Japanese developers are very rooted in tradition, which can be a little quizzical to us in the west. Nowhere can this be seen more plain than in RPGs. Western developers like Bethesda and Bioware change the landscape by introducing action elements and allowing players to drastically change the outcome of a story. On the other hand, the bleeding edge eastern developers like Level 5, Mistwalker, and Nautilus seem forever tied to the Dragon Quest tenets of design: menu-driven action, dialogue options that rarely make a difference, and traditional leveling and advancement mechanics.
As a result, people have marginalized the impact of eastern developers on the advancement of video games in recent years. It’s easy to understand why, even the most cutting edge and experimental games from eastern development houses are still inexorably tied to traditional design. Take Persona 4 for instance; for all its experimentation, it’s very much an eastern RPG. The hero is silent, the role-playing and combat gameplay are segregated, and most actions are driven via menu input. That being said, it does boast one of the greatest (and most ignored) features with which Japanese developers absolutely excel: universal art theme.
As it turns out, those TV screens aren’t just for show.
Persona 4 is all about television, and not in the sense that you’ll be staring at one the whole time you play. The game’s protagonists enter a bizarre Little Monsters-esque underworld via TV screens to rescue people trapped there. More than just a plot point, Atlus has taken the theme of television and infused it into every part of the game. The most obvious influences come in the UI; while in the television alterna-reality, the screen has a halo of scanlines to replicate an old CRT display, and all menus and speech bubbles even have a “reflection” to make it seem as though everything’s overlayed on a glass screen. The icon to advance dialogue in any text window looks reminiscent of a channel knob on a TV, and after a battle characters have a spot light shining down on them like a hokey game show.
The game also uses several static overlays to simulate poor reception on old antenna-based televisions. Antennas even play a role in the story of the game, as does fog and rain which relate to the look and sound of television static respectively. These elements in concert with several other visual and thematic elements create a universal theme that ties the whole game together and gives Persona 4 a strong artistic identity.
Several other eastern games have shown similar consideration in presentation. Odin Sphere (also from Atlus) emulated a stage play, with stage curtains and classical overture introducing each chapter. Cutscenes and game play take place on a 2D plane with all the characters angled to face the screen as stage actors face an audience. Background art is flattened onto one plane and scrolls by at different depths to emulate set pieces panted on wood or paper. The game’s characters even engage in subtly melodramatic monologues to relate their inner turmoil in grand stage fashion.
All this needs now is a guy in a scarf scoffing at the acting.
In some non-Atlus examples, Killer 7’s entire UI and presentation was just as disconnected and creepy as the game itself. Everything about the UI and menus exuded wrongness, from the anachronistic 8-bit beeps to the ominous discolored moon in the loading screen. Menus composed of jagged lines and clashing colors embraced a shattered glass motif. Just viewing the game made the player feel as disjointed and demented as the actual characters in the game.
Grasshopper Manufacture – opting for the bizarre over the functional since 1998.
Beatmania IIDX, a Japanese rhythm game just passing its sixteenth entry, has to rely on UI and presentation to distinguish one edition from another. For example, here is the introduction and interface for Beatmania IIDX 12: Happy Sky –
And here is the interface for Beatmania IIDX 14: Gold –
While both games are functionally the exact same thing (with different songs and negligible tweaks), they maintain different identities because of their themes and presentation.
For some reason, more consideration is given to universal art theme in eastern games than western. The high profile western fall releases -- Fallout 3, Gears 2, Resistance 2 -- all have minimal text-based vertical menus. Perhaps this is because eastern developers feel more restricted by tradition. Eastern gamers feel comfortable with certain gameplay mechanics, so developers must rely on art style and presentation rather than fundamentally different gameplay for individuality. It can be tempting to say that time has passed eastern developers by, but perhaps the factors limiting their contribution to gameplay innovation has allowed them to silently make great strides in terms of theme and presentation. As such, let’s not discount them just yet.
