The Last Door Chapter 1 Review: Beyond the Veil of Crowdfunding

Good horror games have been a bit thin on the ground ever since the AAA industry apparently misplaced the recipe, but in inadequately-dark times like these one need only turn to the indie scene for delicacies like The Last Door. I've always been a big gothic horror fan, and the sensibilities of Poe and Lovecraft are put across strongly with retro-minimalist graphics that leave most of the horror to your twisted imagination.

In chapter 1 you receive a cryptic letter from an old friend and decide to pay a visit to his creepy mansion because you fear something is amiss. (Spoilers: something is amiss.)

Gameplay is standard adventure game fare. Puzzles are fairly basic and logical, but the emphasis is on mood, which is made all the more chilling by an excellent musical score that contrasts pleasingly with the otherwise retro aesthetic. The horror is more subtly chilling than panic inducing. There are a couple of jump scares, but they are deployed effectively and used as a spice rather than a crutch (to mix old and limp metaphors).

Mostly I'm posting this because I want to spread the word for selfish reasons. Currently they need about 6k in donations to make Chapter 2, and I want to find out where the story goes dagnabbit!

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.

Tomb Raider Review: Baptism by Fire

Ms. Pac-Man may have kicked things off with her audaciously gender-specific bow and sassy single honorific, but ever since Lara Croft's debut (trudging up a snowy monutain in short shorts if I recall), Tomb Raider has been the central talking point for how women are portrayed in videogames. And although this has tended to overshadow other discussions of the series and has undoubtedly influenced successive videogame heroines, it's never been settled whether the portrayal has been a positive or a negative one. On the one hand, Lara Croft is a strong, independent woman who can kick ass with the best of them, which set her strongly apart from the gaggle of damsels in distress dominating the medium prior. On the other hand, her wardrobe and proportions (and marketing) present her as a sex object right from the start. So is Lara a feminist vanguard, or a demeaning symbol of the old guard? (or not a type of guard at all?)

I think an important thing to keep in mind in all this is that “sexism” does not exist in a vacuum. Lara's cold femme fatale attitude undoubtedly had more clout back before it became the go-to method for ensuring that female characters be regarded as more than just eye candy while not having to actually give them much character (because making your female character a real person is also dangerous, as we will see). In the same vein, there's (in my male opinion) nothing wrong with creating a female character intended to titillate; the problems come when all female characters in a medium seem to be designed to be most ergonomically ogled. It's all about context, is what I'm saying.

So now we come to the gritty reboot/prequel ambiguously titled Tomb Raider in which we find a very different Lara. Rather than an idealized sex toy, we find an attractive but realistically proportioned human. And rather than a hard-edged femme fatale(/cold-blooded killer) we find a realistically scared young woman in over her head. And yet her thorough transformation has done anything but allow her to escape the realm of gender politics. The controversy kicked off when an early trailer showed a scene in which Lara is threatened by a group of ruffians with what could without too much imagination be construed as rape. This, combined with a statement by the developers that the game would make players want to “protect” Lara, unsurprisingly provoked a Himiko-level storm of internet backlash.

So is the new Tomb Raider sexist? Having played through the story, I can say that the “rape” scene barely registers as a thing, though rumor has it that it was toned down in response to the fan outrage. Admittedly I have never personally been in a situation in which I feared being raped, so perhaps some might find the sequence more disturbing (though were I marooned on an island with a gang of murderous cutthroats, I imagine I would be more worried by all the shooting and knifing directed at me that by a little suggestive pawing). Failing the associated Quick Time Event actually results in Lara being choked to death rather than being raped, so that's better(?) As for Lara's characterization, I can unequivocally say that Lara is a more engaging and fleshed-out character, and certainly more well-rounded despite the smaller cup size (*badum tush*). But depth alone does not determine whether a characterization is sexist. Again I would say it's largely a matter of context. I do not see anything wrong with casting Lara as scared and inexperienced, and tasking the player with protecting her. If the concept took off and henceforth every heroine in gaming (and only heroines) became scared and inexperienced and in need of protection, that might start to become troublesome.

As it is, the dynamic feels fresh. The most obvious comparison is with the Uncharted series (which as others have noted is an ironic comparison, seeing as the Uncharted series clearly took inspiration from the Tomb Raider series to begin with, and yet improved upon the formula in enough areas that the flow of inspiration has seemingly reversed, at least for the time being), but in Uncharted the player is never “protecting” Nathan Drake. Here, through an impressively realized combination of scripted and emergent narrative, voice and visual cues, and yes probably cultural issues surrounding violence against women, the game does an impressive job of making you feel bad about allowing this poor girl to come to harm, and cheering her on in the occasion that she doesn't. The experience elicited an impressive number of squeamish “egad” moments from me after a slip of the controls would doom Lara in some brutal fashion, often impaled through the neck by something metal and sharp (with enough consistency that an armored scarf would be an extremely useful wardrobe upgrade). Even the regenerating health, of which I'm often not a fan, serves this aesthetic purpose. Whereas it always felt a little jarring for Gears' Marcus Phoenix, hardened convict/soldier, to find himself huddled in a corner sucking his thumb and waiting for his health to regenerate, Lara hiding scared in a corner with gunfire all around fits the characterization and doesn't feel like an interruption of the action.

Yet despite this “protection” dynamic, Lara is anything but a delicate little flower. In fact she goes through more punishment than probably any videogame character I've seen, to the point where it starts to become kind of silly. Tomb Raider's gameplay mechanics are commensurable to those in Uncharted, but I feel that the cinematic style works less well here. Where Uncharted's tone purposefully evokes an escapist Hollywood blockbuster through and through, Tomb Raider's tone has strong leanings towards gritty realism, and it starts to be a problem of wanting to have one's cake and drop it off a waterfall too. The game desperately wants us to feel like Lara's a real person in real danger, yet it also heaps on so much spectacle that Lara would most likely be a quadriplegic within the first 20 minutes of gameplay. I'm not saying videogame characters can't do unrealistic things in a game with a realistic tone, but I'm not sure the unrealistic things should also be emphasized with frequent “look how crazy and over-the-top this all is” cutscenes.

