tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18036328203726673372024-03-07T23:14:44.252-08:00PlayingDan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1803632820372667337.post-62673771027217796502012-12-14T12:32:00.000-08:002012-12-14T12:32:18.570-08:00Kieran Jordan: Rhythms in Irish Dance<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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[By way of explanation: although I do like to offer opinions on this blog, I've really shied away from anything that might be seen as commercial, even when it comes to discussing some basic facts. For example, I've never talked about my band, <a href="http://www.ivyleafmusic.com/" target="_blank">the Ivy Leaf</a>, which consumes a lot of my interest and energy on a regular basis. This post was written as a "Friend Feature Friday" for that site - we like to do little write-ups about our friends in the music scene who have influenced us. If you're interested in hearing some of my playing, the website has links to sound files, and information about our album. So there.]</div>
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Our Friend Feature/Influence Friday posts have given you a
bit of an understanding of the Ivy Leaf’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sound</i>.
Lindsay’s post on Marla Fibish and Jimmy Crowley will make you listen back to
her playing of rhythm and melody on plectrum instruments, and you’ll have a
better sense of how she conceptualizes the music, makes decisions, and puts
them into practice on the fly – what she’s internalized, what she’s used as
fuel for reflection. Caroline’s post on Dylan Foley could probably tell you
something about her own upbeat, rhythmically-driven, crisply-ornamented, and
sweetly-melodic style of flute and whistle playing; Caroline and Dylan share a
kind of modern tradition, nurtured in Comhaltas competitions, which prizes a
certain tasteful technical brilliance. As Armand mentions in his post on piper
Joey Abarta, the two of them share a great deal in terms of expressive
intonation outside of the classical Western equal-tempered scale, and I also
find their choice of ornamentation to frequently coincide in tight triplets,
startling glissando passages, and long smooth rolls. All of those musical
influences can be heard – they make themselves evident – on the Ivy Leaf album,
or at any of our live performances that you might happen to catch.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>However,
that’s really just one part of the full picture. Our music, of course, is much
more than just “our music.” Whatever it is in full, it can’t be reduced to a
series of sound files on a digital disc. Obviously, better scholars than I have
gone to great lengths to discuss Irish music as a social phenomenon, and as a
tradition of dance-focused musical rhythms (tunes are universally classified
not by rhythm, like 6/8 or 4/4, but by the corresponding dance forms, jig or
reel or what-have-you), so I won’t belabor the point. What I would like to
bring up is how that fact also suggests that our friends and influences should,
to be honest, extend further than other musicians. Beth Sweeney, the Irish
Music Librarian at Boston College, has vastly changed my understanding of the
tradition, and has made available to me numerous recordings of long-dead
traditional musicians. She has her own lovely fiddle style, but it’s quite unlike
mine; her influence on my music has been paradoxically non-musical. Our lovely
friend Samanatha Jones, herself a sean-nós dancer, finished her graduated
studies at Boston University with an extensive thesis entitled “Getting into
the Groove: Dancing in Boston Irish Music Sessions” (it’s exactly what it says
on the tin); her scholarship has indubitably deepened my appreciation for the
living tradition, and for our part in it, but I’m still not certain that such an
influence can be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">heard</i>. Part of this
is a kind of epistemological question, but the other part is a personal
insecurity. I often find myself particularly pliable to the musical styles of
the people with whom I’m playing. When I play with Joe Abarta, it’s a totally
different Dan than when I play with the Ivy Leaf; indeed, if I’ve been
listening to a lot of Denis Murphy, I’ll play much differently than had I
listened to John Doherty all day. It leads me to ask one question – “What is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my style</i>?” – and then another – “What
influences underlay all my playing?”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s an
attempt to answer these questions which ultimately led me to choose Kieran
Jordan for this week’s Friend Feature Friday. We play dance music, for sure,
and we play it in a dancing style, so it’s something of a hilarious oversight
that we’ve never mentioned any of the dancers who have passed through the
Boston Irish music scene and contributed to our sound. The Ivy Leaf has
frequently had guest dancers at performances – we’ve had Siobhán Butler and
Jackie o’Riley at a few of our house concerts, we traveled to NEFFA with
Rebecca McGowan, we were once graced by the spectacular step-dancing of Rhode
Island’s own Kevin Doyle, and Erika Damiana (who went to high school with
Armand and myself) will be joining us at our upcoming Blithewold Mansion performance.
