Voting Systems

If there's one thing I've learned from designing games, it's that if you want different outcomes in a system involving human participants, you can't just expect people to start behaving differently/better, rather you need to modify the system in which they are behaving. The way people behave tends to be fairly predictable mostly as a pursuit of self interest with some psychological quirks thrown in. This view puts me at odds with some who discuss politics by lamenting the greed and corruption of man (possibly with the implied undercurrent that "things never change"). In my view, the 2008 housing crisis was not cause by "a bunch of greedy bankers" but rather a bunch of rational actors sensibly taking advantage of a system which heavily rewarded dealing in highly questionable mortgages while offering minimal risk of punishment (unless a 700 trillion dollar bailout can be considered punishment). Relatedly I don't blame someone for exploiting a dominant move in a poorly balanced fighting game. Don't hate the player, fix the game.

In most cases I feel the best fixes would involve simplifying law, language and procedure since a highly complex and arcane system ends up being understood only by those who can profit by exploiting it. It's hard enough to balance a system with five players and ten pages of rules, let alone one with millions of players and enough rules that one can earn several degrees simply by trying to learn them. However there's one area of policy for which I believe the beautifully simple and elegant way of doing things is in fact horribly misguided, and that's the First Past the Post voting system. I delivered a speech at Toastmasters a while back on this subject, and since I made some cute slides I figured I'd throw it up here as well. (A shout-out to CGPGrey's excellent YouTube videos on the subject for inspiration.)

 Since most concepts are better explained with anthropomorphized letters, we imagine a fictitious election involving three horrifically mutated animals: Alligator, Bear, and Cat. How shall we elect a leader from this sorry bunch? (And we're disregarding any system that results in a coalition government; two carnivores aren't going to be able to share an office. Single winner required.)

At initial glance the ubiquitous First Past the Post system seems simple and obvious: have everyone vote for the person/thing/outcome they want, and the one that gets the most votes wins. If there are only two candidates, this method is wonderful. More people like Bear, Bear wins, no problem (until Bear inevitably goes drunk with power and delicious honey).

Problems arise as soon as with introduce a third candidate. Even though voters #4 and #5 hate Alligator and everything he stands for, Alligator ends up winning the election because the majority, who prefer warm and cuddly rulers, found their vote split by the "spoiler effect."

The spoiler effect is a very real thing that happens. There was a quiet little town in Ontario that decided it would let its citizens vote on what it should be named. The ballot included three options: "Lakehead," "The Lakehead," or "Thunder Bay." Of course they used First Past the Post and the final result looked like this:

The Lakehead - 8,377 votes
Lakehead - 15,302 votes
Thunder Bay - 15,870 votes!!!

If this vote were held semi-annually, it can be assumed that the people who liked "The Lakehead" would quickly jump on the "Lakehead" bandwagon. This spoiler effect, and the reactionary bandwagoning, is why nobody bothers voting for Ralph Nader (or the Green Party), and why all political system that use First Past the Post are doomed to devolve into a two-party system where everybody votes for the side they hate the least.

Enter my personal favorite solution, Instant Runoff Voting (aka "Alternative Vote"). In this system, voters order their candidates in order of preference, and then when the votes are being tabulated, candidates are "eliminated" if they have the fewest ballots rating them highest until only one candidate remains. In the above example, only two voters rated Cat highest, so he is scrubbed off everyone's ballots as though he never existed. Voters #5 and #6 are left with Bear as their highest rated candidate. Five people now rate Bear highest with only four preferring Alligator, and so now Alligator is eliminated and the fur-lovers have it. (Note that this system does not require voters to cast multiple ballots. All the elimination and recalculation is done during tabulation.)

As much as I am a fan of Instant Runoff Voting, it's not perfect (although literally no system is. Stay tuned.) In the above example, the majority of voters have a preference for Cat. Some hate Bear, some hate Alligator, but everyone thinks Cat is a pretty cool guy. Unfortunately under this system he is immediate eliminated because not enough voters listed him as their highest candidate (though it's worth noting that First Past the Post has exactly the same problem).

A way to alleviate this issue is the Borda Count Method. With the same set of ballots, candidates are assigned points based on their ranking on each ballot, the points are added up, and the highest total wins.

Alas this system is also imperfect. In the above example, a majority want to elect Bear, but those slimy Alligator voters have purposefully put him at the bottom of their ranking, thereby allowing Alligator to eke out a victory.

So clearly voting systems are more problematic than one might assume. How does one construct a one that gives fair results in all situations. Short answer: you don't.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a mathematical proof that all voting systems imaginable are, in some instances, horribly flawed and unfair. The criteria given for "fairness" are:

• If every voter prefers alternative X over alternative Y, then the group prefers X over Y.
• If every voter's preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged (even if voters' preferences between other pairs like X and Z, Y and Z, or Z and W change).
• There is no "dictator": no single voter possesses the power to always determine the group's preference.

I won't try to go into the mathematical proof that a system that satisfies all three criteria is impossible (since frankly some of the math is over my head). As a briefer means of illustrating, consider the following:

How do you solve that?? You don't. All three candidates have equal claim to victory. The only reasonable solution is some sort of caged death match. No voting system can sensible deal with this result. But it's important to keep one thing in mind.

Even though no voting system is, or can ever be, perfect, that doesn't mean all voting systems are created equal. First Past the Post is strictly worse than Alternative Runoff Voting because it doesn't solve any of the latter's problems, and it is plagued with the spoiler effect. Its only real advantage is that it's easier to explain and looks more logical at first glance.

So remember, the next time someone complains that both the Democrats and the Republicans are terrible and yet no other party will become a serious force in American politics in the foreseeable future, the problem is not that politicians are corrupt and greedy scum who have created a stranglehold on the nation via their control of the media or what have you, the problem is that First Past the Post is a terrible, terrible voting system.

Man of Stale

I'm generally not a stickler for movie logic. Generally I think it's more important that a movie hang together thematically and emotionally, and if telling a good story results in some plot-holes then so be it. But I thought Man of Steel was, while reasonably entertaining and well put together, a little bland and unengaging, so I'm going to go ahead and explain why I'm fairly convinced that the central plot actually makes no sense. (**Major spoilers ahead obviously**)

One aspect that differentiates this film from previous tellings of Superman's origin is that a great deal of time is spent on Krypton before Jor-El fires his son into space. General Zod also realizes that the planet will be destroyed and is staging a military coup that involves chasing Jor-El around on pterodactylesque things. This whole escapade adds a much needed breath of fresh air, but why is Zod after Jor-El you ask?

You see in this continuity Kryptonians have long ago taken to genetically engineering all of their offspring to fulfill specific societal roles. Zod and his friends are designed to protect Krypton at all costs, and he's of the ideological position that certain other genetic lines should be discontinued when they find a new home. Jor-El's very unhappy with all this genetic engineering stuff (and in fact his own son is secretly the first child in centuries created through some good ol' fashion Kryptonian lovin'), so he refuses to work with Zod and instead steals "The Codec," an artifact that houses all the data for future generations of Kryptonian test-tube babies, and inexplicably destroys it by encoding the information onto his sons "cells" before sending him off to Earth to start a new beginning.

