Artsygamer

It’s a tragedy, I tell you, tragedy! I really reaaaally hate having unfinished games/books/movie… and yet I do. Why? Well, two great reasons:
1) repetition / lack of content
2) frustration / difficulty

Unfinished games are bad for:
a) players: not only do you lose satisfaction, but you also may feel like you’ve partly wasted many hours of your life because you never got the payoff
b) developers: not only does the audience miss out on a part of their vision & work but they also go away frustrated customers, and less likely to get their next game

So, I think we can say they’re an all round bad thing. First let’s search the root of the problem:
For 1) : unfortunatelly games often tend to be more about engine/gameplay than what I think they should be about: content/story. Players quickly realize this and become bored. It’s obvious why things have come to be this way: it would involve a lot more work (thus investment in time/money) from the developers to make more content.
For 2): well, i think this one is just plain design usually, which i just can’t find a justification for, but also there’s a bit of cheating on the developers’ part: they create a great game, put a lot of effort into it, and then they’re afraid people won’t value it as much as them so they artificially lenghten their games with either higher difficulty (usually grinding work which keeps the player busy more for the same rewards) or content reuse.

So do I propose any solutions? Well, I won’t say unrealistic stuff like I hear players journalists usually ask for: you can’t expect the company to double their manpower, double their work and produce in the same timeframe just more content at the same price, so I only see these guidelines:

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I must say I don’t find them as criticals as many, but I must admit there’s something to feeling that in an artistic game the real-world rhythm of the things you do somehow mimics the onscreen story. Destructoid features a indepth article argueing this with great passion:

Shadow of the Colossus’ controls are an exercise in art

The "videogames as art" movement is a funny thing. Artsy wooks like myself love to wax philosophic about the potential that games have in terms of narration or eliciting meaningful, emotional player responses. We laud innovative game designers for forcing us to make morally ambiguous choices about ourselves and the characters around us. Unfortunately for us in the post-post-pre-metamodern crowd, games as a medium fall short in one crucial, yet easily overlooked, way: They only go half of the distance.

Head on over to read Joseph -Orcist- Leray’s full article.
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As you probably know by now I deeply desire deep games with complex stories, both in branching and in morallity. One of the first such games that gave me hope for this thing called games was Fallout 2, so I too have high hopes for Fallout 3. These hopes were now increased following an interview on next-gen.biz. The particularly exciting part for me was:

Fallout 3, for instance, will be like Choose Your Own Adventure injected with literary growth hormone. With 30,000 lines of dialog played out in an open world, Fallout 3 ain’t kiddie stuff.

Bethesda put the game in the hands of the very capable Emil Pagliarulo, the lead designer on Fallout 3, the brains behind The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s amazing Dark Brotherhood storyline and no. 24 on this year’s Hot 100 Developers list.

Thankfully, he’s also a self-professed literature geek—good news for people who have high expectations for Fallout 3’s storyline.

Yep, I thought the Dark Brotherhood plot line was quite brilliant and seeing it’s designer behind Fallout 3 gives me quite high hopes.

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As per his usual great habits Razvan gave me today another awesome link: Ten golden rules of Japanese RPGs. I can’t say I’ve played that many JRPGs but from those that I did play I must say that some of these rules were the problems for me that made me avoid some of them. Take for example Digital Devil Saga 2 with a fighting screenshot to the right: amazing story, superb setting, some brilliant concepts, interesting leveling up grid… all ruined for me and leaving me frustrated because I never could finish it: just when I thought I was getting near (again) I found I was super-super-super under the level I needed to be, having wasted a lot of time having to level up characters I was hoping to ignore and facing annoying random battles and level grinding. So I can really relate to the article for example in this section:

No JRPG can truly call itself complete without having an end dungeon packed so full of the toughest monsters that it requires an additional twenty hours of "gameplay" just to get through the first screen. When the final furlong approaches, the game technically screeches to a halt, and what ensues is a magical new game where one runs around the same spot in circles, then presses attack a lot, and then runs around in circles again. For days.

PS: am I against JRPGs? No way!!! Some of them have the most brilliant concepts, amazing attention to detail, superb mature approaches and ways of thinking… it’s just that it’s so annoying that to get to all this brilliant stuff you must do a kazillion little annoying things.

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Way too often, we, the veteran players, don’t even notice anymore when games do weird and un-natural things: we’ve gotten used to them over the years. We’ve come to accept them and they’re like a blind spot in our minds. Weird stuff, environment behaving strangely, invisible barriers, hundreds of enemies… which are all clones of eachother, all without any character, things that should burn that don’t or fire isn’t really doing anything to them except darken them a bit… it all started because of strong technical limitations. But the problem comes when we stop thinking about them at all, not even desiring them… so it’s refreshing seeing a developer taking a step back and re-evaluating such game concepts. Sure, we might be 50 years away from realistic realtime water simulations, or materials with true and complex molecular simulations (I dream of getting to live to play the game in which I’ll actually damage a building so much until it crashes not because of shooting but because of architectural/gravity/support reasons)… but it’s nice to see they’re thinking about things like sticky, interactions… oh, and in the second video I actually saw shelves crashing after burning and it seems to me like the table actually broke where it was shot… I wasn’t expecting such inovation from a Alone in the Dark game… i’m impressed!

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How is it that so many people have experienced so strongly the attachment to this object? It’s totally passive and yet (wikipedia):

Jeep Barnett, a programmer for Portal, noted that players have told Valve that they had found it more emotional to incinerate the Weighted Companion Cube than to harm one of the "Little Sisters" from BioShock.

Is it the solitude, the sympathy with the secret prisoner, or maybe it’s only when they have a productive colaboration prior to the departure that people feel this kind of attachment? Well, maybe it’s just a joke… but not only is this video moving enough that I thought I had to post it but also it’s a good excuse to underline the importance of emotion, attachment in games. And here’s me getting back to my usual tune: please make this interaction and attachment a real one, one made with one’s own choices and decision. I can’t and will not feel personal attachment to a character that I’m only interacting with through cinematic moments. That’s as passive as a movie, not as powerful as a personal experience. Here’s to hoping more emotional attachment moments will surface in games!!!

PS: for those who’ve played Portal: this is trully an image that makes me laugh & warms my heart & makes me think at the same time.
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Now this quite stimulates the imagination. I don’t know how far the technology can be pushed on motion tracking and shape recognition but something like this could be veeeery interesting and catchy. Wii’s success is greatly attributed to it’s more physical interaction with games: done well this could be one step further. Unfortunatelly I can’t say I’ve heard of a lot of focus on this… but should it be done with serious budgets I think it would be amazing.
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