We love it! It’s a thick reminder of what the music is about, and where it
comes from, and why it is the way it is. A collaboration with a good dancer is
as rich and meaningful as bringing on another musician – it changes the sound,
the rhythm, the whole groove of the thing. Of all those people, however, I
chose Kieran for today because I think very particularly about her influences
on me as a musician and dancer together, and how she’s helped me (as well as
Armand and Caroline) shape a kind of rhythmic headspace which may not be
evident on the album, but is much more obvious now.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Kieran
is an extraordinarily accomplished dancer, and her whole story is on her
website so you needn’t bother reading it here. Instead, I’ll let you know about
the very first sean-nós workshop I ever attended. One thing to consider is that
I wouldn’t have initially considered going, still quite sheepish about my
dancing as I am, but that Kieran had hired me to play for the workshop. Once a
month she makes a point of having live music for a proper sean-nós workshop.
That should already tell you enough about her – that she understands the music
and dance to have not only a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rhythmic</i>
connection, but a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">social</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">personal</i> connection. In particular, the
improvised, free-flowing, close-to-the-floor style of sean-nós rather demands
the energy of a musician right in the room, reacting to the sounds and
movements of the dancers as they themselves react to the tunes. The dynamic is
easy-going, yet rolling and relentless. It was preparation for that workshop
which made me think about my music as totally dance music.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span> What
really stuck, however, was Kieran’s introduction to the material. She explained
to us – not a large group, but a few familiar friendly faces – that she teaches
absolute beginners by asking them to think purely about rhythms. She thinks
about rhythms in the body and the world: breathing, walking, your heartbeat,
the sun rising and setting, the seasons. (She jokes that her classes, for some
reason, always come up with other examples: eating and pooping! Getting your
period!) To be honest, I’d thought about myself as a creature of habit, but
never as a creature of rhythm. Jackie o’Riley has talked to me about coming to
traditional music and dance – turning a corner from conceptualizing herself as
an audience member, to conceptualizing herself as an active participant. In a
similar way, I found Kieran’s simple suggestion to be an electric rail-switch.
I once thought of my playing as something that had to be “fit into” a rhythm
which existed outside of it (dancers need x/y tune at z beats per minute…).
Kieran thought of the dance, and the music that accompanied it, more as clothes
for the body of rhythm – fitted, but with some breathing room, clothes that
make the body feel covered and sexy at the same time. Her philosophy is clear
and clean in her dancing: rock-solid, light but sturdy, with a puckish sense of
humor and a big smile on its face.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I could
go on to describe Kieran’s immense role in churning up all of Boston Irish
dancing into a beautiful traditional froth, and the amount of work she’s done
to generally nourish Irish culture in the United States, but to me, it’s
nowhere near as powerful as the realization of how a few simple sentences from
her changed my understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts in my
life.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Cheers,
Kieran!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
--Dan</div>
Dan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1803632820372667337.post-34971405533797995472012-11-27T12:12:00.000-08:002012-11-27T12:12:27.697-08:00Trending Now: Halo 4 and Appropriating Mechanics<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Trending Now: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>and
Appropriating Mechanics</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(or: Things I Really Fucking Hated in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>and Several Justifications Thereof, Contextualized by
Reference to Other Games Which Did it Better or Worse, and Suggesting that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>Should’ve Just Left it to the
Them, Really.)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[Editor’s Note: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">expect
spoilers for all the </i>Halo <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">games, </i>Metal
Gear Solid 4, God of War, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and </i>Spec
Ops: The Line.]</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know it’s a bit hairy to go about writing an article, or
review, or what-have-you, about the latest <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo
</i>game. That’s always been the case. The fanbase for the franchise is so
huge, and passionate at best, and rabid at worst, that engaging the issue can
often lead to one’s voice being drowned out by the cacophony of opinion, or at
worst, simply disregarded as part of that very cacophony. As such, I’ll save
everyone’s time and effort by disengaging a lot of us right from the get-go.</div>
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<br /></div>
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First of all, I’m not writing about multiplayer; in fact, in
large part, I’m not writing about the core mechanics of the game at all. I will
certainly be considering the way that the designers treated their own
mechanics, and the ways in which they deliberately decided to disregard or
depart from them, but I’m certainly not too concerned by which button makes me
melee and which one switches grenades (which change apparently causes some
people to froth at the eyes, for being too similar to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Call of Duty</i>, or for being too dissimilar to the other <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo </i>games, and what have you). When it
comes down to it, I’m writing about the campaign mode of the game. So, those
many of us gamers who are totally disinterested in that sliver of gameplay, and
in fact, likely didn’t much bother to play it anyway – I absolve you! Go forth
and cherish your disinterest.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent: -0.25in;">
Second, and in direct dialogue with the previous point, I want
to make sure everyone knows that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I
FUCKING LOVE </i>Halo. The whole franchise! I love a good rollicking
space-faring adventure taking place over thousands of years and in multiple
media. I love video game novels and live-action tie-in series. I love the games
themselves. I love their world, really, and I love inhabiting it. I’ve spent
hours and hours doing nothing but
flying/hopping/walking/scoping/grenade-jumping my around the various spacecraft
in the games, which have done nothing but become more beautiful over time, and
in a very meaningful way. [Addendum, apropos of said comment: the ships in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo</i> games have always been important,
you realize? Space marines are only marines in so far as they exist in close
contact with the ships that carry them, and operate in close support with them.
