I just posted a new blog on Gamasutra, in which I try to define a “meta-genre” that I call: Story-Generating Games.
The article’s a bit drier and longer than my previous two, but it’s a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I think I end up touching on some important points of the oft-discussed “conflict between narrative and gameplay.”
This is one of my favorite gaming stories, but it’s not really mine.
My brother Bradley and I were home from college, and we had rented the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil. Our friend Wesley was staying overnight at our house. They were planted in front of the TV, Bradley was “driving” the game, Wes sitting next to him eating popcorn, while I was on my computer a few feet away watching them.
Naturally all three of us were getting pretty creeped out by the game what with all the zombies attacking you and whatnot. As Bradley navigated the spooky mansion, we had been victim to several “jump moments” – though since I was paying less attention, I was much less creeped out.
I remember Bradley opened a door and entered a moonlit hallway, then paused for a while, looking around. He started walking down the hallway…
“Wait,” broke in Wesley.
“What?”
“Look. Look at the wall.”
As I said, the hallway was lit with moonlight from a large window. And on the opposite wall from that window, you could just make out a shadow. A shadow that could only be cast by a human body splayed across the window.
“Dude… as soon as you walk past, that thing is going to jump out and attack you.”
“Yup. Good eye. We’re ready for it this time.”
Bradley then proceeded to tilt the analog stick tilted at exactly .001 degrees, just enough for his character to creep down the hallway at exactly the speed of a glacier. I had become engrossed in their attempt to pre-empt this jump moment, and all three of us were tense and ready for it…
As Bradley crept closer and closer to the shadow…
And then was right under it…
And nothing happened.
He walked back past the window.
And again. He started running back and forth.
Nothing.
“Huh.”
“Maybe you’re just not triggering it.”
“No, man, I’m trying everything.”
“Well… who knows. Let’s go on.”
They passed through the hallway, presumably to solve some puzzle that involved combining items in unintuitive ways.
These puzzles eventually led them to retrace their steps… back to the hallway.
“Oh man. Don’t forget!”
“Oh yeah.”
“I bet it will happen this time.”
Creeeeeeep forward… ever so slowly…
“Nope. Nothing.”
“Huh. Maybe it’s just a dead body hanging across the window.”
“Whatever… where did you say I should use that key?”
Later they passed through that hallway without incident again. And again. And again. Nothing ever happened.
Meanwhile they were becoming deeply involved in that puzzle. “Wait, do you have to put that key in there? Oh dude, you got a hairpin, maybe you can pick that lock! We need to go back over there.”
Run back, run forth. Pick the lock. “Oh we need to go back.” Run back. “Ooh now we can open that cabinet.” Run forth.
About the 6th time Bradley ran through that hallway, he took it at full tilt, his guard completely down.
And that’s when two zombies crashed through the window right on top of him.
In my memory, Brad and Wes’ girl-like shrieks created a pitch-perfect harmony. They didn’t sleep very well that night.
Today, while playing Torchlight demo on Steam, my PC crashed.
I sighed deeply. I’m playing a single-player RPG on the PC for half an hour and I don’t remember saving anywhere. I’ve just lost 30 minutes of progress, right?
Apparently games are awesome now. I start the game again and it tells me that:
Not only have I lost no progress, but I could go start playing this tomorrow on my work PC from the same point I left off, without having to ever transfer any save files around or other such nonsense.
That is all fantastic. Thank you to the unsung developers at Steam and/or Runic Games who put the time into those features and made the experience “around” the game so much more streamlined and forgiving… and allowing me to spend more time having fun and less time banging my head on my keyboard.
Is it too much to hope that this means that if (when) I buy the full version of Torchlight, it will transfer my demo character over unchanged?
ADDENDUM: As a commenter already pointed out, and as I discovered firsthand, buying the game is completely seamless. In fact I didn’t even notice Steam downloading it, so I suspect that “Torchlight Demo” and “Torchlight” actually are using the exact same content behind-the-scenes. Fantastic design all around.
Hi there my name is Slashy P. Dott, and I’d like to express my opinions about PC games!
