My First Video Game

Naturally it takes me two months to sum up my thoughts on making my first game–longer than it took to actually make it, I think.

One thing strikes me:

Being able to create your own resources is almost as much of a barrier to entry as learning code or design utilities.

I’m lucky: the old graphics tablet I got in high school was sufficient for Fingering’s (feels weird to italicize my own game but I’m trying for a style here dammit) scratchy doodles. My headset was decent enough to make various game sounds with my mouth, and SFXR took care of the rest. My experience with Audacity was sufficient to bludgeon the audio into a usable format, and my experience with GIMP was sufficient to do the same for images.

Each of those tools or skills added up to make the barest minimum of what laypeople might recognize as a video game: a colorful moving screen which makes sounds and does other weird things when you interact with it.

But even for a bare-bones project, I spent almost as much time drawing and futzing with audio as I did designing, maybe more. Creating a game by yourself means you have to be a Digital Renaissance Person. (Maybe a shitty one, in my case, but nonetheless.)

How do we get over that hump?

The best answer right now is tools like Twine. Many more people can write than can do all the hoop-jumping I described above, and that’s mostly all you need for a Twine game. There’s still a teensy-to-heavy amount of code-like stuff, depending on how complex the story is, but it’s close to approachable overall.

Not everybody wants to write a story, though. People want to make games with moving graphics, sounds, complex representations of their world or their dog. Why should they have to make all that crap just to do up a game with it?

I can’t mold plastic, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make a plastic skyscraper. We need game design Legos.

RPG Maker is the closest example I know of to an all-in-one playset, in which creators just need to put attractive, generic parts together and decide how they move. It works because it’s limited by design; it’s RPG Maker, and you can try to make other games with it, but you will have a much easier time if you just make a damn RPG.

Unity and Construct 2′s asset stores are half of the equation, but actually making a game with those pre-made resources is another story.

Maybe we need more, and better, genre-maker tools divorced from games. (Mods are great but are usually beholden to somebody’s copyrighted project, which is tricky for both legal and accessibility concerns.)

That leaves potential creators with the unfortunate need to pigeonhole any given project by common game genre. Still, limitations can foster creativity–especially when those same limitations mean you only worry about who your character is and what it’s doing instead of how to make it move without falling through the floor.

Also, drawing hands is harder than I remember.

Jet Set Radio Motion

I’m leaning into my monitor, grinding my teeth, muttering under my breath. I’m missing the rail for the fifth time in a row. I’m pushing the button harder than I need to skip through pre-round exposition. I’m leaning into my monitor, forgetting that my jaw hurts.

Jet Set Radio is rough and frustrating; its difficulty leaves me feeling relieved, not skillful, when I overcome it. Beat will always wait for me to catch up halfway through when I race him, so why repeat the first half of the competition over and over? Why make me pursue the Noise Tanks for 30 seconds before I even get a can of spraypaint to tag them? Why is there no restart option, even on stages that take five or six minutes to complete? Just to irritate me.

But I read the first sentence again. When was the last time a game made me lean into my monitor, grind my teeth, mutter? When I’m moving, everything is worth it.

The motion compels me. Cans of spraypaint guide me from one tag to the next, an artificial and delicious Slurpee of momentum. Speed boosts timed with hops and grinds turn uphill slogs into slalomous gravityfucks. Even when my skater waits at the select screen, he or she dances.

When that momentum is broken, it hurts! I only realize how perfect I felt wall riding over the heads of Tokyo-to’s pedestrians when I crash into the bench behind them. My stomach knots and my molars crunch; I need to do it better.

Frustrating games aren’t inherently more rewarding. They become that way when players justify their efforts, and it’s no better or worse than the addictive feedback loop of energy-metered social games. I wish Jet Set Radio didn’t do that to me.

But when I’m boosting, grinding, soaring, and the pedestrians are running, and the cops are bumbling, and my cartoon skater is shouting, and I’m shouting, and the music just turns me on, I don’t care. It could be my first attempt or my fiftieth.

Just let me move again.

Killing is easy with eyes closed

In many video games, the easiest thing to do is kill someone.

