By Kieron Gillen on January 25th, 2009 at 1:14 pm.
Sunday Morning is a time for slowly making your way across London town whilst carrying very tired friends. Though, I suppose, that was more Saturday Night. Sunday Morning is now Sunday Afternoon, but still – its true purpose remains. That is, compiling a (shorter than usual) list of fine games-related reading from across the week for your entertainment whilst trying to avoid linking to potted histories of last night’s clubbing or in fact any music whatsoever. Go!
- Ian Holdstock mailed me a while back with his paper on “Greek Tragedy And Its Relation To Interactive Media”. Which I enjoyed, and said if he ever put it online, I’d link to it. He did and I have. KOTOR, Portal and (especially) Mirror’s Edge features prominently. And he got an A. RPS Reader Brain-dump for high-marks winnah! All RPS Readers are “A”s in our book.
- Edge do a big ol’ feature on building gaming’s future, with an eye on User-generated content and “indie” development. Jim thinks the observations about publishing-as-restriction are interesting, and comprise an argument against Steam catering wholesale for indie games.
- Point/Counterpoint. Point: Michael Samyn of Tellers of Tales argues eruditely about how achievements open up many new types of videogames, whilst not one they’re currently pursuing. Counterpoint: Only dicks care about achievements.
- Okay – I know if I played pretty much anything from the club I went to last night there’s only go to be whining, no matter what. So, sit down, turn on the computer and find myself thinking, for no reason at all, of Mistakes & Regrets by They Shall Know Us By The Trail of the Dead. I fear there’s always a reason.
Failed.
25/01/2009 at 13:22 Jochen Scheisse says:
Also, the FEAR franchise jumps on the Red Alert weird ad train:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/44751.html
25/01/2009 at 13:23 EyeMessiah says:
Womaniser is tripe but mistakes and regrets is AAA. Although haven’t you linked to it before? I seem to remember commenting that ever inch of hope becomes a world of shame at least once before.
25/01/2009 at 13:24 EyeMessiah says:
Every I should say.
25/01/2009 at 13:24 thefanciestofpants says:
That’s a hell of a band name. Noted.
25/01/2009 at 13:27 EyeMessiah says:
I think its actually “…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead”
25/01/2009 at 13:27 TooNu says:
The telegraph article about gamer druggies and alcoholics is hilarious.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/4323067/Computer-game-players-more-likely-to-drink-ignore-family-and-have-low-self-esteem.html
25/01/2009 at 13:31 Ginger Yellow says:
Freaky. I was going to be at Black Plastic but I had a birthday party to go to.
25/01/2009 at 13:40 EyeMessiah says:
“Prof Walker said that it was still unclear whether playing computer games caused other social problems, or were merely a symptom of them.”
This is the key phrase surely? If you are too stoned to leave your house anyway then what else are you going to do? There is only so much Jeremy Kyle that someone on the edge of a drug induced psychotic break can take. Games a probably a stabilising influence on these people!
25/01/2009 at 13:49 Theory says:
What the fuck? That would be terrible!
How anyone who makes arty games like The Graveyard could even consider slapping gormless achievements like those all over it, let along decide that they’re a good idea, is beyond me.
25/01/2009 at 13:49 l1ddl3monkey says:
@Toonu: So a newspaper study identified that people who like one form of escapism, in this case playing computer games, are also more prone to liking other forms of escapism, such as drink and drugs? Wow – those are some clever scientists.
I presume it was the same scientists who also managed to suss out that the surface of the sun is quite hot.
Glad to see my taxes are still being put to good use.
25/01/2009 at 13:53 Gap Gen says:
Yeah, I disagree with the achievements thing. It could be tastefully done, possibly, but while playing Vegas 2 it annoyed me that every time I shot a bad guy in a slightly interesting way it said “DING! I’M A GAME! YOU’RE NOT REALLY A HIGHLY TRAINED SOLDIER BUT A NERD GETTING POINTS FOR NO REASON!”
25/01/2009 at 14:03 eyemessiah says:
I should really log in to the forums so I can get edit working!
ALSO, the “I suspect its circular” thing is a total cop-out: its just a way of avoiding having to establish clear causation but still imply that their is some kind of dangerous “runaway” effect in play.
Also, why do they keep going on about high scores? Did they base their research on watching King of Kong or did they just poll Space Giraffe players?
Also, as we all know historically gaming has been a marginal hobby indulged in secretly by marginal people. This has changed a bit, but there is bound to still be a bias in the gaming pool toward the maladjusted simply because stigma dies slowly. I suspect the that same “research” (I’ll bet it was one of a million uni-psy-dept surveys) if conducted 20 years hence would struggle to show such a correlation – provided gaming continues to conquer the mainstream.
Also re. the quality of relationships bit, this effect (modest as it is) is partly due to the difficulty in getting SOs to play games, because as I said its still a somewhat stigmatised hobby – and also because many family members did not grow up with gaming. Once that 55% start having children I fully them to spend much more time SOCIALLY playing games with their family. IMHO this will have a positive effect on their relationships, which you can’t say about watching TV, which is one of the few things people still do together.
