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Quick – Move the Mouse to the Right and Press the Shift Key!

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I’ve played through a good number of games lately, and I’m noticing a design trend I don’t like much. Specifically, games in modern and futuristic settings are routinely providing the player-character with a constant telecommunications link to NPC’s in other locations, ostensibly so the plot can continue without the player having to return to base for each new mission. Fair enough: I enjoy a well-motivated device as much as the next guy.

Unfortunately, this ‘in your ear’ voice-over capability is being used for a whole lot more than just advancing the plot. It’s also being used to cover for lack of a plot, lack of a coherent plot, bungled level design, and worst of all, for the player’s own exploratory inputs. The final straw for me was an early mission in Splinter Cell, in which I was told by an NPC in another locale that I needed to go through door X, climb staircase Y, and open door Z – which, it turned out, was pretty much the only route I could have taken anyway!

Now, maybe some of this is necessitated by the reach to a broader, less hardcore audience, but I don’t think even that kind of pandering is a good idea. Any player who bought Splinter Cell and managed to load and launch it should probably be given the option of exploring for a while before a voice-over helper tells them what to do. Wind Waker seems to do this pretty well so far, with Tetra only popping up to tell you something new, or to point out that what you’re trying to do is something you won’t actually be able to do for a while.

— Mark Barrett

Setting Ascendant

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I’ve played enough Wind Waker now to say categorically that virtual sailing has never been more enjoyable. While the fact that I can cause my little boat to jump out of the sea on command may take away from the purity of the simulation, numerous other aspects of the game more than make up for that quibbling bit of fancy.

As with many games, however, some of Wind Waker’s greatest joys are passive: a glimpse of some far-off vista, a coming storm churning a foamy sea, a craggy island jutting into a swirling cauldron of clouds. In such examples it is the setting, and not the game mechanic itself, that provides an emotional payoff, and I’m hopeful that setting is going to become a more important aspect of game design for just that reason.

As I mentioned regarding Morrowind in my last post, the right combination of detail, distance, and discovery can make a place seem alive and vital, and I think our audience really craves that kind of virtual experience. Given that movement in virtual spaces is almost synonymous with the core interactive mechanics of most 3D games, spending time and money to elevate setting returns benefits to core gameplay — and that makes it distinctly different from time and money spent on cutscenes or canned narrative elements.

— Mark Barrett

The Morrowind Experience

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My main curiosity about Morrowind was whether the large scale of the world translated into greater immersion or greater tedium during play. Having played it extensively for close to a month I think I can say without equivocation that in this case more is more. Unlike any game I can think of, wandering around in Morrowind and bashing things for experience points gave me a real sense of place, and created an equivalent-sized mental space in my mind. Even better, I interpreted this space not just as distance, but as depth of setting.

Here are some of the things that I think helped create that effect:

  • Detail
    With the exception of the large mountains, there were no locations in Morrowind that seemed so similar as to reek of tilesets or recycled polygons. I don’t know how the world was created, or how much hand-crafting went into the placement of each bush and rock, but the simple fact that I never confronted a recognizable physical space in more than one location kept my suspension of disbelief intact.
  • Distance
    It’s a delicate balancing act, but in order to create a real sense of space I think you need to have areas of interest surrounded by a good deal of relative blah. Morrowind does this perfectly, and because most of the nonessential spaces are still unique, walking around in Morrowind just feels right. And while the game provides several means by which you can avoid having to walk to and fro on foot, quite often I found myself hiking simply for the pleasure of literally seeing the world.
  • Discovery
    One of the most basic and important techniques in interactive entertainment, discovery involves exploiting the innate human pleasure of finding things and seeing new places. In Morrowind, nonessential dungeons and monsters populate the landscape, making walks in the wilderness rewarding both visually and within the context of the game. For a narrative game, they got this about as right as I think you can get it: I never felt like I was on a treasure hunt looking for powerups, but instead felt like I was discovering ancient ruins, etc.

In fact, I got so wrapped up in just wandering and experiencing the world that I let much of the plotted story slip for a quite a while. When I finally got around to pursuing the story, the mechanics of language interaction that the plotting hinged on actually seemed constraining, and made the world less enjoyable. At one point I was forced into an action that I didn’t want to take because of the limited number of choices available to me, and it was only at that point that I really felt like the world broke down. I stopped playing soon after, but I do intend to begin a new game in order to experience the story the designers intended to tell.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that Morrowind does an excellent job of simulated an interesting fictional space, and that that in itself was compelling for me.