The original games were definitely technologically limited, and for that reason
it was tough to see the total vision that was described in the books and
comics, for instance, wherein most of the action depended on strategically
positioning ships for major engagements in space. The ships didn’t just get
prettier on the Xbox 360 – they actually changed in design and function to
better reflect their relationships with the actions you, as a player,
performed, until <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo: Reach </i>has you
bombing around in a space fighter while a UNSC frigate circles around,
providing fire support. It’s a really sexy feeling.] So basically, the point of
that is to say: I am critiquing the game because I had a ton of fun playing it.
That merely highlights that tragic danger of making a really good, really fun
game: the un-good, un-fun parts will stick out rudely, like a sore thumb on
Mona Lisa’s hand.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent: -0.25in;">
Now, if one were to ask more directly why I entitled this
post “trending now,” it’s because I wanted to catch people’s eyes with a catchy
little hook-title-phrase guy, of course. More importantly, I realized as I was
mulling over the subject matter that I was irked by these sore thumbs for a
very specific reason – not only because they were poor choices, not only
because they were poor choices made by a studio with a very popular franchise
to develop, not only because I’m an ornery gamer, but moreover because I
couldn’t shake the feeling that those poor decisions were made, somehow, as a
result of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">peer pressure</i>. Other games
made these mistakes, and somehow, 343 Industries decided their best option was to
appropriate and compound those mistakes. Hopefully that will become
self-evident in the writing of this article, but you can exercise your judgment
to determine the truth of it; for my own benefit, I’ll provide some examples of
the sort of things I’m thinking about when I make the claim.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. Arbitrarily changing the whole feeling of the controls</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s a moment early on when the Chief, having recently
awoken aboard the derelict frigate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Forward
Unto Dawn</i>, pries open the doors to an elevator shaft in order to access the
next deck upwards. He slides the doors open just in time to be WOW KAPOW hit
from behind with crates and debris as decompression from other parts of the
ship causes air pressure to equalize and he gets knocked into the shaft and
there he is, clinging to pipes and cables, looking up as space-junk starts
falling towards him, and the screen suddenly tells you, use the left stick to
climb.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well. This is very curious indeed. It is very curious,
because in a rather amusing fashion, we can technically argue that this is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> one of those most hated phenomena, a
quick-time event (heretofore QTE, for ease of espousing disgust). I wonder how
many of us actually reflected on what had just happened. You see, in a QTE, at
least such as I generally conceptualize them, the usual control scheme for the
game is superseded by another, completely contextualized series of functions.
