You know that I live in Australia.

If you have a promotion from which you’ve decided you will exclude Australians, would you mind not telling me about it? Would you mind not sending me an email offering me all these “benefits” that you’re planning to block me from enjoying? Would you mind not suggesting that I participate in “Xbox LIVE Rewards” given that when I spend the time hunting down a password and signing in to your service, you will then tell me “Unfortunately, residents of your area are not eligible to participate in Xbox LIVE Rewards”.

So why the bloody hell did you send me an email taunting me with them?

In summary, get stuffed.

Yours sincerely,

Jeremy.

And playing Minecraft. Oh dear…

Anyway, for those of you with good taste enough to enjoy Digital: A Love Story – there’s another (equally unique) game out by the talented author. It’s a fascinating concept, once again using online interaction as a component in the story.

Yes, it's an anime.

In this case, the game is called Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Aint Your Story (jeeze it feels weird capitalising that). It’s set in a high school in 2027, and you’re the home room teacher for a rabble of year 11 kids. The twist is that in this future, social networking has engulfed the world even more. Every kid has a tablet PC, and social networking in a sort of facebook-wall/twitter type system happens everywhere – almost like the classes have their own hashtags. (They already do at many universities, but this is high school – so it’s much more of a Soap Opera)

Anyway, check it out – I will be. Full thoughts will follow once I’ve finished the game.

We want to ensure the best possible gaming experience for our users and there is the possibility that Nintendo 3DS software sold in one region will not function properly when running on Nintendo 3DS hardware sold in another.

Is it just me but does the second part of that sentence completely contradict the first? You’re going to “ensure the best possible gaming experience” for me by making my software not work? Uh, what?

If Nintendo was looking for a driver of piracy, something that would push ordinarily law-abiding consumers to dabble with the dark side of the industry, it couldn’t have gone much better than region-coding – a system that sometimes makes it impossible to obtain certain titles lawfully, and encourages regional price-gouging.

Welcome back to 2000.

Hell, we even did our most recent podcast on just that, regardless of just how cliched a subject it is. I guess it’s an organisation thing. People like making lists – be they shopping lists, lists of girls you’d secretly like to bed or lists of what booze you need to get from the bottle-o next time you sober up enough to drive up there.

So, I decided I’d make up a list to ring in the new year. The real trick was just what to make a list of. For ages, I was playing with the idea of listing something like, say, “The top five video resolutions used in video games on the iPhone platform between January 2010 and December 2010″, but then I realised it was the most boring idea in the whole world.

This idea came about when I was browsing the recent new year steam sales. So many bizarre, cheaply-made simulation titles were on the list! Simulations of things that make submarine simulators or flight simulators look as mainstream as shooter-garbage like Halo.

Thusly, I bring you the second most boring list of 2011 so far:

SIMFAILURE: The Top Five Most Bizarre or Obscure Simulation Titles of 2010

Number Five: FARMING SIMULATOR 2011

I want to take my virtual-thresher out for a spin tomorrow. Who's up for it?

I suppose it makes some kind of sense that a farming simulator would happen. I mean, lots of people I know – even those who these days prefer hugely mainstream titles – hold a soft spot in their heart for Maxis’ underrated and addictive farming game, SimFarm.

Add to that the way FarmVille and other examples of awful ‘social games’ have taken the inherent joy of tending to crops and turned it into a hugely success market despite jettisoning anything which could resemble actual gameplay… and something like this is kind of inevitable. It may have been years since SimFarm, but somebody had to give it another whack.

What’s surprising about Farming Simulator 2011 is manyfold: firstly, that the game has almost no management or financial aspects to speak of beyond the very rudimentary… secondly, that it’s actually a sequel to something… and finally… that there’s DLC for it.

Yes, that’s right – enough people wanted to simulate such “classic” pieces of farm equipment as the Deutz-Fahr AgroPlus 77 tractor and the Krone Comprima V180 automatic round-baler that you can actually download an expansion pack, containing such exciting hardware as the Pöttinger Eurohit 130A 10-rotor rake and (if that’s not enough for you) the Pöttinger Top 1252C 4-rotor rake. Are you excited yet?

I know I am.

Number Four: WORLD OF SUBWAYS VOLUME 2 – BERLIN

More tunnels! More exciting stations! More timetables! Whoopee!

We now enter the realm of the train simulator. Not a popular genre to develop for until recently, it was probably the emergence of both Microsoft Train Simulator and Auran Trainz in 2001 that brought the genre to public attention in English-speaking countries. Before this, most train simulators were Japanese, and never released here.

Despite neither simulation doing particularly well (Microsoft canned plans for a sequel and Auran went under in almost every definition of the term after half a decade of development on Trainz and its sequels) both have kept a strong fanbase, eagerly paying money for addons of all sorts – new routes, engines, rolling stock and even physical controllers simulating the layout of a Dash-9 locomotive. *cough* Iownthis *cough*

To me, this makes some sense. A huge number of young children have memories of watching big trains rattle by, hoping their waving would attract the attention of the driver so he’d deafen them with the horn on the lead engine – and who doesn’t love at least the idea of playing with train sets?

The exciting part of the trip - a bridge instead of a tunnel!

Few of us have the space, time and devotion to actually build an expensive to build and maintain train layout, which meant that games like Trainz were inevitable. But there’s a huge difference between carefully modelling steam trains dramatically puffing through the English countryside… and dank little subways trains screeching from underground platform to underground platform, with nothing to stare at but pipes, walls and rats.

