Blips: Code Tones

Source: Coding For Music
Author: Richard Vreeland
Site: Disaster, please?

I still haven't played Fez, though I do own it and intend to, but Rich Vreeland's (aka Disasterpeace) original soundtrack for the game is one of my recent go-to albums to put on when I need to get some work done. Vreeland also seems pretty busy these days with music composition, appearing as a part of every other Kickstarter game proposal I seem to run across. One of the things I love about his Fez score is how it evokes the sounds of 8 and 16-bit chipsets, but doesn't actually sound like it was made on those machines. It's a more dynamic, modern sound that relies on the strength of its own compositional structures rather than mining those increasingly bare tunnels of nostalgia. I think that's part of why it has so much staying power for me.

In a recent blog post, Vreeland details how he used code as a music generator in a game/tool of his own creation called January. In the game you play a person who walks around a snowy field with their tongue out, Charlie Brown-style, hoping to catch snowflakes. Each captured flake emits a musical note, so as you continue to walk about, you're also doing a bit of composing. In the most recent build of the game, you can modify the amount of snow, player movement, and a bunch of key changes that are beyond my music writing comprehension (very very little). What Vreeland makes available in his post is an explanation of what can be accomplished when music is written into the code instead of applied afterwards.

This is an idea I'll be exploring in depth in an upcoming Kill Screen piece, for which I'll definitely be citing Vreeland's ideas. How much music-centered interactivity needs to be in a game for it to be considered a "music game?" Most games have music, as do films, but only a specific subset are considered music games and musicals, respectively. I wonder how much it matters if the music comes through code or is just set on loop in the background. Ultimately my questions come down to the importance or lack thereof of genre distinctions and where lines need be drawn. I haven't formulated many concrete conclusions on the issue yet, but be on the lookout for an in-depth examination of the topic in a couple weeks.

Blips: A Tale of Two Indies

Source: Embed With...London
Author: Cara Ellison
Site: Embed With Games

Most of the Blips I post on here feature articles and essays that express a particular point they'd like to get across or a desire to open up some subject for further critical discussion. It's not that Cara Ellison's new Embed With Games project lacks either of those, but they are more difficult to summarize and present in a succinct abstract. Ellison's initiative, which is the premise for her Patreon campaign, is to perform personal, investigate journalism with game developers. Not necessarily to talk about their games, but to gain access to their everyday lives and tell those stories, which invariably intersect with games. This along with telling her own tale of travel and personal reflection is what Embed With Games is all about.

Ellison's first stop was London, a city with which she expresses a pensive relationship. There she literally shacked up with devs George Buckenham and Alice O'Connor as they prepared for and carried out The Wild Rumpus local multiplayer video game and music event/party. I'm not going to recount the whole thing here, partly because story-wise, there's not much to tell. The Wild Rumpus came and went, seemingly without incident, and that's that. What makes the story worthwhile, and why it's a feature that you have to read for yourself, is because Ellison doesn't actually tell a story, she paints a picture.

Ellison employs short, bluntly descriptive sentences that make her journey one of constant activity and shifting attention (and rather funny to boot). One paragraph speaks about the international, Internet-grounded make-up of Die Gute Fabrik (Johann Sebastian Joust) and before long the subject has shifted to spooning, missed connections, and cat bacteria. Still, it's not a poem, it's a documentary, and of a kind you just don't see in video game coverage. I can't wait to read about where Ellison heads next, and am curious to see how her experience might change if she heads into more foreign territory.

:image from The Telegraph:

Blips: A Life More Ordinary

Source: Beauty in the ordinary
Author: Kris Graft
Site: Gamasutra (blog)

I'm loving this post from Kris Graft about the virtues of games that focus on "the ordinary." Graft sets this up by contrasting the views of his Midwestern existence with those of his city-dwelling friends, and vice versa. It's all a matter of perspective of course, and so what one views as an ordinary day means significantly different things depending on setting. Having grown up in the Midwest and now having spent the past 5 years living in east coast cities, these points of contrast are starkly illustrated in my mind. If I change cities again, what will I miss from my previous sense of ordinary, and what what will I be happy to be rid of?