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">God of War</i>, that eminent
repository of QTE gameplay, that means that the button that usually makes you
jump or hack instead causes you to break a ship-mast in half and stab it into a
monster’s face, or whatever. This is not what happens to you when the Chief
busts into the elevator shaft to climb up to the observation deck. What happens
here is, schematically, just plain weird.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
:: You are using the left control stick to control Chief’s
movement: forward, back, side to side.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
:: Chief gets hit by debris and clings to the inside of the
shaft, and must climb upward while dodging more debris.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
:: The game informs you that you must use the left control
stick to control Chief’s movement.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why – what? How did they not notice this while they were
making the game? Did they not realize that they had created so disconcerting a
gameplay experience that they actually had to tell you, explicitly, that
nothing had changed? That had to give them pause at some point. I found it
quite horrid, actually, once I got past my initial bemusement at the
realization of the facts. The game <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does</i>
need to tell you that you use the movement-control stick to control movement,
because the feedback system has changed, and utterly for the worse. The feeling
of smooth forward motion has been replaced with a finicky, jumpy (literally),
awkward, stilted confusion, as Chief hurls his Donkey-Kong-like cyborg body
from one perch to another, in first-person.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What galls me so much is the question of why. Did the payoff
work for most playtesters? Did people think that the intense, exciting drama of
Chief getting hit by flying crates totally paid for the pointless instant of
dragging his shiny metal ass up a mechanical wall? He could just as well have
gone up some stairs. Or, without changing the geometry of the level, the
elevator could simply have still worked, and he could have ridden it up a
floor. Or whatever! What was the point of introducing so unpleasant a mechanic,
for so short a span of time, and with so viscerally unnatural an effect that it
demands on-screen acknowledgement?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But wait, we might say! Dan, you’re not giving them enough
credit. Surely they are beholden here to your much-vaunted love for reflecting
narrative facts in gameplay mechanics, and you as a player are experiencing the
Chief’s own awkwardness and confusion upon being woken from four years of
bitter cryo-sleep. Indeed, let’s consider a better example later in the game –
near the end – when the Chief, weakened vastly by his Big Bad Foe, the Didact,
must crawl forward on his hands and knees, like a mere mortal, to continue his
mission. There we have a moment of beautiful narrative and experiential
poignance, made possible only because it was mechanically foreshadowed by the
experience of crawling up the elevator shaft. Right?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well…meh. It was here, in fact, that I began to wonder how
much was cribbed from other games, because all I could garner in reply to such
an argument is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metal Gear Solid 4</i>
did that in so extravagantly superior a fashion that any game since should be
ashamed to consider too close a mechanical comparison. One whole chapter of my undergraduate
thesis was devoted to how well the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metal
Gear Solid</i> games use explicit instances of broken control schemes to force
the player to confront a particular emotional or psychological state. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>has its moment when the Chief
must crawl forward, shields depleted, body nearly broken, to grab hold of a
nuclear bomb, and to set it off, intending to destroy himself in addition to
ending the Didact’s threat to Earth. Granted, the controls feel stilted and
awful – the Chief crawls with one awkward elbow at a time, and the first-person
HUD system offers you some confusing feedback on your progress – but that’s
what’s going! Same as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MGS4, </i>when
Solid Snake must crawl through a hallway of radiation and laser beam defenses, going
more and more slowly as he weakens, all by tapping the triangle button (which
was, in itself, a strange if largely unimportant choice).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s the thing, though. The whole story of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MGS4 </i>is the story of Snake aging, of
Snake deciding that the world has changed in a way which demands his absence.
More than that – he believes that his actions have, or ideally, can, create a
world in which he is no longer needed or desired. He is old, he is weak, he has
been disfigured, and he is fighting a losing battle against men and against
time. When we urge Snake onward, crawling in anguish through a boiling tunnel
of gamma rays, we are seriously concerned that Snake may not make it. The
split-screen display shows Snake’s bodysuit melting away while his friends are
overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers in a battle yet raging between two
warships. We know the arc of the whole game, and the whole narrative, has led
us surely to this point, and we know that Snake’s death and failure are real
possibilities. The anxiety and turmoil of Snake’s slow, slow crawl (which takes
frighteningly long, in game terms) is thematically significant. Chief’s moments
of weakness and awkwardness, however, have neither of these superstructures to
support them. First off, they each take barely a few seconds – nowhere near
enough time for the emotional investment we are allowed in Snake’s arduous
trek. And secondly, the game as a whole does not ever allow us to believe that
Chief feels weak in this moment. We know that he has been struggling; we know
he has struggled, we know he has failed in the past; but we don’t believe,
right then, that what’s happening might be the end of him, and our journey with
him. It’s just a moment of weird control fuck-uppery. Maybe I’m out of line in
drawing different sources into the gameplay experience, but let’s be serious:
