Archive for November 2008
Games are Software
There’s been a blog debate brewing the past week about Mirror’s Edge, and exactly what’s wrong with it – or what’s wrong with our critiques of it. Did we shortsell its innovation? Are we missing its true design flaws? On Twitter, Brinstar and Mitch Krpata have both called the game “frustrating” – but it sounds like Brinstar really likes the game, and while I find it frustrating, I keep coming back to it as well. If I had to sum it up in one pithy phrase, I’d say that its core problem is that it looks like Rock Band 2 but plays like Mega Man 9; you want to settle in and enjoy the thrill, but imagine if Rock Band stopped the song every single time you hit a bum note.
But the other day, I said something less pithy: that this first version of the game was merely okay, but the sequel would be better. Keith Stuart anticipated this very argument, by asking if we would ever say something like that to, say, a film director. More than just a cop-out, it’s an argument against games as art, and we all want to say that games are art.
But you know what? Games are also software.
I come from a software background, as well as an artsy-fartsy one. I want to see games as art, but they’re also supposed to work as logically-constructed bodies of code. And in a lot of cases, reviewers need to see them as software rather than as art. Here’s why:
Sequels are not bad. In movies, sequels are usually a sign that the bankers are taking advantage of the artists. But movies don’t have to invent a new studio, lighting system, camera, and style of acting every time they’re made. Games often benefit from sequels. Noone remembers the first GTA, the first Ultima, or the first Burnout as fondly as the later ones.
Games can be patched. Critics have to start considering more and more that games will be fixed after release and ultimately, upgraded or expanded upon. To an arts reviewer, and even to a lot of games reviewers, this seems very fishy. Should you cut some slack to a buggy, short or unsatsifying game on the off-chance that it’ll get better with the next content release? If a good game like Far Cry 2 or Fable II has DLC on the radar, does that bump it even higher? My hunch is that while you shouldn’t err too positively, you should see the game as something of a platform that may or may not be worth building upon. I might cut Fallout 3 slack for a couple of its brazenly stupid but easily fixed bugs, and at the same time, feel eager to see how they expand it, whereas Fracture could get all the DLC in the world – and I’ll still hate the game.
Playtesting is crucial. I don’t know how much playtesting Mirror’s Edge received, or how much time they were given to act on what they learned. But I suspect it got a lot less than Portal. That game’s learning curve was paced pretty perfectly, and there were no cheap shots or headbangers that I can remember – whereas Mirror’s Edge has a number of them. Now, in movies, focus groups still carry some stigma (even though they’ve helped more of our favorite movies than we care to admit). But in games, as with software, we know that usability testing is crucial, because a team of developers cannot anticipate all the ways the players will behave. And to take it a step farther: think of all the data that Valve collects on its players after their games ship. What does that data inform? The sequels. And the patches …
(And btw, musicians effectively “playtest” their music in concert again and again. I feel like this is turning into an argument of why games are not like movies – and I knew that already.)
Not everything in the game is worth evaluating. This seems obvious yet it’s the one thing critics grapple with the most, because everyone draws a different line in the sand. We often hear that every element of a work of art should be integral to the whole. For example, in a poem or a short story, every single word should matter. We cut novels, movies and pieces of music a little more slack. But in a game, whole elements of the work could be considered features that are optional to the player.
A piece of software should have a vision – not visions, but a single vision that unifies the feature set and defines the audience it’s targeting and the user experiences it hopes to create. But once you’ve mapped that out (if you have), not every feature is equally important. Microsoft Word has a vision of giving users a powerful way to create text documents. You can argue that Word fulfills that vision even if you hate the word count tool, or even the spellchecker.
Game by game, we have trouble deciding what matters. Should bad sound design really cripple the grade? Did the graphics matter that much? Were the three redundant chapters at the end so boring that we should dock it some points for wasting our time? That’s all for us to wrestle with – just as the critics who liked Mirror’s Edge for its innovation, but hated its combat, might have their own opinions on how that turns into a final score.
But I definitely believe that games deserve more slack on this front than any work of art. They are not a unified experience. They are pieces of software with rich feature sets.
Games don’t pose arguments, they present systems with which to interact. See Ian Bogost on procedural rhetoric. Again, we know that games usually don’t have one single meaning that is transmitted equally to every player. But every time we tackle a game with strong and prominent themes, like Fable II’s exploration of morality, or Fallout 3’s portrayal of the many ways that people reorganize themselves after a nation-ending cataclysm, we risk looking for linear arguments when the game is offering a loaded scenario. See also Jonathan Blow’s discussion of the thought behind Braid, and what differentiates it from, say, a piece of writing.
… So that’s a starting list. It doesn’t even get into the obvious stuff, like the fact that not everybody has a PC that can run Crysis, or that people with regular TVs have a hard time reading type on PS 3 games (like me).
So here’s one case where I wish I had personally followed these recommendations: Spore. I reviewed it and also blogged about it, at length, trying to work through all the things that I thought worked and failed in the game. But after 10-15 hours with it, I didn’t get a full assessment of what was right or wrong with it. I would need to approach it the way I would evaluate a piece of software – and try to end up with a 10-15 page document that tries to assess the vision the game was trying to fulfill, the critical success factors that would execute that vision, and all the ways that it did or didn’t live up to them. If I had the time, I would love to do this kind of mega-critique with Spore, or even with Mirror’s Edge, which would be much simpler.
After all, it’s easy to write a favorable review – really, an appreciation – of a game that fires on all cylinders. But if we could dissect exactly what works and what doesn’t work about games like those two, it would probably be more edifying.