Jor-El's strategy raises several questions. Seeing as it can be safely assumed that humans do not possess the means to create a new generation of Kryptonians using the Codec (assuming they would want to), it's puzzling that Jor-El seems to think that sending his son off with it will somehow lead to a new beginning for their race. But even if Superman somehow obtained the means to utilize this Codec, all that it would let him do is create a bunch of genetically designed Kryptonians that Jor-El is seemingly against to begin with. Indeed when Superman discovers a hologram of his father's consciousness on Earth, Jor-El gives no indication that he wants Superman to create more Kryptonians, and he certainly doesn't mention that "by the way, you have a bunch of data written on your cells that is the last genetic record of your people!"

Which raises the question: why did Jor-El go to all the trouble of stealing the Codex in the first place? If he merely didn't want Zod to have it (and just felt like dooming his entire race), would it not have been a lot easier to simply destroy the Codec? And if he only wanted Superman to have the Codec (for whatever inexpiable reason) presumably Kryptonian technology is advanced enough to maybe have a copy-paste feature that could avoid destroying the original (and likely his species' only chance at salvation)? It would seem that if Zod was engineered to protect Krypton at any cost, Jor-El must have been engineered to provide the villains with a MacGuffin at any cost.

But the madness certainly doesn't end there. After Zod and his pals show up on Earth, they discover that the Codec is written on Superman's cells and that they must capture him dead or alive to retrieve it, despite the fact that they make this discovery after having taken a sample of his blood! Or do you need all of his cells?! One might assume that a hidden message would want to be written in someone's DNA or something, seeing as cells have a habit of dying and replacing themselves. The only conclusion I can come to is that perhaps Kryptonian cells do not die and that Superman has retained each individual cell that the Codec was written on when he was a baby. Perhaps when he decided to (somehow) shave he was unknowingly committing genocide!

Assuming that retrieving Superman's body will be no trouble, Zod sets about terraforming Earth so it can be a new Krypton, which will have the unfortunate side effect of wiping out all human civilization. No particular reason it needs to be Earth though. You would think that perhaps he could choose an uninhabited planet to terraform (seeing as Earth would be de-inhabited anyway) and Superman might even help out by turning over the Codec (i.e. himself) in order to save not only the Earth but his own race as well! Presumably there would need to be something preventing Zod from simply choosing another planet since this would lead to a rather unexciting climax (or maybe Zod just really hates human for no reason), but this solution is never even proposed or mentioned by anyone.

Zod's right-hand woman named Zodalina (maybe) does tell Superman that morality has been "evolved out of" Kryptonians, which is a fantastically stupid statement for three reasons:

1) "Morality" is an evolved trait that allows us to live and work together in groups. Lack of morality is a trait of lower lifeforms (for example, slugs are total wankers).

2) Nobody with the goal of creating a perfect society populated by superior beings would ever intentionally engineer them with no morality. Psychopath Land is not even a place you want to visit. (Psychopath Land might be L.A.)

3) They clearly do have a morality. Their extremely central moral precept, which they will do anything to follow, is to protect/reestablish Krypton at any cost. That is their moral imperative. The only character in Man of Steel with no discernible morality is Jor-El.

Five-Point-Exploding-PR Technique

For the second year running, EA has been voted the “Worst Company in America” in a poll by the Consumerist. Is it possible that publishing bad videogames is in fact a worse sin than ruining the economy, murdering sea life or giving millions cancer?

Aside from the sample bias that people participating in online polls are more likely to play a lot of videogames than they are to own equity, swim in the Gulf or watch MTV respectively, EA's problem isn't actually an inability to publish good games. Seeing as they own half the industry's AAA developers at this point, a great many of the games they publish are in fact excellent. No, their problem is largely one of PR.

When SimCity failed to be playable by many at launch due to always-online DRM and dodgy servers, what was their immediate response? We made our game so fun that too many people just couldn't stop playing! (See, it's totally your guys' fault!)

In similar fashion, the response to the consumerist poll includes a beautifully laid out list of reasons why in fact you are stupid (and homophobic) for hating them. So enlighten us EA. Let's go through this sucker point by point:

-Point #1:
"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."

Except that it totally is DRM. If the online features were not merely implemented to combat piracy, there would have been an offline option for the billions of people who do not have internet connections, sort of like every other SimCity game ever. (SimCity is not an MMO and never has been.) I also like how they're dubbing it the “Always-On function” since it conjures images of a product that is always ready to go when you need it rather than the complete opposite of that.

-Point #2:
"Some claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam. 45 million registered users are proving that wrong."

You know what? I'm a registered Origin user. You know why? Because a ton of EA games require you to register and be logged into your account in order to play them (thanks to that lovely Always-On function). Do I use Origin for anything else? I suppose I gripe about it in blog posts. Admittedly that's a service Steam hasn't provided me yet.

-Point #3:
"Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."

Tens of millions of people also love Hollywood movies, but that doesn't prove that they all need to be teal and orange.

-Point #4:
"We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for EA because they disagree with the choice of the cover athlete on Madden NFL. Yes, really… "

Initially I actually agreed with this point... until I saw the new Madden NFL cover:

Disclaimer: not actually the new Madden NFL cover.

-Point #5:
"In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we're not caving on that."

Thank you EA for championing equality and inclusiveness by having 99% of your games star straight white male protagonists (along with the rest of the AAA industry, sadly).

I know times are tough financially EA. I understand that it's not easy being the most hated company in America (it's quite impressive actually when you consider the competition), and I sympathize that you feel the need to take extreme measures to combat piracy, but I feel like both might be resolvable were you to show a little more humility, benevolence and good faith and perhaps, just a thought, try to include features that make your games better than the version the pirates are offering rather than worse.

Gamifying Education

Someday I want to teach game design in an academic setting, so I've been doing Toastmasters to get better at public speaking and presentation. Here's video of my 10th speech, which I'll be giving again at the Calgary area contest next week.



I took the idea of reverse grading from this Extra Credits video and the baseball analogy from this excellent TED Talk. Thanks also to Iris Talbot for her coaching, support and camera.

The Power of Implicit Goals

This is an addendum to my post a while back about explicit vs implicit goals. I've been thinking more about the issue, and it strikes me that not recognizing the validity of implicit goals can have a deleterious effect on various aspects of game design.

It's natural to think in terms of explicit goals where players have to complete a particular task like dodging the fireballs or finding the key in order to succeed. The problem with explicit goals is that there is definitionally some possibility for failure built into the game. Maybe the player can't find the key or manage to dodge correctly and the narrative grinds to a screeching halt because they are unable to proceed.

As a brilliant example of an implicit goal, I submit the tutorial for Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. The game is genius in many regards, but I find the initial introduction particularly genius. Shortly after selecting “New Game,” the player finds themselves trapped in a room with an endlessly spawning horde of emaciated zombie-like creatures and armed with a shotgun. The player then discovers how to aim and discharge said shotgun into the mob for a short while until they awaken in a cold sweat to discover the combat tutorial was a dream all along!

This sequence is brilliant in terms of pacing in that it immediately grabs the player's attention for the following expository cutscene, rather than like most games where the player would impatiently sit through this cutscene waiting to be allowed to kill something. (It also does a good job of immediately humanizing the protagonist, which is also something a great many games struggle with.)

