Posts Tagged ‘video games’

Arkham Asylum‘s detective mode needs a trade-off

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Batman covers a corner while in detective mode in “Batman: Arkham Asylum”

I recently finished Rocksteady’s excellent Batman: Arkham Asylum. It is a good game, but I feel that its detective vision mode is not particularly meaningful. It’s useful, but using it is not special nor interesting—and it could have been, if it were less powerful or less available.

Nothing lost, much gained

Detective mode includes a form of night vision, which makes it easy for the player to find her way in the dark. When close to certain enemies and items, detective mode brings up a little window with information on that item: stuff like its state, weaknesses, and backstory. It also highlights doors and vents, collectibles, destructable walls, hackable circuit boxes, and armed enemies. Further, the answer to many of the Riddler’s puzzles can only be found when in detective mode.

The only thing detective mode lacks is a downside. It gives the player a number of advantages over the game’s enemies and environments, but has no cost, no time limit, no weaknesses. Indeed, playing through Arkham Asylum, I found myself in detective mode all the time. As Yahtzee asks, “Why would you ever want to turn it off?”1

Arkham Asylum tries to encourage the player to step out of detective mode now and then (it takes the player out of detective mode whenever she finishes off the last thug in a room or triggers a cutscene), but everything the game gives the player to do is easier when she’s in it.

Arkham Asylum misses an opportunity to present the player an interesting choice. As it is, the player never has to consider whether or not to use detective mode. The player is made to think when solving puzzles and during combat—should she attack, dodge, or counter?—but to stay in detective mode is a no-brainer.

Trade a strength for a weakness

Arkham Asylum could make its detective mode better by making it weaker or more limited. Vision modes in other games are not only useful, but also give the player a choice to make. They provide a trade-off between some advantages and disadvantages, and thereby make the choice to use these modes meaningful.

Fisher interrogates a guard while in night vision in “Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory”

The flashlight in Half-Life can be used for a time limited by its battery power. Deus Ex‘s tech goggles provide night vision, but have a hard time limit, and cover only part of the player’s vision. In Doom 3, the flashlight occupies the player character’s hands, and so trades light for the ability to use more powerful, ranged weapons.

These simple costs and limitations make the player use special vision modes judiciously. The player can help herself with the flashlight in dark areas of Half-Life, but can’t rely on it all the time. In Deus Ex, the player saves the tech goggles for when they are most needed, and then must take advantage of them quickly before they run out. In Doom 3, the player often finds herself fighting in a dark room, desperately swapping weapons and the flashlight.

In Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the player has a number of vision modes at her disposal: night vision, heat vision, and EM vision. None of these modes are limited by time nor by what the player can or cannot do when a mode is on. Their trade-offs are all based on what the player can and cannot see when in a mode. Night vision makes it easier for the player to see in the dark, but makes it much harder to see well-lit areas and distorts the edges of the player’s view. Thermal and EM modes each highlight a certain kind of enemy or item, but make it much more difficult to see other kinds of enemies or items.

The result is that the player has to decide when and where to enter into a vision mode, when seeing enemies clearly is more important than seeing any nearby surveillance cameras, for example. These trade-offs make modes meaningful tools in play.

It’s too bad that Arkham Asylum‘s detective mode isn’t meaningful in a similar way.

  1. He goes on to note that detective mode is a bit of a shame as it hides much of the hard work put in by artists and designers. Visual details and colours get lost, turned to same-looking glowing skeletons or blue walls. ↩

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Strengths and limitations of radio pictures

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Opening logo for RKO Pictures

The large radio tower in the RKO logo which appears at the very beginning of King Kong is a curious thing. It is a piece of an old medium, radio, in a new one, film. The logo seems awkward, a sign of a time in which movies were “moving pictures,” only beginning to gain the legitimacy of radio and print, to develop a vocabulary.

There are a number of elements of new media that are left over from their earlier forms: the prompt to “insert coin(s)” in home console versions of arcade games, electronic documents broken into distinct pages, to be stored in file folders on a computer desktop.

You might say these are analogous to vestigial traits.1 They are remainders of past forms, still present but made useless by gradual change. The RKO radio tower is to film as the grasp reflex is to newborn babies.

This analogy is misleading. The truth is that carryovers from older to newer media are not always dead weight. In many cases old media serve as a fulcrum on which to advance the goals of new media.

Tropes as bridges

Consider the spinning newspaper trope (first used in Citizen Kane—an RKO radio picture). Presenting a brief banner headline, a film communicates that an important event has occurred, shows that it has impact, that it is known publicly, and that some time (enough to publish the paper) has passed. Taking advantage of the audience’s understanding of how newspapers work, this technique manages to get across a great deal of information in an efficient manner.

