Press Fire to Start

Imagine this: it’s 1985, and you’re playing this new video game called Tetr. In it, one of seven differently shaped blocks appears at the top of the screen and starts its slow descent. You can then rotate and move that block and even make it fall faster. Once it settles either on the bottom of the field or on top of another block, a new block appears. You can stack the blocks more efficiently, making your construction reach the top of the screen less quickly. When your construct does reach the top, the field simply scrolls down and play continues. There are three difficulty settings, which affect the speed the blocks fall with. Oh, and you can design your own blocks, although all anyone uses that feature for is making slightly more phallic straight lines.

This is the mystery of Spore: Why has no one walked up to Will Wright and said, hey Will old buddy, how’s about lines disappear when they’re full and the player loses the game when the blocks hit the ceiling? That way you’d have a game.

 

What is wrong with me?

I’m in no way opposed to post-modern experiments in gaming. I enjoyed the hell out of flOw when it was just a little Flash game. For no more than half an hour, of course, but still. I don’t mind sandboxes. And does cute bother me? Well, wait for my Civ Rev review to find out, but the short answer is no.

The “design your own 3D models” editor at the core of Spore is pure genius. Obviously you could nit-pick about this and that, say that a toggle for the snap might be nice or that a grid could be really helpful, but what the editor does is present a minimum complexity, maximum accessibility interface to 3D modeling, and already its success can be measured by the amount of variations on the human penis the internet has come up with. One guy (it must be assumed) made a species that looks like a perpetually copulating human couple. Inspired, really, and amazingly funny when they dance or jump.

What seems to bother me most is that there is but an empty husk of a game loosely attached to these editing tools. I’ve seen this before, in Wright’s last offering. Fasih seems to like the Sims, but we should all remember that in many ways, he is actually a woman. But clearly I embody the vocal minority here. The Sims sold like Heroin Hotcakes, and Spore seems to have earned its creators at least enough money for a decent-sized space station. Someone out there must be enjoying this stuff, but this new casual crowd is as alien to me as gamers must have been alien to the mainstream ten years ago.

 

Toys vs games

Two things sucked up large chunks of my playtime back in my early childhood: first it was Lego, then it was computer games. With myLegos I always asked for those boxes of generic bricks and parts, never the model sets where you could build one specific vehicle only. I really liked coming up with my own designs. But that was the thing about playing with Legos: once I’d built something, that was that. It was built, it was done, and if I wanted to move on and build the next thing, I had to break it down and start over. In short, creation was lots of fun, but ultimately rather pointless. There was no purpose to it.

When my father came home one day and brought me a PC game he had borrowed from a colleague at work (supporting my addiction and teaching me to be a good pirate from day one) I was a little perplexed and couldn’t fathom how this was supposed to be fun. “Run a railroad company? Ship cargo and passengers? That sounds like something grown-ups do at work!” And of course I spent many, many months doing exactly that.

Railroad Tycoon qualifies as a sandbox game. Sure, there were competitors you could buy out, there was money to be made and so on, but there always came a certain point when it was clear that your company was successful enough to dominate the rest of the game. This was never the point when you stopped playing. Constructing railroads and optimizing train routes were ways of creative expression not unlike building a spaceship on wheels with Lego (okay, so I thought it would look faster if you added wheels. It makes sense when you’re nine years old). Here’s the thing, though: there were conditions for failure and success in the game. Even after it was clear that failure would no longer be a threat, the presence of this guiding system gave the whole experience purpose.

A good toy is one that gives the player ample opportunity for creative expression. A good game is a good toy with a purpose. A plastic guitar is a toy. A game that makes you play songs on the plastic guitar and grades you on how well you played is a game.

 

Spore. Spore never changes.

When you play a new game that you’ve been anticipating for some time, there are always two conflicting games: the one you’ve made up in your mind and the one you’re actually playing. Sometimes these can be nearly identical (Serious Sam anyone?) and sometimes the discrepancy can be truly jarring. Of course this doesn’t mean the game has failed, but often looking at the differences between expectation and reality can be educating.

When Spore was announced, I was excited even though I couldn’t have told you why. Clearly the premise had a lot of potential: play through a creature’s evolution from single-cell stage to galactic hegemony. And that Will Wright guy, he and I may not see eye-to-eyestalk on the whole Sims thing, but he made so many games that I played obsessively. I’m old enough to have played both SimLife and SimEarth when they came out, and I loved them both to death. I could see Wright revisiting that kind of game, tying everything together nicely.

As more and more previews came out it became increasingly clear that Spore would be a collection of minigames connected by an overarching meta-narrative, the development of your species. Okay, less exciting, but hey, this can still work, right? I bet what you do in minigame 1 changes everything about minigames 2, 3, 4 and so on. I bet it’s going to be a really dynamic game.

And there’s the jarring discrepancy. Spore is about as static a collection of minigames as I’ve ever seen. Sure, depending on whether you eat meat, plants, or both in minigame 1 you get a different special ability in minigame 2, and there’s the ever-present editor which allows you to come up with your own 3D models for all stages of the game, but in none of the stages do these models make any real difference.

No matter how many times you play through it, Spore is going to be pretty much the same game.

 

So close it hurts

I can hear you ask, so why do you complain? Lots of people like the game. Maybe you wanted it to be something else, but you’re not Will Wright. Well, normally I’d move on and ignore the game. My problem is that they got so very close to what I imagine could have been a legendary game. Time and again I caught glimpses of that incredibly good game just below the surface.

Let’s walk through the minigames. Fasih mapped the progression of Spore thus: flOw to WoW to Dune II to Civilization to Star Control. Each of these are great games for different reasons, and a game that ties sufficiently good clones of them together in a satisfying manner would have been amazing.

The similarity between the Cell Stage and flOw is probably greatest among these comparisons. The cell stage was really great fun: it felt like flOw with a purpose. You eat/avoid other creatures and gain DNA points for doing so. These points you invest into new parts. This is a great, addictive mechanic. You constantly toy with your creature to make it better somehow. Forward-pointing spikes are great for charging into enemies, but they make it harder to gobble up the resulting food-bits, electricity and poison are great defence mechanisms, but wouldn’t you rather invest those points in more speed?

