writer thoughts on a game-crazy world
Dangit, lost a few posts thanks to the incompetence of 1&1 Internet hosting.
However, I’ve found a backup and I’m reposting the goodies. Sorry if this is a repeat for you…!
Take a listen to this killer tune by Carl Sagan, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Richard Feynman, and Neil deGrasse Tyson (with a little help from Symphony of Science):
The voiceless game hero? He’s an ass.
Well, inadvertently. Have you ever noticed how a voiceless game hero fails to respond to mid-mission communications?
I recently finished Resistance on the PS3, and the game’s avatar, Nathan Hale, is a classic, cliche game hero with little to say and a lot to do. When he gets mid-mission updates, there’re always some stilted moments when the game writer has to wriggle around Hale’s inability to talk. “Hale, are you there? Anyhow, as I was saying….”
Needless to say, this isn’t a major objection to the voiceless game hero, but it is another missed opportunity for emotional connection in a medium (I shudder to say “art form”) that already sorely lacks connection.
Part of the problem is that in-game cinematics – the voiceless game hero’s lone venue to speak – have traditionally been expensive, pre-rendered cutscenes. They are almost always non-interactive, constrictive experiences that players hate to sit through. As games move to in-game cinematics rendered through the game’s own graphics engine, the costs can drop (although not always).
The Metal Gear series is an interesting special case to the silent game hero syndrome. Snake is quiet during the games, but truly epic quantities of backstory and narration take place in cutscenes and non-interactive radio communications. When Snake has some work to do, he’s as silent as night, but get him chatting to some cute support operative about cardboard boxes, crouched in a supply room in an enemy base, and the conversation goes about a thousand times as long as you’d ever expect. (Yes, cardboard boxes.)
Metal Gear games definitely tread that uneasy line between movie and game. The effect is well-documented: people either hate it or love it.
It is a shame that the prototypical game hero has nothing to say. He can’t trace much of a character arc, and we don’t find out why he’s willing to risk it all over and over again. He’s just a shell of a person, really.
In that respect, movies once again have cultural primacy over games. We often don’t get to know the game hero, and that’d be a huge failure for a movie. Would you enjoy movies if 90% of them featured nearly mute protagonists? Can games be considered an art form if game developers can’t draw a decent portrait of a protagonist?
Again, game designers are dramatically losing the battle to rival the emotional punch wielded routinely by screenwriters. Your typical half-hour episode of “30 Rock” packs more resonance and character than the entire 20-hour slog through Gears of War or Resistance.
Does that sound like an exaggeration? Well, let’s try some trivia questions:
1) Why is Marcus Fenix in prison at the start of Gears of War?
2) Who gives the orders to Fenix and Delta Squad?
3) What’s Kenneth the Page’s hometown?
4) Who gives the orders at 30 Rock?
Yeah, I had to wikipedia all those Gears of War answers too.
It’s really the adventure video game genre that does the best at connecting players with a rewarding narrative journey. Games like The Longest Journey and Grim Fandango are well-known for their humor, characters, and plotlines.
On the other hand, the adventure genre has long been a niche gaming genre that left some of our twitchier game-playing brethren cold. Technology may yet come to the rescue, though. Newer action/adventure titles like God of War and Uncharted 2 are proving that an epic storyline can be paired successfully with addictive, responsive gameplay.
The typical game hero is mute. Have you noticed?
Especially in first-person shooters, your typical game hero is a stoic son of a mesh. He has an inhuman pain tolerance, miraculous healing powers, and can tote as much military hardware as a Sherman tank. But he can’t communicate. He’ll say a few words in the cutscenes, but he’s useless otherwise.
If you’ve served in the military, you know that the average soldier is a lot happier talking about combat than getting shot at. With good reason.
If you were big on symbolism you could delve into this for all sorts of pointless conversation about the status of the modern soldier, the devolution of the archetypal hero, the social skills of today’s kids, etc. etc.
And can you imagine what a Leno or Larry King interview with Master Chief or Samus would be like?
But seriously, what does this mean to gamers and the game experience?
The game hero vocalization quandry was bandied about a lot by the other game designers and me on two games in particular, the PS2 launch title Army Men: Green Rogue (blink and you missed it) and the PC space-sim Freelancer (top ten). Some game designers liked the strong silent hero because he was more intimidating that way. But the winning reason in both cases was that a talking game hero breaks the fourth wall and disturbs the illusion of verite.