343 Industries <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">announced </i>the game as <a href="http://www.halopedia.org/Reclaimer_Trilogy" target="_blank">the start of a new trilogy</a>. You can’t have a poignant moment of loss and failure at
the beginning of what we already know will be a larger journey. For both
mechanical reasons (it feels stupid) and narrative reasons (it is stupid), the
gesture falls flat – whether it was intended to tie the player into Chief’s
feelings, or just to be a moment of sudden spiky excitement, it fails.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2. QTEs (DEAR GOD QTEs) </div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hasn’t <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation" target="_blank">Yahtzee</a> yet convinced everyone everywhere that QTEs
are awful? Why is the rest of the world still deliberating on this issue? He’s
smart <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and </i>sassy! Case closed! His
opinions are valid, if not always totally true, and when it comes down to it,
his feelings on “press-X-to-not-die” moments seem pretty spot-on. They’re not
good. Indeed, another blogger posting on GamaSutra <a href="http://gamasutra.com/blogs/AndreasAhlborn/20121125/182220/THE_IMPRISONED_PLAYERs_DILEMMA_IPD_Disabling_players_in_a_meaningful_way.php" target="_blank">recently described</a> a few
horrible applications of QTEs in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Assassin’s
Creed 3</i> which utterly ruined the game for him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can’t believe this is still a thing. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>tries to do a decent job of setting up the Didact as an
immensely powerful and malevolent villain, but then finds it’s backed itself
into a corner: now he’s too powerful for you to actually defeat. Solution? QTE
boss fight! Cortana immobilizes him with many rampant mini-Cortanas made out of
hard light so that you can plant a grenade on him (yes, I said that sentence
shut up). Here’s where my bitterness comes from:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
:: The first time I played that part of the game, I simply
couldn’t read what button the game was telling me to use to plant the grenade,
because not all of us have gargantuan HD televisions. I pressed the bumper,
when I was supposed to press the trigger, and therefore found myself treated to
a scene of the Didact grabbing Chief and tossing him out into space like a used
metal condom. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I was not amused.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
:: It’s lazy fucking design. It’s a literal “press-X-to-not-die”
moment; the screen will flash with directions saying “press [inscrutable icon
of the left trigger] to plant a grenade,” and if you don’t, well fuck you for
thinking that games were about making decisions or figuring things out or
trying to do anything other than follow the rails like a wee cybernetic
gun-train. Especially after the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exceptionally
goddamn awesome</i> edifice of exorbitant space-win which precedes this final
stage (flying a spacefighter through the geometry of the Didact’s ship like the
Death Star run on acid), the utter and abrupt diminuendo, which leaves you
fighting the HUD instead of your enemy, can only leave the acrid taste of
disappointment in your mouth. And ultimately, fighting the HUD, instead of the
Didact, is exactly what happens. He spent too much time in his ship, doing bad
things and hurting lots of people, but in game terms (and dramatic terms), not
enough time showing his weird gross Voldemort-face. I never felt like I was
fighting the Didact; I was fighting the Prometheans, but not their leader, and
the final “boss fight” only reaffirmed this apprehension. You try to foil his
plans, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you never fight the villain</i>
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4</i>. Sure, maybe he’s being
saved for a sequel, but it’s simply feel pallid – if nothing else, a case of
eyes being bigger than stomach.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3. Over-writing </div>
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
And here’s a shifty one.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Also, do I ever write a blog post without mentioning
writing?)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was deliberating on whether or not to ultimately include
this point, but it was one which refused to abandon me during my whole first
playthrough. I think it’s also a valuable point of consideration, apropos of
the whole design process, and the whole imagining of the game within the
context of a new series within an old intellectual property. The Chief is being
overwritten.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I mean it literally: they are writing more lines for the
Chief than they need to, much to the detriment of the character. Sorry to flip-flop
on you, but it’s something like the precise opposite of the problem most games
have – not a trend, an anti-trend. Indeed, the closest example I can think of
is from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spec Ops: The Line</i>. I had the
good fortune of playing it with a friend of mine who does not play games, and
her mind was something of an uncarved block, in opposition to my jaded
gamerbrain. Relatively early in the game, you come across a kind of domestic
encampment, and one of your squadmates remarks, “Man, they even have a piano
down here?” My friend and I both had the same reaction: can I play the piano? I
meandered over and did my damnedest to bash, shoot, or however the hell else
play that piano. But you can’t. And here’s the bake-your-noodle moment: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why did they mention the piano, and not make
it a dynamic object</i>. Why? Why the ungodly shit would you explicitly draw a
player’s attention to an object with which they will want to interact – indeed,
an object whose very function is interactive? This isn’t Chekhov’s gun; this is
basic human curiosity. After games like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metal
Gear Solid 2, </i>where every mundane object does something (and ice cubes
realistically melt faster as single cubes than when they’re frozen together),
nobody can afford to talk about a piano without making the piano interactive.