This is all great, but once you replay that stage for the first time, problems become apparent left and right. For my second play-through, I decided to be a hippie and eat only green bits. I found myself heavily handicapped, with the constant temptation to simply add a carnivore mouth and be done with this nonsense of trying to outrun hunters who mostly were faster than anything I could afford buy with my meagre budget of DNA. By the time defensive options became available and affordable, the stage was already over. Also, many of the combinations and experiments I’d had in mind during my first play-through turned out to be impossible due to the very low DNA point limit.

While I do think that the cell stage is the best part of Spore, there’s still plenty wrong with it. These short-comings seemed like oversights to me at first, but now that I know the rest of the game, I think I can call them symptomatic. In short, it’s decisions and scope that are off in each segment.

 

Decisions, decisions.

My childhood hero Sid Meier said something about meaningful or interesting decisions once, and that line has taken on a Frankensteinian life of its own, used variably to define what a game is, what a good game is, what fun means, or how you should live your life. Unfortunately, even with my advanced google-fu, I could not reconstruct the original line or its context. Here is the version I knew:

“A game is a series of interesting decisions.”

Chris Bateman does a good job of debunking that sentence, although he could have saved a lot of bandwidth/breath by just saying Guitar Hero. Troy Goodfellow tries to track the quote down but doesn’t fare much better than me. Guess there are things Google doesn’t know the answer to after all! At any rate, that phrase will be the subject of a future article. For now, let it suffice to say that there is a sub-genre of games for which “a series of interesting decisions” (with varying definitions for “interesting”, “decisions”, “series”, and “a”) (and “of”) is a central defining phrase, as in if you removed these decisions, you would no longer have a game. All the stages in Spore draw heavily from tropes generally found in these types of games.

But here’s the thing: none of the decisions in Spore are interesting or meaningful. This goes for all stages. You can create a creature with no legs, two legs, or many more legs. However, it doesn’t make any sense to build anything other than an erect bipedal creature for game-play purposes. Further legs cost more DNA (of which there is never nearly enough) and add nothing useful to your creature. It goes on like this in all stages. There are always seemingly a lot of decisions to be taken in the editor, only most of the time there’s only one truly viable way if you’re playing to win, or worse, nothing you do matters at all.

My happiest and unhappiest moments in playing Spore were within minutes of each other. I had just finished the tribal stage and was plunked down in the vehicle editor. Vehicle editor? Oh yes, I get to design a land-vehicle for my budding civilization! Awesome! I made a pimped-up version of the Bird of Prey on wheels with extra rocket boosters for awesomeness (my stance on spaceships-with-wheels hasn’t changed much in the last 19 years). I was so happy with it–and look, there are three stats! Power, speed, sturdiness! Cool, it looks like my decisions finally matter!

That was my happiest moment. Then I got to playing the Civilization stage, and fuck, talk about disillusionment. First, you don’t see your own design anymore, because in order to see what’s going on, you need to zoom out as far as the game allows. Next, those three stats? Utterly and completely irrelevant. You just pump out a number of indiscernible vehicles from your cities and drive them over to your enemy. Whoever happens to have more vehicles wins, at which point the vehicles start their ultra-generic attack animations against the cities. In a word, everything you’ve done in the editor was useless and is ignored. I’ve seriously spent more time designing my ground vehicle than using it. I breezed through the Civ stage like through all other stages, never to see my creation again as I took off into space.

Oh, yeah, space. Either the culmination of a great game, or the actual game proper, according to most reviews. Well, let me tell you this: everything that’s broken in the first fourminigames is also broken in space, only now it’s broken on an epic scale. Decisions still don’t matter, you are still required to do simple menial tasks again and again, only that now there is no end in sight.

Scope

By the time you understand what’s asked of you in any of the minigames, you’re either done already, or in such a dominant position that the rest of the game is a series of meaningless grind. This is particularly bad in the two early stages, where you get DNA points to add things to your creature. You never have enough points to do any interesting experiments. You just build your way to a generic creature with pretty much the same parts each time, and you’re done.

In space, this is inverted. Now you can play around with everything you want to play around with, only hours and hours of go-and-fetch quests, the most boring space combats I’ve ever witnessed, and micro-management on a scale that shocked and deterred this veteran of Civilization IV: Fall From Heaven (if you think the amount of micromanagement in Civ IV proper was bad, try a mod that not only allows 100 pop cities, but that also has two different classes of units for terraforming).

Armchair Design Inc.

Right, this is the moment when I derail the article completely by indulging in that wrongest of things a reviewer can do: armchair game design. Look, I know I don’t understand half of the intricacies of developing a complex piece of software and clearly enough, Wright & Co. don’t need my help to make heaps of money, but I feel that by describing the game I’d love to play I can express the wasted potential I perceive best.

First of all, let’s re-do the cell stage. The carnivore vs herbivore decision now affects part prices. Carnivore parts are cheaper for carnivores and vice versa. You see members of your own species in the cell stage, which is a nice touch, but irrelevant as it is now. How about creatures of your race start hunting in packs at a certain DNA level, and you can decide whether to hunt with them (and risk getting less food per kill) or go solo. That decision could influence future social skills. Finally, as it is right now, the cell stage simply ends when you hit a certain DNA limit. Why not give the player a minimum and maximum DNA level they can reach and let them decide when they want to leave the cell stage? That way you could either emerge from the primordial ooze as the first species to conquer terra firma, or emerge later with better stats/more parts, but compete in a world where other species emerged before you.

It goes on like that. You could give players actual options during the creature design and not just force them to simply use the highest level parts for their chosen path once each (highest level attack parts for carnivore path, highest level social parts otherwise). Social interactions could be turned into a game of primitive diplomacy instead of a mindless Simon Says game. The vocabulary and grammar of MMORPGs is so large that there must be things you could steal that are more fun than what we have now. Let different body parts unlock different spells. Let me level up body parts and spells.