And at the end of the day, there is nothing interesting about saying “If you spend too much time doing something by your self it will hurt your relationships with other people.” Clearly this isn’t a problem restricted solely to gaming, and in fact they don’t even specify whether or not they found that this is more of a problem for gamers – they just say that too much time spent gaming (by your self presumably) is bad for your social status. Du-uh.
As Monkey points out its kind of tautological to say that people who were marginal anyway are more likely to be attracted to marginal pastimes. The thing that is dangerous about these kind of articles though is that they say one thing, which is obviously and trivially true (NERDS DO NERDY STUFF), but imply another (GAMING RUINS GOOD PEOPLE) which they can’t prove but which kind of piggy backs on the first assertion.
25/01/2009 at 14:06 Gap Gen says:
Yes, watching films & TV socially is interesting, as the act of watching films is intrinsically antisocial. Then again, it’s a shared experience that can be talked about later.
25/01/2009 at 14:11 eyemessiah says:
@Gap Gen: So is gaming. Gaming can be an intrinsically social experience AND you can talk about it later. Gaming wins!
I’m supposed to be cleaning my kitchen right now, which I think is why I am so involved in these comments.
“Researchers now want to test whether the games also cause harm to romantic relationships.”
Even this implies that they established causation for their first set of assertions – even though they admit that they couldn’t. I suspect they won’t be able to do so in their next study either, but luckily that doesn’t matter because their findings will be reported in such a manner that the salacious implications will be emphasised over the logical status of their claims.
25/01/2009 at 14:16 Machina says:
Interesting to note that the author of the gamer study, Prof. Walker, is based at the ‘School of Family Life’ at Brigham Young University (owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Have a look at the Wikipedia page for BYU. It’s terrifying – an ‘honor code’ on behaviour (including, interestingly, alcohol consumption), and even a Statement on Academic Freedom.
25/01/2009 at 14:17 BaconIsGood4You says:
Achievements are the worst thing to happen in design. Ever. A whole industry (art?) is obsessed in adding valueless elements. Good design is paring something down to the bare minimum, it is having a clear and consistent goal and execution. It is not slapping a bunch of random and lazy stuff on top. Ornamentation is death.
Game design needs a Bauhaus.
25/01/2009 at 14:18 qrter says:
No mention of this week’s Steam deal, concerning a RPS favourite?
What, 75% off Mount & Blade, you say?
I wasn’t very enthusiastic about M&B in the demo stages myself, but at that price they certainly got me!
*toothy white smile at camera*
25/01/2009 at 14:18 James G says:
Wow, that Telegraph article was terrible. Part of me is hoping that they are seriously misrepresenting the original study, but the quotes from the researchers make it clear what their motives were. I can’t find the paper in the literature database PubMed, which means that either its unpublished (which means it hasn’t gone through peer review) or its in a journal not indexed by PubMed. As always, the paper fails to provide a reference to the original study. (Seriously guys, a DOI is short enough that it can be added on to the end of even the print article. There is no excuse for not providing proper links in online articles.)
I don’t dispute the possibility of a correlation between some of their measured factors, but to imply a direct causation is lazy at best. I sincerely hope that they also accounted for the gender divide when churning out half those statistics.
25/01/2009 at 14:25 qrter says:
I agree with you as far as lazy achievements (“you finished quest X, here have some points, whatever those mean”) or when achievements break the immersion of the game, making it too gamey if you will (“find all 5000 bags/flags/sacks/caps/laps/taps/raps unconveniently scattered all over the place”).
But there are good achievements – the Little Rocket Man achievement from HL2: Episode 2 comes to mind. That one made me view and play the game in a completely different way, which is a nice thing.
25/01/2009 at 14:27 Lewis says:
Michael’s discussion of achievements was limited by it being his own personal take on them, though. When I pointed him in the direction of ludicrous people who focus more heavily on achievements than what the game is actually trying to say, he came round to my way of thinking a little.
Funnily enough, I’m currently researching for a feature about how achievements are ruining the narrative-driven single-player game. But bizarrely, none of the players I’ve interviewed about it seem to consider it a problem, even though they’re clearly guilty of neglecting the core of the wonderful worlds they’re exploring. I worry that this says more about people’s consideration of the importance of a strong narrative than anything else.
That ‘druggy-gamers’ study is flawed from the ground up. Firstly, you’re interviewing students, so there just is going to be a higher intake of booze and drugs than in most other walks of life. And, y’know, because it’s based on the assumption that games are a cause of this, rather than the fact that smoking weed tends to make you want to do nothing more than sit in a chair and make minimal movements.
D’oh!
25/01/2009 at 14:31 Dinger says:
Well, in all fairness to the BYU study, the reason for the imbalance is, no doubt, mathematical. If one man has 10 wives, that leaves 9 pathetic single males without mates and low-esteem.
Achievements: it’s already been said. Collecting stuff is really dull. The game recognizing that you did something cool, well that’s great. It’s another game with its own set of rules and victory conditions, and if that offends you, why are you playing games anyway? And hey, I don’t mind suggesting cool or silly things to do, especially if you give it a witty or semi-witty name.
Building gaming’s future. There’s a lot to digest in that article, but I’m not entirely sure of the change. Construction sets have been a hallmark of personal computer games since the beginning. Likewise, free software has coexisted with pay stuff, from the start. The notion of “open source” might be relatively new, but “public domain” games aren’t. Consoles have spearheaded the enclosure movement.