But what is pertinent here is the fact that shooting the zombies is a wholly implicit goal. There is no health bar introduced yet. It does not matter how effectively one deals with the zombies. The player could get completely mobbed by them, or she could dispatch them with ease and efficiency. But it doesn't matter. Mechanically speaking there are zero stakes; the heroine awakens in a cold sweat regardless. And furthermore it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. The player isn't thinking “I don't see a health bar so I'll just let the zombies maul me,” she's thinking “Ahh! Zombies! Get away! Take that!”

Were there no consequences to zombie-mauling for the entire game, it would quickly lose its horror-aesthetics and feeling of challenge. But the purpose of the tutorial is not to provide challenge, it is to put across the basic mechanics in a way that also serves the narrative flow. (Also no player is going to replay the tutorial and be annoyed that they can't lose, because at some level they recognize what the tutorial's purposes are and aren't.)

Another example of this idea is the indie game Dys4ia, which attempts to put across the designer's experience of going through a sex change procedure via a series of often-abstract minigames which serve to convey various emotional circumstances. While there are some points at which an action must be performed by the player in order to proceed (making them explicit goals imposed by the mechanics), in each of these cases the action is both easy and glaringly obvious (e.g. press "up"). In any minigame in which there is actually some challenge posed, such as when the player deflects hurtful comments with their shield, there is not actually any penalty for failing to do so. Perhaps this is because we are all ingrained with games like Pong (which at one point maybe did require its failure penalties to teach the correct play dynamics), but it in no way detracts from the intended experience that the player cannot fail, and in fact having to retry a minigame would completely ruin the artistic message. The game isn't trying to tell you "if someone's comments hurt you, just keep listening to them over and over until you are able to deal with it." (Of course the unintended message of most games is "if you fail to defeat this world-ending threat, don't worry, you can just keep trying until you inevitably succeed," but that's another discussion.)

The point is that player behavior is guided by more than explicit goals, and additionally having an explicit goal can actually ruin the intended experience. Would it be a good experience for the player to fail the tutorial in Eternal Darkness and have to try again? No! It would be annoying, feel "gamey" and also vastly reduce the menace of the zombies when they are reintroduced much later. Luckily there is no need to make failure a possibility in this case because the player will behave as intended regardless, and the sequence loses no excitement or impact.

If we assume that players' behavior is guided only by what is mechanically defined as success and failure, we hamstring our ability to craft certain experiences. For example, escort missions are almost universally hated in games. This is because the goals of these sequence tend to be too explicit in the sense that if the character is not escorted properly, the player fails the sequence and is forced to go back and try again. On the opposite end is Telltale's The Walking Dead game (which in my opinion is one of the best games ever made) containing a couple of sequences in which you are trying to "protect" a character, but where failure is actually impossible (in one, you cannot make it to them in time, but another character steps in). These sequences work because it is unclear when the player is in danger of being penalized for failure, as well as being unclear what the ramifications will be (sometimes it means trying again, sometimes it means a beloved character is permanently dead). Secretly mixing between these three types of sequences (ones where you can't fail or it's almost impossible to fail, ones where you can try again, and ones where the effects of your actions are permanent) allows the game to ambiguate player assumptions in order to craft an experience (or rather, a set of possible experiences) which successfully puts across the intended emotions.

We can argue about whether The Walking Dead is really a game or an interactive story (it's both, and to varying degrees all games are also interactive stories), but the answer is irrelevant. What matters is that, through a combination of story and mechanics, The Walking Dead is successfully putting across unique emotions and experiences that no other game has managed, and so is Dys4ia, and they are doing so by subtly challenging longstanding conventions about how games, and gamers, work.

Surrogates Review: Determinedly Pointless

I saw the Bruce Willis movie Surrogates a while back and it frustrated me. Enough so that I intended to write a post on it, but doing so has taken me several months because I wanted to gather my thoughts it was sort of unmemorable and I forgot about it.

Surrogates is the most frustrating type of movie because it is not straightforwardly bad such that one can simply mock it or discard it, rather it is quite watchable and competently constructed, yet falls drastically short of what it might have been. This is mostly because Surrogates has quite a strong and socially relevant premise.

The idea is that it's “the future” and humans, rather than living normal lives in our flawed meat-bodies, have adopted perfect android bodies as “surrogates” (title drop!) through which they experience and interact with the world from a neural interface at home. Not only is it more fun to be a physically perfect meta-human, but it also makes life a whole lot safer when anything bad that happens to your surrogate can be solved by, worst case, going out and buying another one. However, FBI agent Bruce Willis discovers the existence of a weapon which has the ability, when a surrogate is shot with it, to overload its system in a way that kills the real-life person operating it.

This all sounds dandy until one realizes that the last bit completely undoes everything about the premise of the film. What makes the world of Surrogates intriguing is the idea that one could live as an immortal avatar of one's self, which could have interesting ramifications for an action thriller of this sort. For example, how can you stop a terrorist who cannot die? To what lengths might someone go when they are in no physical danger? And how does the average hooligan behave when their actions can't physically harm others or be effectively traced back to them?(see: The Internet) None of these ideas are properly explored because the plot's central devise precisely nullifies all of the potential of its premise, and we are left with a standard action film in which people are shot and then die as a result.

On top of this, the film has one of the dumbest moments I've ever seen. Bruce Willis discovers that his boss might have been working with the bad guys all along (as one does in these sort of movies), so he wanders into FBI headquarters after getting suspended (as one does in these sort of movies), gets his boss alone in his office, and proceeds to stab him (or rather, his surrogate) in the back of the head so he can paw through his computer and transfer some incriminating files to a USB. After the download completes, he causally walks back into the main area just as one of his co-workers receives a call from an angry boss complaining about a stabbing incident and suggesting rather vocally that perhaps someone should stop our hero from leaving the premises. Then we cut to him driving away. Wait, what?

It's been clearly established previously that when harm comes to a surrogate, the user is instantly booted back to reality, and the boss is shown to still be sitting in his neural interface chair while he makes the call. This means that in order for the scene to play out the way it does, the boss finds himself at home having been “murdered,” then decides to wait a while and give our hero a fair chance, or maybe hunt around behind couch cushions to find his fairly large phone and then go back and sit in his neural interface chair, and then make the call. Meanwhile our hero casually walks through an office building full of employees who have just been informed that he killed their boss and should be immediately detained. No reason to show how that played out, just cut to him driving away. No, it's fine, no need for an action movie to show how its hero escaped from what appeared to be an inescapable situation. This is one of the few instances where showing our hero jump out a plate glass window or single-handedly fight off a bunch of trained FBI agents actually would have made more logical sense.

Aside from the largely wasted premise and some sprinkles of idiocy, Surrogates is actually decent. It mostly fails as an "ideas" movie, but as a straight action thriller it's moderately engaging, and it does at least get some mileage out of the concept that one doesn't know precisely who one is talking to when interacting with a surrogate. For example, this review was actually written by Ron Perlman.

Implicitly Explicit Goals

Over the years I've come across numerous opinions that games like Sim City, The Sims, and most recently Minecraft, are not actually "games" because they do not have a goal. I would like to posit that not only is this position wrong, it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how games work.

