05.24.12 |
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Keith Stuart at The Guardian writes on plot problems in Max Payne 3:
But here’s a problem. Throughout the game’s beautifully constructed narrative sequences, we see Payne going through agonies of recrimination and remorse…When the game begins he’s effectively drinking himself to death in his filthy New Jersey apartment. He desperately seeks some form of salvation.
…Yet he is also an accomplished killer, capable of gunning down a room full of “enemies” in a matter of seconds.
Much like an article I linked to several weeks ago, Stuart identifies an issue running through many modern games: You craft a complex, conflicted or “good” character in the main storyline cutscenes, but have no trouble murdering thousands of bad guys during the action. How do we reconcile these issues?
05.24.12 |
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The Gameological Society, a new gaming spinoff of The A.V. Club, interviews game designers on the challenges of establishing setting. There’s analysis here of three different games, each with widely different aesthetic and mood: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Yakuza and Final Fantasy XII.
I especially liked the breakdown of Deux Ex’s futuristic Detroit setting, on setting the right balance of freedom for the player character:
The goal, then, isn’t to make the city big, but to make it seem big. It’s all about how you wrestle out that illusion of urbanity. “The player must feel like he has freedom of exploration, that he can be creative with the environment,” Jacques-Belletête said. “At the same time, we need to set limits and boundaries in the world and these boundaries must feel ‘natural.’ We think a lot about what these boundaries will be.”
The boundaries can be superficial. A police barricade, a boarded up door, a chain link fence that’s just too high to jump. Those boundaries can be masked, though, by any number of perceptual means. “A great trick to make the city feel bigger and livelier than it actually is with the sound. Having dogs bark in the distance, the echoes of police sirens, and people talking and babies crying when you get near windows of apartment buildings. The streets of our game don’t have cars moving in them. But with each opportunity we had, you can see moving cars in the distance—on overpasses, on the other side of fences, and other such places.”
05.22.12 |
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Gamespot writer Hilary Goldstein argues how Microsoft should shape the Xbox successor to remain competitive. I’m not so hot on her arguments for “Kinect integration for all games” (many games are better addressed with a standard controller) or to bundle an HD Kinect on every system (guaranteed to push system costs up by at least $50-100, which would hurt Microsoft against its competition). Still, many make a lot of sense: throw in Blu-ray, raise the bottom end system setup, and branch off into new first party gaming franchises.
05.17.12 |
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Tracey Lien for Polygon on the indie gaming studio Capybara:
Vella says that the main thing they got out of their film school education was the ability to critique their own work – a skill that has played a crucial role in shaping their award-winning games.
“We’re a ruthlessly self-critical studio,” he says. “Our studio culture is: If you have an opinion, say it. Don’t be afraid to critique yourself. One of my favorite things is sitting in a meeting with programmers and artists and sound designers and producers, and going from visuals to audio and having meaningful conversations from every discipline, rather than just saying ‘OK, you’re an artist so you just do art and that’s it.’
Tight collaboration and T-shaped employees make all the difference. I still haven’t gotten around to Sword & Sworcery, but Capybara’s Critter Crunch is a great game.
05.14.12 |
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Michael Lopp, writing for Rands in Response:
Great design makes learning frictionless. The brilliance of the iPhone and iPad is how little time you spend learning. Designers’ livelihood is based on how quickly and cleverly they can introduce to and teach a user how a particular tool works in a particular universe. In one universe, you sport a handheld Portal gun that cleverly allows you to interrupt physics. In a slightly different universe, you have this tool called a cloning stamp that empowers you to sample and copy any part of a photo.
Awesome article. If you love design, this is an really smart read, illustrating how the goals of game and application designers have so much in common.
05.10.12 |
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About an hour after reading that Taylor Clark opinion in Kotaku, I saw a recommend over at Giant Bomb to check out this counterpoint. It’s also quite eloquent:
The very second you try to wrap actions like those in a “good story” that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience is the second you fail to write a good story. The dissonance of the Uncharted series is a famous example: the experience implies two completely different worlds. One is where Nathan Drake is an affable hero, and the other is where Drake murders hundreds of fellow human beings and feels nothing. Though the developers took care to paint over the seams where they could, even the cleverest narrative design couldn’t change how completely incongruous that really is, on a basic, fundamental level.
At that point— with the model already broken, what can you do as a writer? Make your main character a sensitive man and he falls flat: he obviously isn’t sensitive to the fact that he just killed dozens of people. Make him a dangerous psychopath and he’s impossible to like, unless, maybe, he’s out for some lazily justified revenge (oh, look, we just stumbled on the plot of so many games!).
05.10.12 |
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I had a lot of problems with the Jonathan Blow article I cited last week. Yet Taylor Clark, the Atlantic author who wrote the piece, wrote an opinion article on Kotaku clarifying his stance. I find it much more agreeable, especially with this point:
My issue, then, is with what we might call the intellectual maturity level of mainstream games. It’s not the design mechanics under the hood that I find almost excruciatingly sophomoric at this point; it’s the elements of these games that bear on human emotion and intellectual sophistication, from narrative and dialogue right on down to their core thematic concepts.
05.09.12 |
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Leave it to someone on Reddit to post shots of awesome 8-bit gaming mug. Clever.
05.08.12 |
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There’s a lot of discussion on tech and gaming circles regarding Microsoft’s subsidized XBox 360, and I liked Ars Technica’s breakdown the most. I’m disappointed and puzzled by Microsoft’s shift; if you want really want to move console economics, you’ve got to do better than this.
05.04.12 |
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Gamers With Jobs‘ Cory Banks dives through analysis on GameStop’s used game market. It’s clearly huge; Gamestop sold $2.6 billion of used inventory during fiscal year 2011.
Having seen many indie game stores close in the past few years, I found Banks’ conclusion sobering:
No matter what, used games aren’t going away anytime soon. Gamers will continue to trade in old titles, while publishers will continue to develop more reasons to buy new. You’ll think of GameStop as the place next to the Orange Julius in the mall. EA will think of them as the big brother with the baseball bat and a bad attitude.
And either way, GameStop wins.