The game isn’t bad. It’s actually quite enjoyable for a train simmer like myself, despite its bugs. You even spend some of your time above ground, staring at the rather card-board cut-out graphics, and you spend the rest of the time trying to imagine where you are.

But still – what a niche concept! A game for the fraction of the train sim community who think electric trains covered with graffiti going through tight tunnels and stopping every 2 minutes is pretty cool.

Number Three: RIG ‘N ROLL

Ahh, the glamorous life of a trucker.

In a lot of ways, Rig ‘n Roll is probably the most conventional title on this list, in that it’s effectively a racing sim merged with a business sim. Rig ‘n Roll is yet another example of a sequel to a sequel to a sequel in a franchise nobody’s ever heard of. It probably doesn’t help that it doesn’t have the same title as its predecessors – the earlier ones were titled Hard Truck.

So yes, this is a trucking sim. On a scale sample of the roads throughout California (a VERY small scale version of them – this is no World War 2 Online) you get to drive your beat-up rig from city to city, taking loads for money to pay for fuel, decals and eventual replacements to your truck itself.

The challenge in the sim is certainly quite different to most racing games, especially with some of the arbitrary time constraints that sometime get added. Cars are one thing in a simulator – but a semi-trailer which takes forever to slow down and has a turning circle the size of Western Australia certainly makes those tight corners as you descend into a valley or climb a mountain extra-tricky.

Add the finance end of this sim, and really, it’s probably the one on this list with the widest appeal.

Number Two: DIVE TO THE TITANIC

James Cameron would be proud

Ah, submarine simulations. Stalking the depths of the Atlantic during World War 2, trying to line up the perfect shot on an Allied convoy without giving away your position. That’s where it’s at. Or perhaps, the cold war? Sneaking up behind ballistic missile submarines, plotting a solution without letting the old clunker and her attack submarine escort realise just how outclassed they really are.

That’s a submarine simulation, right? Well sure, the military kind. But watch out! Now we have the sub sim equivalent of games like Virtual Skipper 5 and Ship Simulator: Extremes.

In Dive To The Titanic, you get to pilot small submersibles down to the ocean floor, to inspect the rusty hulking remains of one of the greatest acts of hubris of the 20th century – the RMS Lusitania. No, wait… Titanic. I got confused. Sorry.

(Side-note: did you know that the RMS in RMS Titanic stands for Royal Mail Ship? True story. It happened to a friend of a friend of mine)

The game does boast one thing quite unique to the titles on this list, I’ll admit – a surprisingly epic trailer that almost makes you want to give it a whirl.

Which brings us, finally, to…

Number One: CITY BUS SIMULATOR 2010

Video Game Character of the Year, 2010: CARLOS, PROFESSIONAL BUS DRIVER!

Now, the more astute of you will have noticed that these seem to largely be German-made games, as given away by the broken English at the web sites and the prevalence of German words in the screen-shots. Some of you may have even made the second observation to be made here: that three of these are made by the same studio – a mob called TML.

Now, I’d love to have given a wider cross-section of developers a look-in on this list, but the simple fact is that TML studios have managed to produce such a huge cross-section of “sure to fail” simulation ideas that I couldn’t, in good conscience knock stuff off the list just because of its developer – especially when they’re such beautiful works of art.

And so, the third TML game on our list wins the grand prise – and the title of the single most obscure & bizarre simulation title of the last little while. CITY BUS SIMULATOR 2010.

Just think of the excitement you feel as a passenger on a bus trip across town. No, really. From stop to stop, bump to bump – and then, it happens! A red light! You stop.

Then the green light starts and you’re off again, trundling like a granny with a zimmer-frame through packed traffic until you finally get to the next stop, where the bus will open its doors to let on and off a grab-bag of the city’s great unwashed masses.

Don't take too long, or you might be late... in CITY BUS SIMULATOR 2010.

Does this excite you? Then perhaps you will enjoy CITY BUS SIMULATOR 2010, which simulates not zero, but ONE bus route – the M42 route along the famous 42nd Street of New York City! You can slip into the shoes of CARLOS, PROFESSIONAL BUS DRIVER and DRIVE A BUS, PROFESSIONALLY.

“But wait!” I hear you say, “Can’t I do that in Grand Theft Auto IV? Or Saints Row 2?”

“Sure,” I reply. “But that’s not very realistic. Don’t you want buses that can only travel at or slightly under the speed limit? And without the many side-streets that are accessible to real bus drivers?”

Okay, so fine, it’s a bit dry. And you may be able to fall through the floor in random places due to horrific engine bugs. I managed to enjoy myself in the game by making a mini-game of finding differen

Do you know how to lower a bus using its gas-lift system? You'll need to, in CITY BUS SIMULATOR 2010.

t ways to make Carlos vanish through the floor – yes, you can walk around outside your bus (or inside it) in CITY BUS SIMULATOR 2010 – the game that has it all.

When you’re done driving the M42 route, you may – just may – get a little tired. So what then? Sure, you could invent little mini-games, like trying to clip through objects as bizarrely as possible or counting the number of texture errors as you race (well, hobble) through New York City, but even is only so entertaining. So what next?

Fear not! Available now, from the web site of the game itself, is a ROUTE EDITOR, so you can drive the same bus along many different routes of your own devising. Perhaps you could add another stop to the 42nd Street route! Or maybe take one away!

The choice is yours… in CITY BUS SIMULATOR 2010.