Their experiences are structured around the attack: move, target, and strike.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater adheres to this philosophy. Its central tenets are stealth and evasion, but it still loads out players with a mind-bogglingly diverse arsenal of firearms and explosives.

While the game’s support characters repeatedly stress it is better to avoid a fight than engage the enemy, unavoidable clashes with powerful foes and the myriad options for violence tempt players to become killers.

They did for me. But more on that later.

A few options stick out in the game and trouble players with an unexpected choice: to kill or not to kill.

It is almost always much easier to simply kill. A silenced rifle, a carefully placed landmine, or a few wildly tossed hand grenades can do in a few seconds what would take minutes of carefully planned non-lethal maneuvering.

The only reason to not kill your enemies, it seems at first, is to not kill them.

But they are only guards. They bear main character Naked Snake no particular malice other than that which their orders necessitate.

They are probably no happier guarding Snake Eater’s inhospitable jungle and mountain landscapes than Snake is infiltrating them.

So to kill or not to kill becomes a matter of how willing players are to separate the combatants from the war; to remove the “enemy” from his current context and place him back home again, with his hopes, dreams, and loved ones.

Perhaps it seems strange to place so much currency in the “lives” of soldiers whose virtual existences boil down to a system of complex patrol, search, and attack subroutines.

Many games only present kill counts as one statistic coolly stacked among others in a menu screen.

MGS3, however, confronts players with their carnage in one of its most memorable encounters. It has no combat and no subterfuge.

It has only a river Styx, and a legion of every single foe who died by Snake’s hand stumbling unevenly down its current.

“Now you will know the sorrow of those whose lives you have ended,” the ghostly apparition in command of the netherworld, himself named The Sorrow, says to Snake.

My experience weaving through the horde of dead men, still clearly afflicted by their mortal wounds, was unexpected.

“This can’t be right,” I thought. “How did I kill this many? I made liberal use of my tranquilizer gun and only killed when it seemed absolutely necessary.”

But a streak of ghostly figures, heads lolling to the side from savagely slashed throats, reminded me that I had not always been so human to my enemies.

For the game’s first hours, before I began to appreciate the bevy of non-lethal options before me, my knife was rarely dry.

After that, killing in the heat of combat remained a natural part of playing the game.

I had a choice all along, but I only acknowledged it at my leisure.

I forgot my sins, but The Sorrow did not.

This prolonged otherworldly moment is a deliberate counterbalance to a — for the most part — more “grounded” military narrative.

Some players might even consider it a trap: why give us the option of killing if the developers plan to punish us for it later?

But these choices, which many players likely made with little thought before The Sorrow encounter, make the individual acts of killing in the context of war much more affecting than would a game which presents lethality as the sole means to an end.

It begins to hint at the personal ramifications of war in reality; while wading through a shadowy river of the dead is perhaps a heavy handed metaphor, killing is not a self-contained phenomenon for soldiers.

Instead, it is an experience which will likely play out for the rest of the combatant’s life, as thoughts of fear, confusion, and self-hatred plague ordinary people who were forced to partake in the extraordinary suffering of war.

It would be folly to propose that a war game — in this case primarily a vehicle for interactive entertainment and cinematic titillation — could acclimate or inform players to the reality of violent conflict.

But it may give them some awareness for, and even some sympathy of, the terrible toll it exacts not only on its casualties but its survivors.

Choose your words: Interacting (or not) with video game dialogue

Video games have countless unique considerations as an art form, but among the most compelling is how to allow players to impact and experience their worlds.

Film directors usually do not need to worry about justifying the presence of a camera in a scene; audiences accept that their perspective is that of an invisible observer.

But character-based video games, which by their definition are interactive, must somehow account for human beings manipulating their artificial world.

They accomplish this in many ways.

Many games, particularly those early role-playing games which establish worlds that seem to exist outside of player exploits, give players a silent protagonist to control.

This design choice, which is seen in games like The Legend of Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest, and the original Final Fantasy, lets other characters in the game speak to each other and to the hero without fear of placing words in players’ mouths.

This springs from mostly technological concerns: human dialogue is a very complex thing. Creating a system which would allow users to participate fully in a conversation with pre-scripted partners capable of reacting in real time is a feat of software engineering which still eludes us.