With Price of Persia (2008), it seems Ubisoft Montreal is starting an annual tradition of forcing reviewers to realize fundamental and upsetting truths about videogames. When a reviewer gets a chance to slam a high-profile release for anything, they cannot wait to bang out a logically disconnected criticism with their fists while they uncontrollably salivate. Flecks of spittle fly, a series of incoherent grunts roll through a studio apartment, and two pages of flimsy criticism hit the internet solidifying a journo’s reputation as a true game critic.
There’s got to be a problem in here, there just HAS to be.
This happened in 2007 with Assassin’s Creed. Gamers and journalists alike decried the game’s repetitive design, collectively patting themselves on the back that they had the capacity to find a flaw in what was actually an amazing game. Calling a game "repetitive" is a completely invalid complaint, as I have previously discussed. Repetition is a fundamental part of any game, electronic or otherwise. Assassin’s Creed forced players that hadn’t yet realized this to do so, and for some reason this caused them a considerable amount of dismay. Now, Ubisoft Montreal has forced players to realize another constant about videogames, and yet again they dislike the game for it.
Severaldifferentreviews proudly slam the game for two main reasons. First, many claim the game is too easy. Why a game’s lack of difficulty becomes innately negative is beyond me. As far as I’m concerned, I know I can beat any game given enough time. Why make me waste time dying a lot just to memorize a section or attack pattern? But that’s not the biggest point of confusion in these reviews.
Almost all the articles call out the game’s interpretive controls. For the unfamiliar, PoP uses a hefty amount of interpretation for the platforming segments. If a jump is somewhat off, the game will snap the Prince back to a safe landing. In addition, the player only needs to hit one button at each junction of a platforming segment: press A to swing from this pole, press B to swing from this ring, ect. Reviewers proclaim that this is essentially a masked QTE, with each action in the segment only having a binary pass/fail outcome.
Well, no duh.
That statement is true for all games, to a degree. Control interpretation is a fundamental part of any game. I can hear the nerd rage building within you, but give me a second, this will all tie together in a bit. In any game, when the player presses a button, any on screen action is an interpretation of that press (unless the avatar on screen is also pressing a button). In Super Mario Bros (NES), the player hits a button and the Italian jumps. While the two actions aren’t the same, the player feels ownership over the action due to a variety of elements – the immediacy of the action, the visual cue, and sound response (the boing sound, you know what it is).
So far there’s no problem. The player feels in control and empowered. As is the case with Prince of Persia, the problems arise when players no longer feel like they’re directly in control of their avatar. More modern games with loads of animation have struggled with this. Say you have a character that’s running. At any moment, the player can instruct the character to jump, but how do you change from a running animation to a jumping animation in a smooth way?
Non-realistic games like Super Mario Galaxy can get around this because, well, it’s not realistic. Who cares if a cartoon immediately changes from a run to a jump? However, when a realistic looking dude launches airbone instantly from a full sprint… it just looks weird. One solution is to throw a few frames of animation in there to transition from the run to the jump. Now there’s a slight delay between the push and the action, and the player feels just a bit disconnected. The two are related inversely; the more animation, the better the looks, but the looser the controls.
PoP opted to go full-bore with animation and as a result the game looks great. The Prince’s moves are smooth as hell (which I assure you is quite smooth, not firey and red as Christian dogma would have you believe), and platforming segments are entirely seamless. Such animation introduces a conundrum involving controls. Either you require precise timing with no easy way to indicate to the player exactly when they need to hit the button – aside from, y’know, putting a button on the screen – or you open the timing window to reduce the frustration. Either you get people complaining that the game is cheap and needlessly frustrating (Mirror’s Edge), or you get people complaining that it’s not cheap and needlessly frustrating enough. Freaking internet, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Obviously, Ubi Montreal went with the wider timing, and I couldn’t be happier. However, apparently gamers need to lose, or at least have the real threat of failure, before a victory has any value. For many of the reviewers I’ve read, just realizing that victory comes easily robs it of any enjoyment. I’m not sure why this is – are gamers’ egos so weak that they can’t bear to enjoy a victory unless they feel they have ripped it from the jaws of defeat? I can understand cautioning against the game to players that want a good challenge, but calling the game bad simply because it’s easy doesn’t compute at all.
