Supple Think: October 2007

Bad End

by Tupperwarez

Posted on Thursday, October 25, 2007
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Lately, I've been thinking of games that end on a downer. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was what really got the ball rolling, leading me to another replay of The Dark Eye. This is an adventure game from the perspective of a man slowly losing his sanity. Each nightmare scenario that plays out is based on certain Edgar Allan Poe stories, seen once through the eyes of the victim, and again through the eyes of the victimizer. Which means that in one go through you'll be Montresor, walling in Fortunato as he begs for mercy, and again as Fortunato, whimpering as you helplessly watch your tomb being sealed.

And that jolly romp lead to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, featuring a cast of characters with deep psychological flaws being tormented by malevolent supercomputer with a burning hatred for humanity. The object of each scenario is to confront the fact that your character is a horrible person and attempt to redeem them. But thanks to the supercomputer's machinations, the closest thing to winning is to 'lose well,' to die at the exact moment you reclaim your humanity.

So you could say I rode the express train to Bleaksville by the end. Pretty invigorating, really. Encountering a game that isn't obligated to make you feel comfortable or shower you with praise is a breath of fresh air. Granted, there is a whiff of grave dirt and misery, but the change is welcome. I mean, since day one games have operated on stringing the player along with treats like high scores, plot exposition, and the venerable bright lights and loud noises. This usually makes the player feel like they're King Bigdick the Badass.

"Well of course, you gin-soaked cretin," you would say. "That's the point of a game: rewards and escapism! No one wants to play a game that punishes and upsets them! They'd rather hammer nails into their urethra!" And you'd be right. Hell, some of my favorite games involve the screen exploding into multi-colored eye-rape (i.e., shoot-'em ups and modern puzzle games).

Goodness knows it's a scheme has worked for years. But there seem to be signs that game makers are starting to chafe at the idea that games necessarily have to be a series of pats on the back. They've all heard that horrible 'A' word and want to make 'interactive experiences' now, and they're wising up to how limited the "Great job for intersecting your vectors with that polygonal solid!" setup is.

I think horror games set off in the right direction, in the sense that they delight in messing with the player's emotions. Good horror games don't have any qualms about fucking with your head. Those good old fashioned gut reactions make for great gaming experiences. However, you'll notice that all the manipulation and mind games are still reined in by the classic setup. You complete a goal, you get a treat, in this case the treat is usually a carefully rationed bit of exposition.

But what element is being reined in, exactly? Shit, I don't know. A wave of games like I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Downer games. Anti-rewards. Games that are less concerned with giving you an audio-visual hand job, and more concerned with getting a response out of you, good or bad. I've seen the good side of it a lot, but where the hell has the bad gone? A downer ending doesn't always have to mean that the player failed. Look at the proper endings for Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts: Covenant.

I do think that we're getting closer to that point where we can start dealing with uncomfortable subjects with some subtlety. Right now the craft is still a bumbling infant, a toddler at best. There's ham fisted gore, pseudo-intellectualism, 'freedom of choice' that is anything but, puerile attitudes to women and sex, it's a laundry list of failures big and small. The thing is though, is that they're getting better with each experiment. A few more cycles, and they'll get the hang of it, at least I hope.

I liken it to a new technology, as bad of a simile that is. Every time a new technology is introduced to gaming, it's used with shameless abandon, with no regard to subtlety. It's only a cycle or two in that developers really get the hang of things and start to make decent, if not good content. And as the audience grows, so will its capacity to digest this content.

But why has writing in particular been such a miserable bitch to master for video game makers? Mainly because writing is a miserable bitch to master in general. But then you've got additional obstacles. The tradition of showering the player with rewards, the player's ability to murder your narrative in cold blood, gamers being fickle douches--

It's like crawling on broken glass, writing for an audience that's been conditioned to expect happy endings that tie up the loose ends. But again, that's okay. Habits can be broken. Think of it as learning to finish all your vegetables. I look forward to the day when it finally clicks for game makers out there. It'll be like that joyful day when I first saw colored lighting that didn't make me gouge out my eyes. Article Permalink

Why I Love Zelda

by Zen

Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2007
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Seriously, who's taking these masterpieces?
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NEW EF PEE ESSS.

by alzabo

Posted on Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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I’m not going to make some lame opening statement about Portal, you need to play it. It’s absolutely without peer, it blends together everything that is good and right into what is the video game equivalent of an orgasm.

Portal blends FPS aesthetics, unique puzzles and NEW game play concepts with a sense of humor that is as black as a python funeral. Christ, just buy it already!

The game also caters to speed runners, as each puzzle can be solved in several "incorrect" ways. Youtube is already rife with videos of people completing puzzles in confusing and stomach churning ways (watching & playing this game can cause motion sickness). The game has built in optional features designed for ‘running, a clock to keep track of how fast you are and a “portal” counter to keep track of how many portals you’ve used (for “minimum complete” ‘runners”). Why aren’t you playing this right now!