But who cares about bugs or extra features? You get to slip into the shoes of CARLOS, PROFESSIONAL BUS DRIVER… and that’s enough for me.

Episode 07:
“2010 Wrapup”

Jeremy and I were discussing our favourite games of the last year, and things that sucked about the year in gaming. (Namely: most of the games released during it) So, rather than simply have this discussion on our own, we decided to record it and release it, in the name of hubris and ego, just like all the cool kids.

Also, because it’d been a bloody long time between podcasts (I’m the guilty party – I was side-tracked with a few more film projects).

The games we discuss include:

• Mass Effect 2
• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
• Just Cause 2
• Red Dead Redemption
• Minecraft
• Digital: A Love Story

Also: apologies for the audio quality. As this was an unplanned podcast, I didn’t have my proper audio kit available at the time.

(I strongly suggest you play both games in question. Each one is 5 minutes long, both can be played in a browser and both are highly recommended. They are Every Day The Same Dream and One Chance.)

Every morning, the same breakfast.

Paolo Pedercini created Every Day The Same Dream in 2009. In it, players assume the role of an unnamed man created out of simple 2D polygons. He is faceless, lacks any definition, and exists in a world just as bleak and despondent as he is. The player only has a few simple buttons to control him – the arrow keys move him (left and right only) and space bar interacts. You awaken in your bedroom and must make your way out of the apartment, down the escalator, into your car, to work, to your desk, and must press space bar to begin your working day.

Always moving right - in the grammar of videogame design being mutilated to make a point.

The game is structured towards the most logical movement always leading you towards the expected and traditional goal: a day’s work. Players have been accustomed to having to progress by moving to the right of the screen in two dimensional games since the 70s, and a typical player wouldn’t think twice about setting about this goal with gusto. Additionally, when they finally reach their cubicle, they’ve been walking monotonously for up to 3-4 minutes with very little happening, so they’re just aching to reach their goal and won’t think to walk past their desk and see what else is available.

Until, that is, they find that sitting at their desk and commencing work cuts straight back to the bedroom, alarm clock blaring and the routine beginning anew.

Disregarding logical gameplay movements yields other 'options'.

At this point, players must think logically about what else they can do. They have to test the boundaries of the game world to see what else is available. They *know* there must be something more to this game than simply travelling to work repeatedly; why else would someone make it? Thus begins the comment Pedercini is trying to make about life itself. You must do the unexpected things, search the corners which are entirely searchable yet in which most don’t think to look, in order to find out what more there is to life than routine work.

The game employs a world which is stark, black and white, and so static it makes the single brown leaf on a tree outside your office, slowly flapping in the breeze the greatest friend your player has. The game specifically uses familiarity to cause anxiety.

If the bedroom looks similar, it is. My keen senses can see through the addition of colour.

The second game, arguably somewhat derivative of Every Day The Same Dream, is another flash game from 2010 called One Chance, by Awkward Silence Games. It attempts to use the exact opposite strategy of having its game-world change on each of the five passes. Much like Every Day The Same Dream, the player operates a simple left and right 2D game mechanic and is only able to interact using the space bar, and the player must also navigate the same rather plain game-world with no sense of challenge five full times before the game ends.

On each pass, the world in One Chance is one day closer to its end. The protagonist is a scientist (straight white male scientist) who has created a cancer cure which has been unleashed onto the public and unexpectedly eradicates all living cells, rather than just cancerous ones. As such, this incredible wonder drug is killing the entire planet slowly.

The player choice makes the difference in One Choice. Work at the lab or a day in the park with your daughter?

Using this typical technophobic plotline, the game can change its landscape each day to represent a slowly more decaying world. Fruit falls off trees, grass turns brown, the wife and child of our hero seem less and less caring about life, and the journey to work is progressively more riddled with evidence of rioting. Where the game differs is in its explicit ability to choose. Rather than the cunning use of railroading the player in a certain direction as with Every Day The Same Dream, One Chance instead makes the player choices obvious, and asks them to exercise their own judgment. Do they go to work, knowing that they only have a few days left with their family, or do they go to work anyhow on the off chance that maybe their co-workers are wrong and there is indeed a cure? Do they indulge in the pleasures of the crush at work or remain faithful to their wife? These decisions each result in the end of the ‘day’ being played, and the game resets and the bed, ready for the player to see what the world looks like today and be given another choice.

In spite of the achievements of One Chance being slightly less artistically masterful than Every Day The Same Dream (although both have spectacular music), we can learn more from it about a problem with modern game design which seems to be plaguing most open-worlds in particular: change.

Sunsets in Red Dead Redemption: a majestic and gorgeous example of temporal illusion.

The space race of size, graphical prowess and weapon-counts in videogames has not come to an end. We still see 2009’s Borderlands from Gearbox Software boasting it’s 16 million weapons (no I’m not kidding), 2010’s Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar San Diego creating a dumbfoundingly large play environment with every nook and cranny hand-crafted, and of course these large worlds are getting more and more beautiful with each new blockbuster to hit the market.

What these massive games could learn from One Chance and its ilk is the power of change. It takes little more than a simple alteration of the location of a family member, an apple having dropped from a tree, a co-worker in a different place or even a slightly longer beard on a character to imbue One Chance’s world with the sense that it is changing, growing and evolving, and little more than a few yes-or-no decisions to make the player feel like that chance is at their behest. As such, there is an excitement to it which larger open-worlds do not match.

The most convincingly 'alive' social worlds in videogames to date. Red Dead Redemption's short-term action/reaction dynamics are not to be beat.