In terms of character and story, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>does
the same thing: by writing unnecessary lines for characters, it draws our
attention to everything that’s wrong with the situation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Master Chief is an interesting character because he’s an
uninteresting one. Perhaps, better, a schizoid one. He’s represented quite
differently in the novels and the games, and for good reason, I’d say. The game
canon establishes him as a stoic, silent pillar of strength – a literally
faceless hero, without too much personality other than some sub-military snark
with his AI friend, and therefore a perfect avatar for players to project
themselves upon. With a game, that’s great! It’s a game, and we know that the
player needs to feel compelled by the story and events, and that can happen if
we allow the first-person illusion to totally overlay the Chief onto the
player. The novels, quite rightly, appreciate that they are not games – they’re
novels, and therefore, they demand more objectively compelling characters. That
means the Chief can’t have the reader’s emotions; he has to have his known. So
the SPARTAN we’ve inherited by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>is
really a dangerous amalgam of these two strains in the Chief’s developmental
history, a condition necessitated by both the increasing connectivity of the
storylines across multiple media, and the need for the franchise to go in a new
direction if it’s to survive a whole second trilogy. There’s a lot going on
there, and I won’t claim it’s an easy morass to navigate – not that I wouldn’t
have relished the chance to give it a shot myself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My qualms about the writing are partially motivated by
nostalgia by what the Chief was, in the earlier <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo</i> games, and partially by an appreciation of this labyrinth of
character which frustrates static cartography. The thing is, the new trilogy <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> going in a new direction, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should</i> do that, and I fully support
that. And for that matter, it has to, even in terms of internal consistency:
the world has changed by the time <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4</i>
rolls around. The Covenant has a ceasefire with the UNSC, and the human
military is itself much different. There’s a new challenge to writing the Chief
simply because his situation has changed; whereas <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo</i> found the Chief typically alone, stranded, and desperate, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4 </i>sees him working in close
conjunction with other UNSC troops. He has to communicate with them, and that’s
certainly understandable. But the negotiation of this obstacle has been handled
differently in the past. There are obvious instances in the earlier games where
the Chief receives his orders and simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does
them</i>, rather than bothering to acknowledge them, and that describes a
particular strength of character. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That rarely happens in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo
4</i>. Indeed, in one level, you get to ride a massive war-machine through a
desert to destroy Covenant and Forerunner installations, until terrain prevents
your mount for progressing. The Chief radios to his CO that he can move faster
if he goes alone, and the officer gives his permission. I scrunched my nose
when it happened; my fingers itched. Obviously, the Chief has always been
duty-driven, and has obeyed orders in the military chain of command
(although…not always), but he’s never had to be so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">meek</i> about it. The man who hears what must be done, and does it, is
powerful; the man who hears what must be done, and asks permission, has lost
some of his Nietzschean vitality.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s a particularly wonderful moment in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halo 4</i>, which pops up after Cortana has
had an attack of violent rampancy. She watches an artificial sun outside of a
viewport, and wistfully reflects on how she can analytically deduce that the
sun is artificial, but will never know if it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">looks</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feels</i> real. She
turns to find Chief methodically loading and checking his weapons, and begs
him, “Before this is over, promise me you’ll figure out which one of us is the
machine.” Chief has no reply; he avoids her gaze, considers the remark, and is
still considering it when another character walks into the room. That’s a
Master Chief moment, the kind we understand – the Badass Bambi, who doesn’t
have anything good to say, so he says nothing at all. That’s a strong formula
for a likeable character, because it strikes a particular balance. Chief isn’t
a silent protagonist – we know he has thoughts, we know he speaks – but he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chooses not to</i> if the situation does not
call for it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This finely under-written scene is tragically
counterbalanced by the ending of the game, where the Chief converses briefly
with another human soldier. When it becomes apparent that the Chief thinks of himself,
and of soldiers, as “outside of humanity,” an external factor looking in on the
object of its duty and loyalty, his companion remarks, “Soldiers aren’t
machines; we’re just people.” And he leaves the Chief to his solitude.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Chief then takes his solitude and functionally headbutts it
in the face, because while he’s standing alone by the window he remarks, out
loud, to nobody in particular, “She said that to me once.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then a pause.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“About being a machine.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
FADE TO BLACK.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Oh…oh, 343i. We know. We know she said that! We were
there! Probably just a couple hours ago! Who is the Chief talking to? Why? We
know that you want us to understand his emotional conundra, but for the love of
all that is holy, you don’t need to slap us in the face with this flaccid
word-dick to make us understand it. The books give him plenty of angst, but
it’s all exposed in the narration; he doesn’t voice his fears, he swallows them
and deals with them. We would get it; we’re relatively smart people, gamers.
And those of us who are not – well, we’re too busy playing multiplayer anyway.
This scene didn’t need that line, at all, and I’m amazed that it survived the
editing process. The scene can literally be improved if you, dear player,
simply wait for the aforementioned “we’re not machines” line, and then
frantically mute your television, so that you merely have a shot of the Chief
looking intense and wistful before the fade. Trust me, the experience is much
improved by the silence.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then again, I’m sure people have said the same thing about
me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4. Mayhap conclusions </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Less is more. Do your controls work? Don’t change them
mid-game for a fifteen-second sequence. Do your characters work? Let them work.
