Final Columns of 2009: Plot vs. Character, Father Christmas

If you’ve been reading my Edge column, you are truly blessed. May the reindeer and elves shine on you, ’cause I love this column and I’m having a blast, and your eyeballs are the reason.

Here are the last ones of the year. First off, I argue why we should stop paying attention to game stories (and how bad they are), and start investing in the thing games do well: creating memorable characters.

There’s an old debate about which is more important – the plot or the characters. But look across the pop mediasphere, and you’ll see that characters are winning. Television shows, comic books, movie franchises, and even lines of toys depend on characters as the hook that keeps the audience coming back, while storylines are just a fleeting way to give them something to do. If you have characters that people love, they will stick around while you flog the property years past its sell date. And if you don’t have good characters, the most radical plot twists in history will not save you.

… and then, I write a column about my abandoned plan for an altenate reality game about Santa Claus:

I would make a joke about how the kids at school are old enough to tell my son that there’s no Santa Claus. This would bother me, because hey, I’ve made it to my thirties without letting anybody convince me that Santa’s not real. In fact, I happen to know that there is a conspiracy out there, and they want us to think St. Nick is a myth, a dangerous hallucination. But I believe, natch, that Santa is real – and play my game, and you would get to save him.

And of course, there’s a reason I bring this up:

We don’t use our imagination in games, and our videogames rarely ask for it in the first place. Make-believe is the exception rather than the rule, and if we get really caught up in a game – if we scream “Oscar mike, stay frosty!” with gusto and spittle in Modern Warfare multiplayer – well, that’s kinda embarrassing. After all, what’s the absolute zero least cool game in the world? Live-action role-playing. I mean, those people run around in the woods in capes.

I’m taking it easy this weekend, but I’ve got a few ideas brewing for next year. The column has done really well, and some of them have been very well received. The voice is feeling more natural, too. So definitely expect to keep seeing this every week over at Edge Online. (And if you have an idea, a new game, or just something you want to talk with me about, don’t hesitate – chris [ at ] savetherobot.com.)

My 10 Best Gaming Moments of the Decade

For this week’s column, I had planned to run my favorite moments of the decade, but I went in a different direction instead. So here are the ten moments I was going to write about. And don’t be shy, share yours too!

10. Left 4 Dead. Everyone has a story like this. I survived the onslaught at the boathouse. I’m a few feet away from the rescue vessel that will take me away from the zombie-pocalypse, and I turn around – and there’s my buddy, Michael Abbott, pinned down by three zombies and struggling to make it to the dock. I check my ammo and weigh my options. Maybe I could get back and rescue him – maybe. Maybe we’d even both get out alive. But, eh, hell with it. I left him to die.

9. Legendary. This was not a great game, but as a corny horror experience it’s chock full of sight gags and hilarious moments where unsuspecting civilians are grabbed and eaten by horrifying hellbeasts. These gags escalate as the game goes on, leading up to my favorite: you walk into a giant cavern under the street, to see a helpless civilian calling for help – and before you can get to him, an entire city bus drops on his head. Note to studios who are making snoozer-shooters like this one: a little inspiration goes a long way.

8. Baldur’s Gate II. BioWare’s role-playing games haven’t lost their tactical depth, but as they move to a third-person perspective and a more real-time, actiony feel, I find that the nuances of combat get less and less interesting – and the battles feel less heroic. Case in point. I was leading my party of six (remember when you could have six?) through the sewers, and we ran into the vampire Bodhi – too strong for us to handle, probably, but it was too late to turn back. We fight, and Bodhi manages to paralyze every one of my characters except Nalia, a mage-thief, definitely a back-row character that I tried to keep out of harm’s way. Nalia had to face off against Bodhi in hand-to-hand combat.

They went one turn, then another, and another – and somehow, Nalia held her off and stayed alive until the rest of the party recovered and won the day. I’ll never forget her triumph against the odds. The rest of the game was well-written, but the writing couldn’t compete with that one lucky victory.

7. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. For all the guff we give the Wii for its poor line-up and underpowered hardware, everyone has their own favorite “motion sensitive controls” story. For me, I just remember the sweat. In at least two fights in Twilight Princess, the motion controls for combat – the quick swings and heavy blows, the blocking, the whole thing – not only engaged me, they exhausted me. I’ve never had a more satisfying final boss fight than in this game, or a better experience with the Wii.

6. The Force Unleashed. Like a lot of folks who grew up with Star Wars, I enjoyed this middling action-adventure more than I expected, because it actually felt like Star Wars – a dark, troubling adventure right in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back, with a real tragedy woven into the story. Before the final act, the Apprentice character is saying goodbye to the love interest who’s been piloting him around the galaxy, and as they have a final kiss, I was sitting there preying that this game wasn’t going to end as badly as I expected, and that they would see each other again. I think I’ve told you before that I’m a total sap for this stuff, and The Force Unleashed got me good.

5. World of Warcraft. My big beef with Warcraft has always been that the streamlined gameplay tamps down emergent narratives and interesting surprises. But I still have warm memories from my first few levels in the game – including one of the first times I ran the Deadmines instance in Westfall. It was close to the holidays, and the game had started handing out snowballs that you could collect and throw at other players. Halfway through the Deadmines, my party had to stop because our gnome rogue kept rushing in and getting himself killed. So to pass the time, somebody pitched a snowball at my head and knocked me over – and I returned fire, and all of a sudden we had a full-blown fight. It was the only piece of emergent narrative I remember from the whole time I spent in that game.

4. PixelVixen707. When edit-hero Simon Carless revealed game blogger and brainysphere booster Rachael Webster not to be a real girl, but a character in an ARG? I would’ve paid whatever to see the look on his face when he solved the puzzle.

3. Fallout 3. The team behind this game is reluctant to fess up to any overt political messages or themes in the game. But whether it’s a message or not, Liberty Prime is one of the funniest pieces of Cold War satire since Dr. Strangelove. Watching him lurch to the Jefferson Memorial, blasting everything in his path while he spouts anti-Communist propaganda, brings home the game’s vision of an America that still clings to its greatness, its patriotism, and its righteousness – long, long after they’ve vanished.

2. Half-Life 2 Episode One. Alyx is the best supporting character of the decade. There’s no debate. She’s an upbeat survivor who’s grown up in hell, and nothing fazes her – except the one or two times that it does. Early in Episode One, the sight of a stalker stored in a train gives her a chance to show some of the grief and fatigue that she’s had to live with basically her whole life. Then the train flips on its side and the stalker actually comes at her, leading to a moment of panic and a quick escape – but when she gets out? She’s back to normal again, upbeat, making bad jokes and ready to tackle anything. Because that’s how she’s lived her whole life – and this scene is the first time you really understand that.

1. Portal. What the hell – what is going on? The computer is singing? It’s singing to me?! This is the greatest game ending ever!

New Edge Column: Amarcord

My memory is awful. I meet people and can’t remember their names, I hear something on the news and can’t remember the details. Titles of things? Forget about it.

I remember a lot of things about my honeymoon in Italy, but I got to thinking about the computer-reconstructed “memories” in Assassin’s Creed II, and how crisp, clear and perfect they are. And is that fair?

Desmond learns halfway through Assassin’s Creed II that if he spends too much time hooked up to the machine, he won’t stop hallucinating when he gets out. Images from the past get in his head; the real world grows blurry. The “bleeding effect” is the only time the game grasps the nature of memory: it’s flaky, it breaks easily, and it’s subjective. It’s the messy residue of experience, rather than a replica of the experience itself.

That’s this week’s column.

I doubt games can handle “memory” as effectively as say, a novel, because games are experiential. You can make memories of how you played a game, but games themselves can’t represent the blurriness and stupidity of memory. Although, if a game presented a confusing and ambiguous section that felt like a dream? I would play that. If I tried I could probably even remember some examples.

And along those lines, I left in some deliberate mistakes and bad memories in the column. I honestly for a split-second thought that Leonardo da Vinci painted the Sistine Chapel. I had a nagging feeling that I was wrong, but instead of just looking it up and changing my draft, I worked it into the column. Call it a rebellion against the omnipresence of Google. But I’m sure somebody will write me a “why are you so stupid” e-mail someday.