I was likewise drawn to meta-ordinary games like The Stanley Parable last year for their powerful examination of both ordinariness in human existence and ordinariness in gameplay. The literal approach in a game like The Stanley Parable isn't the only way to go about it though, and in fact it's likely a trend that will fizzle out before long (how many obscure simulators can the market realistically support?). Any game world can establish a sense of the ordinary, given the time and space to do so. What do the characters do when they're not embroiled in the craziest thing that's ever happened to them. And no, those quiet comedown moments of fireside chatting in the wake of a tragedy don't count. I want to see when those characters return home and go back to work. What does the extraordinary look like once it reverts back to the ordinary.

Blips: Drifting Off

Source: Proteus (Review)
Author: Gregg B.
Site: Tap Repeatedly

I can't pass up a good Proteus review, which is why I'm pleased to share this recent take from Gregg B for Tap Repeatedly. One thing he picked up on that slipped past me was the wide range of control configurations that Proteus allows, and how this makes the game feel more comfortable. I ended up not caring much for Dear Esther and was vindicated to hear from someone else that they too grew tired of depressing the UP arrow key (and little else) for the entirety of that game. Proteus is lumped into a similar walkabout genre with Dear Esther, but in contrast, it in no way feels laborious. Where Dear Ester was a path littered with trip wires that trigger obtuse voiceovers, Proteus is a living, breathing place that invites genuine exploration.

I've continued to play Proteus when I need a good come down. Some people drink tea, others listen to music, but I've found that Proteus is actually the perfect fit for this, and it seems like Gregg B is in agreement. He calls the game "tranquil and blissfully calming" and admits to wandering off to sleep not long after playing the game. I'm in no way saying that Proteus is boring, quite the opposite, but it has a different effect on me than most games. In fact, I don't have any other games that really provide the same effect, and this is likely because most games aren't built for relaxation. Even the gorgeous serenity of Journey is wrapped up in bouts of dramatic tension. There's something truly unique and, dare I say, beautiful to Proteus, and that something is everything that it is.

Blips: Feature Complete

Source: Early Access exposes the lie that the best games should, or even can, be finished
Author: Rowan Kaiser
Site: Polygon

Another week, another opinion piece with some interesting gray areas to discuss. Over at Polygon, Rowan Kaiser picks up the discussion of Steam's Early Access games and what it means for a game to be "finished." Many players and critics have voiced complaints about Early Access games for a variety of reasons ranging from their pricing structure, to the clarity of their current status (i.e. what's broken), to their prominence and quantity in the Steam marketplace. Kaiser posits that we've been playing "unfinished" games for years, and in fact that unfinished-ness is by design. He states that in addition to what we understand as unfinished games that have not seen a complete development cycle and final retail release, there are also games that the player can't complete.

Unfinishable games include sports games, endless runners or puzzlers (Tetris), MMOs, and pretty much anything resembling a multiplayer mode. We can think of every version of Street Fighter as the same game, just with various updates, each sold separately of course. Kasier's essay draws a parallel between Early Access games and unfinishable games in that they both see tweaks and additions to gameplay months and years after "official release."

There are two points I'd like to voice in response. First, while it's great that there are seemingly "mandatory" status notices on the store pages for Early Access games, they're not all super helpful, including Rust, which is cited in the article. The description for Rust currently reads: "We are in very early development. Some things work, some things don't. We haven't totally decided where the game is headed - so things will change. Things will change a lot. We might even make changes that you think are wrong. But we have a plan. It's in our interest to make the game awesome - so please trust us." While this is enough information to tell me that now is not the time to spend money on Rust, I also don't think this is evocative of the transparent development process that consumers are supposedly buying "access" to, unless Steam starts allowing players to return games for refunds.