The other half of the argument is more poignant; that the wide window on the controls breaks the illusion that the player is actually in control. To me, this smacks of players that blame a game for having any kind if cheat available, because that means they just have to use them. Just because the timing window is really wide doesn’t mean the player has to use it. Even cognizant of the wide window, I pressed the buttons the instant the Prince reached the ledge / pole / ring / whatever while playing. Even though the game didn’t require me to be so precise, being precise anyway created the illusion of control.
One might say that fooling one’s self in this way is cheap and shouldn’t be required. However, thanks to the aforementioned translating process of videogame actions, all controls are based on illusion. Until we get full-body sensory immersion VR suits, this will be true of any videogame. Besides, by the time we get full VR suits we’ll be living in a dystopian future where renegade AI cyborgs will be running around trying to kill us, so we’ll have bigger fish to fry. Plus there will be flying cars then, and once I get one of those I probably won’t need a videogame for a while.
Flying car or Madden 2019… easy choice.
PoP has removed several of the behind-the-scenes conventions that gamers are used to; chief among those being the potential for failure. Even so, why should that ruin the fun? These reviewers are the guys that can’t wait to tell you that space shouldn’t have sound when you talk about Star Wars, or just can’t get why Romeo and Juliet didn’t book it out of Verona the moment they got married. Try to have fun with a game before you look for all the ways you can’t.
With the exception of those born in or before the 1960s, gamers have had to endure constant nagging due to their activity. That’s not to say that older gamers made it out unscathed; they still had to endure Rod Stewart. Regardless, the younger folk heard their mothers across the land echo the same refrain: “You’ll ruin your vision,” “Playing all those games will turn you into a zombie,” “You’ll never meet any girls…” Ok, well, maybe some of them were true.
You’ve got a long, lonely road ahead of you, kid.
For the most part, these fears turned out to be baseless. Far from becoming a crop of maladjusted stimulation junkies, the generation reared by the NES is now entering the workforce, working 8-5 pedestrian jobs just like everyone else. While videogames may not have helped our generation find our jobs more tolerable, they have helped in other ways that may not be immediately obvious. Here are five ways that videogames have helped me become a better employee, aside from being able to vividly imagine shooting annoying managers with a railgun.
Videogames condition gamers’ minds to manage many more simultaneous streams of thought than the average person. Video games are so much more intellectually demanding than other passive forms of media like books or movies. As such, kids reared on entertainment that demands such a high level of mental activity have the capacity for more simultaneous mental tasks. Proof of that can be found in your average World of Warcraft player; while playing they watch TV, talk on AIM and Ventrillo, listen to the radio, and read two books and a magazine while learning Italian.
These habits have tangible benefits in the workplace. Aside from obvious applications, such pretending to listen to someone on the phone while playing Minesweeper, the ability to multitask prevents workers from becoming too stagnant on one project. I’ve had several co-workers that will dedicate themselves entirely to one project until it is completed, regardless of any roadblocks that may come up in the meantime. I prefer to take on several at once and jump to whichever is the most practical in any given situation. Not only can I work this way, but I prefer to. It keeps my mind fresh while increasing my throughput and experience base.
In games, first encounters with bosses are always great unknowns. Without knowledge of movement patterns, attacks, or weaknesses, most bosses will unceremoniously rape a player during the first few tries. After a few terrible defeats, players eventually gain the skill and experience needed to overcome the challenge. In any game (excepting some newer casual experiences) losing is part of the package; an eventuality that, when dealt with properly, can turn out to be a positive in the long run. Every gamer eventually realizes that no matter how good the gamer, they will lose sooner or later.
This is a METAPHOR for work, is that deep or what?