Or, if Minecraft's not really a game, then neither is World of Warcraft.

The misunderstanding comes from a belief that gameplay dynamics are more fundamentally defined by a game's explicit goals than they really are. If I drop you in the middle of a beat-em-up, you're going to start punching people not because you want to save your virtual girlfriend, not because you want a high score, not even necessarily because you don't want to die — In fact you might have no knowledge of those aspects of the game — No, your natural approach to gameplay is going to be to punch people because every aspect of the mechanics is centered around the act of you punching people. The action button makes your character punch, all the other people seem to want to punch you, there's a satisfying 'thwack' when your punches connect and an even more satisfying 'uaagh!' when they dramatically collapse and disappear after being punched by you enough times, and manipulating distance and time to land that finisher is a tantalizing mix of frustration and satisfaction. This is where the "game" resides because this is where the fun resides, not on a leaderboard or a credits screen, but in the mechanics of a virtual alleyway, a simulated ant farm, or an endless playground of voxels.

Now of course if I offer you an achievement that requires getting through my beat-em-up without any punching, only throwing enemies and barrels, this effects the game's dynamics a great deal, assuming (importantly) that you take up the challenge and decide to impose a rule on yourself that you won't punch. Interesting goals can change gameplay dynamics dramatically and potentially create interesting gameplay situations. Reiner Knizia has based many of his games primarily around an unusual scoring mechanism. But an interesting scoring system or achievement is not a requirement of games. You do not jump on the Goombas in Super Mario Bros. because of an interesting scoring system. It's also important to note that in our fictional generic beat-em-up, most of the achievements and scoring systems thought up off the top of one's head won't impel the player to stop punching people because that's what the game's about, irrespective of the "goal."

My favorite definition of "game" comes from Bernard Suits' underrated book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. It reads as follows:
       —————————————————————————————

"To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity."
       —————————————————————————————

We have the concept of "goals" here in the idea of "bringing about a specific state of affairs." Maybe this state of affairs is defeating the other player, maybe the state of affairs is making all the thugs on the screen go 'uaagh!' and disappear, or maybe this state of affairs is mining enough diamond to craft diamond armor. The key point in all this is that this "state of affairs" does not definitionally have to be chosen for you by the game itself. In fact, at some basic level the game cannot choose your goal for you, because you must consent to play (or continue playing) the game in the first place. If I'm choosing what to play, and I decide to mine for diamonds in Minecraft rather than shoot Nazis in Medal of Honor, it hardly matters that I could have chosen to build a castle (or any number of other things) in Minecraft instead, whereas there weren't a whole lot of other things I could have chosen had I booted up Medal of Honor; these are all, at some level, goals I'm voluntarily taking up.

Now you could perhaps argue (and I have seen it argued) that Minecraft is in fact a suite of games including "the mining game," "the building game," "spleef," etc. and that Minecraft as a whole entity is not a game. I find this position more sensible, but also wrong. By this logic, Ocarina of Time is not a game, but rather a collection of games which include "the horseriding game," "the swordfighting game," "the orcarina playing game" and "the accidentally restarting explanatory text game."

But perhaps you take issue with the Bernard Suits definition of games and insist that games require an explicitly defined goal. In that case I present World of Warcraft. Oh sure, you can compete on various leaderboards and win internet fame in the same way that Minecraft allows you to build insane things like this and win internet fame, but WoW doesn't have a goal as such. There are at least four main reasons for playing, but there's no way to "win." Many have remarked that endgame play is merely a cycle of "get better loot to kill more stuff to get better loot," and at no point did an NPC even state that your mission was to get the best loot, just like no NPC in Minecraft stated that your mission was to portal into the Nether or build a giant pair of breasts on the side of a mountain or whatever your proclivity. Yet nobody argues that World of Warcraft, or others of its ilk, aren't real games. It's right there in the genre title: MMORPG ←case closed.

Scripted & Emergent Narrative

There are essentially two overarching ways of delivering narrative in a game: scripted narrative and emergent narrative. Scripted narrative includes all the stuff like dialogue and cutscenes, and also scripted action sequences like many of the setpieces in the Uncharted series. Emergent narrative is the stuff that emerges directly from the gameplay, like how you took out a truck in Far Cry 2 by ramming a boat into it, or that time your Sim missed his carpool because he wouldn't stop throwing a tantrum about being bored, or that time a Creeper killed you in Mincraft and made you drop a bunch of diamonds in lava.

In reality you can't escape emergent narrative in games. Even during the most tightly scripted setpiece, there will be some room for player-driven narrative, whether you plan for it or not. Maybe the player doesn't notice the boulder hurtling towards them, and casually walks into it instead. I guess you could make a visual novel, which may or may not count as a “game,” but this is getting a little off track.

I was recently watching Mission Impossible 4 and got to the totally awesome Dubai scene where Tom Cruise climbs the exterior of the Burj Khalifa (which he apparently did for real because... Tom Cruise). In the film he's using special spy gloves that adhere to the wall but, in the middle of his climb, one of them malfunctions! Can our hero make it the rest of the way with only one glove? (spoilers: yes)

**{I dearly wanted to find the clip, but to no avail. Paramount evidently does not want me advertising their film.}**

Anyway it got me thinking, since in my view there are basically two approaches for doing something like this in a game.

Approach #1: you script a sequence where the player has to climb a tower, but then have their glove malfunction (after they pass the halfway point or something).

Approach #2: you present the player the goal of reaching the top of a tower and you give them a bunch of spy equipment which has, among its characteristics, some probability of malfunctioning.

Both of these approaches have various advantages and drawbacks. The main advantage of the first approach is that you can ensure that everything plays out roughly how you intend it, every time. You set up all the dominoes and choose when and where they fall. The main disadvantage of the scripted approach is that, similar to the Hollywood movie, your player most likely understands that this is a scripted event, and knows that if they play properly, they will escape.

Approach #2 is likely harder to pull off well, design-wise (if the equipment failure is too sudden and extreme, it could just be really annoying), but I wish to argue that it not only provides a potentially richer experience, but is also less development-heavy in the long run.

Take a similar situation in Minecraft. Let's say you're low on health and are trying to dig your way to the surface, but just before you make it out, your pickaxe breaks. Now you realize you have to get back to your chest to pick up some wood so that you can craft a new pickaxe, all while avoiding spiders and deadly lava.

In another game this could work as a scripted sequence, certainly. But wouldn't it feel like arbitrary backtracking if the game told you your pickaxe broke and now you had to go back and make another in order to move on?

There is tendency right now for game developers to want to make things “cinematic.” If a AAA studio were designing the above sequence, they might add some musical cues, some shaky-cam effects, and maybe hire Ron Perlman to go “Just my luck!” And it might be totally awesome.

But Notch didn't have the budget to hire Ron Perlman, so instead he built a world with some voxels and some basic ground rules, and he figured out which ground rules made that world interesting to inhabit. Notch may or may not have intended the above scenario, and it might never happen to you, but then there are a million other scenarios that just might.

