LVL Headed

Recently I’ve been playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (after getting a cheap deal on Amazon), and the battle system has just blown me away.  The mini-game attacks, the way levelling up works, and all the subtle interactions between the types of enemies and the types of attack.  It’s fun, and it’s one of the rare games these days that I can’t stop playing.

But Paper Mario got me thinking about the other RPGs out there, and where all the fun was.  If you think about it, your average jRPG is like an easy game theory puzzle.  Forget the prisoner’s dilemma, in games like Final Fantasy you just worry about attacking or defending, or perhaps which method of attack to use.  Your attacks don’t take any skill to implement, you simply choose the option and it happens.  Why is this fun?

It’s gambling.  That’s where the fun is.  If the player knew everything in these battles, such as the enemy’s HP, whether or not the attack would be a success, whose turn was next, and so on, the choices would become obvious, and it wouldn’t be fun at all.  Instead, it’s all a guessing game in which the player puts their bet either on Attack or Defend, and then watches the outcome to see if they’ve made the right decision.

This is not exactly how Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door works.  Your attacks are more successful if you have good timing and you can see which special attacks enemies can use on you from the start.  There’s less of a bet here, and more need of skill, even if that skill is just pressing a button or releasing the joystick at the right time.

RPGs, or at least Japanese RPGs ask the player to gamble on their actions, and give the player options to better their wagers through the manipulation of statistics.  The fun in Final Fantasy is to try to make a perfect warrior through the acquisition of higher stats, better weapons, bigger spells, and better tricks.  The player attempts to better their odds in games of chance in which the odds are continually stacked against them.  Enemies continue to get stronger and meaner, and so the player adds their stats to make themselves stronger as well.

My wish is for RPGs to experiment more with their statistics.  I want a game in which the main object is to manipulate the system in your favor in each battle.  I want a game that incorporates gambling-style risk and reward, but not in a silly “let’s just put in an attack with a roulette wheel” sense.

And on the other hand, I’m having lots of fun with Paper Mario, which straight-up tosses most of the statistic-based play to the side in order to experiment with other gameplay mechanics.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, let me say a few words about random encounters.  Paper Mario presents the player with a set number of enemies for each level that you can either rush into to fight or try to avoid.  This is a great system because it gives the designers more control over how the character levels up.  Random encounters give the player loopholes in the game, such as being able to run in a circle outside of a town for hours on end until the player reaches level 1000.

I should clarify, but I’ll leave that for a later rant.

I’ll admit I’m nerdy enough to watch the cartoons every now and then, and I was lucky enough to catch this the other night.  It’s so spot-on.

People have an understanding of games as toys, and not as media.  This causes them to have odd reactions to the discoveries of current games.  At least, that’s what I think.

Appearantly, GTA IV includes a parody situation in which if the player tries to access littlelacysurpisepageant.com on the game’s faux internet, the player will see a warning from the police department and their wanted level will automatically raise to the maximum level.

We could look at this logically and realize that the inclusion of this site in the game is parody, that the player is punished for visiting the site, and that the purpose of this site’s inclusion in the game and it’s consequences is to make the point that child porn is something you can get arrested for.  And obviously all of us (or at least the non-sleazy majority) can agree that kiddy-porn is wrong.

But people don’t look at it like this.  It’s crazy to me that there would be any controversy around this message, that people would see it as “glamorizing” child pornography.  Not everything included in a game is meant to be a goal.

Sorry about the title, I just couldn’t help myself.

I just found out from Wonderland today that the new MMORPG Age of Conan contains some female nudity.  I could just let this go, or I could over-analyze the hell out of it like a sophomore English-major.  I know which one I prefer.

I think it’s pretty sensible, on a corporate level, to put nudity in an MMORPG.  After all, your main audience isn’t people with disposable income, but with reliable income who can shell out the bucks month after month to kill rats.  There’s a good chance then that most of your available market is going to at least be old enough to enjoy Titanic without their parents shoving a pillow in their face during the drawing scene.

But what will the consequences be of introducing nudity in such a casual way in a game like this?  There’s the chance that it was put in to drum up sales… no, scratch that, it’s pretty damn certain that it was put in to drum up sales, but still, is this just another BMX XXX?  Or is it a chance to introduce sexuality and adult situations into games more subtly?

Breasts themselves aren’t sexual organs, it’s our culture that turns them into something sexual.  In other MMORPGs, the issue is skirted with magical skin-grafted underwear that’s stuck on every character model.  By including breasts in a non-sexual situation, just as an obvious part of the body, the game could work towards de-sexualizing them.  There’s a message in society that breasts are dirty and should be kept covered and secret.  A game like this that provides nudity simply in the context of getting dressed normalizes it, makes it just part of the body.

But then we get to the questions that arise from MMORPGs and the stereotypical audience.  Can this nudity be normalized in the context of a social game in which many, if not most, of the players will be men raised in a patriarchal society?  Surely there’ll be a few players running around topless as a source of humor or entertainment.  And women have traditionally been marginalized in MMORPG environments.

Then there’s cybersex, but that turns the game into something more like the real life. I said that breasts aren’t sexual organs, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be sexual or shouldn’t be. As this game is played, there will be those looking to use the system for their own games, for things like cybersex, and there will be those looking to play within the system, in other words, to kill rats. These parties usually don’t intersect, and I think this might create a useful schism in the game. Players who want to use nudity as a tool for their own games will do so, and players who want to play the game as it’s set will avoid it. This way, the nudity in Age of Conan becomes sexualized when players are looking for a sexual situation, and non-sexualized when they’re questing.

But of course, everything I said in the last paragraph could be negated depending on the attitude that the players take to the inclusion of female above-waist nudity in the game.  And that’s likely to be pretty sucky.

In the end, this is where I think games need to go (and I think so does Daniel Floyd). However, the topic has to be tackled gently. These open-world games allow the inclusion of nudity and sexuality, but in a way that isn’t necessary to the game. It makes it an option to the player, without creating specific goals. It turns it into ambiance, and not necessarily a mechanic.

As for Age of Conan, I’m not exactly sure, because I don’t know that much about the game. I don’t know how much control players have over how they look in the game, and I think that would be very important as well. I think if someone has the option to go topless, they should also have the option to be obese, or muscular, or any other body-type that exists. Limiting body types is a way to make certain body types more acceptable than others.

And that’s about all I have to say about that.

Boobs.

Get Up on the Raft

Sent from BlueOrganizer

Somewhere in the bowels of California lives Liam Lynch, my hero.  An insomniac and artist, Lynch spends his time creating music, films, podcasts, and I figure anything else that pops into his brain.  If you’re wondering, Lynch is my personal hero because he just does what he wants.  He’s the one who helps me believe that, if you want to be something, just do it and you are.

But I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself, haven’t I?  I should wait to shovel out praise only after I talk about Lynch’s new CD, Get Up on the Raft.

If you’re familiar with Lynch’s previous work, you’ll notice that this album is much more serious.  This is a great departure from Fake Songs and Lynch’s hit “United States of Whatever.”  Get Up on the Raft abandons the silly and fun attitude for a more personal tone, with songs like “Get Up on the Raft” and “Tracing the Shape,” which speak of growth and life experience.  These songs have the ability to tweak your emotions and put you somewhere within the lyrics.

If you’ve listened to Lynch’s last album, How to be a Satellite, you’ll hear a continuation of the style in songs like “How to be a Satellite” in this album.  There’s still energy in the sound, but it’s a bit more subdued in favor of a more personal experience.

My personal favorites on this album are “Exhibits” and “I’m not Ready.”  Lynch channels a purer style of rock that bands like Tenacious D use like a punchline, but Lynch is very sincere.  You can listen to samples of the songs on Amazon.com, and you can always see what Lynch is up to on www.liamlynch.net

Alright, so I was talking about Hardcore games and Casual games, and how they are played by people with a different state of mind.  The Hardcore game is played like you read a book.  You sit down, you have a few hours free, and you’re truly looking forward to immersing yourself in the title.  The Casual game, well, is more like a song.  While you could spend your time entranced with it, like some do, you could also just use it as background noise.  Something to keep you entertained while you take care of other things.

Casual games are popular with people who haven’t played before because they present the game in a familiar format.  Checkers would never take 40 hours just to finish, and neither will Diner Dash.  It’s not so much that the rules are simpler in these games, it’s that the games can be digested in smaller chunks.

Tell a non-”hardcore” person that you want to play a game, and they’ll think you mean something like checkers.  Pull out The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and they’ll get annoyed because their assumptions aren’t getting met.  They don’t expect a story, and see the story as extra nonsense rather than anything important.  When they skip the story, they miss the clues and context which tells them their goals.  Without goals, they get confused and just give up.  They expect Chess, and they get The Godfather.

Casual games bring more people to the world of gaming, but they haven’t prepared those people to look at games in a new way, the way console and PC gamers have seen it for years now.  Casual games don’t prepare people for hardcore games because they affirm the idea that games should be consumed like songs, and not like books.

Nintendo is changing this with their games and the Wii.  The odd controller forces developers to re-teach all gamers how to play their games.  Wii Sports is a casual game which rewards players for more involved play by giving out and taking away points for overall wins and losses, with that “Pro” status hanging just above each player’s head.  Unlockables are becoming a great way to get casual gamers to put more interest in play while allowing them to play the same way they’re used to.  They create objectives, and lead players to understand long-term objective based play.

Super Mario Galaxy is a great example of a game which could introduce casual gamers to more hardcore styles.  The game has an over-all objective, but play is split between small galaxies which can be completed in a matter of minutes.

In the end, I think we need to train people how to play games, and what to expect from them.  We need a gaming literacy system, in order to break old ideas of what games are and to teach people what they have become: narrative simulations.  We need games which spread through the casual-hardcore scale, providing more ambient information, longer play periods, and long-term objectives that are tied within a plot, as the game moves up the scale.

Right now, it seems as if the two master-genres are moving apart, creating longer cutscenes that turn off even hardcore gamers.  I don’t really have anything else to say about it.

The first Pong machine was set up in a bar.  Flash forward a decade or two, and there’s a war being fought in Washington which rests on the general assumption that Video Games are children’s toys.

Actually, I’m sorry for that.  I don’t mean to be too political here, and I’m not yet about to start my rant on games legislation.  Instead, I want to focus on the divide between Games and the mainstream, how it’s weakening, and how that may or may not “help” games in general.

First, let’s talk about modern games.  The hardcore.  What’s special about God of War, or Beyond Good and Evil?  Comparisons are often made between the gaming industry and the film industry, mostly in predicted profits.  And while games are beginning to share much of the visual flare of the Hollywood movie, one consumes a game much differently than they would a movie.  The game is interactive, it demands user participation.  It also takes time, something around 30 to 40 hours a game.  Games aren’t like movies, they’re like books.  In the same way that we can’t just pick up War and Peace, read a few pages, and be done with it, modern video games demand that we make time for them.  Starting a game of Ico is a commitment to sit with the controller in hand for a significant period of time.

Then there’s the casual.  These are games which are designed to be quick and disposable.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying casual games are bad.  They’re just different.  One doesn’t plan to play Tetris for seven hours, it just happens.  And then, when you realize you have something else to do, you just turn it off.  There’s no need to save, you weren’t really working up to anything.

Many would say the difference between Hardcore and Casual games lay in the rules, and while I won’t dispute it, I’m not so sure.  I think the big difference is narrative.  In my personal opinion, you could boil down Metal Gear Solid by taking away all the com-link stuff and the cut-scenes, and you’d have a perfectly playable casual game.  Actually, I guess that’s what Metal Gear Solid: The VR Missions was.  After all, most of Metal Gear was the narrative.  Take that away and you’ve just got running and shooting.

It’s narrative in games which demand more participation from the player.  It’s easy to stop playing Tetris at any time, but Final Fantasy VII is a bit harder because the player is still working for their reward, the end of the story.  Once again, boil Final Fantasy down to a purely abstract game of statistics and management, and it becomes something you can just turn on and off whenever.

I’ll finish with my controversial statements with my next post.

Metal Slug has recently been re-released on Nintendo’s Virtual Console. This is kind of a funny thing to do, since Metal Slug was playable on the Wii about since it was released if you bought the Metal Slug Anthology disc, like I have. Well, however it’s been released, Metal Slug is still a classic.

Like games such as Contra, Metal Slug has you running about shooting soldiers, collecting power-ups, and bringing down bosses. Also like Contra, it’s hard as hell. After all, Metal Slug was designed for the arcade, where the cost of a human life was only a quarter, so the game has to make it up in volume. You die a lot. A whole lot. And yet, you’ll come back for more.

Like any shoot’em-up, the appeal in Metal Slug is the overwhelming enemy fire. The fun lies not so much in shooting back, but rather in dodging the rain of bullets. The reward in shooting the enemies is that they’ll no longer shoot at you. The designers of Metal Slug knew what they were doing, as the environments pull together the dodge-and-shoot mechanic of the game excellently. The early levels are somewhat flat, lend a lot of cover, and generally give the player a few good shots before they enemy can get a round off. As the game progresses, the terrain gets rockier, the enemies shoot faster, and it becomes harder to stay safe. There’s a good curve here for difficulty.

This isn’t to say you’ll learn not to die. I already warned you, you’ll die over and over again. And strangely enough, it’s enjoyable. While a large part of Metal Slug is the dodge-and-shoot gameplay, what keeps you coming back is the challenge of staying alive. That sounds either a little strange or a little obvious, but just run with me. When you first pick up Metal Slug, you’ll die so much that you will begin to think of death as the default state in the game. Ten seconds of gameplay, and then you die. Fifteen more, then again. As you keep playing, you’ll get better, and you’ll start to live a little longer. The challenge ceases to be about killing enemies or reaching the end, instead it becomes a test of will. How long can you stick it out? The game challenges you to live through the entire level, as it resets count of how many prisoners of war you’ve rescued each time you die. In Metal Slug, you don’t expect to make it through the entire level on one life, you just try to use as few as possible. Each second alive becomes reward in itself, a sign that you aren’t sucking quite as much as you were earlier.

As for style, Metal Slug won’t fail to toss a lot of detail at you. While the game has a cartoony style, they make it work for them. Enemies and environments are incredibly expressive, and the few enemies trying to run away or sneak off of screen pull you more into the game. Backgrounds are detailed, and you’ll never feel like you’re walking through the same hallway again. It’s a fun style for a fun game.

There’s much more to Metal Slug than all this, but the game is best experienced by playing. Preferably, in an arcade, where the fight to survive is strengthened when the cost of death becomes more than a loss of points, it becomes a quarter as well.