I had a bit of a laugh when I got the ultimate wallet and the magic armor, only to find myself quickly penniless (rupeeless?) whenever I wore it. It came in handy really only in one circumstance, in the Cave of Trials, a 50-level dungeon of increasingly difficult combatants where there was virtually no health to be found. There were, however, three Poes to be found in that vast time-sucking dungeon, and that's what I was really after.

I can think of two explanations for the Zelda economy in Twilight Princess. The first, and the one I want to believe, is that the designers are trying to say, "Money isn't everything. Money just gives you means to do stuff. Doing stuff is more important." The other is that it's essentially the biggest shell game I've ever participated in.

Come to think of it, it's probably both.

¹Although, I have to say, I far preferred the look of Wind Waker to the more realistic look presented here. In a way, the realism accentuates issues like the Zelda economy -- with a world that looks so real, how can there be money under every bush and tree? In the GameBoy games, in Wind Waker, and in games like Four Sword Adventures, the fact that money is hiding in all those places matters less, somehow, because the look better lends itself to it. (back)
²Somewhat amusingly, the last pair you're likely to encounter is the snails. Snails are natural hermaphrodites, and she even mentions this in the little song she sings or poem she speaks when she receives them. Subtle humor entirely lost on young'uns, I suspect, who are thought to be Nintendo's target audience. (back)
³Itself a supremely surreal experience, with disco-style lights and dancing patrons and a dancing storekeeper who appeared to be singing some sort of song to you... (back)

At the time, I was in the midst of playing Rise of the Kasai, a sequel to the very enjoyable 2002 SCEA action-adventure title, mostly remarkable for its art style and innovative combat style. I mention this because we'll return to Kasai in a little bit, because that game seems to want to offer some sort of interesting choice, but fails so miserably that it's an object lesson in What Not To Do™².

Much virtual ink has been spilled over the moral choice that BioShock provides -- to rescue the Little Sisters or to "harvest" them. To recap (and to spill a little more): either choice will give you a certain amount of Adam, a useful game resource which effectively gives you weapons and other increases to your abilities (more health, more power for your bio-weapons, better ability to hack in-game computers and other security devices, etc.). Rescuing a Little Sister frees her from her endless quest to find Adam in corpses throughout the underwater city of Rapture, turning her into a human girl again, while harvesting her generates more Adam for you, but at the cost of the life of the Little Sister, who does not survive the procedure. I haven't seen the result of harvesting, but rescuing them is a decidedly creepy affair, with chilling Exorcist-style lines and animation, with the ultimate result of a tranquil little girl who thanks you and runs off to the nearest Little Sister tube, apparently so they can creep around Rapture hiding from Slicers much like Newt.

I read in a couple places where critics/commenters indicated that this was a false moral choice, since as gamers we would choose the option which had the greatest game utility. While I'm sympathetic to the argument, I don't think it applies to BioShock, simply because this utility was false -- or at least, I perceived it to be false.

The issue is that the resource -- Adam -- wasn't rare enough for the choice to be all that meaningful in game terms. I ended the game, on normal difficulty, with several hundred Adam left over, which would have been enough to buy myself a couple of new powers, or more health or energy (had either been available to me at that point). I had maxed out the plasmid attacks I used most frequently, and even some I pretty much never used (freezing, for example, or incinerate). I guess I could have gone and bought additional attacks -- but I already had more than the 6 plasmids that could fit in the plasmid attack slots. The utilitarian value of the Adam resource was simply too low for me to care one way or the other, which made it no choice at all -- in a choice between doing "good" and doing "evil" in terms of the game's fiction, no matter ambiguous they try to make the choice.

It wasn't just on the subject of the moral choice that the game's choices felt meaningless -- it was pretty much across the board, in every choice I might make. Late in the game there were goodies hidden behind glass (health, ammo, that sort of thing), but breaking the glass would cause drones to fly after me for a minute or so. Choosing to break the glass to get at something was fairly meaningless -- the drones were not much of a threat, since my first person shooter skills are pretty decent, and a cost-benefit mostly came down to whether I felt like adding a couple of drones to fight on my behalf for a little while, since they could be fritzed out and hacked to fight for me. That's just an example -- I simply never felt that my decisions had much in the way of long-term impact, either because my first-person skills would save me, or because of other in-game helpers (the ability to completely swap out plasmids for other ones, for example).

It's hard to be down on them for that, though, since the pure play was fantastic -- Ken Levine frequently said that it was a shooter first, and absolutely, the shooter elements are fantastic. I can also see that the ability to switch out plasmids is a natural response to complaints about being unable to understand which choice you'd prefer to make between competing augmentations in Deus Ex. I can also understand why the degenerating weapons of System Shock 2 would be abandoned -- why spend time thinking about what weapons to use, if you have plenty of ammo and oodles of weapons? It keeps the pace going, and makes you less cautious about mistakes.

Of course, I liked having to take a moment to think about what augmentations would make sense to me; I think another mechanism could have been chosen to improve on Deus Ex's augmentation system. I also loved System Shock 2, even if I did get to the end only to discover I was effectively unable to continue (not enough psi power) -- I didn't feel cheated, I felt like I didn't pay attention and make good decisions, it was all above board.