Thus, the few questions which are directed toward the hero have their answers distilled down to simple list items: Yes; No; Rest; Save; Fight. These choices are meant to convey the general idea of the ensuing speech, and it’s assumed the character is participating in the conversation more fully — we just don’t hear it.

Crono, the main character of Chrono Trigger, has (almost) no lines of his own despite playing a pivotal role in the game’s events. A few moments of player decision come from simple dialogue choices, but most emerge simply from deciding what to do and where to go at any given time.

Silent heroes did not disappear with the advent of common voice acting in games, although they did become much more rare.

Gordon Freeman, the main character of Half-Life (the so-called thinking man’s first-person shooter series) holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT and the respect of his scientific colleagues, though his perennial silence is a common subject of the game’s self-referential humor.

Players are capable of much more nuanced expression with their heroes in battle than in dialogue, where attacks can be carefully plotted out to combine and counter in a conversation of their own right.

The set of priorities which made interesting violence develop much earlier than interesting verbal interaction in video games merit exploration of their own.

Role-playing video games like Mass Effect and Fallout took the RPG system of simple speech choices and expanded them.

Players are still limited to at most four or five responses to any given part of a conversation, but those options are realized as fully developed thoughts.

This choice makes main characters seem to be more of their own people with their own experiences, but leaves it up to the player which kind of person — from a relatively narrow set of possibilities — they want the character to be.

It allows main characters — and thus players — to be a much more powerful force in the game’s story, as opposed to letting non-player characters do all the talking while the hero just sticks around to kill the dragon.

Almost all of Mass Effect’s much-vaunted moments of decision occur within dialogue: players must choose which subordinate to save and which to leave to certain death by encroaching enemies and a soon-to-detonate bomb from several options in an interface wheel.

However, these moments also have the potential to disenfranchise gamers. None of the choices presented may be comfortable for the player, or the actual content of the dialogue which will ensue once the choice is made may be unclear.

Mass Effect and other games with similar methods of character interaction simply distill the basic idea of each dialogue choice into a brief sentence to save space and make it more interesting to hear or read over again. If a summary sentence is misinterpreted and chosen, players can feel immediately divorced from the experience by an apparatus which fails to reflect their will, and the unwanted consequences which may ensue.

In other situations, players may feel thwarted when player choice suddenly dries up to expose a clearly delineated path.

This was very much the case in the ending moments of Fallout 3, when players were forced to martyr the main character to provide clean water for a post-apocalyptic wasteland, despite the presence of several characters who could clearly accomplish the same thing safely. This inconsistency was later rectified by content released after the game.

It may be preferable to give gamers no influence on character behavior at all. This allows them to distance themselves from the main character and accept the third, most commonly used option in modern video games — keep the character’s personality and the player’s agency separate.

Characters from more action-oriented games such as Uncharted, Call of Duty, and Halo clearly have their own thoughts and inspirations completely separate from whatever the player may want to pursue, which they usually express in cut-scenes or quips throughout player action.

The juxtaposition of player action and character expression can, however, often interfere with character identity.

The main character of the Uncharted series, Nathan Drake, is a typical good-hearted rogue who is not afraid to scrap and steal but seems to follow his own moral code.

But that moral code evidently leaves room for sneaking up behind henchmen and snapping their necks before they can even utter a cry of surprise, because Drake never expresses any cognitive dissonance at the violence the player commands him to carry out, nor the body count in the hundreds he accumulates by the end of the game.

No form of character expression is perfect, and all previously enumerated in some way indicate the problem central to many games — balancing player input with the directive of a compelling, pre-authored experience.

Terrifying choice: Moral dilemmas in gaming

Why do so many games give us the choice to be a good or bad person?

What do players gain from being asked to choose between killing a stranger and forsaking their character’s son?

Presenting players with ethical dilemmas has become one of the hallmarks of 21st century game design. When done well, it can empower and terrify in challenging situations without foreseeably good or bad resolutions.

When done poorly, they become oft-disjointed morality play moments, which do little but encourage players to start the game over again and explore alternative paths and their mechanical rewards.

As the first example taken from 2010 interactive drama Heavy Rain illustrates, games can create distressing and memorable moments through a combination of context and uncertainty.

In this case, the context comes from knowing central character Ethan Mars outside of the current moment — breaking into a man’s house and pointing a gun at him — as a fairly peaceful father who just wants to do right by his son. Doing right by his son, in this case, means following the orders of a serial killer holding him captive.

The uncertainty comes from player agency in the moment. Instead of watching a narrative scene beyond the player’s control (cut-scene), the ability to fire at the man is always present, from the moment Mars encounters him and throughout the unfolding situation.

Were this a more action-oriented game such as Uncharted or Call of Duty, the choice would be as clear as the hundreds of pulled triggers which preceded it: Kill the target.

But it isn’t. Mars is not a hardened soldier, and the man is not an anonymous henchman — he’s a down-on-his-luck guy who appears to deal drugs to be able to support his daughter.

The game softens the burden of choice placed on the player by having the man go for a shotgun at one point — an opportunity to argue for self defense.

It’s what I did. I had no choice when I directed Mars to shoot him to death.

But really, I did have a choice. I didn’t know he was going to use the gun, or if it was even loaded — he might have just forced Mars to leave his home.

This is a good use of moral dilemma.

2009 open-world action-adventure game Infamous presents much more rote choices to its players, and suffers for it.

Main character Cole MacGrath becomes super powered as a direct consequence of city-wide destruction he was partially responsible for bringing about.

An early example of the game’s binary ethics come when MacGrath discovers a pallet of air-dropped emergency supplies suspended above a crowd of hungry and injured city residents.

He is then presented with a clear choice, which he vocalizes for players: either shoot down the supplies for the refugees using one of his new-found powers, or scare away the crowd and claim the supplies for himself.

The game makes a half-hearted attempt to justify the latter choice when MacGrath points out those supplies could do a lot of good to support his small group in its survival efforts.

But there is no hunger mechanic in Infamous; MacGrath and his friends are not in danger of starving, nor are they in need of medicine.

Thus, it is clear what is really happening here: an early choice between making the central character walk the path of a two-dimensional hero or anti-hero.

These flat ethics are perhaps acceptable in a game which uses superhero comic books as its main inspiration, but their inconsequentiality in other areas of the game make for a character who seems unstable in affect.

In accounting for a protagonist capable of going from great acts of heroism to terrible wrath at the drop of a hat, the game’s developers, Sucker Punch, had to make him a bit dull.

MacGrath can be gratingly self-absorbed when players are attempting to be self-sacrificing guardians and frustratingly even-tempered when trying to embody vengeful destruction.

The character would have been more enjoyable if Sucker Punch had simply picked a personality for him and more carefully tailored his words and actions to suit it.

This presents an interesting question in game design: should main characters be their own people who players simply “assist” in parts, or should they be avatars for the player’s will?

How much authorial control should we have not just over our character’s actions but also their personality?

We’ll just have to do some thinking about that in the next post.

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Call of Duty just works (toward our undoing?)

Why do we love Call of Duty, even though it hurts us so?

Because of the Steve Jobs axiom: it just works. Perhaps more than any other game before it, the first CoD just worked for its intended audience.

People didn’t have to think hard to get a lot out of it — at least sensually. After initial control mechanics were mastered, all the rest was “instinct.”

Follow the leader. Flee from the grenade. Aim before firing. Shoot your enemy.

“Instinct” is lodged in quotation marks because, aside from perhaps the first example, the rest of the equation does not seem to be a natural part of the human experience.

But for CoD’s primary demographic, it is. Males from early adolescence to early adulthood are submerged in a culture of cinematic militarism, glorifying skill in combat and honorable bloodshed. Many of their most popular films do a better job of exploding helicopters than showing interactions between believable characters.

This zeitgeist allowed CoD, when it began with a depiction of World War II in 2003 and even more so when it moved to a fictional contemporary setting with 2008’s Modern Warfare, to instantly resonate with its audience.

While games like Super Mario Bros. may be simpler and carry a more broad, abstract appeal, the prospect of jumping on ambulatory mushrooms and flying turtles to save a princess is not nearly as narrowly tailored to evoke pre-existing cues as CoD’s cinematicism.

Why is cinematicism desirable? At least partially because video games are still commonly perceived as film’s odd little sibling. The best thing a game can do, from this perspective, is let players interact with the scenes of what would otherwise be a compelling motion picture.

