Blips: Theatrically Inclined

Source(s): At the gates of Temple Studios: Where gaming and theatre collide,  The immersed audience: how theatre is taking its cue from video games
Author(s):Tristan Jakob-Hoff, Thomas McMullan
Site(s): Eurogamer, The Guardian

Starting off the week, here are a couple articles from across the pond that center the Punchdrunk theatre group, whose recent performance, The Drowned Man, is finding common ground within the video game community. As both Jakob-Hoff and McMullan's pieces report, theatre and games actually have quite a bit in common, especially in staging/level design, making crossover function rather naturally. Punchdrunk has been putting on performances with interactive elements for years, and even inspired certain aspects of Gone Home, but The Drowned Man appears to be their most ambitious project to date.

Not only are there interactive components to The Drowned Man, but the performance takes place in a 4-story complex, with actors on different floors performing simultaneously (if I'm understanding the description correctly). So you could be opening a "prop" drawer and reading a note for additional narrative context while a soliloquy takes place above you, and another viewer is selected and pulled into a room next door for a one-on-one performance. It's the sort of show that you can't see the entirety of in just one go. And that's a key difference between working in digital and real world "theatre;" in games the action can be programmed and instanced to always make you the center of attention, and thus able to have every actor wait on your arrival to begin. But I also like the idea in live theatre that the world doesn't revolve around you; in some ways, I find there's more immersive potential in that arrangement.

Blips: Chess Storm: Reckoning

Source: Chess 2: The Sequel - How a street fightin' man fixed the world's most famous game
Author: Christian Donlan
Site: Eurogamer

I am by no means a "chess player," but some of the changes in Zac Burns' and David Sirlin's Chess 2, a ruleset and upcoming video game, do seem pretty exciting. The reasoning behind their variant is meant to solve what they see as problems in play at the grandmaster level: most matches end in draws and play relies too heavily on memorization. Basically, the highest level players don't seem to be having much fun with the game anymore, and Chess 2 is trying to tactfully shake things up to specifically address those issues. There's a concept of "dueling," which I'm not entirely clear on when it occurs, but it involves a Risk-like battle system where each player reveals a certain number of stones in their hand in a rock-paper-scissors draw, and that highest number wins the duel. The catch is that you only have a certain amount of stones per game, and they're single use, so once you're out, you'll continue to lose duels until your opponent also runs out of stones. This modifier is intended to add an psychological action element to the game that gets you to engage with your actual human opponent, not just their board strategy. It's sort of poker-like in that way.

For me, the most interesting and accessible modifier is the "midline invasion," which is a win condition wherein a player moves their king across the midpoint of the board, ala scoring a touchdown. This rule sounds like it could be a really fun addition since the king's position becomes something you always have to keep in mind, even as you're trying to play the rest of the pieces normally. It reminds me of the snail win condition in Killer Queen too. It's no surprise then that the minds behind Chess 2 have experience balancing rosters in the competitive video game scene. I'm sure there are a billion other ways of modifying chess, but this one caught my eye and seems to make a lot of sense. It's no use getting upset about it either; Chess 2 won't be replacing regular old chess after all, but it could make for a fun alternative.

Blips: Portal Don't Need No Stinkin' Bullets

Source: Games of the Generation: Portal
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: Eurogamer

Portal is the only Valve game franchise that I care about, and in a new feature for Eurogamer, Simon Parkin explains why that might be the case. Portal shook up the first person shooter genre by making your gun a puzzle-solving navigation tool instead of a killing machine. It's a mechanically subversive game in light of the commercial dominance of shooters, but it also executes on an ambitious narrative that brings those mechanics, it's aesthetics, and its characters full-circle. As Parkin notes in his conclusion, it even resists then normal sequel structure for games where the second pass is usually better than the first. Not to put down Portal 2 (a fine game), but Portal did not need a sequel; its story is a parable, not an epic.

Parkin's remark about Portal's non-existent influence on the video game industry is questionable though, but I will buy it in a very specific context. In my opinion, Portal was most influential for it's use of physics and puzzle boxes. There have even been a few games that take Portal's puzzle-solving structure and apply different mechanics, like Magrunner, Q.U.B.E., and Quantum Conundrum, not to mention more distant cousins like Antichamber, but even in games where this isn't the core conceit, the influence of Portal can be felt. Now, perhaps Parkin is referring to the mainstream, in which case the bullet-gun shooters still reign supreme and have all but ignored the larger lessons or Portal when looking at the industry's broad strokes, but I'd argue that the influence is still quite pervasive in those games; it's visibility is just a bit more subtle.

Blips: Neverending Finality

Source: Dispatches from A Realm Reborn
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: Eurogamer

Video games have been known to possess addictive qualities, and I like to think I've been able to show more restraint from falling into unhealthy gaming patterns as I've gotten older. MMOs always seemed to be the black tar heroin of addictive video games, and as such, I've steered clear of them, scared off by tales of lost time and disintegrating real world sociability. I've never wanted to subject myself to that sort of atmosphere. Whenever I hear MMO players discuss their experiences within these virtual worlds, they often seem intriguing, if not amazing, in concept, but I have trouble seeing past the grind of the actual moment-to-moment activities and the stunning time commitment.