With regards to BioShock, this sense of decisions not really mattering all that much was the same with the Little Sisters: sure, I could "rescue" them and get X Adam, with some additional Adam every time I had rescued three. I could "harvest" them and get Y Adam (with Y greater than X) with no such promise of later reward. I have no idea how balanced this equation was, but I had so much left over at the end that arguing that the choice had a significant gameplay impact seems a bit wrong-headed.

Now, one thing I will say that they did very well is to telegraph that this would matter in some way, that some sort of reckoning was coming based on how you treated the Little Sisters. It was very evident in the way that Tenenbaum would speak to you that the game was keeping track of every decision you made with regards to those little girls, even saying at the end that "even losing one" was bad, was a tragedy. It strongly reinforced that the choice you were making was a moral one, in the context of the game, even if in my view there were really no game system consequences to one choice or the other. So, I was left with a choice where the gameplay consequences mattered little, but I knew that might be some long-term result that mattered one way or the other (could be game-play, might not be). I hadn't read any spoilers beforehand, so I wasn't aware that there were multiple endings; but I could tell something was going on, even if the game wasn't explicit.

I mention this in particular because of another game I've recently been playing, Rise of the Kasai, which doesn't telegraph that you're making choices that have any long-term impact at all. The game had a host of problems and head-scratching design decisions, from the minor (unable to determine how many of a particular collectible are left to be found while in the level) to the horrendous (when I'm busy doing some other task, it is unforgivable that the AI controlling the other character die somewhere else in the level if there's nothing I can do about it), but the core combat remained satisfying when used skillfully, and the stealth kills were still memorably savage and rewarding to pull off.

I was a fairly big fan of Mark of Kri, which I thought presented a really interesting combat system -- simple enough for button-mashers, but still satisfying for those who could get into the nuances. I hope that will survive somehow into this generation; it'd be a shame to see such a clean combat system go, but I don't think that poor sales of this sequel are an indicator of the strength of the core gameplay. I also liked the strong, silent hero, Rau. In any case, each level in the game offers you the choice to play either as Rau or as his sister, Tati, and after playing the introductory level as a character more like Tati, I had decided to stick with Rau and if I really felt like it, I'd go back and try a few of the levels with Tati.

Well, apparently that choice had an impact, which was never specified nor explained. Late in the game, two or three levels from the end, Tati was faced with a choice to join the Dark Side or not⁴. And apparently, whether or not you had much in the way of input into that choice was decided based on whether you had played her very much, or whether you were playing her then, or something. In any case, I was unable to choose for her to stick with Rau and team up to fight the bad guy. Instead, my only option was to have her join the enemy, and apparently kill her. I replayed to that point several times, and came up empty every time -- while there was a little bar indicating that the decision was somehow being made, it was completely unclear to me what I had done to affect the decision, if anything. To date, I don't know -- I started playing some of the earlier levels with Tati, but after it crashed a few times in loading screens, I gave the title up for good. I'm very forgiving, but even I have limits.

What killed me about it was that apparently out-of-game choices were influencing in-game results; there was some meta-tracking going on that mattered to the game but which was unclear to me. I would happily have taken a little control over the story -- but I need to be nudged to know that's what I'm doing. I'm not sure what was going on, but it seems unfair that the story would be forced into a path where the AI's choices have turned my characters against one another. The lack of agency on my part to influence that decision was appalling, and were it not for my curiosity to figure out how it was supposed to work, I would have probably broken the disc in half right there.

So, systems designers: giving us choices that impact real game results: good. Not telling us that we're making those choices? Bad.

¹That's about as blatant a plug as I think I've ever pulled... ;) To be fair, I haven't played oodles of shooters in that time, though I played Quake n (was it 4? it was completely bland), Doom n (okay, being snarky, it was Doom 3), Deus Ex 2 (not better than SWRC IMO, falling far short of the bar set by its predecessor), and Thief 2, which I finally finished after a multi-year hiatus, and which was probably better than SWRC but so significantly different it's not realistic to compare them. Anyway. (back)
²Or maybe I should say "Patent Pending", since it came from Sony. Sony, this generation at least, seems to be driving very hard towards What Not To Do. Yes, that's a Sony slam -- the PS3 has a ways to go this generation. I think the power of the brand is strong enough to overcome all of their missteps, but poor PS3 market performance is clearly hurting them. (back)
³It's confusing, which is a whole different problem with the game altogether. The story weaves in and out of time, going back twenty of thirty years to lay some groundwork, then bringing it forward, then swinging back again. The two character archetypes are reflected in each set of characters, though -- there's really only two ways to play the level, but even that is a step up in terms of replayability. In theory, you can play the whole game twice, and other than cutscenes you'll pretty much see new level areas. (back)
⁴Or the legion of evil, or whatever. Who even cares. The story is pretty forgettable, even twisting through time as it does. I did like how they were able to generate player interest in a character who was going to die, but that's a tricky one, since it's a character you play, and having him die later on... (back)