What the internet thinks of Portal*:
  • "I would set up a portal to Taco Bell inside my living room so when I get drunk I can just stumble in, get a chalupa, and leave"
  • "one portal at hone one at gamestop so i could play the motorstorm demo all night when they closed"
  • "ohm y fucking god i just came everyuwhere"
  • "i would put one end in front of my fist and the other in front of nintendo so I COULD PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE FOR DELAYING MY SMASH BROSEH"
You need this game. Don’t forget, thecakeisalie.
thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie thecakeisalie
*stolen shamelessly from SA
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The Speed Runner's School of Game Design -- The Circumspect, Heedful Everydayness of Metroid

by Zen

Posted on Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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In the previous entry on this subject I mentioned playing fair as a quality common to all games that are speed-run-friendly, and this refers to possibly the most important aspect of game design: heedful circumspection (you must have seen this coming). This bombastic philosophical term refers to the way a person uses the tools and abilities available to pursue a goal. A game that is conducive to speed runs, a game like Super Metroid, is designed as possibilities; a player will at any given time be expected to have certain tools or abilities, and the levels will be designed according to what abilities the developers intend for them to have. This is "playing fair" because a deal exists between player and game: the player has abilities, and the game provides obstacles with these in mind. If the player somehow "outwits" the intended path and uses his or her abilities in a new or inventive way, a game that plays fair does not invoke some deus ex machina to prevent this unintended progress.

Obviously this design philosophy has to be used carefully. If the game is not well crafted, game-breaking exploits may emerge, a terrifying possibility that has led many a developer to carefully wrap each layer of a game in layers of safe, reliable limitation. The more this is done, the more the game environment and abilities reveal themselves to the player as obstacles rather than useful things at hand. This notion is by no means unique to speed running, but it's never been more apparent than in the actions of a skilled player running an artfully made game.


Another scourge of speed runs that hurts everyone is the forced delay. The freakish impulse to speed run every game ever made was savagely put down by the realization that a run of Xenogears would have seven hours of dialogue alone. I'm not making fun of the game for being wordy here (I'm in no position to, frankly), but rather for being unstoppably wordy. Four-thousand pages of shallow symbolism and mind-grindingly inane plot twists (spoiler alert: soylent green is people) are no problem as long as the text moves by at a good clip, but as in many games there is no control given to the player as the exposition grinds its way across the screen. I'm not just going out of my way to bash Xenogears here, either, since some of my favorite games ever are guilty of this--any Zelda game ever made has been full of slow text you can do nothing about, and I can't even count how many RPGs have had sluggish menus that make you wait for every input to register. A lot of thought goes into game flow, but at no point can I understand why it would be necessary to display text letter by letter rather than all at once, and when the majority of the notes on a speed run are there to describe the finely-tuned method of skipping text you know there's something very, very wrong. Voice acting has only aggravated this problem, as there are usually three second pauses between each line that make things take even longer than ever. Once again, an obstacle to speed running presents itself as an obstacle to casual, everyday play of the game.

The last aspect of a good speed run game is a touchy one--randomization. It's the hallmark of every RPG, and to a certain extent is necessary to keep a game experience fresh. It's also a case where speed runs can highlight problems with a game, but aren't necessarily the guide for how things ought to flow. Grand Theft Auto 3 is a perfect example of this: often, some random and inescapable event complicates the mission you're currently playing. This can be game-breakingly frustrating when a random event simply makes you lose the mission outright, but when these complications force you to adapt to emerging situations, letting you discover the power you have to make things work out in your favor, the game shines gloriously. Neither case is particularly good for a speed run, but the lesson they can teach us is there in the former.


A great example is Yakuza in Metroid Fusion. This boss fight is the bane of every speed runner's existence, and anyone who plays the game will feel their pain: Yakuza jumps around the room randomly until chance works in your favor and the game deigns to present his sole weak point. Most boss fights work on the mechanic of revealing a weak point, but ideally it is up to the player to coax it out, not the game. The beauty of fighting Kraid in Super Metroid is washed away when suddenly instead of forcing his mouth open you're waiting for it to open. These moments pull the player out of the situation, replacing challenge with frustration.

Ultimately, the lesson to be learned from speed running is that the video game should be placed in the hands of the person playing it. For a medium whose defining aspect is interactivity, an alarming amount of game design these days seems to be carefully and meticulously obtuse, restrictive, or downright punitive. Games work best when they reward experimentation, and there are few better places to see the best and worst of this the medium has to offer than in the ultimate forum for experimentation: speed runs.
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Attention, all Supple Think Contributing Authors!

by K1

Posted on Monday, October 8, 2007
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i.e. all you people on the right sidebar.

This is an open declaration of warning to all authors (including me): Post content to Supple Think within the next week or be subject to the Super-Mega-Supple-Quote-A-Thon, which incidentally, starts next week.

And don't worry, I've got dirt on all of you :V

Get postin'. Article Permalink

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