Posts Tagged ‘first-person games’

Jumping at spiders in Dark Messiah

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

A spider in “Dark Messiah of Might and Magic”

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is full of spiders: monstrous, poison spiders, spiders that leap at your face, spiders that build city-sized nests in which they wrap up and devour their human prey.

These spiders terrified me. Despite knowing they weren’t really there, I felt uneasy when they were around and would lose my cool when they advanced on me. I wasted a lot of potions in my panicky desperation.

It’s just a game

Dark Messiah does a lot to encourage a sensual sort of immersion. Its settings are rich and colourful, blows from swords feel weighty, and there’s a nice meaty thump when you kick an orc in the chest—often off a cliff. (Their yells are satisfying too.)

The game also has many unreal elements. Equipment is represented as icons in a grid and has explicit attributes like +3 Damage. No matter how well you can sneak, if your player character hasn’t upgraded his Stealth skill, guards will spot him long before he can get behind them. And why are guards so often hanging out by racks of spikes and cliff edges anyway?

Inventory and skills in “Dark Messiah of Might and Magic”

These arbitrary and artificial things work against the sense of being there supported by its clashing swords and pretty vistas. Thinking about skill points and armor classes draws the player out of the dungeon and into her computer chair, managing stats instead of impaling goblins. Well, you might think so.

It’s real to me, dammit

Dark Messiah‘s unreal elements (stats, inventory swapping) didn’t hold me back from dreading the spiders, though I was never unaware of them. I knew I was playing a game—I was constantly reminded by the interface, the click of my mouse, the cheesiness of Xana’s dialogue—but my reaction to the spiders was nonetheless a gut-level thrill.

“We really can’t differentiate between real and unreal images,” notes Chuck Klosterman.1 “We can describe the difference, but we can’t manage it.”2

Humans have existed for 130 000 years. The Great Train Robbery was made in 1903. For roughly 129 900 years, any moving image a human saw was actually real. It was there, right in front of you. If a man in 1850 saw a train chugging toward his face, it was actually a train. For 129 900 years, we were conditioned to understand that seeing something in motion had a specific meaning. But that understanding no longer exists; today, we constantly “see things” that aren’t actually there.

Spider attacks the player in “Dark Messiah of Might and Magic”

I am struck by the idea that for all my understanding and all the game’s self-evident artificiality, I was still affected by the spiders. Once they were dead, I would quickly become conscious of the game, the system. Using potions to get rid of the annoying and overlong poison effect the spiders dealt me was never so natural that it felt part of the same reality in which giant spiders were attacking me.

It’s as if the sense of being there and the knowing of toying in a system were like a figure–ground illusion: I could see both, but never at the same time.

Maybe, or maybe I need to grow some balls and do something about my arachnophobia.

  1. Klosterman is writing in Eating the Dinosaur about Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.↩

  2. For Klosterman, the inability to feel real and unreal stimuli differently is behind a “vague sense of alienation.” There’s something to his argument, though I think the passivity of radio, television, and film have a great deal to do with it too.↩

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Observation | 1 Comment »

On Mirror’s Edge

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Faith reaches out during a difficult jump between rooftops

Mirror’s Edge, which I played through recently, provided me a patchy experience. It was sometimes thrilling, sometimes aggravating. In ways, Mirror’s Edge is its own worst enemy.

The most common actions of the game, running, climbing, and jumping, were great. The experience of free running through a modern city was sensational, in both senses of the word. I felt a rush when I managed to escape a dozen armed guards by running through an office building, vaulting over desks, then leaping out of a window onto another building’s roof.

There was a fluidity about doing these things, as if I were really pulling off something acrobatic. The lack of explicit health and speed meters and the presence of my character’s body—my hands would grab ledges, my fingers would push against walls, and when I looked down, I could see my feet, all while my character panted and gasped from exerting herself—reinforced my feeling of being in those places, of being a physical actor in that world.

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Criticism | No Comments »

First-person game controls on consoles and computers

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

The latest podcast from the fellows at Idle Thumbs has a brief discussion of first-person games on consoles and how they’re different from those on the PC. The topic caught my attention because, recently, I’ve been trying to become better at FPS games on consoles. (I completed Mirror’s Edge last night, and am now starting on BioShock—late, I know.)

To me, the key difference between first-person games on PCs and consoles are the control schemes, how they map from intentions (move forward) to player actions (press W), and how the buttons, sticks, and etc. interact with the player’s body.

For example, keyboard control requires coordination of multiple fingers for diagonal motion (e.g. hold W and A), whereas analog controls have a more direct mapping of intention to action (the movement vector is the angle and direction of the stick from the centre).

Speed is also different. In Thief, the player using a keyboard has to toggle between discrete sneaking and running modes: there are only two speeds. On the console, the player has direct, analog control of their character’s speed: it’s up to the player how fast or how slow to move.

The keyboard also has a greater management cost: the player has to remember stuff like the keys to toggle modes, the mode she’s in, and has to coordinate two or three simultaneous actions across two or three fingers.

I think in these two examples, dual analog controls are less abstract and more closely related to what the player is trying to achieve in the game world than are keyboard controls. This might be why some players find it easier to pick up and learn console games.

That said, analog sticks are controlled by thumbs—they’re literally “all thumbs.” With the mouse, motion comes from wrist and arm movements. With the mouse, gross movements are easier to make (arm) and fine ones too (wrist, slow movement). Thumbs aren’t as capable as arms and wrists, and that makes the tradeoff between accuracy and speed harder to adapt during play.

The mouse is also not bound by an arbitrary magnitude as are analog sticks (which the player can only push so far). Instead, mouses are limited (at most) by the physical range of the player’s arm (or the mouse wire): I can move it almost as far and as fast as I can. This means that, in theory, I can whip around much faster in Quake, and snipe more effectively in Team Fortress, with a mouse than with analog sticks.

But, in practice, I suck at Halo and Team Fortress, mouse or gamepad.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Observation | 2 Comments »