Scripted sequences can be a powerful tool, but at the end of the day, what you tell your friends about are those moments when you took out like four guys with a single sniper bullet, or when you flew off your motorbike and landed in a kiddy pool, or when your spy glove gave out but you still managed to reach the top.

I'm not arguing that all games should be “sandbox games,” whatever that term means exactly. I think there is lots of happy middle-ground between experiences entirely crafted by the designer, and experiences entirely invented by the player. What I am saying is that it's wrongheaded and inefficient to try and craft every part of a gameplay experience because ultimately, no matter how “cinematic” you make them, those moments will never be significantly better than their film equivalents. Whereas when you give up some control, and design in a way that allow for things to happen organically, a game can be so much more than the sum of its parts.

CERN Scientists Discover Comic Sans!

Today, after years of research and experimentation, scientists at CERN made the remarkable discover that people on Twitter really hate Comic Sans.

They also found the Higgs Boson, a particle theorized half a century ago by the standard model as necessary for explaining the existence of mass in the universe blah blah the point is, font choice is important! I bet when Cowan and Reines published their discovery of the neutrino, they used something sensible like Helvetica!

Mass Effect 3's Ending Doesn't Suck

**Warning! Huge spoilers below!**Like seriously, "you are NOT the father" level of spoilers**Do not look directly at the spoilers unless wearing proper eye protection**

About a month ago I posted some thoughts about Mass Effect 3. I didn't say much of anything regarding the ending, partly because I didn't want to spoil anything. Little did I know that an internet storm was brewing, with nasty, big, pointy teeth. Apparently the ending was so bad, on so many levels, that it actually ruined everything that had happened up to that point, as well as earning a place alongside such fabled endings as "A WINNER IS YOU" and "CONGRATURATION THIS STORY IS HAPPY END THANK YOU."

The thing is, not only did I not have this reaction to the ending, I actually thought it was pretty good.

It might have helped that I didn't read any of the hype preceding ME3s release because, looking back, some of the statements made seem basically like lies, such as "It’s not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C.....The endings have a lot more sophistication and variety in them.”

No, actually that is completely what the endings are like. You either (A) destroy the Reapers, (B) control the Reapers or (C) merge with the Reapers. Aside from minor variations, any real differences between outcomes have to be inferred.

And I have no problem with this. Most of my questions were answered before the final showdown, and I respect that the events following your final decision are not explicitly spelled out for you. I like a little bit of mystery (and Shepard is dead after all, generally). I also don't mind that everyone's story ultimately comes down to a 3-way choice. Many of the choices throughout the series, when all possibilities are examined, don't have the great divergence in outcomes that is being implied. It's just the fans never collectively compared notes on any of the earlier choices and their consequences. Or maybe everyone assumed that every choice they made would be acknowledged and accounted for in the conclusion in some way that showed that it all really mattered. Well I'm sorry kids, it doesn't really matter; you were playing a videogame the whole time.

I've read a lot of rants against the ending, and people unhappy with it generally deny that what they wanted was a happy ending, and that their objections are only about logical inconsistencies and a lack of choice and explanation. I'm not sure I buy this. Mass Effect's ending is pretty dark. And it's not dark in an Empire Strikes Back "what will our heroes do now?" kind of way, like all too many videogame endings. It left me with a feeling of hollowness like many critics describe, but for me this hollowness was mixed with respect for BioWare being willing to let there series end on such a downer. It was made clear all along that if victory were to be achieved, it would come at tremendous cost. Most of the fan-made or proposed endings I've seen try to wrap things up far too cleanly and happily. We've become so enured to saving the galaxy that we don't expect there to be negative consequences, even though the idea of consequences has been stressed all throughout the series. We're narratively spoiled. For the record, I have seen no ending suggested thus far that I prefer to the one we got. The "indoctrination" theory is intriguing, but it merely defers the issue.

I've read complaints that the final choice invalidates your previous hard work because two of the choices are equivalent to the aims of Saren (merge with Reapers) and the Illusive Man (control Reapers). So you spent the entire first game trying to stop Saren from achieving his goal of merging organics and synthetics, yet in the end you decide this is actually the best solution. This is called DRAMATIC IRONY. This is actually my favorite aspect of the endings, and it fits perfectly with the theme of grey morality that permeates the series.

I've heard various complaints that certain things about the ending are illogical. I disagree, but I won't argue point-by-point. I'll agree that it isn't clear why Joker is using a Mass Relay when he ought to be trying to help out in the final battle, but this didn't occur to me at the time, so it didn't ruin anything for me.

The one point which I do agree on is that I was hoping to see my war assets actually take part in the battle. I think a few cutscenes could have been done away with if I could have seen the Blue Suns shooting at some husks, or a bunch of Geth ships take down a Reaper. That would have been a lot more meaningful to me. Aside from that, I was quite pleased with the ending. I found it satisfying, intriguing, heartbreaking, ambiguous, ethically challenging, memorable, and unique.

I'm very glad BioWare are sticking to their guns and not planning to change the ending with DLC and merely plan to pad it out and explain things a bit more. I could see this potentially improving something that, in my humble opinion, was never broken to begin with.

Now go and rest our heroes!

A Hardware Problem

Videogames have a problem that other media don't seem to. Maybe it has to do with their origins as technological oddities, and their primary fanbase of geeks and tech nerds (among whose ranks I count myself), but games have always struggled with an odd duality; they are designed, enjoyed and critiqued as both technological and aesthetic entities, with inordinate attention paid to the technological side. Perhaps it started with the bit wars, with all parties fiercely promoting their products as having the most. That no child at the time new what a "bit" was didn't matter.

The Genesis proudly displayed its now-laughable bit-count on its front:

And Atari marketed its Jaguar with one of the more bizarre videogame ads, which is saying A LOT!


Perhaps because the Jaguar was such a tremendous failure both commercially and, well, graphically, people eventually caught on to the fact that more bits didn't necessarily mean better games, but that just meant developers needed to be a little more subtle about their message, which has become tacitly accepted by review sites and used as ammunition by fanboys the world over. The message: "better tech equals a better game."

I've wanted to write something addressing this for a long time, but for me it came to a head with the recent HD re-release of Silent Hill 2.

Despite being a workhorse with more longevity than perhaps any other game console, the Playstation 2 had its limits, and the environments that Team Silent wanted to create for their game simply would not have been able to run smoothly at the fidelity they needed. Their solution, surround the player with fog and cut the draw distance down to as little as possibly, thereby allowing things within the player's limited field of view to be rendered with clarity, with the added bonus of providing the signature element to one of the most atmospheric and well-regarded horror games of all time. Sometimes necessity is in fact the mother of invention.

So what did they do for the HD remake? Get rid of the fog of course! The PS3 can do way better draw distances!

Left: HD remake - Right: good version

When Masahiro Ito, the game's art director, saw the graphical "upgrade," he was understandably upset. Aside from being an iconic element of the series, the fog also did a few other things such as cover up unfinished textures and map edges(!) I imagine the monsters are also a little less frightening when you can see them coming a mile away.

This example of putting tech ability ahead of aesthetic consideration is inexcusable, but it is hardly unprecedented. Across the industry games are defended on the basis of their technical specs rather than their actual visual appeal, let alone their gameplay.