It’s a matter of scale. Red Dead Redemption’s game world was the most interactive yet in an action open-world game. Boxes could be smashed, dynamite exploded, citizens would run and scream in panic, the time of day changes with the weather beautifully, and posses would take the law into their own hands well after a player commits a crime, giving the illusion of a self-interacting and changing world the player cannot see. It is, however, merely illusion.

Bully dramatically changes as the seasons go on. It only uses a few small cues, however.

Rockstar Vancouver’s 2006 title Bully (named Canis Canem Edit in Australia) created change on a larger scale. The game took place over the course of one year, and the seasons changed to match in between chapters. During these seasonal changes, characters the player had come to know would be seen wearing different clothing, and would all have unique things to say about the weather, their attitudes towards the protagonist Jimmy Hopkins would alter, and Jimmy would be spoken to in increasingly familiar tones as the year went on. These minute changes made the player feel that their existence in a predominantly static world was active, vibrant and changing, even within the realm of a fixed narrative.

The town in Deadwood: perhaps the only television program to demonstrate true change.

Red Dead Redemption was a Western game, and as such it fit squarely into a genre which was specifically about an era of rapid change. The characters in the game, the themes it tackled and the ending in particular, all spoke very plainly about the trajectory of American modernity; about the death of the frontier and the birth of bureaucracy. Such a period of change warrants a game capable of clearly demonstrating it.

A medium which has interactivity as its greatest strength should not be satisfied with a static world, especially when attempting to represent a period of change.

As such, open-world games have something in common with the two above flash games. In both cases, the player has to traverse the same environment often and repeatedly. But, what good is it to familiarise a player with a section of an open-world only to have them move on to the next section and render the original area redundant? If a player doesn’t return (or worse, returns and sees nothing new or different) to a certain area every again, the game is wasting valuable familiarity. When you have familiarity and acquaintance, you have an emotional attachment. A player seeing struggling towns they’d fallen in love with several years (in the game’s narrative timeline) later existing exactly as it was destroys suspension of disbelief and reminds people that true change in an open-world is such a monumental task that it still hasn’t been attempted, even by the largest and most competent of open-world designers.

This is by no means a fault in the game design, simply a limitation of the number of hours of labour which would be required to create the subtle changes I yearn for to make an open world feel alive.

So the constructive part of this article is this: larger open-world game developers should consider the power of a temporal world, one which changes with the player and around them. The change could come from the player’s doing (eg. the demolition of one of the downtown cranes in 2009’s The Ballad of Gay Tony from Rockstar North), or could happen without their involvement to reduce their perceived power and create a feeling of tension.

A world which changes around a player is a daunting experience, and one which hasn’t had its potential even remotely tapped yet.

This article is cross-posted both here and on Leigh’s blog. The original article can be found here.

Hover-Hitler VS Chaingun. Now that's a story with depth.

After this (doubtlessly familiar) process, I went into the bathroom to scrub a day’s worth of coder/gamer-scunge off myself in the shower, and began to think about it some more. Sure, the image is funny, if ever-so-slightly inaccurate, but there’s more to it than just map design.

There has been a major paradigm shift in first-person shooter development since the days when I played Doom and Quake at LAN parties next to piles of empty coke cans so large as to make you think of something out of greek myths. Buzz-words aside, they are different. Almost different enough, I think, as to more or less be an entirely separate genre.

Sure, the mechanics are roughly the same, right? You move around with the W, A, S & D keys, moving your mouse to tilt your head and clicking to blow away monsters. Well, I’m beginning to suspect that’s actually where the similarities end.

Back in the early days, from Wolf3D to Doom to Quake, story was less important than the architectural design of the levels and the challenge of the combination of monsters & puzzles. Were you a capable enough player to rocket or grenade-jump over a ledge to push a button, or did you have to go the long way around, slaughtering a dozen creatures and spending half your ammo?

Difficulty-levels were important back then. So much so that Quake built a shrine to them.

The skill of circle-strafing around a shambler, hitting grunts at extreme range with a rifle or timing your way through jumping puzzles was the point of the game – not to find out who was behind the dastardly events in chapter one. Stories were told in other genres – adventure games or role-playing epics, but the FPS was for people who wanted to truly hone their gaming skills to perfection.

This was epitomised during the Quake era by the prominence of speed-runs, starting with the seminal piece of machinima, ‘Quake Done Quick‘. Try to finish different levels in the fastest time possible, using whatever means you can without actively hacking or modifying the original game in any way.

It was around this time that shooters started coming out with less of an emphasis on maps, puzzles and skill and more on a linear progression through scripted sequences – by the time Quake3 came out, single-player in the traditional, campaign sense was completely ditched.

For a while this was fine – story and immersion in an environment was driven by titles like Half-life and Call of Duty, while the hardcore shooter players stuck to pure-deathmatch titles like the Unreal Tournament series. Over time, these series’ petered out in popularity, and these days the most common online games are Counter-strike inspired games like Call of Duty multiplayer, or team-based tactics experiences like Left 4 Dead.

Despite being hugely immersive experiences, the Call of Duty games provide little challenge for a seasoned FPS veteran.

This isn’t really a criticism – I enjoy COD multiplayer immensely and have sunk at least as many hours into that series over the years as I have into the original Quake, and Left 4 Dead is a legitimate and unique gaming experience in its own right.