Games of the Year
So I’ve survived the fall game deluge. Everything’s on the table. It’s time to start making a list.
I’ve fallen behind on music – I can’t name ten albums that I love enough to put on a list. (Max Tundra will be #1.) Movies? Forget about it, I don’t ever, ever watch movies anymore. Or TV really. But games? I’m pretty on top of games right now.
Here’s my list today. I reserve the right to update it (and will note when I do).
(Update: having trouble remembering what games came out this year? Ask Matthew Gallant – he listed ‘em all here.)
GAME OF THE YEAR: Fallout 3. A game about the American dream; and game about looking for bullets in every single tin can you come across.
I’m listing the next games by category or distinction, but also in order of bestness.
2. BEST INDIE: Braid. For the puzzle where you and your Robert Frost twin have to get the key across the fire pit.
3. BEST RPG: The World Ends With You. “Any tree can drop an apple. I’ll drop the freakin’ moon.”
4. BEST KID’S ALL-AGES GAME: Professor Layton and the Curious Village
5. BEST SEQUEL/UPGRADE: Rock Band 2. Just an upgrade, but the one-person band mode, no-fail and drum trainer made a big difference to me and to my three-year-old. And that Paramore song is really good!
6. BEST CO-OP: Left 4 Dead
7. BEST PUNK GAME: No More Heroes
8. BEST BROWSER-BASED GAME: ForumWarz
9. BEST POPCORN GAME: Gears of War 2
10. BEST LIFE SIM: Fable II
And then games that I just really liked:
FAVORITE GAME THAT SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE AGAIN AND AGAIN: N+
FAVORITE ART GAME: Randy Balma Municipal Abortionist
FAVORITE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: Mirror’s Edge
FAVORITE ONE-HOUR SPAZ-OUT: Noitu Love 2: Devolution
FAVORITE ARG: PixelVixen707
FAVORITE RTS: Multiwinia
FAVORITE IN-GAME MUSIC: Grand Theft Auto IV
And …
GAMES I THOUGHT WOULD BE ON THIS LIST: Little Big Planet. Spore.
What did you like? What did you hate? What did I miss?
(Updates so far: Added Left4Dead (!), Multiwinia, Randy Balma. Bumped L4D up, Fable II down.)
Work Links
If I’ve been bad at blogging before, you can count on it getting worse after a week like this. It’s been a total roller coaster, and to top it off, I spent most of my gaming time playing … Legendary. Review for that is forthcoming. Don’t hold your breath. (Update: Enjoy!)
Here’s what I’ve been up to:
Interview with Felicia Day (AV Club). She’s scary smart and was really interesting to interview. This felt more like a Charlie Rose sitdown than a fanboy screed. Naturally, the all-male commenters were brain-meltingly vile. I had to apologize to her when I sent her the clip – not ’cause she’s some naif who’s never been catcalled on the Internet, but because I felt it reflected poorly on me. It’s like if you invite a girl to your apartment, and you walk in, and your roommates are all playing with themselves. And they don’t stop.
Interview with Max Tundra (Resident Advisor). Fun and fascinating interview with the maker of my album of year, Parallax Error Beheads You. This is far and away the most beautiful layout I’ve ever gotten on a web article.
Callers, Fortune (Pitchfork). This is a really good listen.
Preview of the Portsmouth Comic Book Show (Wire NH). Cover story previewing this Sunday’s comic book show, with quotes and context for a bunch of the local creators who’ll attend. I spoke with a lot of really cool people for this article, and hope to keep covering their work.
And oh yeah, buy The Pitchfork 500.
The Pitchfork 500 – In Stores … Now?
“For all of the crap shoveled on Pitchfork, they really nailed this.” – Mike Barthel
River Run in Portsmouth just stocked their copies of The Pitchfork 500, so now I finally have a copy. It looks really great. I’ll admit I started by reading all my own stuff again, and now I’m going to read it straight through.
Reaction so far has been good. People acknowledge the snarky reputation of Pitchfork, and then they seem to go on to talk about how surprisingly thoughtful and interesting the book was. Some reaction so far (I’ll update this as we go):
The Tri-City Herald Atomictown Blog
The Onion AV Club (as part of an Inventory)
As of this morning it ranks 1,017 at Amazon. UPDATE: Wednesday afternoon – #221. Speechless.
Fallout 3: The American Dream
My new review of Fallout 3 just went live at Variety. Editor Ben Fritz gave me a lot of help with this one, and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. One subject he helped me flesh out, and about which there’s more to say, is the way the game plays off American ’50s imagery, the early nuclear era/Cold War patriotism and paranoia, and all the various tribes and archetypes that are scattered around the game.
Reading the other reviews, I was actually disappointed to see that almost nobody paid attention to any of that stuff. Most of the reviews I’ve read focus on the gameplay, the RPG stuff, the V.A.T.S., and all the other mechanical stuff. The realistic environment and the political themes seem to be treated as background texture. Certainly if you’ve been playing meaningless pieces of shit like Fracture, which pick up controversies like stem cell research and do nothing with them, you could get in the habit of thinking that this stuff is just windowdressing. But Fallout 3 comes off as such a smart, thoughtful game that I thought more of the reviews would call attention to it. (Though maybe the afteraction reports filling the better gaming blogs will make up for that.)
To read more though, check out thus Slashdot post that links to recent stories about the advertising controversy and Bethesda’s location scouting.
More food for thought: what if the first man out of the Vault was Homer Simpson?
