Blips: Actions into Words

Source: Verbs
Author: Mitch Krpata
Site: Insult Swordfighting

What do you do in a video game? No, like what do you do? When trying to come up with a basic description of a game, it's helpful to frame it as a series of verbs. For a game like Space Invaders, there aren't very many: aim shoot, dodge. Things get more complicated in games that begin to add contextual modifiers to those verbs, which you can think of as adverbs. In the Street Fighter series you can kick your opponent, but there are different buttons for different kinds of kicks, further modified by whether your character is in the air, standing, or crouching. Mechanically speaking though, you're still just kicking.

These verbs are commonly referred to in game design as "mechanics," but I appreciated Mitch Krpata's use of the word "verbs" to describe them because it gets at a more plain-spoken understanding of what options a particular game provides. In his piece, Krpata laments the lack of evolution in the verbs of the Grand Theft Auto series over the years, and the limited verbs of Bioshock Infinite in comparison to Dishonored. Having mechanical variety can offer more agency to the player, allowing them to approach situations in ways they see fit.

While I definitely see where Krpata is coming from, part of me sees this as a matter of personal preference. Krpata himself says that there's nothing inherently wrong with a game like Bioshock Infinite focusing on shooting instead of anything else, it just frames the protagonist's role in the game world under limited terms. Games with few verbs tend to focus on perfecting mechanical execution of those actions over time, but can also be implemented in gameplay that isn't "skill-based." In Proteus, your verbs are walk, look, and sit. There's no way to "get better" at these things, but simply doing them is pleasurable and entertaining. Proteus doesn't need to be a sandbox of mechanics to be interesting because the island you explore is what's interesting, not so much your "character."

Games use verbs to place you in an empathetic mindset with the protagonist. I haven't played Bioshock Infinite, but I suspect the issue might be that the game's world and narrative express a depth that is hamstrung by your limited mechanics. In Proteus, this isn't a problem because the low mechanical focus puts the emphasis on the island instead, which does all sorts of things that would go unnoticed if you were busy playing around with a list of verbs. I hope this illustrates that mechanical diversity should be taken on a case-by-case basis, and that the verbs that make one game great, could very easily ruin another one.

Blips: Fall Fling

Source: Untold Riches: An Analysis Of Portal's Level Design
Author: Hamish Todd
Site: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Portal's a pretty smartly designed game. I played it for the first time a few months ago, and was impressed by inventive physics-based puzzles. Portal has proven to be a tremendously influential game in terms of environmental storytelling and making your standard block-pushing minigame even more boring that it already was. There's just something kind of amazing about staring into a portal you've created and seeing an entire area, just waiting to be stepped into. It has a similar appeal to mirrored surfaces in games; offering moments where you can see your character and the world around you from a different perspective than the one offered by the game's camera.

Now, the article by Hamish Todd that I wanted to share is all about Portal's physics –specifically the "fling" technique. The picture above illustrates what flinging is all about. Basically, you set up a situation where you jump from a height through a portal on the ground, only to emerge from a wall portal with he forward momentum gained from your quick descent. The result is that you are flung forward through space. The fling ends up becoming one of Portal's core conceits, sometimes asking that you rotate or shoot a new portal in midair to change trajectory. It seems so simple, yet it hadn't really been done before –not like this anyway.

In his article, Todd walks through a number of different puzzle rooms from Portal and some of the extended challenges, showing how many different ways the fling was implemented (some great illustrative GIFs in there too). The fling was a naturally occurring phenomenon in the game engine before it became central to Portal's gameplay, as if it was something to be discovered. This reminds me of how Devil May Cry's air juggling mechanic was born out of an Onimusha glitch where enemies weren't falling to the ground after being launched above you. It's a philosophy of looking at something that happens unexpectedly and embracing it for what it is. How refreshing.

Blips: Midwestern State of Mind

Source: Chicago: Home of a New Indie Gaming Renaissance
Author: Jordan Minor
Site: Kotaku

It's no secret the the vast expanse of land between the two coasts of the United States is largely neglected when it comes to cultural video game happenings. There's an east coast epicenter up in New England and a west coast expanse between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Except for Austin, Texas, there's not a lot of video game scene visibility in the country's midsection. However, if a recent article by Jordan Minor for Kotaku is to be believed, Chicago may be on its way to filling that void.

Minor's piece offers up a solid list of names and projects that are gaining more national recognition, and I find the whole thing inspiring. As a St. Louisan it can be alienating to be invested in a cultural medium like video games, but feel limited in what physical membership in such a community means. If I wanted to attend just about any major gaming convention, it would have required a pilgrimage-level of effort to get there. Perhaps sometime in the near future, that won't feel like the case anymore.

Of course, I live in New York now, so I'm able to see the industry from the other side of the lens, but I don't plan to stay here forever, and if I find my way back to the Midwest, Chicago seems a likely destination. So, maybe my motivation is a bit self-serving, but I also think the industry could use more perspective from folks who aren't around the corner from Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or Times Square, even on the indie front. So, all I really have to say is, keep it up, Chicago!