But there is still something missing – where once shooters were a sport, and the act of exploring levels or refining your monster-killing abilities was the whole point, now the majority are spectacle-shooters, and there’s a trade-off to this. When a game is all about the experience and the story, repeating aspects of it frequently become hugely frustrating for the majority of gamers.

I used to enjoy (indeed, still do enjoy) re-playing the same few levels in Doom or Quake numerous times, until I had perfected my ability to pass them on any skill level. When you are going through what amounts to a series of tunnels between cut-scenes, having to re-play something becomes frustrating. So much so that I’ve actually began to notice my chosen ‘skill setting’ slipping. Not because I cannot finish a game on hard, but because I do not want to.

To hear the same dialogue from NPCs more than once is jarring – to have to storm the same building 20 times, a chore. When Call of Duty 2 came out, I was playing on hard on my PC. By Call of Duty 4, on regular, and from my couch so I get the film-like 10-foot experience instead of the more personal 2-foot experience. Now, picking up the latest action spectacle, I play on easy. Just so I can deal with the experience, like a movie, slide it back into my subconscious and get on with my life. I don’t want to die in-game any more. After all, you don’t need to die in a call of duty game to have ‘near-death experiences’ plugged into the cut-scenes for you like chapter-stops.

The "real" world invaded shooters, and we found ourselves in places that, more and more, looked familiar.

They are not games so much as ‘interactive’ versions of films in a way that the much-maligned CD-based interactive movies of the mid-’90s wished they could be, and to a degree, I think this change was only natural. There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, as technology made our games look better, we went from relying on gamers’ imaginations to make the square blocks in Wolf3D seem like buildings deep within The Third Reich to creating small sections of street  and space stations.

We reached a point where game level design hit an ‘uncanny valley’ – where it looked so real that it was no longer natural to try and awkwardly kludge in the kind of mazes and puzzles we were used to in shooters. In Duke3D, we knew that games could not reasonably model whole cities in 3D space, so we were accepting of magically-blocked-off streets and buildings with only half their floors actually modelled.

The second reason is that we had spent so long with the technical limitations of our computers that tiny, twisty little passages were the norm. So the moment we started being able to show large, open landscapes – from our first voxel-based baby-steps with Delta Force to sprawling sections of countryside in Far Cry – it became the must-have feature of the game.

Once we got over that and began to close back down, nobody wanted to go back to literal tunnel-shooters (see Doom 3 for an example of what happens when true old-school was brought back to us) and so a happy mid-ground had to be found.

This mid-ground is what we’re stuck with now. The illusion of distance and scope without any actual freedom – because if you encouraged precision, puzzle-solving and mazes in a world where what blocks you are invisible walls, you just might drive the player insane. We’re at a place where most shooters are spectacle shooters, and most ‘sport’ shooters are either niche open-source projects with few players or extreme (but failed) attempts at multiplayer-only shooters, like The Club.

For people who miss more old-school designs of shooter, what is there to look forward to?

Personally, I still cling to hope. The future of shooters like your father used to play lies, I think, with indie developers. In the same way that stylised graphics have made games like Limbo, Minecraft and Spelunky possible, I think the idea of actually building brand new shooters with an old-school feel – be it with pixel-art, black-and-white or some other method, is now completely viable.

As an experiment, I’m going to do that. Here are some scores, by Australian gaming sites.

Firstly, of Halo 3:

• IGN: 4.5
• GameArena: 4
• Gamespot: 4.5

And now, Heavy Rain:

• Gamespot: 3.5
• GameArena: 0
• AusGamers: 4.4

How about Assassin’s Creed?

• IGN: 2.7
• GameArena: 3.5
• Gamespot: 4.0

And finally, Kane & Lynch 2…

• Gamespot: 1.5
• IGN: 2
• PalGN: 2.5
• GameArena: 0

Does it really make anything easier to get at a glance?

What sort of game scoring system do you prefer? Thumbs up? Out of five stars? Out of ten? Percentile? Out of a thousand? Or none at all?

Do they affect your decision to purchase a game? And, more importantly, do you ever skim review scores after clicking a link to a review, but then fail to read the actual review itself?

Playing angles for cheap scares in Alone in the Dark 2.

What triggers these angle-changes, however, is the player. Maybe it’s moving toward the edge of the screen that triggers it. Or, maybe, hitting the ‘view’ button in a more typical game. So the idea of the art of editing actually existing within a game – especially a first-person game where your perspective is constant and entirely player-controlled – doesn’t seem like a big deal.

But really, when you consider that the pace of a game is so heavily controlled by the player in a video game, it makes the managing of pace not just more difficult – but much, much more important. Let’s take a look at the most common way of dealing with pace…

The Half-life series seems like a funny example, but it’s actually a good one. Gameplay in Half-life is almost completely uninterrupted by cuts of any sort. There are, by design, no moments where the player loses control (sort of). I say sort of because there are certainly bits where you’re constrained inside various objects or rooms, stuck watching something occur. This helps give you the illusion of control, even though it’s a perfectly linear game which is barely more complicated than a ‘rail shooter’, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

You could spend hours staring at these two jokers if you wanted to. Now that's pacing!

Despite being a bit extreme in this way, the game does what most video games do – it lets you slow down the pace of your gaming as you like to explore the little details. If you’re scared by a head-crab sequence and take your time around the corner, you’re setting your own speed, and your experience is going to be wildly different from some guy at a party, playing half-drunk, who runs around the corner blasting without taking any time to really experience any feelings other than adrenaline.