Next, how about some consequences? Each stage needs to lock in certain aspects, like development of your creature’s biology stops at the end of the creature stage. The decisions you took in order to get through one stage must affect all subsequent stages. Decided to go for huge, scary claws in the creature stage because they gave you tons of damage? Well, you now have a heavy penalty on manual dexterity and tool usage in the tribal stage, there is a limit to the complexity of your vehicles in the civ stage, and in space stage other sentient races react more negatively to your hideous, hideous claws.

This is the game I’d been hoping for. I can’t quite believe that I was alone in that hope, but pretty much every review I’ve read seems to eat up the under-cooked stew of not-quite-good-enough minigames Wright has served up in its stead. What confuses me even more is that he does have this wonderful content distribution model and decides to use it for nothing but aesthetics. Dear Will, aesthetics are the least of your worries.

Crowdsourcing

The game imports creatures from other designers into our game. This is all well and good, but if the impact of this is merely aesthetic, then what is the point? If decisions taken during the design and the play of the creature influenced gameplay more, if say an ingenious stroke of design could make a really novel, challenging aggressive creature, if the creature of a player who, on first playthrough, decided to be social would be much more eager to engage in social interaction with me, then suddenly we’d have something.

A game like Spore will not fail because there aren’t diverse enough models. Surely, more and more diverse models are a plus, but beyond a certain point, numbers fail to impress since there are only so many hours people will sink into this game, and once there are enough creatures in the database that I will not see one twice during however many hours I will play the game for, any improvement beyond that becomes irrelevant.

The aesthetics of the game were never the problem to begin with, anyway. Wright’s team used their own editor to great effect and designed  some awesome-looking critters. I would have been happy with those alone. No, the game obviously has one different weakness, and it’s such a shame that the massively singleplayer online game mechanics were not used to address that weakness: sameyness of content. Let your players’ creations affect gameplay, and suddenly you have a game that will change drastically on each play-through. Better yet, do something that should be the standard for a modern PC game: offer your players real modding tools beyond your awesome but limited editor. Look at Civilization IV! But don’t look directly into because the intensity of its awesomeness might blind you.

Not only did Firaxis deliver a rock-solid iteration of their legendary franchise, they also made it the easiest and most moddable Civ so far. How did the community thank them? By creating massiv, incredibly good mods which increased the lifespan of the game by an order of magnitude. Look at Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization, which simulates the dynamic emergence and disappearance of civilizations throughout the course of history, or the even more legendary Fall From Heaven, which turns the game into something else entirely: a modern day Master of Magic with a super-complex spell system, dynamic alignments, and the ability to summon Hell itself (which will gradually transform the entire world). Firaxis not only supported these people by listening to their feature requests (often obscure, arcane functions they needed exposed to the SDK or whatever these kids are doing these days), but they also embraced the community’s creativity by packaging many of the fan-created mods with their latest expansion (and in doing so creating tons of content for the fans). Seriously, my love for Firaxis knows no bounds.

All these little quibbles I have with Spore would by this time be non-issues, as there would already be mods out there fixing them. The vast majority of mysteriously casual gamers could go on playing their purpose-free Barbie Adventure: Spore while I and the other “hardcore gamers” (how I loathe the term) could be playing some genius’s RealSpore mod which does whatever we want. But while Wright decided to give practically everyone access to the easiest editor imaginable to edit the most shallow of aspects of his game, the actual hardcore modders who are ready to invest countless hours into changing deep aspects of the game are left out in the rain.

Flittering below the surface

As it is, we get a glorious 3D editor with four tiny, broken minigames, and one long, boring space exploration game attached to it. I would really like to see how the people who love the game are playing it. What are they doing in the game when they are not editing?

But the more interesting question is this: would they still love the game if it was changed in the ways I outlined earlier? I cannot honestly see why they would not. Hell, make the game as it is now the easy difficulty mode and only introduce the changes I suggest in the higher difficulties. I realize that nothing I say will convince anyone to make Sporeis, the acutal game where full lines disappear and you lose when you stack the block too high, but therapeutically, this article was very healthy for me.

Spore makes me feel like the eight-year-old boy who looks up a particularly steep staircase and catches a glimpse of panties up a teenage girl’s skirt: I realize that, tantalizingly close to the surface, there is something awesome that I could have years of fun with, but for reasons unknowable I am not allowed to have it.

Maybe I just need to grow up.

I have always respected Will Wright. This has several reasons. He’s one of those old school game designers who probably think of themselves as some omnipotent gaming deity, much like Peter Molyneux. The difference–the reason for my respect–is that Wright, unlike Molyneux, has something called “clarity of vision”.

Wright’s games usually have a unique premise and simple gameplay mechanics. Most of the time, they are very easy to understand and have addictive qualities. Wright is also one of the few game designers who doesn’t care about narrative at all. His games are more like electronic toys instead of interactive stories. The term “sandbox” is more appropriate for his games than any others.

Naturally I was excited to see his new game Spore. Not because I was particularly impressed by the premise or the bits and pieces of the game shown in several different events, but mostly because I had faith in Wright.

I can sum up everything about spore in one sentence. So everyone who’s looking for a short review is allowed to stop reading after this next sentence:

Spore is not a good game.

There. With that off my chest let us examine the two parts of that statement.

Spore is not a good game.

That is a problem. It is usually a tremendous task to make a single game well. Spore is not a single game but rather five different games bound together by a shiny tin foil which is the sixth game. This sounds like a very good deal. Especially considering that the all-combining omni-present sixth game is pretty good.

It’s not a particularly new idea. Back in the 80’s during the rise of Amiga, many big budget games were actually made of entirely different, smaller games held together by some main game. Sid Meier’s Pirates! had among early RTS and RPG elements also a gun shooting, a sword fighting and a sun sight taking game in it. It was held together by the general map and travel interface/game. Cinemaware’s It Came From The Desert was basically a non-linear adventure game, but it had a top down shooter, a flight game, a driving simulation, a sneaking action game and a first person shooter in it.