The same is true of the employee. No matter how good a worker is at his or her job, mistakes will happen. I’ve known several co-workers that take on more passive roles for fear of making mistakes. Playing videogames for years has forced me to deal with failure in a calm and analytical manner. I know that I will make mistakes, but I also know it’s no big deal (as you may have guessed, I don’t work for NASA). Any problem can be re-worked and the product in the end can be the better for it. The ability to approach an unknown without fear is vital to any good employee.
When watching a movie, one need only kick it on and relax while the story unfolds. Games, on the other hand, require continuous input. With the exception of overbearingly long cutscenes (I’m looking at you, Kojima), nothing happens in a game unless a player makes it happen. Win or lose, the onus is on players to come up with a plan and put it into action.
This tendency to be active rather than passive helps video gamers become real problem solvers in the real world. This can also be stated as “pro-active” for people that just have to wear a tie all the time. Far too often, employees will be willing to just sit on a problem and let it stagnate, rationalizing to themselves that the problem is in someone else’s hands. As a gamer, I feel compelled to take action – to throw myself at a problem, investigate, make calls, threaten some people with a stapler, and ultimately resolve the issue.
After playing games for nearly two decades, my approach to new challenges and environments has become methodical. First I evaluate the challenge to make sure I understand the conditions for victory, then make sure I have the tools to work the problem, and finally work the challenge. Take any RTS game as an example: in this map, is the goal to demolish the enemy or just destroy a particular building? Once I understand that, I need to learn my tools. How do I order around units, what do the units do, and how I can best utilize those abilities? Once I have a grasp on all that, I can set to completing the map.
Tell your parents that this will get you a job someday.
This problem solving process carries over perfectly into work. Habits instilled by years of videogaming have saved me hours of frustration I’ve seen co-workers suffer from due to not adequately understanding the assignment or the means to complete it.
"The problem’s not on our end, it must’ve been someone in your department."
Anyone that’s been reliant on another group of people to complete any work knows the absolute hell it can be to get anyone to acknowledge a problem. More often than not, people need irrefutable proof that the problem is theirs before they will deign to help you with it. Playing games has forced me into thinking that the best way to deal with any problem is to skip the blame and work the problem directly.
Granted it wasn’t always that way. In the early days I blamed any difficult game for the problems I had with it (despite willingly playing it). Every death resulted in a stream of curses directed at the developers that would last precisely as long as it took me to hit continue and get back to playing. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I yelled at the controller, Mario, or Nintendo in general, I would keep dying until I forced myself to admit that I wasn’t playing correctly. Regardless of how much easier it might make your life – the game you play, like most people, won’t change. The fastest way to deal with any problem is to take action, personally, regardless of whose fault it is.
These are just some of the ways video games have been beneficial to me in my professional career. For all the gamers out there reading this when you should be working, I’ll give you another way to kill some of the work day. How has your work experience benefited from video gaming?
The World Ends With You is just a fantastic game. It’s imaginative, unique, innovative, and startlingly of all, mechanically sound. As such, I have a very hard time believing it actually came from Square Enix. Their games have largely relied on story and setting over raw gameplay for value, and since Tetsuya Nomura’s star has risen, their stories have become so inanely metaphysical that they no longer even have that going for them. Luckily, in TWEWY Nomura’s pen was used to draw stylistic art instead confusing words.
I’ve been told it actually makes sense, but I don’t believe it.
The majority of the game leaves combat in the hands of the player -- something decidedly un-Squareish. Players choose when to scan for enemies and even how many to fight until they approach the final boss. The game starts to force encounters on players as they approach the end of the game. This may at first seem like an annoying break in design, but it’s done to force some experience and levels on players that may have avoided battle until that point. If the player is under-leveled, this will make final boss preparation much less arduous.
This isn’t the only mechanic by which the game ensures players are prepared for the final boss. Another forced encounter pits players against a reincarnated boss. Unless they are already overleveled (and thus already prepared for the final boss), most players will lose this encounter. This may smack of a scripted loss in their grand and annoying tradition, but this one actually serves a purpose. After the match, win or lose, the boss essentially says “I am as hard as the end boss” before running away. The game gives players a sneak peak of the difficulty in store before throwing them at the end boss.