(Insert jibe here about game developers who believe that “realism” is a quality to be preserved when your hero is melting animated plastic soldiers.)
The “broken illusion” argument is persuasive, although I don’t buy it. I hate to play Hollywood and dogmatically rely on previous games to support all my theories*, but I do have to point to Duke Nukem 3D, once a true rival to DOOM and a lighthearted triumph that featured a bombastic muscle-bound hero who’d spout endless and funny catchphrases like Arnold on steroids. I mean, more steroids.
Duke’s taunts and jokes were a big part of the game’s charm. He was a game hero whose verbosity added to the character and fun.
On Freelancer, the key question was twofold: how would the player know that the game hero was talking, and what would it add to gameplay?
During gameplay, the player was either conducting transactions baseside or flying/fighting in space. I was hoping our game hero, Trent, could talk while at the controls to break the monotony of long-haul travel and help us deal with some narrative deficits. (We had some sizeable plot holes that had to be stitched together.)
I said that Trent’s face could appear during “comms” just like the faces of other characters did when they spoke during flight. Additionally, our game hero could have sonically different comms that sounded like they were cleaner, louder, and even physically closer.
Trent was another hero who never got his gameplay voice. It’s not a huge regret for me – ask any Freelancer team member, and they’ll willingly admit that we’re all just thankful that we finished that game and got the sales we did – but I do wonder why game developers continue to pass on opportunities to enrich gameplay with the voice of the most important character in their games.
* One hit game does not prove a theory; it only carves a creative rut for imitators to wallow into in search of the almighty “oops I bought the wrong game for Junior!” dollar.
If you’re a habitual This American Life radio listener like I am, you might have heard the story about a guy who has differences with his dad in the program entitled “Go Ask Your Father.”
Unlike most father-son conflicts, this one wasn’t about sports, report cards, or borrowing the car to make out with the girl next door. Noooo. Paul Tough (now an editor at The New York Times Magazine) didn’t understand why his dad, a university professor, has spent so much energy trying to get ET to phone home. Or rather, phone us.
In fact, I thought you might enjoy a peek at the webpage where Prof. Allen Tough is asking any and all interested extraterrestrials to contact his organization. I thought it might be a simple form, but apparently Prof. Tough has higher expectations than I do of ETs.
And here’s the list of questions compiled from suggestions from over 200 humans, in which we ask about how humanity is holding up against its intelligent peers, and how aliens get it on, among other things.
Here are the other five photos from the European extravaganza. Hope you’re keeping up with the disjointed narrative, such as it is!
The Louvre from within.
Millennium Bridge headed toward St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Shoreline near Durdle Door, Dorset.
London at night.
The Princess Di-Dodi Al-Fayed memorial in London’s tony Harrod’s shopping emporium. I was amused by their wardrobe — Di is wearing a sheer shift and Dodi a collared shirt that’s unbuttoned and flapping in the sculptor’s imaginary breeze. It’s more Fabio than Royal Family, that’s for sure. I wonder if the Queen has seen it.
A bonus sixth photo for you. Austin Powers’ roadster, near the British Museum. I had no idea carmakers made vehicles in robin’s egg blue.
If you’re a talented vampire hunter, you’re willing to work for free, and you live in the Austin area, here’s your chance. There’s a Craig’s List ad for a vampire hunter or paranormal investigator who can investigate some bled-out animals and worker blackouts.
Hurry! Vampire hunter opportunities don’t come knocking every day. Serious inquiries only.
So your immodest game writer went to Red Robin, the burger chain, the other night. While the experience is fresh in my mouth (why does that sound wrong?), I feel I must crack wise about what Red Robin gourmet burgers tell us about the future of this country.
Red Robins are really a microcosm of what is good and bad about the name-branding and big-boxing of America. They’re made from fresh, healthy ingredients. They’re tidy, clean, identical, carefully marketed to Joe Six-Pack, and unerringly friendly.
The staff seem ridiculously cheery; you have to wonder about the pep talks and management, because they’re totally getting it done. I do admit, however, to a flashback to the cynical and often twisted movie Waiting when I saw them gather up twice to sing out birthdays to families celebrating their kids’ special days.