— Mark Barrett

Zelda: The Wind Waker

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I’ve only just begun this game, but I’m far enough into it to say one thing for certain: cel-shading is huge, and it’s going to make a big difference in how we feel about playing games. In fact, I think it’s going to go a long way toward making games more immersive and less mechanical, simply because it bypasses the tired textured-polygon look and feel. Moving around in Wind Waker is like moving around in a Disney movie, and it feels great.

In an article (pages 7-10) I wrote a couple of years ago I said that the next step in graphics would be the development of house styles, where the products from one developer would take on a certain look, just as the animation styles from Disney and Warner Bros. did. I don’t know enough about cel-shading to know how costly and labor intensive it is, but if it’s at least comparable to the mesh/skin process, I think it’s going to take off for exactly this reason.

— Mark Barrett

The Last of the File Swappers?

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I was going to buy a book recently via Amazon, but before I pulled the trigger and clicked myself a copy, I remembered that we have an old, venerable institution in my home town called the Public Library. When I logged onto their online catalogue I found they had a copy of the book, and that it was on the shelf at that very moment, so I saved myself the price of admission and checked it out – literally and literally.

This reminded me that not only does my library check out books, but they also have a good video collection, and even a CD collection. Which made me wonder how long it’s going to be before the record companies try to jam Digital Rights Management legislation down the throats of America’s libraries. For the record, I don’t have a problem with people trying to protect their copyrighted property from theft, but there’s also no question that this is a slippery slope. Just as the computer makes it easy to copy works, it also makes it (or will make it) possible to monitor, track, and retaliate against people who may still be within their free-use rights to enjoy a product.

You’ll know the end to the debate is close when somebody (again) takes a run at public libraries.

— Mark Barrett

Image Corruption

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Have you noticed lately how often a television show you’re watching will be interrupted on the fly by a promo, a logo, or some other form of advertising? It’s gotten to the point that I can’t watch Spongebob anymore because Nickelodeon keeps running ads for upcoming shows on the lower part of the screen – which right now you’re thinking is maybe the bottom inch, but I’ve seen them take as much as the lower third of the on-screen image. Or take some of the NBA games I watched this year, which included on-screen promos during the game that momentarily flashed close to the center of the screen, forcing your eye to acknowledge them.

I mention this because I think it’s a measure of the degree to which television has been trivialized in the current offering of entertainment options. Sure, taken as a whole television itself is still popular, but there are so many channels now that the model is more like that of the magazine business than anything else. And like the magazine business, channels are struggling to attract and keep eyeballs while building a brand, because building a brand on TV means doing intrusive things like having omnipresent on-screen logos, border ads, overlays, etc.

What’s interesting about this relative to interactive entertainment is that it wasn’t that long ago that people were worrying about product placement practices in TV, and wondering if it was going to destroy the business, or save it. Well, those concerns are long gone in TV land, but they’re soon to roost in the interactive industry, which is already tipping toward licensing as a means of catching the eyeballs of those same consumers – who today have a ridiculous number of entertainment options available to them. I’m already seeing intrusive overlaid ads on pages like Gamasutra (that irritating Radeon-slime ad), and I guess I’m wondering how long it’s going to be before I fire up a piece of interactive entertainment and have to deal with an omnipresent logo in the lower right corner of my monitor while I’m playing a shooter.

When that happens, I’ll know the industry threw in the towel on suspension of disbelief. I’ll also know that the part of the industry I cared about died.

— Mark Barrett

Innovation is Overrated

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Speaking of licensing, the debate framed by Warren Spector’s 2003 GDC speech and Greg Costikyan’s GDC lament may have less to do with the economic rigors of our business than I originally thought. While reading a book called What Einstein Told His Cook, by Robert L. Wolke, I ran across the following quote:

GE’s market research [on microwave cooking] discovered that 90 percent of all American Consumers’ cooking entailed only 80 recipes….

Familiarity may breed contempt in human beings, but in what we eat, and in what we choose to do with our playtime, it may be a much more important ingredient than we’re admitting. While that kind of oversight isn’t surprising given that many of the people doing the commenting, like me, are creative types who get their enjoyment from pushing boundaries, it’s at least a reminder not to dismiss the choices of the masses outright. From their point of view the question isn’t whether there’s enough new stuff being made, the question is whether there are enough choice available so they don’t feel like they’re playing the same thing all the time.

