I always need to know where my next meal is coming from. During the average work day, I raise the question “what should we have for dinner?” at about 4:30pm. When I’m traveling, I need a plan in place about obtaining sustenance. My friends make fun of me for this foible, but–like my apprehension about getting left behind on BC Ferries–it’s baked into my psyche.
I’ve never understood the origin of this anxiety until the other day, when I was talking to some friends about a computer game I played in my childhood. Called Enchanter, it’s a text-based swords and sorcery game first released in 1983 by Infocom. You can play it online. It isn’t exactly Dead Island.
I never bought the game. My older cousin made a copy of it on a floppy disc, bless him, and sent it up for me from California. He was the original dealer for my gaming jones. The game was definitely too old for me. I was probably 10 or 11, and as such never finished any of the early Infocom text games. I wasn’t clever enough, and there was no Internet on which to find walkthroughs, clues and cheat codes.
In talking about Enchanter, I explained to my friends how the game–like many early games– requires you to eat and drink throughout your adventure. At the start of the game, you find a loaf of bread, and you slowly consume it as you play. As you eat it, the game tells you how much is left:
Naturally, the game reports less and less bread left as you make progress. It’s a game mechanic, I suppose, to prevent the player from playing a particular playthrough for a very long time.
For reasons that I can’t explain, that mechanic embedded itself in a profound way in my pliable young brain. I have an ever-present awareness of the amount of consumable stuff I own. I know how many eggs are in the carton in our fridge, how many bags of berries I’ve frozen for my Canadian diet and even a pretty accurate sense of time (something I never “lose track of”–I don’t understand how people do this). As my wife pointed out, this bread and water requirement is probably also responsible for my low-level worry about my next meal.
I don’t think often enough about the impact all those hours of gameplay had on my prepubescent and teenage mind. I’m truly among the oldest people to have grown up playing video games. What other lasting impacts did it have on my psyche?
If you played a lot of games grown up, how did they impact your life?
About five and half years ago, I wrote about the spouse of an Electronic Arts employee who was upset about the working conditions at her husband’s job. At the time, her blog post got a lot of media attention. I’m not sure if conditions changed for her husband, but one of the outcomes was Gamewatch, a discussion forum where people could discuss the working conditions inside gaming companies.
I was poking around that forum and clicked through to another blog post from January, 2010 by the wife of a Rockstar Games developer that articulates very similar complaints. The article is written in a peculiarly baroque style, but here’s an excerpt:
Little is there to motivate continuation as they also have lost a free vacation week between Christmas and New Year. Without time to recuperate and no efforts made to alleviate the stress of such conditions would procure on an employee after a period time, serious health concerns. Yet, now the health concern becomes another financial concern as the stripping of medical benefits surfaces to realization. It becomes rather worse rather than better as employees gain experience and become “senior”. Instead of appreciation, numerous non-exempt designers and artists have had their overtime pay cut as a result for being “too senior”.
Apparently not much has changed in the intervening six years.
Here’s what’s weird: why do we keep hearing from the spouses of game programmers, and not the programmers themselves? The obvious answer is that the developers won’t speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Yet both the blogging spouses remain anonymous. The developers could write articles anonymously with a similar result, couldn’t they?
Perhaps these are just clever programmers posing as their wives, figuring that they’d be able to bring more attention to the issue in this end-around fashion?
And why is this phenomenon specific to game developers? I’ve see no open letters from the husbands of prenatal care nurses, or the spouses of public defenders?
To me, their entire argument is specious. If you don’t like where you work as a game developer, get a new job. You’re highly educated, in demand and have skills that are transferable to other parts of the technology or animation industry. If you really can’t find another job, then tough it out in this one for another year, save some money and start retraining in another field.
Of course, if your spouse doesn’t like where you work, that may be a more vexing problem.
It’s always great when I discover a succinct essay or lecture that summarizes the state of the union for a particular industry, art form or research topic. The other day I watched this half-hour talk by Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell discussing trends in casual gaming. He starts a little slow but gathers steam:
Here’s a kind of response to Schell’s lecture, specifically discussing this idea of external rewards.
One of the undervalued aspects of the Internet is its endless capacity to enable nostalgia. Whether you had a childhood love of My Little Pony, Dungeons & Dragons or a defunct hockey team, there’s a website (and probably an eBay auction) where you can revisit that pleasure of your youth.