Simon Parkin breaks down his mostly positive experience with Square-Enix's MMO reboot Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn in a recent piece for Eurogamer. The game does seem to have it's appeal, and the story behind it's development is incredible, and a bit heartbreaking. If ever I was to be swung over to the dark side and pick up an MMO, something with the Final Fantasy name attached to it might be the reason. Final Fantasy XII and Xenoblade Chronicles showed me that I actually enjoyed combat stylized with MMO trappings, but both of those games also have preconceived narratives with definitive endings, and, much to their credit, rarely pushed me to grind. Seeing series callbacks in FFXIV just makes me want to go back and play the older games in the series, not invest in a new title that also requires a monthly fee.

I want to like MMOs. The raids, the guilds, and the performative elements are all quite intriguing, but I've resolved to wait on the massively multiplayer structure until it breaks out of the World of Warcraft mold where it currently finds itself. If MMOs were for me, FFXIV might very well be my game, but since they're not, I'll continue to observe and appreciate from a safe distance.

Blips: Gimme Game-y Games

Source: Systems vs. Stories
Author: Dan Whitehead
Site: Eurogamer

It's not a new argument that video games should be developed around their systems, not as vehicles of cinematic storytelling. That's the crux of Dan Whitehead's stance in a new piece for Eurogamer, but his point is more salient with the comparison between two recent games that use a zombie apocalypse as a premise: The Last of Us and State of Decay. Sure there are new zombie games every week (sigh), but here Whitehead explains why he thinks State of Decay is a better "game" than the critically lauded The Last of Us, and it all boils down to story presentation. In The Last of Us, Whitehead felt like he was just keeping the main characters alive in between cutscenes where the story was told. In State of Decay, he claims that you're almost always playing the game to push the story forward, to the point where there's not even an explicit plot in the traditional sense.

Though I haven't played either of these games, I can see where Whitehead is coming from, and can hop on board except where he gets superlative with his claims in ways that restrict the narrative possibilities of various media. The topper is his closing line that refers to games as "the only truly new creative medium of the last 100 years." Cutting it pretty close to the invention of film, but I guess I can let that slide. However, let's not forget that games have existed prior to video games, and are founded on the same principles. Games in fact predate film and photography by hundreds, if not thousands of years. Furthermore, I don't have a problem with cinematic games with minimal interactivity, so long as the parts where I play aren't just there as boring filler to meet a "game" requirement.

If there's a problem it's how we lump all games under the same set of expectations. The kinds of interactivity should be what we use to classify games because they let the player know what kind of experience they're in for. If I know a game is going to be little more than a visual novel where I press a button to turn the page, so be it. I might be in a mood for that kind of game. If the story is interesting, that game could still be great. The interactivity might not get in the way and involves the player in the story just enough to be meaningful. I haven't played Asura's Wrath either, but isn't that the basic idea there? The real issue with most story-based games isn't interactivity, it's second-rate writing. By the sound of it, The Last of Us actually makes great strides on that front.

Blips: Buzzword Computing

Source: In Theory: Can the Xbox One cloud transform next-gen gaming?
Author: David Coombes
Site: Eurogamer

Try as I might to cover stories unrelated to Xbox One, here's another, this time on Microsoft's claims that cloud computing will supercharge their new console. David Coombes dissects Microsoft's PR-speak, pulling out what details are to be had and sets them against examples of real-world implementation where available. The gist of the piece is that Microsoft might be making a bigger deal about the power of cloud computing as it pertains to Xbox One than they'll practically be able to deliver.

I'll be honest, a lot of the material presented here is far beyond my technical understanding, but one point that did register was how low-bandwidth for your average Internet user will severely bottleneck information and limit the impact that cloud processing will have. I'm already imagining scenarios with Xbox One where texture pop-in becomes even worse or certain game elements don't load at all because my connection is too slow. I already know that I have a slow connection; it's a minor miracle that my PS3 hasn't kicked me offline in over a week.

To be fair, it sounds like Microsoft has pin-pointed a few areas where they can utilize the cloud effectively and avoid bandwidth and latency issues, but those examples hardly seem like game changers. In fact it's another situation where I'd rather just get all the power I need up front and not have to worry about cloud processing every time I just want to play a game.

Blips: Secrets of the Colossus

 
Source: The Quest for Shadow of the Colossus' Last Big Secret 
Author: Craig Owens
Site: Eurogamer

Everything in a game is there for a reason. There's symbolism and deliberate design aplenty in Team Ico's PS2 classic Shadow of the Colossus. Even though most of the landscape is empty of typical video game-y quests and characters, the pacing and journey through the vast expanses establishes a specific tone, which in turn colors the epic colossi battles when they occur. Sometimes though, the purpose of an object in game is a well hidden secret, and other times it's leftover from an element that was cut during development.

In Craig Ownes' piece for Eurogamer, he delves into a community of Shadow of the Colossus secret-seekers. These individuals have devised traversal methods for reaching areas unthinkable to the average player in hope of uncovering a hidden colossus fight. One seeker used a hacked version of the game to scour every bit of the existing terrain, discovering new landforms along the way. Still, a hidden colossus eluded secret-seeking the community.

I find the concept of secret-hunting in SotC perfectly fitting to the nature of its world. It's not that the game is largely empty, so there must be missing content, but that the game is structured around exploring ruins of a bygone age. The game is full of crumbling architecture that feels as if no one has visited for thousands of years. Secret-seekers take to the game like a relic full of riddles, concealed by code in the final retail version. It's a kind of meta-game usually reserved for the speed-run crowd (part of the SotC secret-seekers community, mind you), but here it's adventure, not execution that motives players to look deeper.