In this understanding, the radio tower before a film isn’t without function, but is instead a bridge between the old and new. It is as the language used to describe internet media—email, web-site—something familiar to explain something unfamiliar.

A spinning newspaper with headline from “Citizen Kane”

The spinning newspaper remains effective despite the fading relevance of and familiarity with newspapers nowadays. Ditto the comedic record needle scratch2: how many viewers laugh at it, but don’t know where and how the sound is produced?

(Of course, things continue to change. These tropes are not going to be effective forever.)

Tropes as interference

Ideas from old media can be useful, but can also interfere with the new. Their effectiveness and convenience can limit media as well as they can leverage it.

Take, for example, film and video games. Video games often use letterboxed screens (once only seen when watching widescreen film on television screens) to denote sequences in which players are meant to watch the game as they would a film, rather than participate in it.

For the same reasons, letterboxed cutscenes are frustrating. They are a sign that the game is no longer an interactive experience, but a passive one; that the designers were not able or willing to look beyond their understanding of film.

The sequence in which Sephiroth kills Aeris works in the same way as does the twist in The Sixth Sense. It’s more film than game. Like radio on TV (which The Score seems to think is a good idea), it disregards core, distinguishing aspects of the newer medium to shoehorn in an older one.

The spinning paper trope does not make a newspaper of the film in the way Final Fantasy makes a film of a game. The spinning paper requires viewers to read only a headline, not an entire article. The trope makes use of the newspaper form without mimicking it. In this way, it is a successful borrowing.

Artful use of old media is possible. The video editor included with Grand Theft Auto IV, with which players replay and edit stunts they’ve performed in-game, is an example of how, as Steve Gaynor has said, “taking cinematic techniques and applying them to games that isn’t ‘let’s just put movies into games.’”

Just as old media can be useful, a reservoir of convention and time-tested mechanics, they can be distracting and limiting. The methods and tropes borrowed need to be questioned, sometimes tempered and adapted, sometimes discarded.

  1. Yeah, I know: analogies to biology and evolution are as overplayed as Blur’s “Song 2″, and often only half as appropriate. ↩
  2. “Harold P. Wiffington’s Comedy Record Scratch” is used with violence in Wonder Showzen‘s episode on “Justice” ↩

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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…)

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Pac-Man in depth

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

The eyes of one of the ghostly antagonists in “Pac-Man”

Jamey Pittman’s “The Pac-Man Dossier” is all about Pac-Man, only barely sparing readers the actual machine code in which the game is written (something Nick Montfort just couldn’t resist adding into his excellent “Combat in Context”). Fortunately, there’s much more to the dossier than technical details, and so it appeals not only to programmers and game dorks: it’s about history, complexity, and culture.

Pac-Man is the most successful coin-operated game ever and one of the most recognizable cartoon characters in the world. The original game—to say nothing of its many sequels and adaptations—has been in demand since its release almost 30 years ago, from its arcade cabinet, to home computers and emulators, up to the release of Pac-Man: Championship Edition on the Xbox 360 in 2007. Pac-Man is a part of gaming history, among the few games (like Tetris) that deserve to be considered classics, well worth learning more about.

Pittman does a good job of covering Pac-Man‘s many aspects. He has not only gone over old strategy books, but, with access to the source code and decades of study by fans, the actual behaviour of the software. He describes a lot of technical details without becoming dry or irrelevant; what details are, are trapped in tables.

The processes of Pac-Man are presented clearly, particularly those concerning the ghosts’ behaviour, but Pittman doesn’t make the mistake of presenting it as a simple game. Indeed, though he doesn’t say it, Pac-Man is another example of how relatively uncomplicated processes acting together can lead to complex behaviour (an example more familiar and relatable than Conway’s Life).

Though Pittman spends most his words on the software, he also goes over some design decisions—from the cross-gender appeal of a non-violent action game based on eating, to the colours of the sides of the cabinets—and, to me most intriguing, touches on Pac-Man culture and lore:

Blinky will increase his rate of speed twice each round based on the number of dots remaining in the maze. While in this accelerated state, Blinky is commonly called “Cruise Elroy”, yet no one seems to know where this custom was originated or what it means.

This endearing little mystery (and the speculation which follows it) is one example of the human dimension of Pac-Man. The article breaks down exactly how each of the ghosts behaves and why, and goes on to mention the ghosts’ various Japanese and English nicknames, how players saw in each ghost a different style of play, a personality. The game isn’t just about the mechanics of play or the colourful, beeping rewards it gives its players, but what people see in it, what they’ve made of it (cf. Senet).

It’s great to have such a full picture of a game, from the low level of memory bugs in the software to Buckner & Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever. Pittman does a good job of showing us Pac-Man as system and of telling us its story, of reminding us that it is still very human.

After all, someone had to feed those quarters in.

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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.