On the off chance that the entire interactive entertainment industry may only have room for eighty licenses, you should probably lock one up today.

— Mark Barrett

Second Person POV

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One of the points I made recently in the IGDA writing forum was that unlike every other form of mainstream entertainment, interactive entertainment contains a second-person you that creators must allow for:

Mainstream (meaning commercially successful) books are either first-person (“I went to the store….”) or third-person (“Bob went to the store….”); movies are third-person, present-tense (“Jensen fires twice – BLAM BLAM!!!”); television is the same; witnessing sports, the same. Only in interactive does the almost unheard of second-person POV come into play: “You attempt to open the chest….”

Now, as writers and designers we spend a lot of time talking about first-person or third-person point of view (POV) for the graphical presentations of our games – meaning whether the player-character is on-screen (Mario) or not (Half-life) – but we don’t talk much at all about the hell of trying to deal with this second-person POV. We should, though, because in the example with the chest it doesn’t matter what our camera point of view is: we’re still in second-person relative to the game/sim. (Morrowind is a good example of this: you can toggle between first-person and third-person on the fly, which effectively means it really doesn’t matter what the camera POV is relative to much of what’s happening in the game.)

I’m not sure how far this line of reasoning goes before it becomes academic, but I think it may be fairly consequential. More to come as I get a better handle on this one.

— Mark Barrett

Space Cadet

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Space Cadet
During a bit of down time on the road last week I opened my notebook to play a meaningless game of whatever had come with XP Pro. Not being much in a card-playing mood I was pleased to find a pinball game called Space Cadet on my machine, which I immediately launched.

After playing the game for a while I began to feel an odd kind of deja vu, as if I’d played that table before. I discounted the possibility for a while, until I noticed, down by the left flipper, the name of the developer: Cinematronics.

Cinematronics was the second company I worked for, and my first gig as a design consultant. Among the projects I reviewed for them was Full-Tilt Pinball, which contained three pinball games, one of which was – yes – Space Cadet. (Had I known how apropos that name would become years hence, I would have suggested they change it.)

No matter how slight my contribution, it was a really good feeling to see that old game still in literal play, and for a very real moment I felt good about my job in a way I rarely do. Had I been a lesser sort (you know who you are) I would have looked up the latest sales figures for WinXP, then relentlessly promoted myself as having been the design consultant on a title that shipped x million copies. Instead, I’m simply proud to report that I responded like a gamer. I set the high score as high as I could, then I kept going back to beat it.

Speaking of which…

— Mark Barrett

GDC 2003

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GDC 2003
My annual pilgrimage to the West Coast begins in a few days, and as usual I’m ambivalent about leaving. Past experience, however, clearly shows that once I’ve arrived I’ll be glad I made the trip. The power-ups of camaraderie and intellectual discourse that one finds almost littering the convention floor always restore my interactive entertainment morale.

As for my objectives, each year I try to have an overarching goal in mind, and this year that objective is to move past teaching and involve myself even more in the process of making games. Between the explosion of interest in the games biz from academic circles – little of which is focused on, or will ultimately yield, anything of practical use – and a disheartening freelance experience I recently had with a division of Microsoft, I am wondering if we will ever truly move past old arguments about the tantalizing but unattainable possibilities that originally drew many of us to this business.

While it’s to be expected that newbies will need to be educated on the state of the art, many newbies who come to the games biz do so with their own intellectual stamps of approval, making them less inclined to pay their dues or learn the ropes. While I don’t begrudge people their bushy-tailed energy or their bright ideas, and I support anyone who has done their homework and truly believes in their vision, I just don’t have the energy to fight the tide of ignorance anymore.

If there’s a silver lining in all this it’s that I now know why I felt no desire to submit my roundtable abstract for the GDC this year. Whereas before I felt it important to evangelize as much as possible about the craft of interactive entertainment, I no longer believe that one voice – or even a hundred voices – can prevent people from wasting time and money on these naive pursuits each year.

None of which should dissuade you from contacting me if you have a question about the games biz, or about interactive entertainment design. I’m still committed to education: I’m just not trying to save anyone from themselves anymore.

— Mark Barrett