My Dragon Age column b/w But really, what’s so funny about gay elf sex?

So here’s a story about missing the boat. A mini-controversy has erupted around the romantic and sexual content of BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins, and specifically, the fact that you can trigger a sex scene between two male characters. I say “mini-controversy” because the only people who seem offended are the wingnut website World Daily News – who I won’t bother linking to – and the folks at Gawker and Wonkette, who actually weren’t offended so much as they found it hilarious.

But the story did make it as far as the New York Times this Saturday, where Dave Itzkoff wrote it up. Itzkoff knows gaming, and he got the facts of the story right, but I wish he’d given a little more context. For example: if you play the game, this isn’t really a “sex” option; it’s a “romance” option. It takes hours of building up a relationship with a character before it gets to that point. Your child, who shouldn’t be playing the game anyway (dig the “M” rating for “Mature”), will not just stumble into the bisexual elf’s tent and start having sex with him. In fact, if you’re not interested in having gay sex with the elf, you won’t pursue him at all, and you’ll never get close to propositioning him.

The game is also fairly tame. People in Dragon Age do it with their undies on, which looks awkward and not too sexy, especially after Mass Effect, where the sex was very sexy. And there was a girl-on-girl scene in Mass Effect, but that doesn’t seem to bother people because … well, I won’t rehash the double-standard about how gay girls are marketable and gay guys are anathema. I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s fair.

And that’s why I’m glad BioWare included the Zevran relationship. When BioWare introduced romance options in Baldur’s Gate II, they only had budget for a few of them: male characters had three female options, female characters got a Paladin, and that was it. Over the years, BioWare has included more relationships and has also included gay or bisexual characters. I believe there was a gay male relationship available in Jade Empire, but it hasn’t gotten much press, and it also didn’t include a cutscene. (Back in the old days, people would say, “Let us go to the tent!” and that was that.) Mass Effect had a lesbian relationship but not a gay one. And now in Dragon Age, we finally have something for everyone.

And that’s just fair. It’s your game and your experience. If the game is going to have romance, you should be able to choose the romance that you want and the fantasy you choose. I wouldn’t say BioWare has been too cautious ’til now – I think the cost of adding these things may have limited them as much as any conservativism about including gay couples. I’ve never asked them and I can’t really speak to it. But clearly they’re not afraid to handle homosexuality in a mature way, and good for them.

Okay, but back to me again. I pitched a story to a magazine about how awesome it was that Dragon Age had romance options. They rejected it, and I don’t blame them: that’s not as great a hook as, “Oh wow, gay elf sex!” The gay elf sex hook will get people to read your story. At the same time, I don’t blame the NYT for pushing that angle – I just wish the story had spent more time talking about the larger context, or talked about how long BioWare’s been doing this, how much context they set up around it, and how harmless the sex scene really is. Itzkoff brings up the Grand Theft Auto “hot coffee” fiasco, but that was an interactive sex scene – push button for thrust, push again to change positions – which is not the same thing as watching a quick little cartoon of two people rolling around in their underwear.

I did write a story about sex in Dragon Age, however: my column Chasing Alistair talks about how I played the game as a female character, and wound up deciding that the best romance option for my character was Alistair. I thought this seemed a little risky when I wrote it, but the more I look online, the more I see other guys making the same decision. They don’t find themselves “threatened” by romancing a guy in a video game; instead, they think he’s an appealing character, and they want their female protagonist to get to know him better. I’m comfortable enough in my sexuality to write a whole column about how hard it was to get this dude to give it up. And a lot of other gamers are too – no matter how much the mainstream press laughs at our silly gay elf sex.

Boston Music Hackday: Links round-up

Boy, Boston Music Hackday was awesome this weekend. If you’re not familiar with the event, don’t worry – the Hackdays just started this past summer in London, and the Boston Music Hackday was the first in the States. If you’re a coder or an electrical engineer who loves using technology to make, remix, or abuse music, this is your Woodstock.