The frequent mini-cutscenes bring forth another issue that I feel plagues a lot of recent games. When the old Tomb Raider games would introduce something new, it would just sort of be there and consequently would be much more surprising. Tomb Raider II introduced spiders of unusual size (S.O.U.S.s) as an enemy near the end, but rather than heralding their arrival with an introductory cutscenes, you just sort of ran into them while exploring a dark cave, making them extremely unnerving and memorable despite their being animated with about four polygons. Conversely, modern games throw all sorts of well-rendered and novel threats at the player, but their consistent introduction by flashy cutscenes completely undermines their impact. Not only am I expecting something “craaazy” to happen whenever a cutscene starts, but because videogames are an interactive medium, I know that for as long as my control is taken away Lara is in no danger, so for the entire three-second sequence in which the roof starts to collapse or the wolves first appear, I jarringly feel less tension than when I had control and was doing something mundane. If Tomb Raider II were remade today, there would be a little cutscene introducing the spiders with a horde of them crawling out of something in all their many-polygoned glory, and I would be sitting back calmly waiting to play again. At least in a movie there is some miniscule chance that the character might get eaten by the spiders while you are passively watching, but with a game you know you're safe until the cutscene ends, or at least until a quick time event icon pops up. Indeed one of the few moments in the reboot that gave me genuine anxiety was the one time a new enemy was introduced without a cutscene. I'm not against cutscenes in principal, but too many games nowadays are using them to try and amp up tension in a way that does the exact opposite. Stop it!

Aside from that, I found a lot to like in the new Tomb Raider. Combat feels tight and transitions from stealth in an organic way, and enemies behave in a believable fashion. The bow is really fun to use whether you're picking off confused enemies from the bushes, shooting ropes to traverse the environment, exploding/igniting things, or murdering various animals (which feels more justified with Lara as a hungry castaway rather than merely an eccentric tourist). The “survival instincts” ability works nicely. It functions much like Arkham Asylum/City's “detection vision” to highlight important features, but because you can only use it while stationary, you aren't incentivised to ruin the pretty graphics by simply keeping it on at all times. The leveling system doubles as a sort of built-in tutorial as you learn various skills, and it doesn't feel shoehorned in *coughangelofdarkness*. And I like the way that tombs are integrated as optional side-puzzles since it makes you feel clever for finding and completing them.

Overall my impression is mixed, but I feel this is an impressive first go at reinvigorating a waning icon. (Certainly I'm more optimistic of Lara's future than Sonic's.) I'm excited to see where this reborn franchise goes, and I'm pleased that it contains a reasonably fleshed-out protagonist regardless of gender. Really I'm happy they didn't just make her a female Nathan Drake.

"Wakka wakka."

Sifteo Cubes

Ever since the boardgame Operation debuted in 1965, it's been clear that hybridization potential exists between electronic and non-electronic games. I've been excited for the possibilities ever since Microsoft unveiled the original 30" Surface, but the $10k price tag put that a little outside the mainstream market.

Well a new challenger has appeared. At $30 each, these Sifteo Cubes still aren't quite at the level where you could expect every customer to already own a set (or include a few in the box), but I could imagine quite a few interesting ways you could combine these with boardgames.

The tipping point draws near, folks. Some day all this stuff will be cheap enough that every boardgame can have electronic components up the wazoo and every videogame can have tablet support and action figures, and instead of distinguishing between videogames and boardgames we can just refer to them all as bideord games or something.

Or maybe that's a bad idea and none of that will happen because it's actually more fun to just tackle your friend while holding a PlayStation Move.

Darkwood Pre-Alpha

Procedural generation seems like a natural fit for a genre that depends on the element of... SURPRISE *cough* Anyway this indy-horror Darkwood game looks very promising. (Don't trust the creepy ghost-child. Pianists are sketchy.)

And if you're already in the market for a game with a lot of procedural generation, I heartily recommend FTL. Not really horror, but lots of accidental suffocation. Remember to close your airlocks, people.

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.

48 Hour Global Game Jam

So there's this little thing called the 48 Hour Game Jam that I participated in last month for the first time, figured maybe I should give my impressions.

Basically it was awesome. I met a bunch of great people, sang along to The Final Countdown several times, and just generally had a blast being in such a productive climate. I helped brainstorm some ideas and offered feedback here or there, worked out some basic for a trick-taking card game with my good friend Tom Sarsons, and composed the music for two games: Pump up the Jam and Bullet Cell (links over there ---->).

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're interested in any aspect of videogame production, this is absolutely an experience I'd recommend.

Last year GGJ won the Guinness World Record for largest "game jam," and from what I heard it was even bigger this year, but I'm not sure whether 2013 set a new record, so I may or may not have helped set a Guinness World Record, but I will still aid in the production of any novelty oversize foodstuffs just to be safe.

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.

The Resource Economy of Super Mario Bros.

It is my contention that virtually any game can be better understood by viewing it as a resource economy and determining what the resource conversions are. To illustrate this, I've drawn up a (perhaps not exhaustive) resource economy for the original Super Mario Bros. and labeled the less-obvious conversion methods.

Fan Film Fanfare: Super Mario Busters & History of the Soviet Union Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris

Videogame-related fan film production quality has become ridiculous lately (and I'm not even speaking of Freddie Wong).