Gotcha!: An ARG Story

My investment in this whole horse_ebooks thing was pretty low to begin with. An infamous Twitter bot that spits out spam poetry (that's a freebie, Def Jam) wasn't actually fully automated this whole time. Or maybe it was and was just being carefully curated by a couple humans; the details are fuzzy. Turns out both horse_ebooks and the Pronunciation Book YouTube channel were both being run by Jacob Ballika and Thomas Bender, and the string of cryptic clues emitted recently by both were the lead-up to a browser-based FMV game called Bear Sterns Bravo. As a result, both the Twitter handle and YouTube account will cease further updates.

Oh well.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this whole string of events is the framing of Ballika and Bender's initiatives as art, even staging a gallery show called Bravospam, complete with live performances. You can call (213) 444-0102 and hear Ballika or someone else speak a horse_ebook-ish-ism into a phone. There are a few videos on display too featuring characters from Bear Stearns Bravo staring back at you, as if "waiting to be spoken to," according to the in-gallery text explanation. Additionally, horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book are referred to as online "installations."

The common thread that supposedly ties the whole thing together was the alternate reality game (ARG) that led up to this grand reveal. Cryptic clues were dropped around the Internet and people read into the patterns of spam being emitted by horse_ebooks looking for clues. The people who pursue hunts like this are intrigued by the mystery, curious to find out what's at the end of the rainbow. In this case, as is the case with just about every other ARG, the pot of gold is an advertizement for an upcoming product. At best these reveals are predictable and don't unfairly inflate players' expectations. Such was the case with the Boards of Canada ARG earlier this year, which everyone knew was being staged by the band and ended in the reveal of a new album, which while not a revolutionary announcement, was something that the ARG players were interested in and kind of saw coming. At worst the ARG culminates in a marketing ploy for something largely disconnected from the game everyone was playing and the point of original interest. Enter Bear Stearns Bravo.

This is a problem for the gallery show as well, which doesn't forge much of a connection between Ballika and Bender's suite of Internet memes and their FMV game about financial regulation, to say nothing of either component's individual value. It hitches onto the label of "art" hoping it will solve this problem and act as the rescue copter, lifting them out of the enraged jungle of followers and subscribers who feel lied to. It doesn't fare all that well as an art show though. Even the title of the exhibition, Bravospam, comes off as a lazy portmanteau of the two distinct concepts. There's no rulebook that states a body of artwork can't have a bifurcated concept, but in the case of Bravospam, it's more of a bait and switch.

And maybe that's the point.

I've played Bear Stearns Bravo, and it's a pretty funny game. If Tim & Eric made an FMV game about the housing crisis of 2007 it would probably look something like this. You play Franco, a government regulator, charged with investigating and taking down financial firm Bear Stearns for their credit default swap practices, among other white collar deceptions. The aesthetic of the game is straight out of the late 80s and early 90s, when FMV games were popular. Everything is shot and rendered in high definition though, unlike the muddly pixels and low resolutions of those old games. Actors ham it up for the camera and knowingly diverge into goofy, nonsensical tangents about their personal lives. Your only control in the game is selecting from dialogue options when questioned. The whole thing takes less than an hour.

The best thing to come out of Bravospam is the all-too-short scene in Bear Stearns Bravo where you encounter Champion and Dynasty, two sleazy, fast-talking debt slingers. They toss glowsticks (mortgages) back and forth and yell into disconnected phones, while justifying their behavior as essential to keeping the worlds systems in motion. It's a great parody of the egos that created the housing bubble and their tenuous relationship with credibility. At one point, you can try and empathize with them by saying that regulators and bankers aren't all that different, but they quickly dismiss your remark and continue shouting into their phones, totally self-absorbed.

The horse-ebooks/Pronunciation Book ARG isn't wholly unlike Champion and Dynasty, both are convincing you to invest in something that appears one way, but yields an unexpected return. And like the real world investment banks that facilitated the global financial crisis, Ballika and Bender have opted for the crash and the spectacle. I understand wanting to move on from silly web jokes that require daily iteration. I wouldn't hold it against Dan Walsh if he stopped doing Garfield Minus Garfield and said, "OK, I'm doing this other thing instead." Surely the appsurfing generation, with their supposed short attention spans, would be able to empathize with the horrors of boredom. This, the same generation that brought us the term "catfishing," too. The goodwill from players was there, but it was exploited instead of shepherded to the next thing.

A second episode of Bear Sterns Bravo is available for $7 from the game's website. It's probably good too, but I have a hard time seeing horse_ebooks fans giving Ballika and Bender any money considering they made a name for themselves through misdirection, and I'm not sure anyone else cares enough to pay attention.