Tell me this:

 

 is visually inferior to this:

This phenomenon is not limited to graphical processing either. None of the "respectable" review sites would dare leave out game length as a crucial evaluation criteria. As I mentioned in my rant about pacing, videogames are the only entertainment media where longevity is reliably cited as an important positive attribute. In the end, you are buying a piece of entertainment and, despite the sometimes hefty price of admission, if the hours you spend with it are less enjoyable because the experience has been stretched out to meet an arbitrary consumer expectation, then there are plenty of amusing things on the internet that may be more worth your time. You buy a car or toaster on the basis that it will last a long time, but nobody chooses to buy a novel because it has over 800 pages.

Yet because fun and innovation (and apparently visual appeal) are difficult to market, publishers end up falling back on technology (and content) as something reliable to pour money into, and then they just need to convince the rest of us that the tech is something worth bragging about, and we tech geeks buy into it, argue fiercely about whether Battlefield 3 looks better than Call of Duty 3, and try to ignore the fact that our "non-gamer" friends seem to love clicking on 2D pictures of corn in Farmville or flicking birds who have about four frames of animation in Angry Birds. We act smug and say they're not real gamers. But your Grandma, or your Boss or your sister doesn't care about HD graphics or blast processing, they just want to have fun. And isn't it possible that, in a way, this makes them the purest gamers of all.

Farmville still sucks though.

Negative Emotions

 (This essay contains vague spoilers for the Mass Effect series, but I will try to keep them extremely vague because I hate spoilers and Bruce Willis is your father)

As soon as the final sequences began to unfold in Mass Effect 1, I knew there was something special and groundbreaking about this series. For perhaps the first time in a videogame, I was completely invested in the narrative in a way that I have not been in any film or book. It wasn't that I really wanted to win the game, I literally felt like I needed to complete my mission for the sake of the galaxy. In truth I could have loaded a save had things gone awry, but somehow that thought was shunted from my mind by the game's narrative.

I'm not the first to point this out, but narrative in games is more than just the "plot" and cutscenes and dialogue, it's inextricably intertwined with everything the player does and experiences. Every ladder the player climbs and every henchman the player guns down is adding to the story that the player experiences, whether the developers intend it or not. The problem is that we (both the developers and the players) are focusing on the wrong things.

Near the conclusion of Mass Effect 3, something happened that opened my eyes to a problem endemic to our medium. Through my own negligence (I was eating fish sticks), I allowed one of my Avatar's most trusted friends to be brutally executed during a quick-time event. My initial reaction was anger, shock, horror and guilt, and I immediately considered exiting the game and replaying that sequence. Then it hit me: I and every other gamer I know has been trained to consume games in a way that is antithetical to real drama. My friend had just been gunned down in front of me and I had had the opportunity to save them, and the emotions I should have been feeling were anger, shock, horror and guilt, yet I was automatically annoyed at the game and automatically considering a reset.

The problem is that, for a long time now, games have been too good to us. I don't mean this in terms of their difficulty, I mean that games have almost universally been trying to evoke positive emotions in us: excitement, curiosity, power, satisfaction. It's gotten so pervasive that whenever we feel a negative emotion during play, we instinctively attribute it to some flaw in the design. Plenty of games try to evoke negative emotions during cutscenes and through dialogue (sadness, hopelessness, regret), but because they aren't echoed in the game's mechanics, they come across as hollow. Why is the movie The Road so much more depressing than the also post-apocalyptic game Gears of War? Because Gears of War is really about shooting things. The same themes of loss and despair are present in the "story," but they aren't being evoked via gameplay, which creates a disconnect with the protagonists. I'm not here to bash Gears of War, I actually really like its game mechanics, this is a problem with virtually every videogame I've ever played. Even most "art" games fail to effectively tie their themes to their core mechanics, though some do manage to effectively evoke boredom.

Some games have successfully evoked feelings of fear and helplessness, which is why I think the horror genre has been so effective (until recent years when they started giving us sufficient firepower and frequent enough savepoints to mostly eliminate these negative feelings). Silent Hill wasn't scary because of its graphics or music, it was scary because its presentational elements complemented its game mechanics to evoke a sense of dread and confusion.

Unfortunately we haven't stumbled upon the formulas for evoking most of the negative emotions utilized in other media, and I don't imagine that figuring out how to make the player feel unhappy during play is at the top of most developers' priorities, yet I believe that the substantial resources being put towards voice actors, character models and writing are mostly going to be in vain until we start to figure out the gameplay side. Though these things look nice in a trailer and help game stories look superficially more like film stories, they are ultimately red herrings distracting us from the real barrier standing in the way of artistic (and entertainment) aspiration.

There is one negative emotion players have accepted over the years: Frustration (though this too is slowly being expunged). Gamers are willing to replay the same section many times over in order to achieve victory. The frustration of defeat serves a purpose since it makes success all the sweeter, and the possibility of failure is necessary in most games, even if the player never actually sees a "game over" or "retry" screen. The problem is that we have grown so accustomed to retrying things, we feel entitled to it. Yet this convention of retrying everything until success has become gaming's life-support system; it is the only type of punishment we seem to be okay with, yet it is ultimately one of the primary things that is holding game narrative back.

Imagine a game of Romeo & Juliet. Failing to stop Romeo from imbibing the poison, the player laments that he will have to replay the whole mission. Or, alternatively, Romeo croaks in the final cutscene, and the player wonders what the point was of retrying the final bossfight with Paris so many times if Romeo was just going to die anyway.

I fervently believe that games can be high art (whatever that means), and that they can attain dramatic weight, but this can't be effectively achieved by laying a story overtop a set of mechanics, no matter how good the story, acting and dialogue might be. In order for a game's narrative to properly draw in the player, the dialogue and thematic elements have to be mirrored in the gameplay. (And vice versa; Bastion does a good job of entwining gameplay and story by having the narrator comment on everything you do, making you feel more like the protagonist rather than an unwanted or vestigial houseguest.) Because good drama requires at least some negative emotion, this means not being afraid to make the player, and not just the protagonist, unhappy, and it also means we the players need to be okay with that. Otherwise we may as well be playing Bejewled with scenes from Goodfellas interspersed between levels.

So what did I think of Mass Effect 3? I absolutely loved it. The series is a firm favorite of mine, and like all good Sci-Fi (but unlike any other games to date) it made me question many things about my own moral code. But unlike Sci-Fi in other media, it also forced me to face my own hypocracy and biases on a few issues. Why did I want to try and give the Krogan race a second chance, yet I did not show the Rachni the same courtesy in ME1? I think it's because the Rachni are creepy and look like bugs. I'm fairly certain I am a specist.

I do feel that one major opportunity was missed however. After a certain fleet was decimated due to some ethically-questionable choices on my part, it left behind a debris field. Like many other such fields scattered throughout the war-torn galaxy, I scanned it looking for raw materials. Sadly there were none present. Only afterwards did I realize what I was doing. Causing the near-annihilation of an entire race and then looting their corpses through sheer force of habit would have been a moment that married story and gameplay perfectly.

hundredth post!!!1!!1!ONE!!!

Huh, somehow I managed to write 100 posts. Not sure how that happened.

If I'm going to keep sharing my most intimate thoughts about games here, I feel like there's something I need to disclose. A shameful secret that I've been hiding for years.