The omnipresent game in Spore is the creature designing interface. It’s a great and unique achievement. Sure, other games had visual editors too but Spore has an incredibly intuitive 2D interface which allows you to manipulate a 3D model in real time. It is truly fascinating. You can practically design anything here.

What’s more interesting is the sharing system. Creatures and vehicles you create automatically upload to an online database, from which other players’ clients automatically download them. So the stuff you create can end up in other people’s games. You’ll always be playing a single player game of course. But this creates a unique and weird multiplayer environment in which players do not actively fight against each other but contribute to each other’s single player experiences by creating unique content. Chances are you’ll never see the same creature again.

Spore, in theory, gives you plenty of opportunities to use these creations. It starts as a flOw clone, then turns into a World of Warcraft clone, which leads into a Dune II clone, proceeding to lead to a weird mix between a Dune II and a Civilization clone, and ending up with a Star Control clone. You get to design your own creatures, land vehicles and starships to use in these stages of the game, which is very cool. In theory. I’m sure this all looked good on paper. Especially with a vehicle design system which rivals the one you can find in Galactic Civilizations II. One major difference of course. Unlike in Galactic Civilizations II, the things you do in Spore’s design tool have almost no game play effect at all. Which slowly brings us to the second part of that statement.

Spore is not a good game.

And this is sad. It made me remember the brief time I spent working for Mev Dinc at Vivid Image. For those who are too young to remember, Dinc is an old school designer best known for his innovative First Samurai and his ports of System 3’s Last Ninja 2. Back then I was brought into the company because of my expertise in RPG games. Dinc wanted to make an RPG, vaguely. But he had no idea what an RPG was. He just desperately wanted to make a game. The main reason for this desperation was his new engine called “Actor”. I remember people coming to the company and watching the “Actor” demonstration with awe and wonder in their eyes. See, what “Actor” did was pretty unique back then. It combined a 3D graphics engine with a realistic physics simulation. That’s right. Exactly like Half-Life 2. Only back then, no one had even heard of Half Life 2. It was so impressive that Intel actually chose “Actor” as a demo showing off the capabilities of its brand new Pentium IV processor.  Brilliant, isn’t it?

So have you ever heard of the revolutionary game Mev Dinc produced using Actor? No, you have not, because there is no such game. Dinc possessed something brilliant, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it.

It appears that Wright is pretty much in the same position. The creature editor is amazing. But it appears he did not really know what to do with it, so he decided to make not one but five games, put them in the same box and call it Spore. Unfortunately for him none of the games are particularly good. Spore is simply not fun.

As we mentioned before, simple games are good. The Sims was simple. Its premise was easily understandable, its rules and goals were very clear, yet it offered the player countless options, setting the stage for countless different outcomes for every decision the player took. The Sims was a virtual doll house. Spore on the other hand doesn’t really know what it is.

So the problem is not the simplicity. Simple is good. Spore is something else. In trying to appeal to the casual gamer and keeping the game simple, Wright here makes a great mistake.

Spore is shallow. We want to direct the evolution of an entire intelligent species. Therefore we want to see the results of our actions. We want to see our decisions influencing the fate of a world. Sadly neither your decisions nor the creatures you design, however amazing they are, have any actual effect on the game itself. It doesn’t matter what you design or if you want to kill or befriend your neighbours.

And all this makes me sad, because the ingredients are all there. It could have been a great game if only they managed to combine its components somehow. But instead of cooking a delicious meal, Wright just throws a bunch of edibles into a pot full of water, turns up the heat and hopes it will become a feast.

-Fasih Sayin

I really wanted “Age of Conan” to be good. Conan, as a story, has a special place in my heart. It’s more than a story; it’s a memory from my childhood. So I really wanted to like the game. I really did.

For the uninitiated, Conan is the name of the main protagonist in a series of stories written by a guy called Robert E. Howard. Howard was what could be called a pulp writer. He was friends with H.P. Lovecraft, and therefore their stories shared more than a few elements. As authors, both of them were rather mediocre. However they were both very competent world builders. As a result it is safe to say that today’s fantasy literature has its roots in two stories. “Lord of the Rings” and “Conan”.

We have a saying around here: “You don’t mess with a bear in its own lair.” In this example the bear would be “World of Warcraft” and the lair would be the MMORPG scene. Like it or not, “World of Warcraft” is a franchise transcending its own scene and identifying its own market. It’s not the name of a product; it’s the name of a series of products. The name “World of Warcraft” now stands for what we knew as MMORPG, much like “Gillette” stands for razorblades, or “Chicklets” stands for chewing gum. Much like “Atari” back then stood for arcade cabinets.

Blizzard pretty much set the rules for what an MMORPG shall be. For other companies producing a game like “World of Warcraft” and beating the sales of Blizzard is incredibly hard. On this table Blizzard holds all the cards and knows all the rules. They are the dealer, the house and the player. This is their town now. You cannot stride through the gates of that town and yell at people. You cannot make the next “World of Warcraft”, because people who’d play the next “World of Warcraft” are already playing this one. So unless Blizzard suddenly goes entirely stupid and shoots itself in the foot, it’s impossible to win a duel against them. So what is the solution?

As Miyagi-san of Karate Kid always said:“The best way to evade a punch is not being there at all.” The phenomenon called “Me Too” was always present in the gaming industry. If something succeeds countless games of the same ilk will follow. But just like there is no genre called RPG, there is also no genre called MMORPG. Any game with many players’ characters going around and getting experience points by killing stuff is called an MMORPG. Now that is a very broad definition isn’t it?

The solution is simple: Do something else. Broadly speaking MMORPG is a an umbrella of genres. So far there have been a few genres beneath it. There was the “Ultima Online” style games, the slow and hardcore “Everquest” like stuff and the new “City of Heroes” style games. “World of Warcraft” is a refinement of the latter. True to Blizzard fashion, they have not created something new. They have just taken something and refined it. This is what they do best.