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Killing time and zombies

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Typing zombies to death in “Typing of the Dead”

Do you like zombies? Like arcade games? Want to improve your WPM? Well, there is a way to combine the joy of Land of the Dead, Virtua Cop, and repetitive keyboard drills: Sega’s goofy masterpiece, The Typing of the Dead. The game alters the well-known rail shooter The House of the Dead 2 by replacing guns with keyboards. Zombies advance on you with word bubbles floating in the space ahead of them. To defeat them, you need to type that word as quickly and accurately as you can.

For those of us who are lazy and in front of a computer all day, but still have a nagging urge for self-improvement, Typing of the Dead is a great way to avoid work, the out of doors, and other people. It’s a tounge-in-cheek re-purposing of a badly written old arcade game (the voice acting is atrocious) but there’s just enough Mavis Beacon to it that you won’t feel too guilty for sinking an entire afternoon into it.

But Typing is satisfying in a way the Mavis Beacon tutors never were. Landing a long word without making a single error means juggling a walking corpse with bullets. Your skill isn’t a score or a ribbon, but explosions of green blood, the rush of having destroyed a wave of infected, knife-weilding circus chimps. You get the feeling that the home row can really kick some ass.

Typing was developed by the same company responsible for the excellent Jet Grind Radio. Originally released for the Dreamcast (your in-game character carries one strapped to his back), the game seems to have found an audience on the PC, and was popular enough to have been re-released for the PS2 in Japan a few years ago.

The full game is available at HOTU, as a direct download or BitTorrent. Be warned, it comes with a suspicious, warez-fabulous installer and loud sound-effects.

I recommend disabling the music: go to the folder where the game was installed and, in the sound folder, rename the bgm folder to anything other than bgm.

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Tending their blocks by night

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Tetris, as a product, has a nasty history. Soon after Tetris spread beyond the Soviet Union, the rights to the game were ignored or sold by people who didn’t own them. Companies pumped out knock-offs like TETЯIS, which angered Nintendo, who believed it had exclusive rights to the game in the West. Lawsuits were filed, disks were taken off store shelves, and the Soviet organization which mediated electronic exports disintegrated. Tetris’ creator was allowed his reasonable right to profit from Tetris very belatedly, ten years after the game had become ubiquitous, when it was almost useless as intellectual property. The success in the West of one of the most emblematic, most imitated games left a knot of confused rights-holders and resentment. The wrong people got rich. The meek Russian who invented the game was left with little more than a 286 desktop computer to show for it.

Tetris, the game, has been a small part of my own personal history. I can remember playing it on my grandparents’ Commodore 64 as a kid; hogging my cousin’s GameBoy to play it; being impressed with my friend’s brother and his shareware success, Ultris; working with Paul on our own variant, Bombtris, in Visual Basic; arguing with my father that pausing every time a new piece showed up in order to plan where to put it was cheating. (I was frustrated that I could never beat his high scores—but it was still cheap.) I’ve copied Microsoft’s Tetris (the same version I’d played in Windows 3.0) onto each of my relatives’ computers time and time again, as recently as last year. Having been raised around computers, it’s always been somewhere near at hand, a constant, innocuous presence: on the 64, the various PCs, Palm handhelds, even on the graphing calculators at school.

So, since my laptop died and took my only working installation of Windows with it (my only foundation for playing the copy of Half-Life 2 that’s been temping me all summer long), my free time has been spent playing Tetris (not Tetris per se, but one of its many imitators: Gnometris).

And, for two non-consecutive nights, I’ve dreamt about it.

It’s not uncommon to have elements of your waking world intrude on your dreams, be they conversations, people, or falling tetrominoes. As with any activity you busy yourself with, video games affect your mind. Given that I indulge in a dozen-or-so rounds of Tetris a day, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see coloured blocks in my dreams. In fact, some psychologists at Harvard Medical School would say that my Tetris dreams are a good thing.

According to a summary article in SciAm, these dreams are a side effect of a two-stage learning process believed to be important in learning and associating important events and experiences. While asleep, the hippocampus (an area of the brain important for the formation of memories) communicates my recent experiences to the neocortex. This communication serves to store the experiences in the cortex, the area of the brain best at associating stimuli and memories. The cortex then sends signals back to the hippocampus, perhaps to request more information, or to release the memories it has just stored. The memories I create of playing Tetris stay in my hippocampus where, at night, they’re passed to and imprinted on the cortex. During sleep, the brain studies these memories and teaches itself how to deal with similar experiences. The cortex is also where sensory input is processed, so as the memories pass through, I experience them: I dream of Tetris.

Of course, despite the benefits of compiling my Tetris experiences during sleep, I should be wary of playing too much Tetris.

Update: BBC Four recently aired an excellent documentary on Tetris. (Link via Grand Text Auto.)

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