                                 I do not like Super Mario Bros. 3.

Again and again I've seen people cite this as their favorite game, or the greatest game ever made. And it's not that I think the game is good but overrated, I genuinely do not care for it.

If you're still here and haven't gone to report me to congress or something, permit me to try and explain myself.

It all started when I was a small boy renting SNES games from the local video rental establishment. One wintry afternoon (I assume, since I grew up in Calgary) I took home a little cartrage called Super Mario All-Stars. It had versions of all the classic Super Mario titles: Super Mario Bros.; Super Mario Bros. 2 aka Doki Doki Panic; Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels aka Super Mario Bro. 2; Super Mario World; and... Super Mario Bros. 3.

I loved this collection and rented it several times. I've always had a soft spot for Mario games, what with their inviting graphics, jaunty melodies and refined gameplay, and each of the games in the collection offered something unique for my young mind to devour... except Mario 3. That one just weirded me out for some reason. I had no problem accepting Mario 2 and its odd Arabian theme, but there was something about Mario 3 that just felt wrong or off-brand somehow, like it was clearly the black sheep of the Mario family. 'Oh well,' I remember thinking, 'they can't all be home-runs.' (I guess I thought in baseball analogies back then.)

Flash forward a decade and a half, Al Gore invents the internet, and I find it scattered with people waxing nostalgic about how great Super Mario Bros. 3 was, yet I find myself looking back on it the same way I look back on my first trips to the dentist's office. So what did I miss?

With commendable optimism I grab myself a copy off of Wii Virtual Console and fire it up, eager to see what my younger counterpart missed all those years ago. 'Okay' I thought, 'the music and the graphics still don't appeal to me, but I'm mature enough to look past that now.' A few levels later I feel my enthusiasm start to fade as the game continually finds new ways to irritate me.

'Well the game's over two decades old,' I hear you say. 'Of course it's not going to hold up to modern scrutiny.' Pipe down, Strawman, I'm a retro gamer. I just played through and enjoyed Castlevania 3, and it has a couple of mechanics that are objectively awful. Dated gameplay does not faze me.

To be safe though, I went back a replayed Super Mario World, and for me the difference was like night and day. Where Mario 3 felt weird and frustrating, Mario World easily won me back with its smooth gameplay and inviting presentation. Yes Super Mario World was released later on a better system, but when you throw out claims like "best game of all time" it doesn't mean "best game ever for nine months, going by North American release date."

I've put several hours into Mario 3 now, just trying to suss out what I find so un-fun about it. My main issue stems from the fact that Mario controls sort of like a freight train and begins moving quite fast once he gets any momentum behind him. Sonic the Hedgehog has a dash attack that allows him to plow right through enemies, but Mario can only defeat enemies by landing on them, which becomes quite a bit more challenging at high velocity. Couple this with a lenient timer and the fact that the levels seem specifically designed to have stuff unexpectedly pop out and kill you, and a slow and cautious approach tends to work a whole lot better. This pretty much kills any flow since as soon as I start to do well, Mario takes off like a bat out of hell and I have to put on the brakes or risk running headlong into some minute projectile, or landing a jump two pixels in front of an enemy. The screen also seems a little reticent to show what's about to hit you.

However I think most of my irritation stems from the level design rather than mechanics themselves. Enemies always seem to be in the most awkward locations, making them difficult to avoid even when they don't catch me by surprise. I'm all for challenge in games, but where I find Super Meat Boy's levels satisfyingly frustrating in an "I can't believe I just did that" sort of way, in Mario 3 I'm usually saying "I can't believe I let that kill me!" I don't think the Meat Boy method of shortening the levels and giving me infinite lives would fix the problem, although it might have prevented a few controller-shaped dents in my wall. The airship levels are pretty rad though.

A lot of the problem is that I just can't get past the presentation. I think it's some sort of uncanny valley type thing. Titles like Super Mario World and Super Mario Galaxy appeal to me because, despite the things that set them apart, they somehow embody that familiar Mario-ness I've come to know and love. Titles like Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario RPG, and Yoshi's Island appeal to me because they are so wonderfully unlike anything else in the Mario-verse. But Mario 3 somehow manages to straddle the line and be just familiar-yet-different enough to make me subtly uncomfortable, like it's Hannibal Lector wearing Mario's face or something.

Ultimately, I can't make a very compelling case for my position. The controls are tight for the era, and there are no major flaws present. It's a "death by a thousand cuts" kind if thing. Mario 3 is not a bad game by any stretch, and I'm not trying to suggest that it doesn't deserves its place in gaming history, I'm merely saying that I would rather eat glass than play any more of it.

Pac-....*blam blam blam*....-ing

It seems to be all the rage right now for AAA developers to try and ape the style of Hollywood blockbusters. Games like the Uncharted series are doing so a little more openly, but increasingly almost every big budget title seems to be taking lessons from Hollywood schlock, from the flashy setpieces to the cliché characters and dialogue.

Putting aside the question of whether videogames really ought to be aspiring to be more like Hollywood, for the most part I don't have a problem with this cross-pollination. Peter Jackson's King Kong game was a breath of fresh air, and I had a blast with Uncharted 2. I think there are many elements of blockbusters that work well in a videogame medium. Story structure is one of the things which does not.

Most good action movies follow a basic structure along these lines: You start with a big action scene to get everyone's attention and stifle their ADD; you throw in some scenes to establish the setting and characters, some action to show the heroes in their element, until things start spiraling out of control; put in a couple of quiet scenes to make the characters less one-dimensional; something goes wrong and everything seems hopeless, the heroes get mad at one another; then, when all seems lost, the protagonist gathers everyone and everything together for a final desperate stand and wins the day at the last possible second, using a nugget of wisdom he learned along the way.

Works great for a 90-120 minute move. Now try stretching that formula over an 8-12 hour game. The most ubiquitous method is to pad out the action sequences to ludicrous proportions. Most games make me feel like I'm watching a cut of Die Hard where every time McClain encounters the terrorists, he has to kill hordes of them for 45 minutes before the plot can resume. This can cause a weird disconnect where the Nathan Drake of the cutscenes is a plucky adventurer whereas the Nathan Drake of the fighting sections is a serial murderer. Another common method for addressing the problem is to make the plot so ridiculously convoluted that it takes a whole 12 hours to play out, but most games that go this route don't seem to stir sufficiently and you get lengthy clumps of repetitive action floating in a large bowl of nonsense and exposition.

Weird pacing in videogames is definitely not a new problem, but the more we've tried to mimic film conventions, the more it's begun to stand out as something that isn't working. Through their interactive nature (and sketchy Skinnerian techniques) videogame worlds can draw us in better than films can, allowing them to waste our time with hour-long fetch quests, and room after room of identical goons.

And it's our fault. Not just because we put up with it, but because we constantly criticize games for being too short, and commend them for being lengthy. When's the last time someone complained that Casablanca was too short? Do people love The Godfather because it's 3 hours long? I understand wanting to get value for your money, but I'm more concerned with getting value for my time.

Despite the success of Portal and Braid, I don't expect shorter game-length to be embraced anytime soon, so what are some ways of keeping an 8-12 hour experience from dragging? Well, the issue isn't the length itself, but the pacing. So how should a videogame be paced?