Point 2: Players can also "be finished" with games, unfinishable or no. Being finished with a game can occur at anytime for a player and even after the credits roll in "finishable" games, many players still aren't done playing them, be it a New Game+, some other bonus mode, or investigating speed run possibilities. And the rub with Early Access games is that players can "be finished" with them before they're even feature-complete or at their least broken. I prefer to think of game sequels as continuations of one game instead of disparate entities, which applies to unfinishable games like the ones Kaiser cites, but "finishable" games as well. This is why sequels to games like Gears of War are met with sentiments like, "well, it's more Gears" because that's exactly what it is. That the nature of Early Access games would be inherently tied to a conventionally unfinishable status just seems like a leap of logic to me.

Blips: A Zap of Nostalgia

Source: Gaming's Greatest Forgotten Technical Innovation
Author: Joel Boyce
Site: Unwinnable

This video of NES/Famicom title screens combined with Joel Boyce's explanation of the technology behind the NES Zapper over on Unwinnable, have set me upon a strong nostalgia trip. While that video is certainly cool, understanding how the Zapper works is kind of incredible. If you're unfamiliar with the Zapper, it's a gun peripheral for the NES, most notably used with the game Duck Hunt, wherein you shoot ducks and a maniacal dog retrieves them. The Zapper simply plugs into the NES and you aim it at the targets on screen an pull the trigger to use it; no sensor bars or motion controls or accelerometers present.

I remember playing Duck Hunt as a kid and being filled with an unanswered curiosity about how the Zapper functions. The most common misconception was that it used some kind of laser targeting; it was called a "light gun" after all. Boyce's explanation is much simpler though, but perhaps more impressive for its simplicity. The Zapper contains a directional light sensor, and when you pull the trigger, the screen flashes black and then a white box flashes wherever the targets are positioned. The light sensor understands high fluctuations in a light reading as a hit. If you're not aimed at the target, the sensors won't pick up the white box, meaning it won't see the light fluctuation necessary to register a hit.

It all seems so simple now, but for a device that has multiple decades on the motion control fad, it deserves recognition for its forward-thinking technological achievements.

Blips: Livin' Life Live

Source: Lethal Frag and the lonely, growing world of livestreaming
Author: Darren Davis
Site: Kill Screen

Video game livestreaming is a bizarre development. It's not without its merits, but that doesn't discount how weird it is. In an essay for Kill Screen, Darren Davis examines the self-imposed 2-year livestreaming challenge of Lethal Frag. On the nightly 2-hour program, Matthew McKnight would play indie games and interact with the chat stream on his Twitch channel, and he'd go on to do this for 731 days straight. While many livestreams are about having an interest in the games being played (particularly with competitive titles), Lethal Frag and many others are more centered on the on-camera personalities. It's not all that different than a piece of long-form, endurance performance art, but McKnight didn't embark on his challenge to make an artistic statement so much as to turn playing video games into a living wage, albeit a seemingly lonely, draining one.

I've watched some livestreams, and regularly tune in to the live happenings over on Giant Bomb, but for me, the appeal is already beginning to wane. Conversing in a livestream chat is exhausting, though knowing that you're a part of a live audience does add a fun bit of theatricality. When something unexpected or outrageous occurs on screen, the chat explodes into a hyperdrive of replies and emoticons that's pretty amusing, but is also more or less the same every time. The shows themselves have an improvised energy to them that, in the right hands, can be tremendously entertaining for even hours at a time. Watching random people play games will get old fast, but when you can "spend time" with certain on-screen personalities, it begins to feel like you're watching a friend play. But at some point the improv takes too long to get where it's going and the outlandish reactions of the players can feel forced and cloying. I realized that the time I've spent watching others play games live on the Internet is time that I could be playing games for myself.