Is your game good?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
GOOD.</div>
Dan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1803632820372667337.post-62533890574285059672012-10-18T22:54:00.001-07:002012-10-18T22:54:46.161-07:00The Elder Scrolls: quantum mechanics and game stories.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Elder Scrolls: quantum mechanics and game stories.</b><br />
<br />
[<i>Editor's note: expect spoilers for the </i>Elder Scrolls<i> series generally, as well as </i>Metal Gear Solid<i> and </i>Knights of the Old Republic.]<br />
<b> </b><br />
<br />
In <i>The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, </i>timelines are strange. The initial conditions of the game are complicated, but fairly typical, when it comes down to it: there are a few different kingdoms in the Iliac Bay, all vying for power, and a kind of WOMD - Numidium - powered by a magical artifact, the Mantella. Using the Numidium, each of the individual kings is hoping to win ascendancy over his rivals in the Bay; the Emperor is hoping to unify the Bay and restore Imperial rule over the area; the Orcs are hoping to establish their own independent state; and some supernatural beings are hoping to achieve immense personal power through the Mantella. The player-character, although ostensibly backed by the Empire's spy network, can of course choose to pursue any of these goals. He or she will come into possession of the Mantella, and have to decide who deserves what end. Great! All those things we seem to love in games: multiple options, different consequences for our actions, and a good fight one way or the other.<br />
<br />
Of course, the problem arises whenever you introduce multiple endings to a game - how do you negotiate the state of the world at the beginning of a sequel, if you want to produce one? The multiple outcomes of <i>Daggerfall</i> are quite robustly different: they involve the creation of a new kingdom, or of new gods, or the subjugation of people under an Imperial banner. The lives of millions are at stake. By the time <i>TESIII:Morrowind </i>rolls around, how do we expect people to discuss the Iliac Bay incident? The <i>ES</i> games have always relied heavily on in-lore writing: there's an acceptable degree of fallibility in characters' knowledge. People in Morrowind (the province, and the game) are sufficiently removed from those events, in time and in space, that they don't necessarily provide an accurate picture of what happened at the end of the last game. This kind of argument from ignorance is not an implausible way of explaining this phenomenon. Other games have used a similar system. In the original <i>Metal Gear Solid</i>, there are two possible endings. In one, Solid Snake's love interest, Meryl, is tortured to death, and Snake escapes with Otacon; the two remain fast friends in the rest of the series. In the other, Meryl survives, she escapes with Snake, and Otacon manages to extract himself of his own gumption. For a while, speculation remained as to whether Meryl had lived or died, and which ending was more appropriate to the series, and to Snake's character, but ultimately, Meryl showed up again in <i>MGS4. </i>The retcon was less a change of facts and more a change of interpretation; it was suggested that if the player had escaped with Otacon, Snake was simply mistaken - Meryl hadn't died, but was severely wounded, and was later found by government agents inspecting the site of the game's events.<br />
<br />
A somewhat more nuanced (but perhaps less useful) approach was employed by the <i>Knights of the Old Republic</i> series, in which the player could (in true <i>Star Wars</i> fashion) either save the galaxy or set up shop as the new Sith Lord to destroy it. By the time the next game takes place, the main character was directly asked by an NPC if he or she remembered the events of the original. The player has clear dialogue options which will ultimately decide the truth of the matter: whether the player-character in the first game was male or female, and whether they sided with the Jedi or the Sith. In each successive playthrough, you could re-determine the issue, and explore the consequences of different actions.<br />
<br />
To return to <i>Daggerfall</i>, however, what makes that game unique is that it does not take either approach. Instead of trying to negotiate five or six endings into one by virtue of information selection, or letting the player decide what happened on a meta-narrative plane, the solution is totally in-world, while simultaneously a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the problem. When the magical Mantella is activated, it causes a Dragon Break, a magical event with the outcome that <i>all the endings simultaneously and truly occur</i>. The civil war ends in a relative stalemate, because every king wins and loses the war; the Orcs do create their own state, but are also defeated by the other kings; and the Empire re-establishes control over the area. There's a <a href="http://www.imperial-library.info/content/dragon-break-red-mountain" target="_blank">weird in-lore technical discussion of it</a> over at the Imperial Library website which suggests what happens - namely, that when the timeline is skewed, the Dragon Break retroactively changes the past to fall in line with the new present conditions. Yes, it's confusing, and quite a few characters and books in the game devote time to speculating on what exactly happened, and how.<br />
<br />