Most RPGs, particularly hefty 30+ hour RPGs, are liberally sprinkled with "sidequests," optional missions that distract from the main plot. The fact that these quests have only tangential connection to the main quest is important, because they help break up the action and flesh out the gameworld without having to increase the complexity of the main story. (In JRPGs, sidequest-like sections are often mandatory, but this isn't that important to the issue of pacing, assuming the sidequests are compelling enough that you'll do them regardless.) For the record, I find the pacing in most RPGs even worse than in action games, but the method by which a game like Persona 3 can keep you interested for 100 hours(!) is by providing an overarching plot, with lots of smaller plots strategically sprinkled throughout, similar to the way TV shows generally have an overarching plot with smaller story arcs occupying individual episodes and seasons.

In fact I would argue that TV shows could provide a much better template for videogames than films, at least in terms of pacing and storytelling. The average season of a TV show is comparable in length to the average action game, and both are written with natural stopping points in mind (episodes/levels, though in videogames there is more flexibility). Characters in action/adventure movies have to be drawn in broad strokes, because there isn't time to develop a cast of fully-realized human beings. TV and videogames don't have this restriction. Benjamin Linus (Lost) and Lex Luthor (Smallville) are well-developed and interesting villains who would both come across as completely milquetoast in a summer blockbuster.

The other suggestion I will make is to mix up gameplay better. Most games have two to four different types of activities, be they shooting, platforming, exploring, driving, macrame, etc. I nearly gave up on Mass Effect (one of my all-time favorites) when, right after the first mission, it had me wandering around talking to random NPCs on a space station for literally hours, and my housemate did give up at this point despite my assurances that it got better. It's not that wandering around talking to random NPCs is inherently a boring activity (which it is), but rather that any type of activity has a tendency to become boring after that length of time.

It's also important to recognize that "quiet bits" in action films are not automatically analogous to "quiet bits" in videogames. Having a conversation scene sandwiched between two action sequences is not the same as having a section of backtracking sandwiched in between two action sequences; In the one case, I'm getting to know the characters, in the other, I'm watching a guy walk down a series of hallways. Please embrace the jump-cut, or at least lay dialogue over the backtracking.

I recently purchased the much lauded Deus Ex: Human Revolution, as well as the much reviled Apha Protocol (which was on sale for a single dollar). Alpha Protocol has no shortage of problems: technical glitches, a broken upgrade system, an almost incomprehensible plot, dodgy AI. And yet I've currently put three times as many hours into it as I have into HuRev. Why? Because when I put a couple of hours into Alpha Protocol, I complete a few spy missions, uncover some secrets, make some friends and enemies, and buy some cool spy gear. Most of the time I've put into HuRev so far has involved wandering around talking to random NPCs.

Seperating the Goal from the Faff

I noticed the other day, whilst twirling something in one hand and dropping something in the other, that it is our natural tendency to be playful. We have an inherent drive to make things unnecessarily challenge for our own enjoyment, whether it be a child trying to avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, or an office worker trying to bank a crumpled receipt into a trash receptacle rather than walking the three feet. I term this behavior "seeking out unnecessary challenges to amplify our engagement with and enjoyment of otherwise mundane tasks," or "faffing about" for short.

Most of us faff about a lot in games too. Grand Theft Auto allegedly has missions you can go on, but pretty much all I've ever seen anyone do is aimlessly cruise around listening to the radio, mow down some pedestrians, get in high speed chases, and struggle with the awkward shooting controls while getting gunned down by police. Lather, rinse, repeat. There's nothing wrong with this sort of gameplay any more than there's a problem with strictly goal-oriented gameplay (though I'm hard-pressed to think of a game that doesn't usually involve at least some faffing about). The act of pursuing goals can also be fun and engaging in and of itself. The problems arise when the goals of the game discourage the most entertaining faff.

Imagine a hypothetical fighter. We'll call it Street Kombat. In SK's practice mode, one can try out all sorts of elaborate combos and specials. If this were the only game mode, it would still be moderately entertaining to try out the countless crazy maneuvers that the developers put in. But there's a problem. The developers put so much time into the various special moves that they neglected to properly balance the game. As it turns out, the safest and most effective way to knock out the opponent in SK is to crouch in a corner and repeatedly trip them. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself, except that the goal of the game happens to be to knock out the opponent. SK's goals have actually made the game less fun.

This is an edge case, and the best solution would presumably be to tweak the game's balance rather than trying to find goals that would make SK's broken fighting system enjoyable. But this issue crops up all the time in (usually) less noticeable ways. Have you ever wanted to explore a level more but couldn't because of a time limit, or horded the ammo for the guns that are most fun to use because you knew you might need it for a boss fight later? When a game's goals discourage players from doing the things they find most enjoyable, there is potentially a problem. (I say "potentially" because sometimes being hamstrung in certain ways can be extremely enjoyable, such as when you have to sneak past some guard or defeat an enemy without using your weapons. Just make sure that whenever you are preventing or discouraging a player from doing something they want to do, you are doing so intentionally and with purpose.)

So if this problem of imposed goals ruining players' fun can crop up in carefully designed systems like games, what happens when we recklessly impose goals and incentives in real-world environments like jobs or schools? There is research that shows that external incentives can erode and supersede our internal motivation (this is known as the Overjustification Effect), but external incentives can also directly discourage us from having fun.

While cooking a meal, have you ever twirled the spatula, juggled an egg, or perhaps stirred along to the song on the radio? What about when you were in a hurry? Would you still cook 'playfully' if you were a high-paid chef in a high-end/high-pressure restaurant?

Goals, particularly challenging ones, can make an activity more engaging and fun, but all too often they can merely prevent us from having fun. Often we faff because the activity is too easy and monotonous. Maybe rather than trying to stop a student from doodling through class, or disallowing humorous emails in the workplace, we could simply let people have fun, or even encourage it, and trust that motivation and productivity will follow. Google recognized this, and they are currently worth about 200 billion dollars. Just saying.

Drop the SOPA

I don't like to get political on a blog purportedly about games, but this bill seems important, and it's allegedly set to pass before Christmas. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), also known as E-Parasite (Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation... way cooler name btw) is a bill intended to help US corporations shut down websites that host copyright-infringing material.

I'll agree that piracy can be damaging, but if you look into some of the wording, SOPA is the equivalent of spraying for termites using napalm. All websites will have to start carefully monitoring everything since they could theoretically get blocked or have their revenue yanked because a user posted some song lyrics or something, and all the added litigation (which will carry no risk for the prosecuting companies, mind you) will likely cost the government tens of millions of dollars. On top of this, downloaders will still be able to easily access pirated material simply by finding the site's IP address, so the affect that SOPA will have on actual piracy will be minimal at best.

If you support any notion of net-neutrality, please contact your local representatives immediately (or if you aren't a U.S. citizen pass this on to people who are) and explain why this bill is important, and why we can't allow it to be rushed through like this.

If you want intelligent, well-reasoned arguments against copyright in general, check out some stuff by Cory Doctorow (who is an advisor in my program at UW, meaning that my degree is cooler than yours).