I’m sad because “Age of Conan” seemed to be headed for the correct direction. Years prior to release the promised features were all pointing at an entirely new breed of MMORPG. It was going to feature Real Time Strategy-like features, a lengthy single player component, NPCs and mobs would have needs, desires and emotions, according to which they would move around the world, and attack or flee from players and/or other mobs. The quests would feature dialog trees instead of simple windows and there would be an ongoing storyline. What’s more the fighting system would be locations based. You’d be able to climb on top of large mobs, hack limbs off people. You’d start off as a Slave and earn classes on the way, evolving your character. Needless to say that many of these things didn’t happen.

So what was the problem? In short, the problem is the director.

As a rule of thumb in any project the director has to have a clear vision. It is always good to listen to feedback from other people, but if they want to change your project into something else, you should resist the urge. Here is an example:

About one year prior to release, the biggest problem in the community was the lack of free for all PvP. “Age of Conan” was supposed to be a controlled PvP game. PvP was only possible in certain areas or under certain circumstances. This, according to some members of the community, wasn’t realistic. Some considered an MMO would not be worth anything without the thrill of free for all PvP. Note that these people mostly hadn’t even played “Age of Conan” yet. They were comparing the game to the MMORPG’s as they knew. A few months later the team announced they would have servers with free for all PvP rules. Even today PvP in “Age of Conan” has no direction or no purpose. The game simply wasn’t designed for PvP.

“Age of Conan” started as something and half way through production it turned into something else. It was going to boldly go where no MMO had gone before. But during its journey, it got scared of itself and wanted to take the safe route, the safe route being the “World of Warcraft” route. Now it’s a little bit more than a “World of Warcraft” clone with incredibly good visuals and some gimmicks.

I wish they had spent the same time they spent on developing the combat system for developing an original system for spell casting too.  I wish the dialog choices mattered somehow and the conversations were not simply glorified but less functional quest windows. I wish my character would evolve more evenly throughout the game. I wish I could start crafting before being half way through the game. I just wish they could have made a realistic Conan universe and found a new way of replacing spell casting classes instead of giving in to the cries of the community. I wish… But that’s not the topic.

The topic is wasted potential. “Age of Conan” is like a movie with its intelligent and original script heavily rewritten to be a summer blockbuster hit. You can still feel the intentions beneath that thick layer WoW-ness. But it’s all buried now.

In contrast, I found “Warhammer Online”, a game which openly challenges “World of Warcraft”, surprisingly well executed. Yes, its quest is a rather foolish one. But you can tell that was its quest all along.  What Mythic is trying to do is beating Blizzard in their own game in more than one meaning. They want to take “World of Warcraft”, a highly refined version of modern MMORPGs, and further refine it, shouting into Blizzard’s face :”See? This is how it’s done!”

Of course their chances are not high. But that’s not the point. There is a thin line between courage and foolishness. Both of these are qualities of a hero. Where Funcom cowered and tried to hide beneath Blizzard’s robe, Mythic openly challenges the king of the land. It may be courageous or foolish. Regardless of which, I salute their heroic attempt.

Daniel and I often have discussions about narrative in games or interactive storytelling in general. We do this because we’re very cool people. See, this is our main goal in life: To be cool. That’s why he’s a guy who switched from studying CS to studying English Literature and is working at a game company. We discuss these things because we’re both sort of studying it.

All this may sound nerdy to you but trust me, around age 30 it all becomes cool. Go to any bar and tell any girl you’re a lawyer who, instead of working as an attorney, studies cinema at PhD level and is writing a thesis about video games and she will be interested. That’s probably because she would assume you are rich enough to be able to afford not being a lawyer, of course. But these are details. All that counts is that it gets the job done.

This mentality is problematic. It’s a roadblock on the way towards progress. Things still tend to stay the way they are until they don’t get the job done anymore. Think about movies…

One of the first commercial movies ever made was about a horse. It wasn’t about the life of a horse, or the speculated thoughts of a horse during a race. It wasn’t about a horse whose best friend is a retarded boy or a horse who realizes his brains would be blown out if he breaks his leg. It also wasn’t about an alternative reality in which horses are the dominant life form on the planet and humans are running around race tracks. It was just a horse; a running horse that wasn’t really going anywhere in particular. The movie was very short. As far as movies are concerned it was a smash hit. It wasn’t a particularly interesting narrative, but it got the job done.

Soon people got bored of running horses. Combine that with other people trying some radical, new stuff with movies and you get people like Eisenstein proving that cinema is not just a recording device for theatre, and Welles proving to everyone without a doubt that cinema is a unique medium of narration with entirely different devices at its disposal.

In my MA thesis I essentially claim that video games are also a unique medium of narration. This is a theory. Most of the time, the best way of testing a theory is asking the correct questions at the correct time. Therefore, the best thing when you’re researching something is a friend or colleague who is able to ask these questions. Maybe the reason I’m discussing things with Daniel all the time is this. One day he asked me this question:

“Can you think of a story specifically only possible in interactive form?”

Understand that this is a very important question. If we’re ever able to answer “yes” to this question without a shadow of a doubt then we’ll have proven that video games are also a unique medium of narration with their own unique storytelling devices. Allow me to elaborate…

Patrick Süskind’s “Das Parfum” is a novel about a guy who doesn’t have a smell himself but has a very sharp sense of smell. He becomes a perfumer in order to create the perfect scent. To succeed, our protagonist eventually kills several women and creates a smell which would make everyone perceive him as a perfect being.

As you can see, the novel is basically about the sense of smell. It is possible to describe a smell in a novel because description is the default method in prose. In cinema though, things change. Describing something in cinema means showing that thing. You cannot show smell. The most powerful part of “Das Parfum”’s narrative depended on the reader imagining his own perfect smell or perfect being. You cannot do that in cinema. Clearly this story is only possible in its original form. You can adapt it of course, but it won’t be the same story.

Narrative mediums are really like languages. Most of the time you’ll be able to translate the basic idea of a story. But the origin of a story is also the language itself, for the language is usually shaped by the peculiarities of the society which spawned the language. This society tells its stories in its language, and those will be next to impossible to translate directly with all their intricacies. That’s why they say translations are like women: If they are beautiful, they are not loyal, and if they are loyal, they are not beautiful.