I ordered the Whiskey River BBQ Chicken Burger, which is basted with BBQ sauce. It also includes cheddar cheese, crispy onion “straws” (think skinny onion rings), lettuce, tomatoes, and mayo. “Cowpokes and real folks both love this one!” crows their website.
The burger arrived promptly, accompanied by a serving of their piping hot “bottomless fries” and some gigantic crunchy onion rings. At first it looked a little small to me, peeking out of a white paper wrap*, but it’s about the size of a chicken burger you cook on your own grill. The menu photos always look enormous.
So I took a big bite and I had a revelation. Red Robin gourmet burgers are telling the future, and the future is expensive, heavily sauced, carefully manicured, and so full of flavor that you can’t taste what it’s made of. The future is served by marvellously attentive people who refill your soda before you’re done, sometimes bringing you a second glass so you don’t even have to lower the glass to get more.
A bite of my burger was like a little bite of Las Vegas. The glittering lights, the gambling, the dancing girls, and the empty feeling. I followed the cheese, I was diverted by the onion straws, and I was waylaid by the barbeque sauce. The overall effect was pleasurable and comforting, because on an animal level I was happy that I was getting some serious calories. My tongue responded to the sweet and the salty. But on the other hand it had none of the subtle interplay of flavors that truly great food possesses. It didn’t surprise or delight; it overpowered.
And somewhere in there was a chicken breast, flanked by some lettuce and tomato, all yelling to be heard, but no one paid any attention.
My gourmet burger was relentlessly adult but built on childish principles. It’s forgotten what it is. A Red Robin gourmet burger is what mall food looks like when it grows up. And the future is lavish, clean, and bright, but it looks to be overdramatic and desensitized at the same time.
*By the way, this wrap is really a brilliant innovation, keeping the burger together without a toothpick, and making it easy to hold.
The Uncharted 2: Among Thieves SKU and its action/adventure gameplay are dominating the ratings at Metacritic. Adventure games? Zork? Monkey Island? Indiana Jones? Hello again. We’ve missed you.
Uncharted 2 brings back Nathan Drake (Indiana Jones?) for another round of high-stakes artifact hunting, this time to the fabled Shambhala, a remote valley in the Himalayas, where he’s pitted against a fugitive war criminal.
I don’t have a full gameplay review today — just a little celebration, and a link to Uncharted 2’s astronomical Metacritic score and review.
97, in case you’re curious — a point below all-time PS3 leader Grand Theft Auto IV.
Hogwarts School and Harry Potter don’t actually appear in any of my “game writer on vacation” photos, but there is a connection, as you’ve probably already noticed.
So I’ve decided to jump the gun and throw up a top five of the photos I took in London and Paris, with five more to come shortly.
Notice the devious writing trick I used — the non-commital “a top five” rather than “my top five photos” or (heaven forfend!) “the top five photos.” Not really a game writing trick, per se; more of a legalistic way to avoid saying anything definitive.* These are just five photos that I like, for various reasons.
* I recently read an interview with one of my English profs, Nancy Packer, who lambasted the semi-colon. She said it’s the language’s ugliest punctuation mark, and that one should use dashes instead. Punctuation passion!
Sorry about the dorky watermark. I’m submitting these to some stock photo agencies and I don’t want slimeballs leeching these.
Was amazed to stumble upon this college courtyard in Cambridge. This isn’t even one of the heavy hitters like King’s College; this is one of the minor colleges. I wish my university dorm looked like this. Ready for a brisk game of Quidditch!
By the way, Quidditch is the most ridiculous game in creation. It’s clear that J.K. Rowling isn’t much for game design. She can write the crap out of candy and sweets, though, I’ll grant her that.
You might recognize this structure. Hint: Paris.
Brick apartments in Swanage on the Dorset coast.
Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Monument.
Hopital de Les Invalides. Napoleon is buried in the cathedral whose gilded dome you can see up top.
Hope you — Harry Potter fans, science fiction readers, and otherwise — enjoyed these ramblings. More soon.
Brain designer seems like a less interesting job than game designer, but it does have a certain ring to it. And let’s face it, your work is more likely to be described as “mind-blowing,” which is how I’d describe this TED talk from Rebecca Saxe, who studies the brain at the eponymous Saxelab at MIT.
The TED writeup emphasizes mind-reading. That’s all well and good, but that’s just the come-on. My takeaways from this stimulating (literally) demonstration are: