LVL Headed

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.

For the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Game Maker 7 (the pro edition) to see if it would work for a project I’m starting.  Before this, my previous experience had been with Flash and Torque Game Builder.

First thing, Game Maker is easy.  Really easy.  It’s a visual coding experience, meaning that instead of typing up what needs to happen, you simply select options to create a list.  Doing the selecting isn’t hard either, as each of the options has a description which tells you exactly what it does.  If you have even the slightest bit of programming experience, it’ll be refreshing not to have to memorize or look up special functions, but rather just pick them off the list.  Game Maker also allows for scripting by hand, but so far I haven’t found anything in which I’d have to worry about it.

This isn’t to say that everything is cut and dry for the beginner.  You’ll still need to look through the help file or go through some tutorials to pick up on certain things, as you would with anything else.  I’ll say though that so far the help section and the tutorials for Game Maker have been tons more helpful than those for Torque Game Builder.  Working with TGB was a nightmare of trying to find anything useful in the documentation.  The Tutorials for TGB mostly ask you to cut and past code instead of explaining what each bit of code does, and then stop before getting to any of the more powerful and useful features in the program.  Game Maker walks you through everything nicely, and really lets you know what you’re doing.

As long as I’m comparing Game Maker and Torque Game Builder, I might as well say that Game Maker isn’t as pretty as TGB, and that I missed some of the options when it came to building stages and levels.  In TGB, I’d create high-res graphics in Illustrator or Photoshop and then shrink them down into the level to retain some quality.  In Game Maker, there’s no ability like that.  You have to create art the exact size that you want it, and so far I’ve had some trouble creating small anti-aliased graphics for use in Game Maker.

In the end, this thing is really cool.  The pro version cost me 20 bucks, but I’ll prefer that to the amount of scripting I’d have to do in Flash and definitely to the hell of searching through Torque Game Builder documentation.

I was stuck in one place for too long, and I started to think about what the systems in computer Role Playing Games have to say about us as humans. In games like Fallout, you’re given points that you can distribute between intelligence, charisma, strength, and other such qualities. After you’ve created your character, there isn’t much you can do to heighten these statistics. Fallout makes sure to separate inherent characteristics from gained skills. You can become better with handguns, but you can’t become stronger.

Compare that with the Final Fantasy series (and most other jRPGs). A player’s intelligence, strength, speed, and so on goes up for every level they gain. A system like Fallout’s uses a mixed nature and nurture system, in which there are unchangeable traits, but skills that can be mastered. jRPGs like Final Fantasy go the pure nurture angle, wherein as the player goes on, they become stronger, more intellegent, get more charisma, and so on.

This is kind of interesting, but obvious enough. But this lead me to think about the level system in RPGs themselves. Is it really necessary anymore?

Levels to me seem to be a kind of shorthand, an easy way to calculate how strong the player should be after enough battles. But a system of levels usually just rewards “grinding,” or going out to fight random things in order to raise levels. Players see the best way to get through a game like Final Fantasy is to go outside a town, run around in circles and participate in random battles until they’ve leveled up to the point where the next boss is an easy target.

I’d like to see a little more thought go into these systems. I’d like to see a game which gets rid of levels on whole. My suggestion is to take each action the player can do (such as “Fight,” “Magic,” “Run”) and give these experience points. Each time a player uses that action, that action gains experience. And instead of adding up that experience to get to a new level, just use the amount of experience to calculate the strength of that skill.

You see what I’m saying?

Give experience to each action instead of the player, and you set up a new system of player growth. Instead of the player choosing new skill sets every level, the skill sets are chosen by what the player uses. If the player wants to be a magic user, they’ll have to exercise their skills with that magic. If they don’t use those skills after a long enough time, maybe they should start to deteriorate.  Deterioration of skills prevents grinding because it prevents a player from trying to level up that skill.  Too much work would be put into “leveling up” a skill that won’t stay leveled up for that long.

With the way computers can take over calculations for us, there’s no reason to use something like a level.  A game could make it so that the player sees the rewards for each action they take, and interesting gameplay could occur around a system that asks players to constantly exercise all of their skills.

Just a thought.

I just stumbled upon pmog.com, and I have to say the idea blows me away. PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game, and is an attempt to create a game you play by surfing the web and doing all your normal everyday web activities. A game that you play passively is an interesting concept, but what’s really got me excited is the idea of using web space as a representation of a game world.

The odd thing about the web is that we all refer to it like it’s a physical location. We say things like “Go to google.com.” We don’t read or scan the web, we “surf” it. And now, when PMOG leaves Beta, we’ll be able to play it, too.

I can imagine going to Gamasutra only to be ambushed by a regiment of orcs, or trading wares with a fellow player I met while shopping for comics on Amazon.com. The organization of sites could also provide opportunities for gameplay. Large sites with multiple directories could act as dungeons, where each page is a different room. There’s also the social aspects. The PMOG site hints at user-created missions, which would drag players across all kinds of sites to complete an objective. Kind of like stumbleUpon with a purpose.

I see so much potential with this. I hope PMOG carries through. Hopefully, if I’m accepted for the beta, I’ll know soon enough.

-SKT

Hi. Welcome to my blog. It’s not really doing anything right now (lazy bum) but I’m working on that. In case you’re wondering, this blog will be about my own ill-informed thoughts on games, game design, game mechanics, and the medium of games itself. Honestly, besides my current college work, the books that I’ve read, and the handful of games I’ve created myself, I don’t have any experience that puts me in a place of authority to talk about these things. But hey, it’s a blog! That’s the point. And who knows, out of my incoherent ramblings about mechanics and possibilities of the medium there might come something new and true.

Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself quite a bit here.

Before I post more, I’m going to take the time to give this site a proper design. If you’re interested in me and the stuff that I’ve done, you can visit my portfolio at http://www.rudeproductions.com.

Hopefully, I’ll see you all later.

-SKT