The comment about the next generation of consoles is interesting. That’s the real result of the console war: Microsoft released the Xbox in 2001, the Xbox 360 in 2005. The next Xbox? Sony’s been running its Playstations out every six years (1994, 2000, 2006). Will they keep it up?
25/01/2009 at 14:33 M_the_C says:
I believe that achievements could work well in a game, the just haven’t been many good examples of such.
It should be mandatory that they can be turned off (or at least no notifications as Gap Gen’s example pointed out) and they should definitely not be required or give any possible bonus or advantage. What they are good for is encouraging a different style of play. For example, I think the base achievements in TF2 are pretty good, it encourages you to use different classes and do your best to succeed. The class specific ones are not so good, the pyros aren’t too bad but some of the medics were awful, ‘Assist in killing 3 enemies with a single ÜberCharge on a Scout.’?! What possible use is ubercharging a scout? Unless you have already activated it and no-one else is around it’s basically encouraging bad gameplay.
And yes, I also think that QTE is potentially a great addition to gameplay, it’s just that no-one besides Shenmue (and possibly Fahrenheit) has used it in a remotely good way.
25/01/2009 at 14:36 mandrill says:
@Eyemessiah & TooNu: I was going to reply to the Telegraph article with a comment here but it turned into a bit of a ramble. so I posted it on my own blog.
25/01/2009 at 14:44 MetalCircus says:
London is a shithole. Today I was affronted by a crackhead who told me he was going to cut his wrists and kill himself if I didn’t give him a lighter. He’s a bit fucked, then, because I don’t smoke. (a woman next to me gave him one)
I really hate it when people romanticize this city. It’s a shithole. I’ve lived her all my twenty one years and I can’t wait to leave. (thought i’d go off on this tangent on acount of Kierons whispy romantic drunk story which did my head in acctually)
25/01/2009 at 14:49 OAB says:
@James G
Try this link http://www.springerlink.com/content/w487673k5415k142/?p=9429dfa722d54b68adea31677b5b8f6d&pi=5
If that doesn’t work it gives the DOI as 10.1007/s10964-008-9390-8
25/01/2009 at 14:52 AndrewC says:
London is bigger than everywhere else, which means it has more of the best and more of the worst. If you are going to define London by one drug addict then you should feel free to move to the home counties and subscribe to the Daily Mail.
25/01/2009 at 14:52 Nick says:
As tongue in cheek as your counterpoint was (probably)… I pretty much agree with it. False attempts to lengthen game time or pat you on the back for doing something you had to do anyway, pointless to the last and often patronising and irritating.
25/01/2009 at 14:54 Rei Onryou says:
Also, the FEAR franchise jumps on the Red Alert weird ad train:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/44751.html
I’ve pre-ordered the Platinum service already. Hopefully the shipping container will have air holes this time.
25/01/2009 at 15:12 Muzman says:
Achievements are great evidence that games are still at the zoetrope stage of carnival gimickry in their artistic development, (at least as far as the industry proper is concerned, if not the developers).
That article’s glee at their potential is a little scary actually as it points out just how well they fit in with a lot of the hip theory on fun, flow and ‘everything can be a game’.
The next iteration of Windows will probably have them at this rate.
25/01/2009 at 15:15 Dr_demento says:
Dicks do NOT care about achievements. Dicks care about having the largest Gamerscore (or its equivalent). If achievements did not carry over between games, if they had no points value attached, if your achievement status was not visible to anyone else – then they would be better. Achievements per se, though, can be a fantastic idea. I refer you (again) to Crackdown and, yes, The Orange Box amongst others. Done well, they provide a stimulus to try playing the game a different way and thus add longevity and replay value. Done badly, they’re effectively a % completion tool.
Oh, and being able to turn off the notifications would indeed be nice, but that goes for every example of “adding options to a computer game”. I think it should be mandatory for games to allow complete control remapping, even (especially) on consoles, but it’s not going to happen. Alas.
25/01/2009 at 15:39 SuperNashwan says:
On achievements: Blizzard are evolving how they work in WoW by changing them from a simple e-peen score to give in game rewards. Currently they made the raiding content relatively easy so everyone can see it, but then layered that with achievements that are currently the hardest challenge in the game (Sarth +3 drakes).
On one hand that looks cheap, because it costs Blizzard nearly zero development time to implement an achievement like that, BUT it does add genuine content (the 3 drake fight is dramatically harder and tactically challenging) while at the same time less hardcore players get to see all the cool stuff of the basic fight.
If everyone gets to see the cool assets Blizzard create and at the same time progression guilds have tough challenges to keep them going (and soon meaningful rewards), that’s not so bad is it?
25/01/2009 at 15:46 Dean says:
Mount and Blade doesn’t appear to be available on Steam in the UK :(
25/01/2009 at 15:50 M_the_C says:
@Dean
It has temporarily been taken down, probably due to the same problem UT3 had in the Christmas Sale, lack of CD-keys.
Although I don’t think there is any official word on the problem yet.