PC games are the best! Especially FPSes. I want to mention right now that anyone who plays an FPS on a console is both a baby and an idiot, and also simultaneously a child.
How can they play that way? Don’t they realize that a mouse and keyboard give you perfect precision and that analog sticks give you no precision whatsoever? This is obviously an insoluble problem, and anyone who thinks that they have made, or played, a console FPS that is fun, is smoking the crack weed! Guess what: you may think you’re having fun, but you can’t be so you aren’t! You should play PC games so that your console toddler games will no longer be any fun to you.
Now that I’ve irrefutably established the supreme sweetness of PC games, I’d like to move on and speak about the problems PC games are experiencing today!
The biggest problem with PC gaming today is that they keep putting DRM on the games! It’s ridiculous, they make it so hard to pirate play the game! Why would they create such a hassle for their hackers loyal customers? And don’t they know that DRM is pointless because me and my friends evil hackers somewhere can crack any form of DRM within hours of the game’s release? So they might as well not use any DRM at all and save us themselves a lot of trouble! They just need to learn that if you make a PC game, it will be hacked, period!
If only the game creators would just accept that! I’m sure the day that they accept that and stop spending their money on DRM is the day that they’ll approve bigger budgets for making these PC games even more fun for us to steal.
The second biggest problem with PC games is: for some reason they’re making fewer games for the PC these days! This really baffles and frustrates me! Like I said, I love PC games and all of my friends do too. We play them all the time! In fact I just installed 20 PC games today, and then I shared recommended them to my friends, who also installed them minutes later!
So PC gaming is obviously super popular, so why would they stop making these games? It’s almost like they’d rather make console games for some reasons; in fact a lot of games get a PC version much later than the console version, or not at all! And when a PC version comes out it usually feels like a port of the console version! All of this angers me and I want to know whose fault it all is!
Take the PC version of Modern Warfare 2! Boy I like talking about that game! A LOT!!! The developers of that game completely violated a sacred covenant which they had made with us PC gamers in ancient times! They took away our dedicated servers, which we liked because they supported playing cracked copies user-made mods!
Yet for some reason developers keep trying to put barriers in our way us enjoying their games for free. Luckily the PC gamer community knows exactly how to respond: we they cracked the multiplayer portion of MW2 within days of release!!! Oh man, did that ever show the developers! Try to control how we use your product will you? Haha, nice try suckers!
Man, I can’t wait until they release Modern Warfare 3 for the PC. I bet they’ve learned their lesson, and it will have full dedicated server support, and no DRM at all!
Of course not every genre of PC game is going away. MMOs are still doing very well on the PC… but I don’t really play those because they cost money. I mean, too much money.
Finally I’d like to complain about this Assassin’s Creed 2 thing. See what they’ve done is make it so that you have to have constant internet access while playing the game; and in fact the game saves and loads your game data from over the internet!
Of course they say this actually gives the player a significant value-add, because they can then access their saved games from any machine, and it prevents losing their saved games if their hard drive crashes! Then they try to say that maybe this is a DRM scheme that is not only relatively non-intrusive (since most gamers are constantly connected to the internet anyway, and they play plenty of other games like Counter-Strike that require nonstop internet connection already); but that it will be very difficult for hackers to break; and that the save-game features actually work to make it a win/win for both developers and customers!
This, is, of course, all stupid and only serves to make me the hackers angrier. So guess what, Ubisoft? I’m going to not buy your game. Yeah that’s right, you just lost yourself a sale. How do you feel about that? I hope you see the consequences of your actions now.
So to sum up my position: I love PC games; I steal them constantly feel strongly that they should be DRM-free; and I’m deeply frustrated and confused by the fact that people keep making fewer of them and moving to the console market!!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go take a piss in the town well again. By the way has anyone else noticed that the water around here has been tasting funny lately? Someone needs to figure that out and fix it!!!
Sometimes I google for how to solve a problem, and find that someone else online has asked that question before. Then I find that either that person, or the people answering the question, are douchebags.
I find this endlessly hilarious for some reason. This is not the most extreme example I’ve seen, but here’s one I just came across:
http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=90509
Dysfunctional! Maybe these are only funny to me, but I’m going to keep posting them when I find them.