I’m late to writing about it, so for a real summation I refer you to:

- Jen Nathan’s segment on NHPR’s Word of Mouth, where you can hear the bleeps and bloops yourself

- The write-up by Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin

- The write-up by Echo Nest co-founder/CTO Brian Whitman

And before I talk about my own Hackday experience, here’s a list of cool stuff I discovered this weekend:

- I don’t want to single out one hackday project from all 40 of them, but Paul Lamere’s Wreckommender – which recommends music you won’t like – is hilarious.

- Derek Sivers of CD Baby has a new start-up called MuckWork. You know how bands always have a pile of odd jobs and publicity tasks to get through, and it gets in the way of making music? With MuckWork, you can basically hire a virtual personal assistant for set lengths of time to help you deal. And on the other end, I imagine that artists who aren’t too busy could make some scratch off this. I haven’t tested or evaluated it but I’m intrigued by the idea.

- Okay, so I acknowledge that the days are well past when a critic with a 1,000-word review could be considered our most important tastemaker. More voices and shorter content are driving the popularity and discovery of music. But two new developments are picking up the pace: I spoke with Anthony about the new Twitter charts at Hype Machine, which rank the songs that people link in their tweets. An influential Twitter user could give a major boost to a song simply by throwing it a link, without a single word of description or endorsement. Matthew Ogle from Last.FM also gave the example of a power-user named Babs. Babs and her pals find the year’s best songs and tag them with tags like My Gang 09. She’s a major tastemaker without writing a word.

- The Zed Equals Zee blog by debcha is a fantasic music/tech/pop blog. Read it!

I was there to moderate the Music Discovery panel Saturday night, which was a real pleasure. We had an all-star panel of people in the music recommendation and music discovery business. In order from “we still use humans” to “robots are the future,” they were:

• Amy Schriefer – Product Manager, NPR Music
• Anthony Volodkin – Founder, The Hype Machine
• Lucas Hrabovsky – CTO, Amie Street
• Matthew Ogle – Head of Web Product, Last.fm
• Paul Lamere – Director of Development Community, The Echo Nest

I don’t know what you could ask about music discovery that these panelists couldn’t answer. (And I got some nice props for moderating, which was much appreciated and made my year.) We covered a lot of ground, but one of the first and most interesting questions was: what is music discovery? Sometimes, people set out to discover new sounds and new experiences.

They take chances and push their tolerances for new music. Other times, when people say they want to discover new music, they’re looking for more of what they already love. They want a web site/machine/radio station to tell them that hey, if Queen’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 is their favorite record, why not try Vol. 2. Serving both kinds of listeners, and helping them find the level of risk they can handle, is a major challenge.

But we hit on another theme about music discovery: whether culture and computers are contradictory. We know that our culture helps guide us to liking and making certain types of music. The communities we belong to make certain styles familiar or alien, and strongly influence our listening habits. I always thought that machines would be a way to break out of that – that a machine could identify what we’re hard-wired to like, rather than what we’re taught to understand, and they could pick songs from around the globe and throughout history that will appeal to us on the basis of tempo or timbre, and with almost no understanding of the actual people who made the music or what they were thinking when they created it.

This sets up a dichotomy, and even a conflict, but the panelists Saturday didn’t necessarily buy it. Paul Lamere’s music tech projects all play off our familiarity with and affection for music, instead of just treating it as raw sound applied to our ears. And Anthony Volodkin made a really interesting point, that he considers Hype Machine not just an algorithmically-controlled feed of songs, but a site that creates culture. Between the people who blog this stuff in the first place, and the audience that comes to Hype Machine to vote on it and enjoy it, a computer-driven process has spawned a very human and social community.

These ideas are really exciting me. I may have to work on a follow-up to my last article on music recommenders (from 4+ years ago!).

But while I came for the panel, I also spent Saturday afternoon doing what everyone else was doing – hacking. I’ve been working on a music game since the summer, and I had a few breakthroughs this weekend that are making it more fun. Coding is generally a solitary activity, but working around a couple hundred other people in Microsoft’s swank office was a hell of a lot of fun.