25/01/2009 at 15:51 AndrewC says:
There’s a good chance they ran out of activation keys and so temporarily withdrew the game.
25/01/2009 at 15:53 AndrewC says:
What he said. Also: achievements! Boo! But a system that invisibly encourages players to approach the game in different and interesting ways! Yay!
25/01/2009 at 16:00 Steelfist says:
”
The telegraph article about gamer druggies and alcoholics is hilarious.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/4323067/Computer-game-players-more-likely-to-drink-ignore-family-and-have-low-self-esteem.html”
Interesting that next to that article is a link to a ‘featured partner’ article about how to use your DS’ memory card better…
25/01/2009 at 16:02 Jason Moyer says:
Achievements are great in score-based, multiplayer, strategy, puzzle, or other styles of games that reward repeated play already. In games that are totally storydriven they’re just annoying.
25/01/2009 at 16:09 Naurgul says:
I was going to read that Greek Tragedy one because… err… I’m Greek myself. But I realised he talked about Plato’s ideas. I’m sorry, but that’s philosophy (even though it’s presented through a dialogue; that’s how philosophy was presented back then) and has little to do with drama, therefore little to do with Greek tragedies (which are a genre of drama, i.e. theatre). Not everything made in Greece during antiquity is the same freaking thing and I hate it when everyone assumes so.
tl;dr – Plato didn’t write tragedies.
PS: Scanning through it I saw that he becomes a bit more on-topic later on but that doesn’t rectify his mistake nor does it make me any more interested to read it.
PPS: Yes, I ranted; sorry about that.
25/01/2009 at 16:32 AndrewC says:
Plato had a lot to say about drama and the role and form of art, on account of being a right mouthy git.
Plus I get the feeling Ian Holdstock had to demonstrate knowledge on a bunch of things in order to satisfy the demands of the course, so forcing him to shoehorn in a bunch of stuff that maybe doesn’t fit together perfectly. Plus word counts always lead to some awkward ellisions.
He’s missing more clarification about what he is lumping together as Greek Tragedy, but that doesn’t undermine his points by itself.
Not that I’m saying I agree with a damn thing he wrote (and his typos are something shocking!), but academic writing is a right bugger at the best of times.
P.S. Never rant.
P.P.S. Never use tl;dr
25/01/2009 at 16:43 sunday evening kobzon says:
I like how achievemrnts mark my progress in games. When i start wandering like a blind kitrten it’s nice to see that i’m doing what designers thought i’d do. Some achievements add a certain potential depth to the game, like crazy Dead Rising achievements about killin a billion zombies. Nice that the game keeps track of such shit. Now off to read that article.
25/01/2009 at 17:08 James G says:
@OAB, Thanks
Well it seems that they do decide to factor in the variation between the sexes, amongst other variables when considering usage. However, that doesn’t excuse the fact that they have pretty much assumed causation in their introduction, referencing a single previous paper in support of this. (I’m outside my area of speciality here, so will end up in unfamiliar territory rather quickly.) Interestingly, they only seem to find some of the corellations in a subset of site (they spread the study over four universities), which suggests local social groups may be having an effect.
As far as I can tell, the survey was conducted online, in a voluntary basis in response to adverts at the end of lectures. This immediately introduces selection biases, and exactly how the study was advertised is going to have an effect here.
They also make reference to the ridiculous finding that placing large numbers of cumputer games is inversely correlated with accademic success. In other words, students who spend less time studying are less sucessful.
Oh:
Indeed.
25/01/2009 at 17:34 eyemessiah says:
Indeed indeed.
RE. “Achievements”
I approach them in the same way I approach XP schemes. Where they are incidental to gameplay I try to ignore them. This kind of works in Planetside because the stuff that earns you XP is often what I would have been doing for fun anyway – it almost solves the “grind” problem by starting with reliably fun standard FPS play instead of trying to polish often dull play by dolling out rewards for persistence ala WOW.
Where they are used for lazy content stratification (WOWCOD4 multiTF2 etc) I get annoyed by them and try to bypass them by cheating if this is possible.
I agree that they should be optional, but I also think XP should be optional.
If I had it my way XP in Planetside would just be an epeen for people who are interested in that kind of thing, and you’d be able to pick a generous selection of certs from day 1 & swap them out without penalty ala Tribes 2. I don’t enjoy being drip-fed.
TF2 is fairly well judged in terms of casual play because the “bonus” weapons aren’t essential, but I’d still rather that everyone had access to them for “free”.
The unlocks in COD4 irritated me and I used a profile hack to open them all up for multiplay before I had even tried the game. I’m glad I did and enjoyed the game all the more for it.
Unless we are talking about progression within a linear narrative I’m not at all interested in games holding stuff back just to lengthen play a bit. In multiplayers unlocks often actually reverse the difficulty curve, with play being easier once you have access to them. IMHO WOW style mmos are guilty of this in terms of the interaction of itemisation and level bracketed PVP.
Even in terms of games like space giraffe I’d prefer it if all the levels were unlocked at the outset.