I don't expect or want livestreaming to go away, but I hope that we can trim the fat a bit on the path to the impending normalization of the form.

Blips: Trademark Saga

Source: Candy Crush Saga Makers Go After The Banner Saga. For Real.
Author: Luke Plunkett
Site: Kotaku

There's not a whole ton to add to this story, but it's worth sharing for the bizarreness of it all. King.com (not to be confused with Kim Dotcom), makers of the super-popular match-3 game Candy Crush Saga, have threatened legal action against any other app developers using the words "candy" or "saga" in their titles, claiming trademark infringement. As a result, recently launched Norse mythology turn-based strategy game The Banner Saga has received one of these notices, which claims that The Banner Saga's use of "saga" in its title is causing "market confusion."

Anyone can see that this is a ridiculous claim, as the two games have nothing in common, so we can all point and laugh at King.com's folly, but we should also recognize why the Candy Crush maker would do something like this. When questioned about their actions, a spokesperson replied that this was something they had to send "to preserve [their] own position under trademark law." So, in other words, they know they don't have anything on The Banner Saga, but they have to send this nonetheless to cover their bases for the sake of legal precedent. Copycat apps are a real thing on the app store, and there are plenty of developers out there trying to make a quick buck on the very market confusion that is being waved in front of The Banner Saga. I have no doubt that there are games out there called Kandy Krush, Candy Crunch, and Candy Crash, which are King.com's real targets.

Whatever you may think about Candy Crush Saga as a game, let's take a step back and see this legal mess for what it really is.

Blips: No Sale

Source: Why Rampant Sales are Bad for Players
Author: Jason Rohrer
Site: The Castle Doctrine blog

I have to admit, part of the reason I started playing a lot of indie games on the PC is because of pay-what-you-want sales on games that were previously only available on platforms I did not own. Humble Indie Bundle V contained Braid, Limbo, Super Meat Boy, Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP, Bastion, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Psychonauts, and Lone Survivor, and I got them all for $15. What a steal. It was a deal that seemed too good to be true, but there was no "catch" to be found. Since them I've been introduced to regular Steam sales where game prices dip down so low, they're practically free. I've held out on buying games for 50% off, just in case they're 75% off at some point during the course of a 2 week sale period. I don't buy computer games at full price, and I never pirate them. I just try to be a smart, informed consumer.

That said, I agree with a lot of what The Castle Doctrine designer Jason Rohrer has to say with regard to the detrimental consequences of a discount video game marketplace culture. The crux of Rohrer's stance is that when you launch a game at full retail price, then slice it in half the next time a Steam sale rolls around, you're throwing the dedication of your most ardent fans, the ones who bought your game at launch, back in their faces. You're telling them, "you should have waited," and the rub is that next time, maybe they will. Rohrer plans to counteract this with The Castle Doctrine by offering the game for 50% off as a pre-order/alpha, raising to 25% off for launch, and eventually raising back to full price a few weeks down the line. Rohrer claims he will not put the game on sale thereafter.

I'm curious to see how this goes for Rohrer (as if his game didn't have enough critical chatter as is) because the tidal wave of discounted games just seems so strong. In some ways, sales are all about the increased visibility as much as the lower prices. Even a 10% off sale can beget a ton of new players if it means the game shows up on Steam's front page. I think Rohrer's concerns about people buying games just to take advantage of sales is valid (the "pile of shame" is proof), but I'd also be concerned about interesting games living out their days in the shadows because no one remembers they exist two weeks after launch. I don't know that there's a right answer here, but I'm happy to see Rohrer exploring new options.

Blips: Final Fantasy: The After-Party

Source: Final Fantasy X-2: Life is Such a Changing Art
Author: Fritz Fraundorf
Site: Gaming Intelligence Agency

To be honest I don't remember the finer details of Final Fantasy X-2, the series' first direct sequel to a previous game. I haven't played it since it first came out on the PS2 some 10 years ago, but I do remember liking it quite a bit. Picking up with Yuna not too long after the conclusion of FFX, the game breaks free of it's predecessor's constraints to offer a game with plenty of familiar callbacks, but ultimately feels entirely different.