Best Games of the ’00s – or, The Decade of Valve

The Onion AV Club posted our Best 15 Games of the Decade today tar. I contributed to the list, and I thought I’d share my personal list here:

1. Portal
2. Braid
3. Baldur’s Gate II
4. Rock Band 2
5. The Longest Journey
6. Fallout 3
7. Left 4 Dead
8. Burnout Takedown
9. Half-Life 2 (franchise)
10. Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD

I’ll be doing an end-of-the-decade thing for my Edge column as well, but probably from a different angle.

In case you’re tracking bias, you can tell right away I’m not a huge fan of the FPS, RTS, sports, or MMO genres. But I was also surprised that neither my list nor the final slate included many indie titles. I’ve enjoyed a ton of great indies this decade, but somehow, the polished big-team games won out. And part of the blame lies with Valve – who hog my list at #’s 1 (Portal), 7 (Left 4 Dead) and 9 (Half-Life 2).

Time and again, we’ve tried to set up a dichotomy between the big, dumb commercial games that cost millions to build, and the smart, svelte indie titles that represent art, and culture, and original thinking. But Valve proves that’s silly. Every time I read an opinion piece arguing that games should be more adult, or more sophisticated – I think of Valve. As Play Like a Girl points out, every time a commercial game throws an extra-large pair of boobs at you on the pretense that that’s what gamers want to see? Look at Valve.

Valve has proven that you can make adult games with believable characters and a sophisticated atmosphere, that leverage or even create pop culture touchpoints, and still make a commercial game that’s fun to play. They embrace innovation, but they also polish and package it: while I’ve played other indies that were as clever as Portal, none of them had Mike Patton adding a voice or Jonathan Coulton writing the credits theme. And while I’ve talked to a lot of people who build worlds – sometimes voluminous, painfully well-documented worlds with nooks and crannies and lore and texts up the yoohoo – one of the case studies we all keep coming back to is Half-Life 2, which tells you more about its back story with a few clues and some grafitti than a lot of games manage in tens of thousands of words. (Note to BioWare: all those codex entries aren’t doing you much good if nobody bothers to read them.)

I’ve just barely started playing Left 4 Dead 2, so I reserve judgment on whether it lives up to the tradition. (In fact, so far, the daylight thing is bugging me.) But the decision to move it to the south and make four new believable characters – characters who feel real, but still don’t actually get in the way of your telling your own story, bullet by bullet – was a good one.

Braid is the highest-charting indie title on my list and the only that made the cut at the AV Club, but in a way, I think Jonathan Blow has transcended whatever “indie scene” we might be talking about. He’s not a brash new talent: he’s more like gaming’s Brian Eno. “He did it practically all by himself” is no longer necessary as an introduction to his work.

I’m looking forward to more games from Blow. But I also want more games from Valve, and I wish every mainstream game developer was more like them. I wish they were all as sophisticated, as stylish, as smart and as mature. I wish they gave a shit about story and characters to the same extent as Valve, by which I mean, I don’t need to drown in your 100,000-word script; I’m just asking that you get it right. After all, Valve did.

And it even made them some money.

No, wait, listen to this: Sweet Billy Pilgrim

… and their fantastic new video for “Kalypso.”

I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)

Yeah, so.

My Edge Column: Mondo Catch-Up!

A whole month of updates have gone by, and I think the column’s starting to catch on with the readers – more hits, more links, more guest stars, more discussion. Here’s what you have to catch up on, in order of how much I liked ‘em.

Brütal Legend: A Love Story. “Brütal Legend slagged my heart. I was ready for solos that shred, men that shriek, and monsters with teeth where they should have had faces. I was ready to dig the jokes and hate the gameplay. But nobody told me that Brütal Legend’s a love story.”

The Most Boring Game of the Year. Demon’s Souls is addictive and engrossing, and it’ll probably be my number one for the year. So why aren’t we talking about it?

Sonic the Comic. My kid’s fascination with the US Sonic comic leads me to a surprising case study in long-form storytelling and world-building. Also, fun fact: if you call Archie Comics, their on-hold music is The Archies.