25/01/2009 at 17:48 faelnor says:
greek tragedies more like geek tragedies lolol
25/01/2009 at 18:05 IanH says:
Looking for it now, I can’t find it, but in one version of that paper there were a few sentences when the cave first came up, defending my including it by suggesting that it contains elements of tragedy in the Aristotelian tradition, like hamartia and anagnorisis which are really what I’m writing about for those first pages. Probably would have been safer to use a trad. play than that parable to introduce the concepts, but I wanted to retain the bits about cave related imagery, which I think are often used deliberately. At some point though, I said something to the effect of, “If you staged The Cave, it would be a tragedy,” and I still hold by that. Also,by that time while writing the paper I didn’t have enough knowlede about enough plays to competently write about them.
@ AndrewC You’re fairly on the mark, although my approach to scholastic efforts is also fairly to blaim. Fifteen page paper due? Oh, but I’m going to turn it in five pages at a time? Which lead to a little bit of inconsistency. For the first four pages, I Ijust had a title to go on, and my high school english teacher reading us the cave bit in the republic and then showing us movies that drew parallels to it, e.g. Star Wars.
25/01/2009 at 18:14 Nick says:
“Blizzard are evolving how they work in WoW by changing them from a simple e-peen score to give in game rewards.”
You mean like how several games already did? Not exactly evolving anything.
25/01/2009 at 18:28 Joe Russell says:
@ Nick
So if an animal evolves legs after another animal has already done so, it’s not evolving? To evolve you don’t have to be the first to do so. I’m just happy Blizzard are still looking at adjusting what is pretty much their core gameplay.
25/01/2009 at 19:18 DrGonzo says:
Well Now I think I may email you the essays I have written on games! Did a few, would love to become a games journalist, wanted to make games but now I’m not so sure.
I don’t know if this makes me a bad person but if someone told me they were into New Romantic Dark Electro Post Punk Disco I may have to hit them. What a ridiculously long and stupid name that gives you no idea what the hell its about! May have to check it out.
25/01/2009 at 20:04 BooleanBob says:
*twitches*
25/01/2009 at 20:21 IanH says:
Ah, so I didn’t do it as well as I thought. I just have, “This parallel illustrates how, while The Cave is not technically a tragedy, it is possessed of elements of tragedy as well as themes that find their way into more archetypal tragedies” which didn’t go as far as it should have in explaining why I was using The Cave (That is, because it is short compared to a full play, and contains elements of tragedy in such a way as to exemplify them perfectly).
Of course, the last three paragraphs are the best of the lot in my
25/01/2009 at 20:47 BooleanBob says:
also, at DrGonzo: By my understanding of music genre terminology (read: arbitrary esoteric dross), it basically just means the Smiths, but with more synth, more fey (c’est possible?), more of a leaning towards dark, untidy nightclubs and less towards those wistful alcoholic afternoons (when you sat, of course, in your room), and yes, more likely to get you punched by small-minded/right-thinking (delete by preference) people should one admit a penchant theretowards.
Also they probably do play the Smiths. Most likely This Charming Man and Panic, as everyone loves the idea of hanging the DJ, poor strawman of the mainstream cultural zeitgeist that he is.
25/01/2009 at 20:54 SuperNashwan says:
You mean like how several games already did? Not exactly evolving anything.
Blizzard are evolving how they work in WoW by changing them from a simple e-peen score to give in game rewards.
*sigh*
25/01/2009 at 20:57 undead dolphin hacker says:
Is bashing Achievements gaming intelligentsia’s newest dick-waving snobbery?
PS: World of Goo sucked.
25/01/2009 at 21:01 john t says:
Yeah, it really seems like you missed the point of The Cave. You mentioned its an allegory, but you didn’t even mention what its an allegory OF.
If you’re going to go with the Cave, you should talk about something like Assassin’s Creed, for example, with multiple layers of reality.
25/01/2009 at 21:05 undead dolphin hacker says:
BUT SERIOUSLY,
To echo Machina’s realization, the Telegraph article Toonu linked does clearly state that Professor Laura Walker, from BRIGHAM (MOTHER-F’ING) YOUNG UNIVERSITY is the study leader.
I don’t know a British parallel, but Brigham Young is a bloody joke here in the states. It’s a puppet “school” for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (read: Mormons) to push their agendas on the secular communities under the guise of education and intellectualism (which the church openly condemns as heathen and dangerous).
So, yeah. Take that article with a grain — make that a boulder — of good ol’ Utah salt.
25/01/2009 at 21:22 dhex says:
“I don’t know a British parallel, but Brigham Young is a bloody joke here in the states.”
that’s a ridiculous assertion.
25/01/2009 at 21:25 El Stevo says:
London is a fucking brilliant place… if you’re rich. I’m not.
If you’re tired of London, you don’t have loads and loads of money.
25/01/2009 at 21:28 qrter says:
For those interested – Mount & Blade is available again through Steam, still a few hours on the weekend deal to go.
25/01/2009 at 21:40 IanH says:
@John T Yes you’re right in that I definitely glossed over the point of the cave – but I didn’t feel it was relevant. Having not played Assassin’s Creed, I may or may not have gone with that, but I liked using Portal, because it’s multiple layers of reality weren’t wholly contained in the game, which says more to the strength of the medium. As in, someone buying Orange Box for Half-Life or Team Fortress might get around to Portal with certain expectations as to what the game was, and then have those expectations subverted in an interesting way so that they are eventually more involved in the game. It’s definitely something movies etc. could do, but rarely ever accomplish because of the nature of their advertising.* I suppose Assassin’s Creed did that as well – I certainly didn’t see the virtual reality thing coming from hearing about the game but, again, having not played it, I can’t speak to its strength. I certainly know I anticipated and began to play Portal on the basis of its being an innovative physics puzzler, and was pleasantly surprised to discover it was much more.