I was reminded of this phenomenon over the weekend, when a friend and I were discussing a new Olympics-themed video game called Vancouver 2010. Like many Olympics computer games before it, it enables you to play a number of the sports from the Winter Games. Here’s a trailer:
It’s noteworthy that the Games’ three sports that are most popular among Canadians–ice hockey, figure skating and curling–don’t appear in this game. It’s not surprising–hockey has its own franchise games, figure skating would be tricky to program effectively (imagine the control scheme) and curling, well, is curling. That said, I think curling would make a great game for the Wii.
The Heady Days of Microsoft Decathlon
My friend reminded me of a slightly earlier sports mini-games-within-a-game for the PC. It was called Microsoft Decathlon, and, believe it or not, it was published in 1982. 1982! The first version of PC-DOS, on which is ran, was only released in August, 1981. I probably didn’t play the game until 1984 or 1985, but I played it a lot. When I watched this video, the sense of nostalgia was visceral:
The crazy midi theme, the four colour interface, the high jump mat labeled “FOAM PIT”–it all came back to me. The whole video is 10 minutes, so don’t bother watching the whole thing. I might draw your attention, however, to the awesome rendering of the shot-put event.
When you compare those two videos, it’s a little shocking how far games have come in 25 years. What will they look like in another 25 years? How much will innovation slow down, as has happened in television and film?
I recently participated in a game of Pictionary. My team came second (or “first loser” as somebody described it), despite the fact that we had four arts degrees between us.
I was given a particularly challenging word to draw, and I thought I did a smashing job of it. My team disagreed. Travis kindly snapped a photo. My rendering is everything above my finger–we did multiple drawings on every sheet of paper. Can you guess the word? Click for super-sizing:
Hmm…in retrospect it’s not really that clear. Though, in my defense, two people from another team guessed what I was on about.
UPDATE: The correct answer is ‘taxidermy’. So maybe I failed. I did like an alternative suggestion I received by email: “Dance dance critter death edition”, which seems to be in the ballpark of correct.
I’m a longtime player of sports games on the PC, and a recovering technical writer. So I take an interest in the manuals that accompany the games I play. As most gamers will attest, game manuals are usually awful. They’re under-written, incomplete and, for narrative games, spend too much time on useless back story.
This problem is usually solved by the far-superior in-game tutorial. Learning by playing is much more effective than learning by reading. There are few tutorials, however, in sports games. That’s fine, because usually gamers know how to play the sport in question, but not always.
When I worked in Ireland, we often played PlayStation games around the office at lunch time (or, you know, other times). A favourite game (and I don’t think it was my Canadian influence) was EA Sports NHL 2002. Most of the Irish guys playing the game had never actually seen a hockey game, either live or on TV. Their understanding of the term “hockey” was strictly verbal. They had a vague idea what offside was from football (i.e. soccer), but no sense of what the icing rule was about. In any case, they mostly played with those rules turned off.
I was just glancing through the manual of a reasonably new soccer (i.e. football) game, and encountered this section:
These are team-wide tactics which you, as their godly overseer, can instruct them to execute. Though I’ve casually watched soccer for years, I only have the vaguest idea of what these are. Wing Play? Flat back? And ’3rd Man Release’ sounds downright dirty. The manual doesn’t include an explanation of what these tactics are for, how they work or when you might use them. It assumes, like icing and offside, that I already understand them.
From talking to educators and influencers, we’ve learned that our videos are often used to introduce a subject – to get everyone on the same page at the beginning of a class, workshop, etc. Recently, as part of our planning for 2009, we came up with a model that helps tell this story. We call it the A-to-Z Scale.
The scale represents the path to learning a subject. On the left side are the basic, fundamental ideas. On the right, the details and applications of the ideas.
Thinking about sports games manuals, they’re really missing the Gs and the Hs of the games they’re simulating. Most players will understand that you throw the ball in the basket, or hit the ball into the hole with the stick. However, many casual players may not understand the nuances of the neutral-zone trap or the dreaded third man release.
Do we need to grasp these details to enjoy the game? Probably not (though the jargon in an American football game is pretty thick and commonplace), but all it would take is an extra couple of pages in the manual or a game tutorial to explain these concepts. I’d imagine that the developer looks at both of those as cost centres, though, so I’d expect they feel that less is more. What do you think?
I was watching some Olympics coverage yesterday, and started thinking about rituals of celebration:
In indoor volleyball, the team converges after every successful point. There’s a momentary huddle where, I assume, encouraging and congratulatory remarks are exchanged.