More conventional shooters will have clearly defined levels, and in the middle of these levels will be the odd scripted sequence where you temporarily lose control of your character. Good examples here are the typical “shell explodes nearby, comrade gives you a hand up” trick from early Medal of Honor and Call of Duty games.

So, the ‘editing’ here from a game development perspective is really about deciding when to break up the gameplay, and how to pace the levels.

Two recent games have stuck in my mind as great examples of pacing / editing failure, but in completely different ways. The first to fail in this way was Mafia 2. The majority of games in an open or “sandbox” world tend to be based around the emergent gameplay that occurs when you let a player loose in a functioning game world – regardless of the effort spent on the story in, say, the last few GTA games, Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption, it is most likely that the things the bulk of players will think about when they reminisce about their experiences with these games will involve these ‘found experiences’, not so much things that happened in cut scenes.

Beautiful city. Pity it's so dead for something we spend hours upon boring hours in...

Mafia 2′s major problem is that it presents very little interactivity in the world – nothing to give you these emergent experiences. This doesn’t, however, make it ‘live or die by its story’, like some folks have said. This introduces an element of frustration for the players who, even if they are gripped by its weak story, are forced to endure hugely long drives through a world which feels less ‘alive’ than we are now, as sand-box gamers, used to.

What’s this got to do with editing? Well, this is an example of the almost complete lack of it. There are a few instances where we’re teleported to the next month, year, or what-not, but for the most part we are forced to endure the most mundane parts of Vito’s life, without enjoying any of the guilty pleasures that his gangster-life has.

There are some situations where ‘editing’, both of story and of gameplay, would have helped immensely, and Mafia 2 needed both. It’s hard not to leave Mafia 2 with the feeling that throttling back the time spent in each section of Vito’s life would have brought more out of the story. This is certainly a case where less would have been more.

A player could spend hours exploring Black Mesa’s every corner, if he or she wanted to, but the option was always there not to. If your gaming style is more like a Michael Bay film than a Paul Thomas Anderson one, then you can craft that experience for yourself – just not out of Mafia 2.

In stark contrast to this, we get to the latest evolution of Call of Duty – the Treyarch-developed Black Ops. Where Mafia 2 needed to at least let us give up and hire a cab for the last leg of that fifteen-minute drive, Black Ops continues the trend of each Call of Duty game being faster and more frantic, both in terms of its gameplay and its plot.

Are first-person shooters the best way to adapt techno-thrillers?

The series began with a fairly realistic plot, but slowly moved from the realm of games that feel like ‘war movies’ of the sort John Wayne would star in, to techno-thrillers of the sort you’d buy at the airport before a long-haul red-eye flight from one side of the globe to the other.

The original Modern Warfare began in a believable setting, but slipped into Tom Clancy territory with a story that involved a nuclear detonation, undercover operatives, stolen nuclear weapon codes and a chase scene right out of a James Bond film.

Next up in narrative terms, we got Modern Warfare 2, which took this techno-thriller feel and ran it all the way into Michael Bay territory, with frantic gunfight after frantic gunfight. The story was so absurd that anybody expecting a semi-serious war story was bound to be moaning and groaning with each new plot development.

Finally, we reach Black Ops, a pseudo-sequel which merges the Modern Warfare universe with the World at War one. In this fascinating universe where one or two men single-handedly won World War 2 due to their remarkable ability to be shot at by dozens of MG-42s on full auto without being hit once, we find their attempt to make a thriller sort of like what would happen if an idiot had written The Manchurian Candidate.

In Black Ops, we have a grab bag of everything anyone who was vaguely awake during history class would associate with the 1960s. The Space Race, nukes, Kennedy’s assassination, Robert McNamara, brainwashing, communists, people trying to kill castro, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Vietnam. None of these subjects are treated seriously, and all of them are there for a very brief period of time, just enough to say, “Hey! Look at us! We wiki’d the ’60s and threw it all into a blender!”

BIFF! SOCK! WHAM!

But really, we’re past the point of taking these plots seriously, so complaining about the absurdity of them doesn’t really serve a purpose. The big problem with Black Ops, and the reason it’s mentioned here, is the pacing.

Where a well-crafted game will either have a very seriously controlled pace from sequence to sequence within the story, and where Mafia 2 is a sprawling mess of nothing intercut with a plot, Black Ops’ uses its Manchurian Candidate-inspired story to let them cut into ‘memories’ whenever they get interesting (read as: violent) and out of them again when they’re about to get interesting (read as: understandable).

It’s as if somebody saw the Assassin’s Creed series’ use of memories and realised it’d be a perfect way to make the series even faster, less understandable and even more directly marketed at fourteen year old boys who grew up glued to shows like 24 and huge-budget hollywood action films.

In Black Ops, missions are intercut with headache-inducing flashes of numbers and images related to our protagonist’s obvious mental conditioning. Add to this that the missions themselves are frequently cut short – sometimes mid-firefight – for our interrogator to slam us into a different memory, with a tenuous logical connection at best. We spend very little time in each fragment of the story. So much so, in fact, that it becomes so difficult to follow the details it’s hard not to wonder if they used this method to simply hide plot holes big enough to drive a creatively dead video game franchise through.

When you pick up an action game you do expect action, so it may seem a bit silly to complain that the game is ‘too’ fast-paced or too relentless in its action, but pacing this action out with moments of tension is what makes a good action film great – or a good video game great.