The beauty aspect of the average video game narrative needs a lot of work. As far as stories are concerned, the entire industry is in its infancy. There is progress, but it’s very slow, probably because people get bored of running horses more quickly than basic games. If we want this medium to be accepted as a vessel for stories, we really need to get beyond these “aliens attack, now save the world” or “giant evil person attacks, now save the princess” things. And although things may look grim, I think there is still hope. There are people who try.

In “Final Fantasy VII”, Aerith, a character controlled by the player, is killed on screen by the antagonist. This is unexpected and unprecedented. But this wasn’t the great thing about the game’s story. Cloud, the main protagonist, tells a story about his past. The player even “plays” these flashback scenes to some degree. Then later we realize these things actually never happened. Cloud was basically brain washed and given false memories. The scene is very effective because as a player we project our personality onto the main character more so than in any other medium. After all, we were controlling that character’s choices and actions. It’s incredibly hard to accept what we told other characters was wrong. This effect would have been much weaker in other mediums. Of course, it would have been much better if Cloud wasn’t brain washed but actually lying consciously. Then “Final Fantasy VII” could have been the “Rashomon” of video games.

“Silent Hill” fails as a movie because the game has only one main character. Horror movies usually have at least a few of those. You never know who will die when. You never know who will survive. Thus you feel in trouble all the time. In the video game a single character played by you faces all sorts of terrors. You can die any moment. In a movie you know a single character in a horror movie won’t die until the end of the movie. You can always check your watch and be at ease. Nothing will happen to her.

Still, when the main character dies, the story ends in a non-satisfactory way. It’s traditional in video games that you only control one character. That’s you. But it doesn’t need to be that way. “Siren: Blood Curse” shuffles several characters like a true horror movie and these characters die in unexpected moments. At one point you unwittingly lead a monster to the main characters.

In “Planescape: Torment” the protagonist’s main goal is to die. You’ll see him die an unspecified number of times during the story, depending on how you’re playing it. He will wake up each and every time. Regardless of how bad a gamer you are, it’s a part of the story. For each player the specific incarnation of the protagonist will be different. Your actions and choices change how the events are played out, but they have already played out thousands of times in many other ways. It doesn’t matter at all. The story is about the nature of a man and what can change it.

David Cage promises in his new game “Heavy Rain” characters will be able to die by the actions of the player and the story will still continue taking that into account. There is no wrong choice. Each choice is a journey inside a story composed of many choices.

Most of these productions use the unique devices of the medium. They are not perfect. Some of them only contain small bits of genius. But great things usually start small. These are bold baby steps towards some great awakening, away from running horses. All we need is a “Citizen Kane”. I’m sure he’s growing up somewhere.

The drums of doom thunder. Soon the rivers will flow with blood, the moon will turn red, the sun will turn black as night. And by the morning star the four horsemen will ride. Granted, as a non-christian who kind of hopes that God exists, my knowledge of the apocalypse may be limited. This is usually the case if the major part of your knowledge about the bible was acquired from Iron Maiden and Manowar albums. I just know there has to be an antichrist of some sort and possibly a doomsday device manufactured by him. In this case, according to the press, the antichrist is Criterion and the doomsday device is “Burnout: Paradise”.

By now it should be clear that we love “Burnout: Paradise”. Criterion was one of the few racing game developers to realize crashing cars is much more fun than going around in circles with them. It’s a game about cars but not necessarily a racing game in the usual sense. In fact Criterion’s latest online research of player activities reveals that only 10 percent of “Burnout: Paradise” players are racing. This is probably due to the fact that there are a lot of other things to do in “Burnout: Paradise”. It’s a great game with a lot of bold, revolutionary design choices. We truly love “Burnout: Paradise”.

Electronic Arts recently announced that “Burnout: Paradise”, a full featured, retail game, will be available in September on PSN as a downloadable title. The downloadable version will be cheaper than the normal disc based version and will contain every single feature of its older brother. Only now you’ll be able to download it.

This thing is directly against all our preconceptions about downloadable console games. The preconceptions were set by Microsoft when they started this whole downloadable console games thing. Their head start naturally gave them the luxury of creating the rules for the market. According to Microsoft, a downloadable console game has to be small, simple and cheap. Small because they need to fit onto the memory card of an XBOX 360 in case the user has one of those hard drive free consoles. Simple because, well, they are small. And cheap around $10, because they are small and simple.

We are disturbed by anything that moves against the natural order of things. Microsoft’s model was great for many purposes. It allowed them to publish smaller, possibly addictive games through a channel which requires less money to maintain. Consequently the market for small, possibly old school games were reinvigorated, allowing smaller, independent developers to survive. “Geometry Wars” proved there is a huge market for these games.

It also manipulated the press. Normally a game like “Geometry Wars” couldn’t have hoped to achieve the critical success it did had it been released through traditional channels. But for a cheap little downloadable game, expectations are lower.

On top of this, this new market wasn’t a threat for retail publishers either. They still got to sell their disc based big games while Microsoft kept on selling small games through “Live”. There was a sharp and clear line between retail games and downloadable games.

This is why “Burnout: Paradise” is important. What will be released through PSN in September is neither small nor simple. And as far as downloadable games go, it’s very, very expensive. Furthermore it was released before as a disc game and is still on the market in this form. Now there will also be the option to buy the game as a digital download.

You have to understand, if this proves successful, the entire business model of video gaming will be called into question. Retailers, who sell tangible, disc based copies of games, will be pissed off because this model potentially removes them from the equation. Therefore, if from now on games are sold this way, it also means their cut from the profit will be gone. This naturally lowers the costs of publishing a game, which would be fine for publishers and developers. But it has further implications.

See, retailers actually have great power over the market. If you think of the business of selling games as a chain between the developer and the user, retailers are the final link. Normally if you remove that link, the chain will be rendered useless. You cannot touch them. This gives retailers the ability to decide what to sell and therefore to tell the developers indirectly what to make.