*I mean, in movies, like say werewolf themed movies, it may not be apparent to the characters that it’s a werewolf movie, and I’ve often seen the story structured so that the audience wouldn’t know it was a werewolf film – but they obviously already do. From Dusk Till Dawn (not a werewolf movie) is one of my favorite movies because I started watching it, towards the beginning of the film, not knowing how it ended, and was completely surprised by the second half.
25/01/2009 at 21:42 Radiant says:
I fucking love London.
I was born here, lived in some of the greatest cities in the world but London is my home.
Unfortunately the rest of Britain terrifies me.
It’s scary out in the provinces.
Here, yes, you may run the risk of a good knifing.
But out there, out there lies real horrors.
Yes I’ve spent all day in the pub.
25/01/2009 at 21:42 Radiant says:
Fuck darts too.
25/01/2009 at 22:01 Dreamhacker says:
Hah, everyone knows the heart of Europe is Brussels. Everything else is “out in the provinces”.
;)
25/01/2009 at 22:05 Pags says:
Why on earth would a christmas vegetable be the heart of Europe?
25/01/2009 at 22:08 Nick says:
You can eat the anytime. They are lovely.
25/01/2009 at 22:20 qrter says:
I agree with Nick, they are lovely and I eat them regularly (then again, they’re not a traditional Christmas vegetable outside of the UK, I think).
25/01/2009 at 23:26 eyemessiah says:
They disgust me.
25/01/2009 at 23:32 James G says:
Halve them and saute them up with garlic and a bit of bacon or pancetta, lovely. (Goes well with savoy cabbage and broad beans, lots of black pepper)
Edit: Oh, and London scares the shit out of me. But then again, I grew up in a village, so get unerved by public transport systems that consist of more than two busses a day.
25/01/2009 at 23:37 Dinger says:
Woah. Achievements — you guys are wrong. I just managed to catch some of these statements.
You know what? Tolkein was not a great novelist. He did an excellent job of borrowing from Medieval poetic forms, palaeography, legends and mythology to create a believable fantasy world, and create a whole genre. But his narrative is kinda flat. And, most Tolkein lovers will admit, his narrative isn’t the point. The fascination with the world he spun, and the idea that one could create of whole cloth an entirely different machina mundi spawned first Fantasy Role Playing Games, and then their computer versions.
Computer games are really good at doing many things. They’re good at keeping (complicated) score and dealing with rapid and complex interactions.
They’re also really good at placing the player in a different world machine, be it abstract or realistic, and letting the player figure out the rules and explore the boundaries.
But narrative? Sorry guys, what does narrative have to do with anything? Computer games are far better at exposition. Any “narrative” that designers place into a game is secondary, if not superfluous. Take the classic narrative games made by Infocom, back in the day. In effect, there were two narratives: the story told by the game, and the story experienced by the game player. The first was used to reward the player and make the puzzles bearable. (“Oh, now I know to cast the ‘talk to the animals’ spell at that point…”) They figured it out pretty quickly — that’s why the central moment of Douglas Adams’ Infocom game featured the most improbable and absurd puzzle ever: a master of satiric fiction, Adams seized immediately on the potential of the genre, as well as the absurdities of its conventions.
20 years after the game The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, we still get narrative-heavy games apparently oblivious to absurd conventions. Take the demo for FEAR 2: for the first half of it, the player explores this grade school, and there’s some story to be told (with all the redshirts dying), with the art direction, and the story, the question I asked myself was: “why is this a rails-shooter?” The second half, as I got increasingly powerful ways to slaughter soldiers, I was asking, “What does this have to do with anything?”
There’s always going to be cognitive dissonance between narrative and any sort of game out there. That’s why A Mind Forever Voyaging is for me the best Infocom game written, and even there, the puzzle at the end is tacked on.
Or take Bioshock. Listen to two games journalists hyping Bioshock before its release (or just go to minute 4). The key to Bioshock? All the different ways you can kill people! The most impressive stories the player walks away with aren’t those written to describe Rapture and the failure of an objectivist society, but all the cool effects that have been thrown into this shooter.
So yeah, imposed narrative has greater impact in other artforms. Videogames don’t tell a story to the player; the player experiences it. And if you force the player to experience “what you have to say,” then you’ll find the player’s “understanding” will be something entirely different.
That’s where achievements come in. If you’ve got a narrative-heavy game, or if you consider a game in terms of narrative, of course achievements will not make sense. But the player is not a passive entity interpreting the shadows on the wall — the player casts the biggest shadow.
So too, for the modernist:
. If by “Random and lazy stuff,” you mean “the conventions of the genre,” then I agree with you. But I suspect you’re implying that a properly designed game has one way it should be played, and the design should reinforce that point. Well, I couldn’t disagree more. The game that matters is the game the players play. And inviting players to explore different gaming styles only serves to make the experience richer.