CoD and the military shooter genre it defined are uniquely suited to this pursuit. The presence of an unquestionable leader in a military setting is at least somewhat realistic and immediately cues players to the notion that the proper experience will unfold if they obey their commanding officer as best they can.

This gives game designers a quick and justified method to exert strong authorial control over the player’s experience, even in large environments with a great deal going on at once — as opposed to, for example, Super Mario Bros., in which players generally move toward the right side of the screen simply because that is all there is to do.

Games like CoD are commonly criticised for depriving the player of agency, to the point where their single-player narratives are little more than spectacle-laden shooting galleries. They are anathema to the philosophy of games as a new art form with potential for unparalleled conversation between creator and user.

Its single-player is more about entertainment through visual and aural stimulation than challenge — whether that challenge comes from difficult-to-overcome scenarios or emotionally evocative material. CoD retains its mass-market appeal because people are often more entertained by spectacle than challenge when they listen to music, watch films, or play games.

Amusingly, famed film critic Roger Ebert’s primary criticism of games as a potential art form is for their inherent lack of authorial control, as he said in 2005 and has maintained since then. From his viewpoint, it would seem CoD and games like it are closer to art because of their more narrowly engineered experience than ones like Super Metroid or Journey, which put players in an environment with an ultimate goal in mind and more or less leave them to the experience.

Despite its contentious presence in the gaming community, CoD should not be an object of disgust for the more scholarly or artistic segments. Its popularity is a direct result of being the best at what it does, and at least its original developer Infinity Ward should be lauded for creating such a captivating work for millions of players.

The games are perfectly legitimate experiences, as long as we remember that blasting anonymous Russian terrorists throughout a five-hour roller coaster ride is not the pinnacle of the medium’s potential.

A Sexy Proposal

A pitch from a Nintendo executive to a character with flagging star power.

Ms. Aran, it isn’t enough to be a capable professional with top-of-the-line equipment to get ahead any more.

We need to grab the 18-to-35 demographic by the pants and lash them to the hood of our car, Samus. It’s the only way to keep the business afloat. And we’re sorry, but keeping your power armor’s — what, 7,000 servos? — running like greased pigs isn’t cheap.

I mean, space marines are out, haven’t you heard? It was a bubble, a damn good bubble, but it’s fixing to burst any second. We know you were in on it before the Doom guy and what’s-his-face-from-Halo and Gears of War’s Marcus thickest-neck-in-the-business Fenix, but we can’t fight the tide.

What we can do is make a deal: You keep the power armor, the super missiles, the ice beam, everything. We wouldn’t change it for the world. But to keep the wheels turning and our market share climbing, you lose the suit for 40 percent of your screen time.

Whoa, sit down — think about this for a second! You’re a good looking woman, Samus! It’s a damn shame to keep your pretty face — and other, ahem, assets — canned up in that big orange behemoth!

(Sure, you’ll need a little work, we completely understand that scars come easy in your gig and you’re just a bit too muscular to line up with the focus tests, but we know a doctor the Dead or Alive girls swear by and the procedures will be 110-percent compensated, with all the time off you need to recover. For a week.)

Haha, put down the gun, sweetheart! We’re just talking business plans, nothing solid yet! But I like your angle there, perfect illustration of my point! Nobody wants you to stop kicking ass! You’re Samus Goddamn Aran, the best bounty hunter in the galaxy! We just want, you know, sexy ass kicking. Forty percent of the time.

Please, think about this for a second. Your skin’s nothing new under the sun, honey; we’ve all seen the “See You Next Mission” commemorative bikini calendar. A little bit of fanservice has been in your contract ever since you started with us. We’re just talking about expanding.

The Japanese guys you signed up with were smart as hell, but shortsighted. You can’t compartmentalize sexuality any more; you’ve got to ooze it in everything you do. Instead of a little cheesecake at the end, we’re just talking about making it a real part of your appearances.

Your audience has changed, Samus. They’ve grown up from little boys with full afternoons after school with nothing to do but explore Zebes with you to young men with jobs, busy college schedules, sometimes even families. A little peep show at the end if they blast through the game fast enough just isn’t going to hold their attention.