I was pleased to find this breakdown by Fritz Fraundorf of what makes FFX-2 such an interesting game, and why it deserves equal celebration with its forebearer in the wake of the pair's HD repackaging. It's a game that knows it's a sequel to a 60+ hour experience, and makes the most of it. Unlike so many sequels that dredge up some excuse to climb the same skill tree ladder time and time again (How does Samus lose her abilities every single time?!), FFX-2 acknowledges that Yuna helped save the world last time, and so she can kind of go wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Sure there is still a skill tree to climb, but at least it's a different system: a modified return to the revered "job system" of FFV, no less.

More than anything, what I remember of FFX-2 is its outlandish style, its fanciful colors, and its upbeat energy. If FFX was a crunch time effort to make it to the finale of an epic quest, FFX-2 is the celebratory after-party. It tells the story that never gets told in these kinds of games: the one about what happens after you save the world.

Blips: Passing Knowledge

Source: Why we should be more confident talking about games we haven't played
Author: Steven Poole
Site: Edge

In a new column for Edge, Steven Poole asserts that you don't necessarily have to play the entirety of a game to be able to voice a valid opinion about it. He cites Pierre Bayard's book How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read as inspiration, claiming that there are four categories of periphery understanding of media (in Bayard's case, books): those you don't know, those you've skimmed, those you've forgotten, and those you've heard of. Poole's central example in his piece in GTA V's "torture scene," and how even never having played it, the potency of the discussion around it provides a researched platform for crafting your own new opinions. Why should you purchase and play through dozens of hours of a game that, as a whole, does not interest you, so that you can have the experience of playing a short sequence for yourself, when that same information is basically available to you via other critical responses and YouTube videos?

I'm not in total agreement with Poole here, but in certain applications, he's spot on. On the subject of having to complete a game to comment on a particular aspect, he's right, that's an outdated qualifier, especially when it comes to large or never-ending games. I just reviewed Gran Turismo 6 without "beating" it. Why? Well, I have other games to review and other stories to write, and no one is going to want to read a review of that game by the time I get all the way through it. I did have a firm grasp on what the game has to offer though, and took an approach to reviewing it that centered on how the game presents itself and it's general tone instead of listing off the pros and cons of every stage in the game. This isn't a flawless strategy, but it does a pretty good job of balancing the elements of time, research, and deadlines, where a completionist mandate can exploit a critic's (especially freelancer) time and energy.

That said, my main problem with Poole's assertion is that it stems from what feels like a need to have an opinion on every subject that crosses the zeitgeist. The reality is that no one can play everything, and so to have an opinion on everything, you have to shortcut the process in some way. What feels like is often the case though is that folks are driven to have an opinion instead of driven to say something in particular. Do we really want game criticism to proceed further down the cable news talking head rabbit hole? Besides, it's always possible that a controversial scene or element in a game is offset by the rest of the experience, a notion only individuals who have actually played it would know. At that point, as a critic and non-player of a particular game, you'd better be bringing something profound to the table. In principle, I have little issue with the idea that you don't have to play a game to have a grounded, respectable opinion on it, so long as it's not treated as a free pass on performing research and understanding in-game contexts.

Blips: Gaming the System

Source: The strange, shady world of $1,000 iOS apps
Author: Mike Wehner
Site: Tuaw

It's rough out there in the App Store world, to the extent that some game developers are attempting to pull one over on the system through some price fluctuation trickery. In a report by Mike Wehner for The Unofficial Apple Weblog, it is revealed why a simple game like The Fleas, made by Vhlamlab, would retail for $999.99. Turns out it's part of a scheme to get some eyeballs on the game by having it show up on the App Store's "Top Grossing" list. So how do they earn enough money in sales to rank on such a list? Well, that's the trick of it.