That most achievements are poorly conceived or grindworthy doesn’t matter. Like any other field of human creativity, most games suck. The idea has good applications, though, and it’s not just ornamentation, although many would question your dismissal of ornamentation as well. It does have a function.
26/01/2009 at 00:10 Robin says:
So Samyn is saying that Achievements are an easy way for designers to avoid having to bother with giving the player motivation which is contextual to the rules of their game? And this is supposed to be a good thing?
I find it strange that he thinks that Achievements sit safely in this ignorable meta-layer. Achievements by their very nature impose a ‘correct’ developer-sanctioned interpretation of (all) the interactions available to the player. Even if the player chooses to turn them off and ignore them, the damage is already done as the developer, and the majority of players who *do* participate with the achievements system, will have been influenced by them. Theory has already said (above) what needed to be said about the utterly appalling ‘Graveyard’ example.
I’ve written more on the potential downsides on this insidious trend here.
(While sober.)
And :wub: London, btw. Even when all the trains and buses aren’t working, like tonight.
26/01/2009 at 00:18 DigitalSignalX says:
Only 3 news items for Sunday? A sad papers, despite great music.
26/01/2009 at 01:06 Lunaran says:
I’m watching Brazil tonight. I have only the unreasonably-highest of expectations, despite falling asleep at the end of Time Bandits.
26/01/2009 at 01:18 Gap Gen says:
DigitalSignalX: A 1:1 game-to-music link ratio, indeed.
26/01/2009 at 04:44 qrter says:
Brazil is fantastic. Look, it just is.
26/01/2009 at 06:52 Andrew says:
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead are excellent. Recommended.
26/01/2009 at 12:05 drewski says:
Music: OK.
Brazil: Overrated
Articles: Mildly diverting.
Comments: Pompous rubbish.
I’m here all week.
26/01/2009 at 13:00 Meat Circus says:
Brazil is my favourite film. Anybody who tells you otherwise is probably *not* me.
HTH.
26/01/2009 at 13:14 Cooper says:
Went to Black Plastic’s first night back in June. Which was an immensly grotesque amount of silly fun. Shame I’ve left me ‘ome town for the North – where there’s no where near as much fun to be had in clubs. Or sunlight.
Also, Brazil is a fantastic film.
26/01/2009 at 13:30 AndrewC says:
I don’t like watching Brazil, though the individual bits are great, if only to remember. I have many very reasonable reasons for this, but that’s not as much fun as calling people names.
Munchausen is where the real joy is, though.
26/01/2009 at 13:47 Lewis says:
Dinger: I’m not quite sure whether you’re criticising my hypothesis or not. If so, I’m also not quite sure you fully understand my conception of a ‘strong narrative’, as I absolutely agree with most of what you’re saying about the nature of narrative in videogames. The player is absolutely key to it, and personal exposition and exploration are enormous factors that set videogame storytelling aside from other narrative media.
Maybe we disagree in our definitions of ‘narrative’. Maybe we just play games for different reasons. I play games for much the same reasons as I watch films or read novels: to become immersed in a world that differs considerably from my own. For me, achievements detract from this, and that’s the area I’m looking into. For Michael, I’d have thought this would be true as well. He creates ‘games’ that are more about the exploration of themes than acutal ‘gameplay’ or elements of challenge. How do achievements lend themselves to this? I can’t see that they can, at all.
***
I was intrigued by the Telegraph article, and managed to track down a copy of the article published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. It makes for quite a bland read, to be honest. It’s more an introductory study, and the only real conclusion it draws is that there needs to be more research conducted in the area before we can really make any strong judgements. Prof. Walker is very aware that the cause/effect argument is a dangerous one to play with. A couple of excerpts from the conclusion:
“The findings highlight that the forms of leisure activities young people engage in are related to healthy, or in many cases unhealthy, development. Indeed, in having greater autonomy as they make the transition to adulthood, young people’s choices regarding their leisure activities may have particularly significant ramifications for their well-being both during this period of their lives, and into adulthood. Taken together, the possible implications of this study underscore the need to view the topics of video game and internet use as more than just areas of interest to pop culture, but as areas deserving of scholarly attention in helping us understand the overall health and development of young people as they transition to adulthood.”
“Despite the contributions of this study, it is not without limitations. Foremost, the correlational nature of the data precludes causal inferences. While our discussion of the findings often took a causal tone, it was done simply to present possible interpretations and to underscore the need for future work to examine these possibilities… the findings from this study are exploratory and modest in magnitude. Hence, there needs to be caution against overstating the impact of video games and internet use on the development of young people based on the current findings.”
In any case, the study itself is rather flawed, and not particularly analytical to any meaningful degree. It’s heavily statistical, and attempts to show plenty of correlations, but it doesn’t really go as far as to show whether these correlations are valid or meaningful, and certainly doesn’t come close to proving a causative effect. All it really shows is that people who play lots of videogames tend to have smaller friendship groups, that there’s little effect on destructive behaviour for women, and that regular male players of videogames also showed a very slight tendency to smoke cannabis and drink alcohol more than those who didn’t play many videogames. Does this prove or even suggest anything? Hardly. It’s very simplistic preliminary research, and nothing more. The Telegraph, ridiculously, tries to treat it as significant, despite regular claims by the researcher that it is not.