So let’s bring it back, let’s put it in perspective: Sixty percent of the time, you’re the same androgynous pile of alloys and power-ups we’ve all come to love and respect for the great strides she’s made in upending gender roles in gaming. Forty percent of the time, you’re the new Samus, who still kicks ass, but isn’t afraid of expressing her sexuality.

In this blue catsuit.

And, no, it isn’t negotiable.

Raised by pixels

I had a great childhood full of wide fields, deep caverns, and fantastic characters.

It sounds like something from the idyllic youth of a bygone generation, but I was propelled by a gray plastic controller instead of a bicycle with a baseball card flapping in the spokes.

Secret of Mana

Please do not misunderstand me — I rolled down my share of grassy hills and partook in several short-lived Super Soaker uprisings.

But for a kid growing up in the center of suburbia, with naught to explore but the thoroughly charted square of grass which was my yard, the Super Nintendo opened as many new adventures to undertake as cartridges I could eagerly slot into it.

The endless caves and corridors of Super Metroid’s Zebes called out to me, and made me a lonely pilgrim in a sometimes hostile but always captivating new world.

Tempting treasures waited to be found amid the Hyrulean mountains and lakes of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, if I could only puzzle my way through its treacherous passes.

Valor, curiosity, and self-sacrifice seemed the bare minimum to become a video game hero, who could barely take a step without encountering a besieged village in need of a savior. I had a lot of good role models.

Contra III: The Alien Wars

Admittedly, the adventure was not always my own.

Video games bound me to my brother, who as my elder of seven years was always skilled enough to be just beyond my comprehension but well within my appreciation.

I was a silent observer to his long journey through the shattered world of Final Fantasy VI, and I gripped a controller to aid him in his quest to prevent a catastrophic clash of civilization and magic in Secret of Mana.

Our electronic exploits were not always so lofty — we did our share of machine gunning and rampant massacring as we fought alien monstrosities in Contra III and sucker punched a hive’s worth of mutated bees in Battletoads in Battlemaniacs.

The shared experiences forged a strong bond between us which continues to this day. No matter any time or distance, we can always reconnect behind our monitors.

Super Metroid

When I grew enough to play in a somewhat linear progression from each game’s beginning to its conclusion as he did, I began to appreciate the games differently.

The subtle art of Super Metroid’s ambient environments, littered with tiny details of life and history, became apparent. But understanding the elements which perplexed and enchanted my younger self did not diminish them.

Instead, my appreciation for games as creative expression began to grow. I saw the lives I led and worlds I dwelled in similarly affected many others of my generation.

The art form, with all the same power to inspire, shock, and educate as its cousins in physical and aural media, was still in its awkward adolescence at best despite our collective admiration.

Most of gaming’s best-known examples are more appeals to profit margins than the human condition — perhaps a symptom of too quickly becoming a multi-billion dollar industry.

But without that pervasive influence I would be a very different person today. I have grown with games, and can even define concrete periods of my life based on how realistic the grass textures were in any given title at the time.

We both still have much more growing to do in unexpected ways, as some pursuits plateau and others begin to take off.
But I hope our possibilities are endless.

The most wrong I’ve ever been

You know you remember the sound this freakish fish man made when you talked to him. (Image from videogamesasart.com)

I was twelve, and I was mad.

Connor circa 2002 was a pretty even-tempered kid, but one thing that could blow his middle school mind was Nintendo’s choice to make Legend of Zelda into a God-forsaken cartoon. Zelda! Swords, skeletons, zombies, dungeons, battle!

But Wind Waker, its next entry, would be a cel-shaded monstrosity! What happened to the gritty GameCube tech demo that showed a nigh-photorealistic Link and Ganondorf clashing like I’d always imagined since I saw that trailer?

And it didn’t even look like a manga! It looked like a Saturday morning toy license — something I’d pretended to be too old to care about for several years.

Naturally, I still got it. And naturally, I played the hell out of it. Maybe unnaturally, my adolescent brain became so attached to the world, to the characters and, for the first time, to this silent but wondrously expressive Link, that I got up to the very end but couldn’t bring myself to finish it.

I said goodbye to them in 2007, after enjoying every moment of a fresh play through.

GAME-UP

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