TWEWY allows players to experience first-hand the challenge awaiting them, and flat out forces them to fight a few fights to prepare for it. Both of these techniques are meant to prepare the player for the final boss and ultimately a frustration-free experience. I can attest; TWENY is the smoothest gameplay experience I’ve had in a long time (barring games with no challenge like Endless Ocean), due entirely to smart design. Had it not been for these warnings, I would’ve been under leveled and frustrated when time came to finish the game.
To find a contrast to this style of difficulty, one need not try very hard. The NES days were practically dominated by the “If the players loses that’s not our problem” attitude from developers. Using one of those games is too easy, though. Instead, I’ll look at a more modern game that wasn’t bad, but just had a very different approach to challenge and player experience.
Odin Sphere was a very hands-off game. After the introductory tutorials explaining the combat mechanics, level system, and concepts of plant growth, the game does little else to help players progress. Instead, players must face down cripplingly hard bosses and forge their own victories from hours of swearing, breaking controllers, and scaring the pets.
The game was hard, see. Not just any normal hard, but that special brand of hard that makes it very clear the developers are not on your side. Some enemies in the game still amaze me with the absurd challenge they posed. One boss, a giant dragon, would pound the ground and cause hundreds of pieces of debris to rain down on your character. Not only would this do an annoying amount of damage, but also slow down the PS2. Beating one of them was hard enough, imagine how awesome it was to have to fight two AND an annoying little wizard guy that couldn’t be damaged by anything except reflected projectiles.
Never again, stupid dragon. NEVER AGAIN.
When I first reached this boss encounter, I was as unprepared as a frat boy in physics class. I tried for hours, throwing my controller multiple times. I was convinced that I should be prepared to beat a challenge in the order that it was given to me. In other words, I figured the developers wouldn’t have given a challenge to me unless I could beat it with skill when I received it. Perhaps this is due to excessive coddling from videogames in recent years.
Eventually I had to swallow my pride and re-approach the problem. I loaded an old save, leveled a bit, and most importantly figured out what potions I would need to attack the problem properly. After stocking up with the tools necessary to fight the boss, I passed the challenge with relative ease. While I did (and still do) feel a small amount of pride for eventually finding the proper solution to the challenge, the hours of frustration spent to get there may not have been an even investment.
On one hand, TWEWY takes a series of steps to ensure the player has a smooth experience. Help is given at every bump in the road to make sure the player can always progress. On the other, Odin Sphere puts the onus of victory and progress on the player. The game sets the bar, and it’s entirely up to the player to figure out how to reach it. The easy conclusion here is that TWEWY has better implemented difficulty.
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. When developers start to take on the responsibility of ushering the player through the game experience, they ever so slowly start to draw back the interactivity of the game as a whole. While the forced encounters and fake boss may have been in my best interest, forcing me down that path is a step away from what makes a video game such a unique experience.
When this concept is taken to an extreme you essentially just have a movie. After all, the player can’t possibly fail to reach the end of a movie barring heart attack, power outage, or Armageddon. A step back from that falls into “interactive movie” territory with Dragon’s Lair, Psychic Detective, and those QTE events popularized by Shenmue that are all the rage nowadays. While these sequences are entertaining, they only feature the bare minimum of success/failure interaction. The player has very little investment and immersion in the challenge, and thus gets very little in return for success.
You only THOUGHT nobody played this.
As much as I hate to say it, this will come down to player taste. Some players want a carefree experience with the illusion of interactivity, while others will enjoy the responsibility for their own success and failure in a game. So, which do you prefer? Do you like the guided care-free experience of softer games or the brutal, out-in-the-cold approach of less forgiving experiences?
Gears of War 2’s dialogue has been derided by some of gaming culture’s giant figures as well as sources not so credible. I can certainly understand some of the complaints levied against the narrative presented in Gears, and more specifically how it is delivered. However, the complaints – even when correctly spelled and grammatically sound – revolve around how the dialogue in Gears 2 is poor at delivering a story. That may be when judged against a traditional metric, but there’s a problem with that.