“”The most striking part is that everything we found clustered around video game use is negative,” said Prof Laura Walker, from Brigham Young University, in Utah, who led the study.”
Which is bizarre, since nowhere in the article does she make this claim. And even if she had, the focus of the study is on the link between risk behaviours and videogames. So OF COURSE you’re only going to get negative results.
Pah. Completely, utterly worthless for anything other than a starting point for proper, well-devised research that hasn’t happened yet.
26/01/2009 at 13:47 Lewis says:
Woah, fucked up HTML tagging there. Apologies.
26/01/2009 at 16:28 Dinger says:
Lewis: This a comments thread; I’m disagreeing with everyone. If I understand you, you find achievements an extradiegetic distraction that’s imposed with the ruthlessness of convention regardless of whether it benefits the particular style of game. You could say the same thing about a numeric score (which, back in the day, even the Infocom games had).
I don’t particularly object to that, nor to the notion that, like scores, many games don’t need them, and for anyone to require achievements is rather shortsighted (“Ok, then let’s make an achievement for completing the tutorial, and an achievement for each level of the game completed”).
My point was that, when a game’s design and achievements reach the level of dissonance that achievements favor ways of gameplay counter to the rules the game purports to lay out, the problem isn’t achievements, but the game design itself, which was flawed in being narrative-heavy to the disrespect of the player’s experience.
“Achievements” cover a wide range of phenomena. Long before they got the name, people were doing timed runs, or playing through Doom using only the chainsaw. All those minigames in the so-called “sandbox” games as best inaugurated with GTA III (more properly called “theme-park games,” if you ask me, and you didn’t) are based around the same notion as achievements. And I see these things, loaded with minigames and stupid puzzles along with annoying conventions such as randomly spawning bad guys matched to your skill level, and then they try to “tell a story” in there. Huh? In that model (The Elder Scrolls Series, GTA, Bioshock, WoW, and so on) advancing the narrative is just another achievement: an artificial reward for doing something according to the developer’s plan.
Yeah, BYU center for family and morality, again, that’s all you need to know.
26/01/2009 at 16:31 yhancik says:
@Dinger :
I second almost everything you said
@Robin :
I don’t see how achievements (as a concept, not in their possibly terrible contemporary implementations) “impose a ‘correct’ developer-sanctioned interpretation of (all) the interactions available to the player”.
How do they influence our interactions more than the “gameplay” ?
For example, in most games, you’ll find enemies attacking you on sight. It means that my only interaction with those characters will be to kill them or escape.
For example, add achievements to Hitman, like Killed Absolutely Everybody, Walked Out Dressed as the Victim, Visited 10 Every Crime Scene’s Toilets, Executed the Contract Only with the Piano Wire (etc etc etc etc), it doesn’t impose you anything, you can still play as you want.
But makes it an “every NPC will try to kill you and launch the alarm” game like Splinter Cell, and you force the player to kill those NPCs or hide from them, period.
My point is that the gameplay‘s influence on how we interact with the game is faaaaaaaaar more important than optional achievements.
Now I agree that there’s a lot of work to do on those achievements and how to implement them in games. You can’t have a funny pop-up in every games. You shouldn’t have a list of unlockable achievements in a lot of games. And above all, it was a terrible idea to link “achievements” to “points”.
I think “achievements” (the name is terrible to start with) should tell about “how you play”, no “how badass you are”.
26/01/2009 at 16:34 yhancik says:
Ah, Dinger’s reply wasn’t there when I was writing one.
>> the problem isn’t achievements, but the game design itself, which was flawed in being narrative-heavy to the disrespect of the player’s experience.
Yes !!
26/01/2009 at 16:41 Kieron Gillen says:
Brazil is officially installed in RPS’ hall of awesome.
KG
26/01/2009 at 16:45 qrter says:
That film works in bits but doesn’t flow well as a whole. That said, it’s one of my personal favourites, the stories are wonderful and it all looks incredible etc.
26/01/2009 at 17:02 chesh says:
That club had me at Warm Leatherette, really.
However, that Tale of Tales page. Blinding. Argh.
26/01/2009 at 19:11 EyeMessiah says:
The “chase” sequence 3/4 of the way through brazil is a bit weak but its worth sitting through for the superb ending.
26/01/2009 at 19:54 solipsistnation says:
“A NEW ROMANTIC DARK ELECTRO POST-PUNK DISCO?”
Why would that cause whining? That sounds like big piles of win. Also my iTunes library.
26/01/2009 at 19:56 solipsistnation says:
editing posts seems to do something strange
26/01/2009 at 20:06 yhancik says:
I guess this is the darkest side of Achievements : http://kotaku.com/5139250/nolan-bushnell-bets-on-gamewager…
All I can say is : O_o
27/01/2009 at 20:28 Andrew F says:
Perhaps for the next night they’ll have to specify that when they say they play New Romantic Dark Electro Post Punk Disco, they don’t mean all at the same time. Though that would obviously be brilliant. Actually, I’m pretty sure it happens somewhere on Britney’s album before last…