An example would be this: in Black Ops, the game opens with a sequence where you are in Cuba, preparing to assassinate Fidel Castro. After meeting in a bar, Castro’s police turn up and you quickly find yourself in a firefight. You fight your way from the bar to his mansion, do some more shooting, and then, after seemingly killing your target, you do some more fighting for good measure. Crash to opening credits. Welcome to Black Ops: a fighting game, with guns.

A better way to pace a cold-open for a video game like this might be the same way a film would. Perhaps your kill is done with a sniper rifle, and you open with the tension of the player preparing to snipe the Cuban dictator. You can still have it devolve into a firefight, but only after a minute or two of tenseness, staring down the barrel of your scope and preparing to take the kill-shot on a man whom you know, historically, did not die.

Editing is different in video games to any other media. Either you force ‘cuts’ on the player and he feels that he’s being dragged through a story in the same way he would be through a TV or Film (but without the production values or quality writing) or you risk going too far the other way and boring the player.

There’s a definite art to pacing video game stories, and we can see it being done both with hard-cuts more akin to traditional ‘edit-points’ or chapter-stops, or by simply allowing the player to decide on (or at least moderate) their own pace.

There has frequently been a tension in videogames which lacks proper definition, and renders criticism vague and at times unfulfilling. There are many moments when the action is intense, frightening, complex, difficult or exhilarating and the button-presses just don’t quite match. I’ll term this interconnectedness ‘gameplay weight’, and want to give a few examples of how it’s been done right, how it’s been done appallingly, and why and how it’s changing.

Doodle Jump for iPhone: a perfect example of how seriously people take modern exponentiontial challenge-based games.

This concept didn’t require as much examination in the 80s and early 90s. Games were still for the hardcore, so gameplay being exhaustingly nerve-wracking the whole way through was common. Other games started slow and the gameplay just scaled up and up and up until you were finally defeated. No matter what your skill level, this game would always find the level of intensity in gameplay which matched your skill and push you just that little bit further. These games still exist today in the form of Doodle Jump, Lumines, Geometry Wars and many others, but they’re now considered small distractions, providing short bursts of excitement in contrast to the awesome scope and power of the big ‘AAA’ blockbusters.

Gameplay began to slow down and become more considered as cinematic prowess in games grew stronger. The advent of 3D, increased potential for emotional investment in characters, and the ability to imbue games with genuine fear brought about the ability for developers to consider a drop in the pace of gameplay where story was taking the fore. This phenomenon has left room for gameplay which just doesn’t belong with the action in one way or another as developers continue to explore this new world of cinematics clashing with gameplay. After all, games require established rules. A certain button-press must do a certain thing or the whole concept of ‘play’ falls apart (which can sometimes be a nice trick developers play, but that’s another story). However, repetition of animations or movements is hardly compelling cinema. So how do developers tackle this tension of establishing rules with unique results every time?

Press X to win! Scaling unfathomable heights can sometimes be mind-numbingly easy.

Assassin’s Creed from Ubisoft Montreal demonstrated revolutionary climbing mechanics at the E3 games convention in Los Angeles in 2007. The gameplay video which turned heads showed all four limbs on a digital character reaching for different climbable objects on the sides of buildings, and crowds were awe-struck as Ubisoft proudly proclaimed that the game recognised any nook, ridge or wedge in a wall. In a world where gamers were used to testing the climbability of a wall by jumping at it a few times like a dog trying to get out of a pool, the idea of a properly agile character was tantalising.

The intuition of the character to land such incredible jumps robs them of their spectacle.

When the game released, it disappointed in a few key areas (most of which were addressed successfully in Assassin’s Creed II), the most notable of which spawned a meme. All the climbing in the game was realised by holding down a couple of buttons. The character made all these intricate and complex feats of agility with so little input from the player as to render the excitement limited. The revolutionary climbing ‘mechanics’ were merely revolutionary climbing ‘animations’. Ubisoft Montreal had shown a revolutionary use of 3D animation and pathfinding, but lacked the stroke of genius on the gameplay side of things to back it up. Even the spectacular jumps between rooftops were automatic, rendering the reward of a successfully timed press of the jump-button moot. These things were not all bad (in fact they opened successful play of the game up to a skill-level of gamer which would otherwise never be able to tackle such a complicated 3D environment) but the hardcore out there (which most game reviewers are) cried ‘Press X to Win’ from the rooftops (at least in game – game reviewers can’t climb rooftops in real life), lamenting the lack of difficulty the climbing provided.

1997 - This was about par for quality in gameworlds. Hardly up to scratch for conveying emotion and telling stories.

The humble cut scene in games (scenes usually based around cinematic sequences where the player has no control) became huge in the late 90s, and has persevered through until today. Inside a game-world, animations were still too clunky and facial movements still too subtle (or sometimes too atrociously overdone) for story and gameplay to co-exist. Aside from in-game voiceovers, the main driver of plot was always in the cut scenes. As technology allowed stories to be told without the need to cut to pre-rendered videos in between levels, stories started to be told at all times during player-controlled gameplay. This brought about a new problem: how do you tell a convincing, emotionally affecting story while someone is busy repeatedly jumping in vain at a wall which looks like it should be climbable? Any impact your narrative may have will surely be mitigated by the borderline-retarded behaviour players exhibit when testing nearby boundaries.

The solution, so far, has eluded us. But there have been a few valiant attempts to infuse gameplay and cut scene, which I’ll list here. And each one has brought about some interesting developments in gameplay weight:

The same button press recreates this identical scene every single time in God of War: Chains of Olympus.