Another game design blog post at Gamasutra, which they’ve again chosen as a Featured Post:
I’ve been reading Gamasutra since I was a nerdy little CS major dreaming of someday working professionally in games, and desperate to read anything published about the art, science, and business of games. Though it appears that the site has had its bumps through the years, these days I think its content and news are better than ever, probably thanks to an absolute killer staff led by, among others, Leigh Alexander (of the Sexy Videogameland blog) and Chris Remo (of Idle Thumbs insanity), both of whom I have serious crushes on.
Since no one actually reads this blog, I thought I would try my hand at writing up a blog article on a blog I started on their site, since they apparently offer that service now. I was thrilled to log on the next day and find that I had been flagged as an “Expert” blogger (though perhaps this just denotes than I’m an actual game developer and not, say, a student, or someone who stalks game developers). Moreover, my first post had been given a “Featured Post” flag – I think that means that it will show up in their weekly round-up of blogs. A very pleasant surprise, and an honor from a site that I respect greatly.
Here’s the first post: “Stickiness” in Games, or: Why you can’t beat WoW
And the follow-up: Levels vs. Stickiness, or: How WoW can be beaten
Yes I am attempting the “inflammatory/oversimplifying headline” technique of blogging.
I may start posting my game design thoughts on Gamasutra rather than here, and reserve this blog for more general ramblings and short posts. I’ll cross-post them here of course.
UPDATE: Huzzah, the second post has ALSO been marked as “Featured”!
If you like falling onto spikes, this game is for you.
I had a great experience this past Saturday attending the Austin Flixel Jam, an “indie game jam” where about ~11 guys met up to make a game in one day – specifically 6.5 hours (which is as long as the library would let us work in one of their offices).
I showed up knowing no one, with no idea what to expect – a true “dive in headfirst” scenario. I met the host, Phil Knoll, a very cool guy, and chatted with him about my experiences at Blizzard and SOE – small world, he’s indirectly done some outsourcing projects for SOE Austin and knows a couple of my friends there.
Finally some more guys showed up and we began talking about what we were going to do. I had expected that Phil, the organizer, might have had some pet idea already picked out; and that every single guy who showed up would probably have their own ideas as well… in short I expected something of a fight over who would get to make their game idea! Instead something very different happen: Phil mentioned that he thought we should make a game like Canabalt (the most well-known game made in the Flixel engine we were using). In particular we all felt the idea of a “single button” game seemed ideal.
Click for full image.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/01/19/0231206/Blizzard-Adds-Timestamps-To-emWoWem-Armory
“In a move that could cause serious privacy problems for players of World of Warcraft, Blizzard has added timestamps and an RSS feed to the game’s online armory site….”
For those of you who dream of making the most successful game of the world, remember that what comes hand-in-hand with that: everything you ever do will be mercilessly and endlessly criticized and picked apart, as soon as you do it or even as soon as you announce that you’re thinking about doing it.
You can even have a team of people spend weeks or months adding a new feature to a peripheral feature of your game, for the sole reason of helping your players to keep up with each other’s progress in the game better and have more fun playing together… only to find that people respond by being shocked that you could be so irresponsible as to do such a thing, and posting headlines about how the CIA can now track their raid schedule and what will they do with that information? I don’t know but the consequences are sure to be dire.
But seriously… although I make light of it as typical tin-foil-hat conspiracy-theorist alarmism, in fact this criticism is pretty valid, or at least inevitable; Blizzard will have no choice but to add an “opt-out” option, or some sort of permissions system linked with the in-game friends and guild lists. (Another few weeks or months of work, by the way.) That’s the other thing that comes with success: everything you do really does affect millions of peoples’ lives. (I’ve heard that in the tool that Blizzard GMs use to log player issues, one of the values of the Issues Type field is “Suicide Threat.”)
When you have 11.5 million players, the problem isn’t “dealing with your players”, it becomes “dealing with human nature, and in fact a big chunk of humanity itself.” All though it’s arguable whether games always should be so deeply wound up in players’ lives, the fact that they can be is why I love them.