Stories can be told through music, written word, movies, paintings – all sorts of art forms. In the most incredible statement I will ever make, I submit that video games are a different medium than all of these, if for no other more obvious reason than it’s spelled differently. Each medium requires different techniques for story presentation. Telling a story through music is different than telling it through, say, a stage play. Mixing the two produces results more destructive and horrible than ex-girlfriends and alcohol.
Behold – a fate worse than death.
Video games, by virtue of being a different medium, require a different way of presenting stories. Gears 2 uses lines of dialogue specifically designed with the player’s presence in mind. Characters use dialogue in game to echo what the player is thinking (or what the developers think the player will think… argh now I have a headache). This helps the player connect and identify with the characters. Allow me to present a few examples:
When the characters are first told about the existence of the Locust queen, one of the characters pipes up with something to the effect of "What the hell is a queen?" exactly as the question ran through my head.
During the sequence where Marcus and Dom ride the elevator sideways through the toppled hotel, Marcus mutters "Unbelievable" as I marveled at how ridiculous the situation was.
While exploring the abandoned COG outpost, Locust show up out of nowhere (presumably just to have something to shoot at). I asked "Why the hell are Locust here?" out loud a fraction of a second before Dom repeated my question word for word in game.
Finally, I played through the campaign with someone that echoed Cole’s line from the first game “Look at all that juice!” every time emulsion was on the screen. This mystified me. Hearing Baird chide Cole for saying the same thing in the second game was nothing short of magical.
From a storytelling perspective, these are meaningless quips. The character and plot details they impart are negligible. In a movie or book, these statements hardly carry any weight at all. And yet, these events had a profound effect on my enjoyment of the story. While they may not have traditional literary value as we are used to thinking about them, they do something new and special – something unique to videogames.
Videogames are interactive, which alone separates them from other forms of art. Story presentation can only incorporate so much interactivity – but one could write a whole book about that topic. Traditional thought holds that story interactivity means that the plot should be interactive, or that the player should control the outcome of the story. The dialogue in Gears 2 implements a different approach.
While the story in Gears 2 is altogether linear, the way it’s presented is clearly designed to involve and immerse the player. The designers thought ‘What would the player be thinking about at this moment?’ and wrote dialogue to match. While this doesn’t provide any interaction through the controller to the game, it does take into consideration the gamer’s mental interaction with the story. The player thinks a certain way, and the game responds, forming a new level of interaction. The concept is a bit metaphysical, I’ll grant. Even still, it operates on the same idea as a developer anticipating that a player may want to say a certain thing in game, then coding a conversation tree for it.
Dialogue trees and one-liners… the same?
These lines helped point out that the characters in the game think and reason like real people would (or, failing that, at least I would). This is very subtle, but very intentional. If the character in game reacts as I would, then one more barrier has been removed from interactivity and immersion. Since videogames are all about interactivity, this is a step in the right direction as far as relaying story in a video game form.
Did you have this experience? If not, what was your impression of the game’s dialogue?
If you’re anything like me, the athletically apt sowed the seeds of competitive pro gaming in grade school when they refused to pick you for a game of pickup basketball. These seeds were nurtured with ridicule and bitterness over the years as I skipped out on football pep rallies to meet with the other kids from the math and science team. "Some day," we would mutter, huddled in the corner, “nerds will be celebrated. We will be the popular ones, and chicks will want to talk to us.” I already sort of have my revenge because I have a paying job and don’t live in a trailer, but the sentiment still survives in a small way. This is why I first started watching webcasted matches of Starcraft.
Finally, it has arrived… just in South Korea.
If you’re unfamiliar, Starcraft is both a ten year old RTS from Blizzard and a national sport in South Korea. They are currently in the middle of the Averatect Intel Classic – one of the largest tournaments over there. Matches are webcasted (in English!) by GomTV live every Sunday morning at 3AM, and I can’t recommend it enough if you can manage stay up that late.
If not, you can always watch VODs. This match in particular is the stuff of legend, I’m not even kidding.