:reposted on Medium Difficulty:

Blips: Target Practice

Source: The problem with guns
Author: Zolani Stewart
Site: The Fengxi Box

I'm really digging this post by Zolani Stewart which is the first in a series about guns in video games. I particularly endorse the use of the word "targetry" to label the action and contextual implications of gun mechanics. Targetry is a great word here because it goes beyond just shooting, and gets at the core conceit of games that present the player with a gun in the lower third of the screen by default. In most first-person games of this sort, you can't even lower your sights to speak with people; you are always aiming and everyone is always being targeted. Third person games are more conscious of this, but only marginally so.

As Stewart details, targetry seems to derail everything interesting it comes into contact with. Maybe I did have a very thought-provoking conversation with a support character, but I can't get over the fact that that character was basically speaking to me at gunpoint, and how they didn't seem phased by the smoking barrel in their face. Maybe the game doesn't care about that though and is content to just be a quickly forgotten time-filler, which is fair enough, but doesn't make for much of a cultural object worth critiquing or archiving for future reference.

Worse still "Big Budget games that are rooted in targetry end up perpetuating simplistic perspectives on complicated issues, perspectives that can even be harmful: the uncritical use of torture scenes, apolitical racism, shallow critiques of American culture and bottomless cynicism," as Stewart puts it.

But guns in games aren't inherently a bad thing, as Stewart points out; they're just missing the drama. This is the drama that can give gun violence the gravitas to be taken seriously. Having recently played The Walking Dead, I've seen that there are ways to include guns and even targetry in games in ways that ground those action with emotional weight. That I'm saying this about a zombie game (a genre that revolves heavily around headshots) should be inspirational. If a zombie game can do it, then there are probably ways to maximize the power and impact of guns in just about any other type of game. It's not that every game should aspire to be the same sort of experience, but if a game is primarily trading in targetry, then whatever else it has to say will likely go unheard.

I'm looking forward to part two of this series which will look at SuperHot, which Stewart claims "gets guns right." Should be good. Til then...

Blips: Arco, My Arco

Source: Real Simulation, False Prophecy
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: PopMatters

My piece on SimCity 2000 and the heartbreaking lack of real-world arcologies finally went live on PopMatters today. I'm pretty happy with it, though they didn't use my screenshot (above) that I took for them. I was playing quite a bit of SimCity 2000 at the time, but that was back in June, and I haven't gone back to my city of Teasureton too much since getting into full-on arcology production. Sure, I finished a large scale highway project and built an entire subway system, but that game is at its best when you're expanding. As neat as an arcology is, reformatting your city to be homogeneously covered in the same 4 sprite models is a pretty dull activity, and sucks the personality out of your city.

That said, I'd love to go back in at some point and start over from scratch, maybe in a mountainous terrain. I've never successfully gotten a missile silo installed in one of my cities, so that's something to shoot for. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the PopMatters piece –maybe it won't be the last time I show up there...

Blips: Papers, Please

Source: Crowdfunding's Secret Enemy Is PayPal
Author: Patrick Klepek
Site: Giant Bomb

In case you hadn't noticed, there's a lot of money being thrown around in crowdfunding campaigns these days. PayPal, the online payment processing company has noticed as well, since they're handling a significant portion of the funds being contributed to these campaigns. More than a handful of times, PayPal has withheld funds and frozen accounts of some high-earning projects as a means of making sure the companies' intentions are legitimate and defending PayPal from getting stuck footing massive chargeback bills. The problem is that these game developers aren't properly informed of this procedure, and have had to resort to public complaints to reverse PayPal's actions. In a new article by Patrick Klepek, he details the frustration that crowdfunded game developers are facing when they're raised a bunch of money, and then aren't given it without having to spend time and energy making a fuss.

From PayPal's side, the desire to protect themselves from the repercussions of scammers and money laundering schemes is legitimate. The problem is how they're going about it. If it was stated up front that there would be a set timetable for the release of funds from PayPal, that would be one thing, but is the instances that Klepek notes in his piece, PayPal typically doesn't make their move until after a campaign has come to a close. Even a word from the crowdfunding platforms would be a helpful forewarning about the series of events to follow. Perhaps PayPal could offer a verification system upfront, the same way they do after the fact for establishing legitimacy, so that these game developers can clear up any confusion before it becomes an issue.

That said, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are services that allow users to raise money on nothing but promises, and don't necessarily require any prior experience or background in what's being projected (though it certainly helps). Still, it's hard to see these recent kerfuffles as anything but poor communication and customer policy on the part of PayPal, which is already just about the least human, most faceless company I can think of. I'm glad to hear that so many of these cases did see resolution in the end, and hope PayPal has learned their lesson here. If they're not working on changes to keep unnecessary funds withholding regarding crowdfunding campaigns from occurring on a regular basis, then their reputation will see further damage and the doorway for competition will crack open a little further. Ultimately, that might not be such a bad thing either.