In gymnastics, the girls (for, yes, they’re mostly still girls) of the American team gave each other the most cursory of hugs after each routine.
Basketball seems to reflect what occurs in the NBA. There’s very little reaction after the average basket, and just some macho posturing after a particularly righteous slam dunk.
I didn’t see what happened in water polo, but I think it’s much like basketball.
In games where teams accrue points, there’s a correlation between the frequency of scoring and the amount of celebration. In hockey and football (that is, soccer), the entire team congregates around the scorer to congratulate them. At the other end of the scale, there’s very little reaction from teammates in basketball or doubles tennis.
Is there a threshold where the group-to-congratulate stops? Maybe it’s not that simple. There’s potentially 25 points in a volleyball game, though there’s easily 75 to 100 in a match. That’s actually more ‘scores’ that the average basketball game, so I guess there’s no hard and fast rule.
Can you think of other high-scoring sports where the team celebrates after every point?
I first watched the trailer for Portal about a year and a half ago. It kind of blew my mind.
Last night I finally found some time to play it, and the game kept me up to 1:00am. It’s a wonderfully-crafted little short story of a game. If Samuel Beckett was a game designer, he might have made Portal.
The setting is a sparse, clinical testing facility evocative of THX 1138. You are only accompanied by the friendly voice of GLaDOS, a psychotic computer with a love of euphemisms. She guides you through 19 tests of increasing complexity. This all sounds pretty ordinary, and though all the details–the level design, the voice acting, the physics–are fantastic.
The first big difference between Portal and other games is that you have no real weapons. Though, of course, the only person to kill is yourself. You do have the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which is the key to Portal’s extraordinary gameplay. From a review:
At heart, it’s a puzzle game built around the “portal” mechanic, which lets you blast a pair of holes onto any two surfaces and teleport between them–for example, to get across a room, or drop on top of a high platform, or blip around an insurmountable barrier. Portal adds this to the standard repertoire of sliding platforms, tripable switches, and near the end, robotic gun turrets that whisper playfully, “I see you!” (When you knock one down, it adds, “I don’t blame you.”)
To borrow a term from Douglas Adams, the result is mind-buggering. When I first saw the trailer, I thought that the portals would make the game very difficult. In fact, after a while, your brain adjusts to this new dimension of travel. Or dimensional travel, if you like.
Themes and Post-Modernism (and Beware, Half Life 2 Spoilers Ahead)
Video games are obviously evolving very rapidly. Increasingly, they’re reflecting more and more similarities with narrative art. The best new games have sophisticated plots, decent dialogue, more rounded characters and original and sometimes breath-taking aesthetics. Portal features a particularly creepy yet catchy ditty sung by GladOS over the closing credits (hear it sung by its composer).
However, Portal is one of the first games I’ve seen that reflects (for want of a degree in literary criticism) some more sophisticated aspects of art. For example, the game explores themes–the tyranny of mechanization, how corporations dehumanize us, the dubious ethics of scientific testing. They’re not examined in vast detail, but they’re present and feel reasonably fresh.
Additionally, Portal is the most post-modern game I’ve ever played. We see this in trivial ways. The whole game is vaguely reminiscent of Q*Bert. GladOS hilariously refers to “Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cubes” or a “Weighted Companion Cube”, sly nods to the crates and boxes that inexplicably populate many games (I think it’s partially because they had a low polygon count, but that’s just a guess).
But the game is self-aware in more profound ways. As you play, you begin to get peaks behind the curtain of the cold, white testing rooms. You discover debris and graffiti (hence the meme “the cake is a lie”) left by former test subjects. At the games’ mid-point, you avoid incineration after the 19th room and spend the rest of the game escaping the facility. You wend your way through rusty catwalks, grimy corridors and soulless offices. You are figuratively and actually inside the game, looking back into the test chambers. It’s the kind of radical (not to mention fun) shift in perspective that you find in novels.
Criticisms? Well, the kill-the-boss ending is ordinary, though comical. And the end game cinematic didn’t provide me with much explanation or satisfaction. Once again, it was very THX 1138.
Portal is a little masterpiece. It’s remarkable that’s it’s just one of five games that come in the Orange Box set of Valve projects. The two Half Life 2 chapters are more conventional, but still excellent (when was the last time you played a game that ended with a fade to black while a woman cried over her dead father?). I’m not a huge fan of Team Fortress 2′s gameplay, but its design is breathtaking.