There is some back door money handling going on that results in, say, $10,000 being loaned for purchasing the game across 10 accounts. Once Apple takes their 30%, the developers have spent $3,000 to get their game on a very visible list for a few hours. At this point, the price is dropped back down to $1 to try and capitalize on legitimate sales and attempt to recoup that $3,000. It seems like an incredibly risky and shady thing to do for such a potentially small payoff, but it does happen. In fact, as Wehner notes, The Fleas is still selling for $1,000. Apparently, some people have actually bought it at that price. Madness, I say.

Blips: Show Me the Way

Source: The Cult of the Peacock
Author: Brendan Vance
Site: BrendanVance.com

Don't you hate in-game tutorials? I do, or at least the forced fit-this-training-sequence-into-the-context-of-the-game ones or the stop-the-action-every-5-seconds-to-read-this-instruction ones. It seems like I'm not the only one, and designer Brendan Vance shares an interesting perspective on the subject. He sees a downward trend where design thinking is replacing artistic vision in the service of ever-lowering the barrier to entry for games. Vance misses the days where video games came with manuals. Instruction manuals offloaded all of that contrived, pedantic in-game instruction into a small booklet that could be referenced at will. While it's simple enough as a player to prefer one learning method over another, Vance argues that the obsession with accessibility as part of a game's design takes a disproportionate amount of development effort for what the payoff begets.

To cycle back, players hate these tutorials scenes (note: I'm not talking about training modes here) and often skip over them without even absorbing the information. I see this happen all the time watching videos of people learning to play new games. They button through as fast as they can because they've gotten bored with the instructions, or perhaps they're feeling impatient after sitting through a loading screen, only to find themselves in control and without a clue what they're supposed to do or how to do it. Then it's a matter of searching through menus of logs to try and find what was just said, assuming those logs exist. A manual would solve this problem and designers wouldn't have spent over half of their time attempting to make the tutorial sections to "user-friendly."

To reverse this trend would take some unlearning. As much as I'd welcome a return to manuals, there is a large portion of the gaming population that has never read one, and is not likely to. However, Vance ends his essay with a call for writers to try and pen their own manual for a game they enjoy, as a kind of "close-reading" exercise. I love this idea, and would be interested to see if anyone takes up the charge. As for me, hmm, Proteus would be a fun manual I think...

Blips: Blue Book Value

Source: Gran Turismo 6 is the racing game of our dreams
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

OK, I'm a week delayed getting back to regular posting, but give me a break, I was driving through the polar vortex. Speaking of driving, I've also been playing quite a bit of Gran Turismo 6, and wrote a review for Kill Screen (check out their fancy new website too). It's a very good game.

The big thing that ended up being left out of the review was how GT6 handles microtransactions, an element that I was concerned about going in. Well, turns out there's no real cause for worry as Polyphony all but hides the real-money marketplace from you. It's a totally irrelevant factor in the game unless you explicitly seek it out, and the game never pushes you to do so. While I applaud this approach, I also wonder how much this diminishes potential profits. It's a smart design choice seemingly made at the expense of contemporary financial sense. Heck, while Forza allows you to pay something like double the price of the game in DLC, GT6 is giving it up for the initial price of admission and still offers more vehicles and tracks than its Xbox rival.

There's something desperate about GT6 too, provoking the thought that because the game is only available on an "after-market" console, that the developers needed to offer more than usual to encourage players to keep their old machines plugged in. The result is that GT6 presents an argument for itself that's extremely convincing and comes off as a product of its time and circumstance more than most. To play Gran Turismo 6 now feels like taking advantage of a tremendous deal, and as much as I'd hope Polyphony would continue these practices come GT7, I have my doubts. So I say, get in on the action now before the microtransactions and DLC inevitably rear their heads once Gran Turismo goes next-gen. I'd love to be proven wrong here.