God Of War: ‘Quicktime events’ are events where the player is suddenly asked to break from typical gameplay, forget the usual controls and just prompted to suddenly mash a particular button, swing a thumbstick in a particular direction, or press a button within a certain fraction of a second. God of War popularised the notion of incorporating quicktime events into gameplay; each finishing move for larger enemies had intervals where the player was required to engage with a simple button press or two to keep the action moving. Failure to complete the assigned task would trigger an alternative animation where the hero Kratos fails his next act of derring-do and is thrown to the ground. The player must run back in and attack the creature again.

Holy crap, you're on the HEAD OF A GOD!! Surely such a spectacle will have incredible gameplay to match!! Or just pressing square.

This meant that the player would go from frantically mashing eleven buttons-per-second in the middle of combat to triggering these finishing moves and entering a ‘safe zone’ for a few seconds; they knew they had a brief reprieve where they could just watch the first awesome stab or two at Monster A’s throat before the first quicktime event demanded their attention. This unusual rift in gameplay weight made the most intense sequences the least interesting in terms of gameplay. The reward for combining a few of Kratos’ signature moves to make a takedown of a particular enemy look exceptionally cool was gone. Every single time you killed a particular type of enemy, the end-result was always the same animation. And worse still, that good ole’ vocal hardcore out there didn’t feel like the quicktime events were an accurate measure of their skill, and were so frustrated by failing one of these sequences that many called for their removal.

A fine example of how to drive a cinematic sequence using gameplay in Uncharted 2.

Uncharted 2 Among Thieves: This exceptional contemporary action title by Naughty Dog contains great examples of how to use gameplay during cinematic action sequences, and how to do it right. In the grand finale, the hero Nathan Drake (voiced by Nolan North OMG!!!! <<sarcastic) is running along a bridge at full speed, escaping from a temple on a mountainside which is collapsing at breakneck speed. In Sonic the Hedgehog (all of them) as well as countless other games, the quintessential escape-after-beating-the-baddie sequence to mark the ending moment of a game is a simple cut scene. Sometimes it’s done so brilliantly it brings a tear to the eye (Shadow of the Colossus), and infusing the moment with gameplay would lose vital aesthetic appreciation of the spectacle. Uncharted 2 knew better. It was an unashamed Indiana Jones-style adventure, and wasn’t pushing for high art. It had an awesome action set-piece on its hands, and gave the player full control to capitalise.

During Uncharted 2‘s escape sequence, running was a simple hold of a button, but you had to manually aim each jump between unstable bridge fragments, and death was the result if you failed. A God of War game here may have been content with a scripted animation where the player continued to pass quicktime events to ensure a successful next jump, but Uncharted 2’s manual control made this one of the most tense and memorable moments of the game, following on from a similar sequence in Bungie’s 2001 effort Halo: Combat Evolved. In both cases, it didn’t ruin the story if the player failed the sequence several times over (and it was difficult enough that the player could expect a few missteps). It is this difficulty which makes the player sit up, re-focus and pay attention at crucial moments. Who wants to relax during the explosive finale after a huge boss battle anyway?

Heavy Rain utilised quick time events to great effect when driving its action sequences.

Heavy Rain: In 2005, Quantic Dream created a game called Farenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), where they recognised the potential of quicktime events and decided to base an incredible cinematic experience entirely around them. During social, slow-paced scenes the player could control the focal character, but generally this was at little more than jogging speed. When the action kicked off, the player had upwards of 20-30 quicktime events to pass to see their hero narrowly avoid certain death.

Flash forward to 2010, and Quantic Dream had expanded on this concept with Heavy Rain, a serial killer thriller where the drama is propelled, again, by a series of quicktime events. This game perfectly demonstrates a consciousness of where gameplay weight counts. By using incredibly simple quicktime events to fuel the action, adjusting the speed of the demands and the tension to very specifically match the on-screen drama and excitement was easy, and Quantic Dream have demonstrated a keen understanding of tone needing to match ferocity of button-pressing for the truly exhilarating rush an action sequence deserves…

Exhilerating stuff. Actually moving your controller like it says is positively exhausting as well.

…while on the other hand completely failing to realise that during a player’s down time, when their character is brushing their teeth, NO ONE wants to actually shake their motion-sensitive controller in time to the toothbrush – ESPECIALLY not when failing to move the thumbstick means you have to start brushing your teeth all over again. Seriously, has anyone here ever accidentally flicked their toothbrush out of their mouth and re-applied the toothpaste to start again? Ridiculous. A wag of my finger to Quantic Dream – and yet, a tip of my hat for their attention to gameplay weight during action scenes. This developer hasn’t hit its stride yet. It has the potential to do great things though.

In Bully, the simple 'mash X' quick time event was used effectively during struggles such as this.

So there are many other examples of gameplay weight being done well or poorly and having it making or breaking a game I’m sure. There is definitely room for quicktime events in gaming. After all, that moment in so many action games where the burly enemy has you in a hold and you need to mash X repeatedly to represent strength and push him off is a tried and tested formula present in everything from Ninja Gaiden to Bully. Some of these concepts run the full gamut of action gaming, others like brushing your teeth in Heavy Rain we hope to never see again. Then again, Sony have just had Quantic Dream allow Playstation Move functionality (the motion sensitive controllers). I may just have to pick up Heavy Rain again and see if the change in gestures from wiggling a thumbstick have made a positive difference.

Stay tuned for my next rant about gaming, where I’ll be talking about modes of transportation in open spaces. The usual open-world mainstays will be on trial as well as Halo: Combat Evolved and a few other interesting ones.