Many retailers have set up their business to sell games to male teenagers. This is part of the reason most of them are refusing to put AO rated games on their shelves while there is no real legal reason not to sell AO games. It’s an automatic censoring mechanism forcing the retailers to adjust their games according to the standards of retail partners. This is the reason why “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” was removed from the shelves, and why “Fahrenheit” was partly censored in the US.

This also removes the possibility of reselling games, rendering the used game market entirely ineffective. Each and every single game will really be sold and turned into profit for the publisher and developer. No manufacturing costs for printing games on discs. Games will never be sold out. Like in Steam, it will not matter where you live, your speed of getting games will not be dependent on any human transportation systems.

This, for all intents and purposes, is really Armageddon for the retailers.

Now this is not the first time Sony is selling a disc based game on PSN. “Warhawk” and “Siren: Blood Curse” come to mind. But Sony was free to play around with these games. They are Sony’s own games. “Burnout: Paradise”, on the other hand, is the first third part game ever to be published this way.

So is this it? Is this really Armageddon?

No, not really. Sorry. Let me slap you a bit to wake you up from your console dream land. The PC as a platform has had this downloadable games model for quite some time now.  Retailers are still alive. Revolutions don’t happen overnight.

This may not be Armageddon, but it’s a small sin paving the path towards Armageddon. Or so I hope.

If we assume video games are a form of art then “Street Fighter II: The World Warrior” would be one of those rare masterpieces created through the usage of either unparalleled genius or sheer luck, or more probably a mixture of both.

It had many revolutionary features. For the first time, a fighting game had asymmetrical gameplay. There were seven different playable characters, and each of these characters had entirely different move sets. The player characters were gigantic in size. Each of them had a dedicated arena with lots of background animation and parallax scrolling.

But the most unbelievable feature was called “hadooken”. It was unbelievable even for me back in 1992. For the uninitiated, hadooken is a fairly well known strike in karate or kung fu. The practitioner breathes in, pulls his hands towards his body, and channels his chi from the main five chakras towards his palms. When done correctly this should already form a white fireball in the fighter’s hand. It is then possible to shoot this fireball towards the object you desire to annihilate. It’s a very hard maneuver to pull. The training is only given in the Himalayas. Don’t try it at home.

It wasn’t the fact that a kung fu practitioner can shoot a fireball from his hands or the fact that the aforementioned fireball is white which bothered me. The part of my traumatic childhood I had spent in cheap cinemas watching horrible Chinese or Hong Kong action movies taught me that when kung fu is in the equation anything is possible. No, the thing that amazed me was how you were supposed to do the hadooken move in the game.

See, back then there were only eight things you could do with a joystick. The game instantly responded to whatever move you did with the controller. Hadooken, on the other hand, required you do make a quick quarter circle and then push a button. This was entirely illogical and against the very working principle of the device called joystick.

Yet it worked.

This was the beginning of everything. There you had the god of fighting games. Every single fighting game made after Street Fighter II took it as a template and tried to improve on it. Experts would agree that, in the 17 or so years which followed, not even the producers of Street Fighter II itself could make a better game. People tried and failed. That’s probably because the evolutionary tree of fighting games grew towards the wrong sun. It’s a classic example of Socrates’ observation of artists. Even the artists themselves don’t know what makes their creations so marvelous.

No, the switch from 2D to 3D doesn’t help. Most 3D fighting games still play on a 2D plane anyway. The problem is a bit more complicated.

Any game designer worth his salt would say that the ultimate goal when designing a game is making it easy to learn and hard to master. What does this mean?

Every game has an objective and a set of rules defining how the player can legally reach that objective. The rules mostly define the core of the game. The game of soccer may require superior agility, strength and endurance, but without knowing the rules you cannot even start playing the game. With the knowledge of the rules but lack of the required traits, you can still play soccer, even if you’d be playing it very badly.

Every game is a test, but it’s not supposed to be a test of your rules knowledge. Whatever it is that the game is designed to test, rules are not part of the test and therefore not a part of the game. For two reasons it is best to have simple rules which can easily be learned by the players.

A good example of a game with simple rules would be the game of Chess. For the uninitiated, Chess is a turn based, tactics game played on a field made of tiles, much like Final Fantasy Tactics. Yet compared to Final Fantasy Tactics, its rule set is pretty simple. There are only 6 different units and one rather bland map, no resource management, no base building, no unit advancement, no skill points, no spells, no alternative attacks, no reinforcements, no random events, no weather conditions, no terrain obstacles or elevation, no custom mission objectives and no party building. On top of that, the combat resolution is rather minimalistic: Attacker wins.

The obvious advantage of this is the fact that even a 7 year old can learn the rules of Chess in quite a short time and start enjoying the game. So Chess isn’t intimidating people with its 1000 page, 20 kg manual. All the rules of chess can be explained on one page.

This doesn’t mean that chess is a shallow game. In fact, it’s one of the deeper games in the history of humanity. And if you’re playing it with an experienced opponent, the game itself is everything but simple. There is a difference between a game being difficult and a game being difficult to play. Which brings us to our second point.

It is a widely known mathematical fact that complicated rules usually result in simple systems while simple rules counter-intuitively tend to yield complex systems.

In our example, Chess is a game with very simple rules. But the number of possible and viable moves available to a player each turn is huge, and therefore the number of possible games is staggeringly high. This is the reason why people are still playing it. The game has incredible replay value and depth, even with its relatively simple rules.

This is not a coincidental trait. Compared to Chess the game of Wei-Qin (known more widely as Go) is much more simple when it comes to rules. The rules “set” of Go consists of only one main rule and a supplemental rule considering a special circumstance which can occur when using the first rule. And that’s it. Yet the number of possible Go games is so high that Chess by comparison seems like a very shallow game.

Exactly this was the genius behind “Street Fighter II”. Despite its six different attack buttons and one stick, everything was clear and simple for each character. Each button was labeled. There usually were only stick and button combinations and these almost always resulted in an expected action from the fighter on screen. Pulling the stick down and pressing medium kick would do exactly what you expect: A low, medium powered kick. Push the stick up for a medium powered kick in the air.