The Mecca of Gaming. “John Teti thought I was nuts. He didn’t say it, but I could tell: here I was, a game journo who lived just an hour away from Funspot, and I’d never been there once.”

Let’s Burn Down D.C. Yeah okay, I kind of whiffed this one – it’s more of an “isn’t it interesting … ” piece than a “here’s my argument about why games will/won’t destroy the fabric of the nation” treatise. Also, I filed a piece on controversial content in Modern Warfare 2 even before the “No Russian” scene leaked. But the comments are fun.

There you have it! And a sneak preview for the rest of the month: I’ve got an idea brewing re: Dragon Age, and if you read my piece about the sex in Mass Effect, you’ll have a hint of where I’m going. Also, I’ll do something to mark the end of the decade, and I have an interview with the guys behind the funniest gaming website in the world. So stay tuned.

My first Google Wave Project: The Yo Mama Bot

So I landed an invite to Google Wave last month (thanks to Ed Atwell), and I finally took a stab at using it for something. And boy, this is something that will change the world: it’s a bot that tells, and learns, “Yo Mama” jokes.

Google Wave makes it very easy to make bots in Java or Python. The documentation that I followed includes:

- The App Engine “getting started” guide

- The Google Wave Bots tutorial

After setting up Eclipse and using these guides, I had a simple bot up and running in a couple of hours (and my Java is rusty). The whole project took five hours.

Wave offers sample codes for very simple bots that will pipe up during your Waves. The trick here is that I wanted to save jokes as well as telling them – and idea I picked up from the game Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. This seemed like the real hook: as people across Google Wave interact with the Yo Mama Bot, it’s learning and then dishing out new jokes.

And it was pretty easy to code, using Google’s almost dummy-proof data store feature. Basically you set up the class you want to persist (e.g. Joke), add tags to the properties you’re persisting, let the built-in Data Nucleus thing “enhance” the class, and you’re all good. The App Engine gives you a dashboard where you can see and edit all the saved data, as well as browse logs, look at traffic, and so forth.

That said, although Wave does most of the heavy lifting for me, I also ran into weird bugs. At first, everything my bot said was repeated – like, “Yo mama! Yo mama!” I made plenty my own mistakes, but this turned out to be a Google Wave bug; luckily, it was easy to find a workaround. I also made a small change that was supposed to improve performance and then, somehow during my build, managed to screw up the Joke class so that it wouldn’t persist anymore, which made me go, “WHA?” and led me to the simplest solution, which was just to rename the class and rebuild the whole thing. The “new” class was correctly enhanced and persisted, and the app ran again.

Other hassle here: you still can’t deploy and test the bots locally; you have to do it in Wave. So the bot I was sharing with my close pals kept crashing all day Saturday. Whoops!

But now it’s up and running and I’m pretty pleased with it. I just need to spread the word, to people who actually have Wave access. If you want to give it a whirl:

1. Add “yomama-bot@appspot.com” as a contact.
2. Add it to a wavelet.
3. It’ll say hi. And after that, type in a “Yo mama” joke to get one back, or just say “Oh yeah?” to hear one that it knows.

Don’t run anything too offensive – I record the names. (Google Wave does not, so far as I know, have anonymous users.)

What did I learn from this? One, a lot of “yo mama” jokes. Two, even though this is a simple example – that was fairly simple to build – it’s also powerful. You could run a sophisticated Java app on the app engine, use Google’s data store for your data layer, and really be in business. If you wanted to run a tabletop-esque game session on Wave, you could code any number of very powerful bots to enforce rules, persist characters, deliver content, or really anything you want. Apparently, Wave can also be embedded in other apps, which opens the door to bringing a sophisticated chat-type thing right into your game or app.

And of course, the nice thing about bots in Wave, as opposed to Twitter, is that you can invite them in to specific waves. You only see them when you need them. Gaming on Twitter appears to have stalled because seeing other people’s posts and autoupdates is lethally annoying. But Wave is fertile ground for bots, and I see a lot of potential here.