Virtua Fighter, widely known as the best fighting game today, is also believed to be extremely deep. Each character has an amazing number of moves which can be executed by pressing certain buttons in quick succession. The buttons most of the time have little to no relation to the move executed. The mechanic is called Dial-a-combo. It was popularized by the Tekken series and used by every single fighting game released in this century with different results. Some, like Tekken, used a system which gave the player a false feeling of these button presses being relevant to the moves. Others, like the Mortal Kombat series, simply required you to enter a combination very fast to execute the move.

The move itself, being a part of the game’s rules, becomes a challenge while what should matter is using that move at the correct moment in a correct way. This makes the game complicated to play but not necessarily complicated.

The interface is there to translate the player’s thoughts to the language the game understands so that the game can obey the player. What these developers call “deep combo system” is nothing more than a bad interface. You could bind one hand of the player to his back and I’m sure the combos would be even more complicated.

In “Street Fighter II”, each character only had around 3 special moves. And by special move I mean moves which can be executed by complex controller input. A newcomer could easily start playing the game in a few minutes. These special moves were a bonus, an extra for those who discovered them.

What other fighting games have done wrong is making the special moves the entire focus of the game. Consequently only insane people who read trough pages of moves lists and memorize all the combinations can truly play these games. For the rest the games are made button mash friendly. Poor normal people can press random buttons very quickly and hope their fighter will do something relevant.

It’s a shame that since 1992 there really wasn’t any revolution in the genre. We’re still using the rule set from Street Fighter II, in the right or wrong way.

Long ago I gave up waiting for a new exciting mechanic in fighting games. Now my only hope is Street Fighter IV, which I hope will be going back to the roots of fighting games for normal people, using the rules set by its predecessor, but this time in the right way.

I spent most of last week playing “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots”. This is because I was bedridden and a game which is accused of having extremely long cinematics by almost all reviewers seemed to be a good game to play (or watch) while I was sick.

There are many things to be said about the game, and many people have already said those things. This is mainly because Metal Gear Solid as a series is quite similar to a train wreck involving a Japanese bullet train, a vintage European steam locomotive, five cars, three helicopters, a truck full of trinitroglycerin, and a bike carrying an unspecified number of ostrich eggs in its front and rear baskets. That is to say it’s most certainly awful, but awful in a very interesting way so that the viewers are usually unable to divert their gaze from the grotesque spectacle. There are many, many things to say.

One of the worst problems with the series, however, is the illness I’d like to call “twist-mania”. Sadly this illness is not unique to Metal Gear series. It’s a horrific disease shared by many video games and by movies made by M. Night Shyamalan.

What is a twist?

A twist is a plot device which usually comes in form of previously unrevealed and unexpected information. This information changes the audience’s understanding of the narrative, the characters or both. A famous example would be Darth Vader’s announcement at the end of Empire Strikes Back. We learn that the antagonist is in fact the protagonist’s father. Therefore our understanding of the narrative changes, our theories about the possible resolution of the story need revising and many things that previously didn’t make sense suddenly do. In short, it is a surprise; something that catches the audience off guard.

When it’s done well, it’s a very nice thing. It can motivate the viewer to go through the narrative once more. It makes the audience go “Wow, I never expected that.” And because it’s usually one of the most memorable parts of a story, people will keep on talking about it. Therefore many inexperienced authors think that the most important part of a story is the twist.

It isn’t. It’s just one of the many devices the author has at his disposal to tell a story.

If we think of the narrative as a multi-layered cake, the twist would be the secret, small, cherry sauce disc hidden in the middle. You will be pleasantly surprised upon reaching it. You will enjoy its taste and tell your friends about it. However if the cake itself tastes awful, no amount of cherry sauce will save it.

The very definition of a story requires that you as a writer have something to say, something to tell. Building a story around a twist is a very risky thing. In the process you might accidentally end up with something good to tell. But more often than not you will make the story a vessel for the twist. And more often than not this results in no story at all, because without the twist, the story becomes meaningless.

A simple method to verify the presence of an interesting story would be to remove the twists from the narrative and reading it again. If the story is still worth reading, then you can rest easy knowing that you have written a good story.

There is a pretty good twist at the end of the movie “Fight Club”. It’s a twist which affects the narrative in far more ways than Luke Skywalker’s parental issues. We learn that one of the main antagonists of the story does not exist at all. But even if you remove this twist, the story remains interesting enough. I have seen people saying that “Fight Club” was like two movies in one and they would have liked both of those movies separately too.

On the other hand, “Sixth Sense” is pretty much written exclusively for the final twist. Bruce Willis is actually dead. If this information is known to you from the start of the movie, the story becomes very boring and not really worth watching, while “Fight Club” would still be an interesting movie with its main twist known.

By now everyone in the gaming community is probably aware of the “Would you kindly?” twist in Bioshock. For everyone who played “System Shock 2” I guess the whole “Bioshock” experience in terms of storytelling was like a prolonged déjà vu. Apart from all the things we expected to happen, does the “would you kindly?” twist really save the horribly patchy storyline? Does anything even remotely make sense? Wouldn’t it be better if the designers focused on the cohesion of the story itself, instead of the -oh so shocking- twist ending?

In the case of “Metal Gear Solid”, things are even worse. If you remove the twists from “Metal Gear” series, you won’t end up with a bad story. Instead you will most probably end up with nothing at all. That’s because Mr. Kojima, like many video game authors, constructed his story entirely out of twists. From the famous “I’m your father!” to the infamous “None of this was actually real!” he uses every single twist in the book. This may sound ingenious to some of you; building an entire story out of twists. But then you’re missing the point.

The point is that the twist is a surprise. Part of the definition of surprise is that you don’t even know it’s coming. When you start bombarding the audience with surprises they will soon start to expect them. And surprising someone who’s expecting a surprise is much like killing a dead person.

So probably the biggest problem of “Metal Gear Solid 4″ is Hideo Kojima, its designer, who happens not to be a writer. Most video game designers naturally don’t know the first thing about writing a story. There is no reason they should.

So the moral of the story is that people should stick to doing things they are good at. When it’s a story you want told, perhaps it would have been a good idea to let it done by a storyteller.