In a strange way, however, the game may have been looking forward to more recent developments in science - namely, quantum mechanics. There's a quality of particles known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition" target="_blank">quantum superposition</a> which suggests how a particle can exist partially in multiple states of potentiality, due to the way probabilities overlap with each other. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment" target="_blank">double-slit experiment</a> is the most common example of this process taking place. Scientists basically set up a reactive wall behind a shield with a single opening, and fired one electron through it at a time. So far so good. However, when they added a second opening to the shield, instead of seeing the electrons go through one opening or the other, they appeared to go through both openings simultaneously. More specifically, rather than going through both openings as particles, they seemed to act like waves, which (to put it bluntly) are quite different from particles. If you try to observe this happening, however, the waves coalesce back into particles. What's actually happening is relatively simple wave interference, like ripples on water where two stones have dropped, and the crest and troughs represents different possible outcomes. And this isn't only true of single particles like electrons - buckyballs do it too, and they're composed of sixty carbon atoms linked together in a soccer-ball-like crystal. If you're familiar with Schrödinger's Cat, that thought experiment is basically a way of asking the question, "What happens if we try to apply this quantum mechanical property to classical, normal-sized objects?" The results are weird. Dragon Break weird. In a sense, <i>Daggerfall </i>ends in a totally legitimate way - a huge scale-up state of superposition, in which every possible ending of the game does take place, no matter which one you personally observe as you finish playing the game.<br />
<br />
On the meta-narrative level, this also happens in <i>KOTOR. </i>At the beginning of <i>KOTOR2</i>, your character from the last game might be any of four archetypes - male/female and good/evil - and they probabilistically overlap. The possibilities only coalesce into a real person when you decide, at the beginning of <i>KOTOR2, </i>that Revan was a man who fell to the Dark Side and regained his throne as a Sith Lord. But there's a meta-narrative conceit that takes place: we understand that although those three alternatives exist in the dialogue box, they exist because the game designer is allowing us to take command of the storyline in this particularly instance. He's winking at us and saying, "Go ahead, pick whatever option you went with from <i>KOTOR.</i>" In <i>TES</i>, this isn't the case. Even the eponymous Elder Scrolls themselves are blind to the events of the Dragon Break. And as in the double-slit experiment, without an observer, the wave form will never coalesce. All possible states are superposed.<br />
<br />
Can we find a way to make this happen in games? A way to model worlds in which unobserved events are superposed until an external factor forces them to coalesce into a single state? There's a problematic way we currently deal with side-quests: they're static, or they're static until we create conditions which make them impossible. (In <i>The Witcher 2</i>, for instance, side-quests are open for a whole episode, until you make one step past the point of no return and the game will suddenly alert you that you've failed five quests all at once!) What if, instead, the smaller conflicts and cycles of the game world waiting for you to arrive, they actually developed upon your arrival? Instead of finding the same set of side-quests waiting for you each time, you might that one side in a conflict had gained an advantage over the other - that the problem had been solved without you, or had become a different one entirely - or you might find that nothing was the matter in the first place. Maybe on its own, it doesn't seem like much, but the mentality of possibility could go a long way towards the next step in building rich game worlds which actually seem alive.Dan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1803632820372667337.post-75916127252212069392012-10-01T10:34:00.000-07:002012-10-08T19:31:54.479-07:00Story where there is none.<b>Story where there is none: how <i>Demon's Souls</i> and <i>Dark Souls</i> tell perfect video game stories.</b><br />
<br />
<b> </b>[Editor's note: <i>Expect spoilers, such as they are.</i>]<br />
<br />
Gamasutra recently featured <a href="http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/178262/deep_dungeon_exploring_the_design_.php" target="_blank">a great little article</a> by Robert Boyd about the surprising relationship between the perceived and actual difficulty of <i>Dark Souls </i>- a game which flaunts its difficulty, but uses that very fact to draw in (and keep!) a large audience. It's a neat piece which succinctly considers the way the game generally depends on the player to determine difficulty. Boyd notes, for instance, that the flexibility of the leveling system gives the player freedom to play any way they like, to tackle any challenge using any strategy they conceive, and the option is always available to summon another player to help.<br />
<br />
Overall, it reminded me that I did a lot of thinking about the storytelling in <i>Dark Souls</i>, and its predecessor <i>Demon's Souls</i>, when I wrote my undergraduate thesis. So, as a companion to Boyd's meditations on how gameplay is fruitfully directed at the player's experience, it might interest some to consider one specific design decision which makes the story as flexible and rewarding as the gameplay itself: the banishment of exposition to item descriptions! It may seem absurd, but that one decision may be the only thing that makes the story in the <i>Souls </i>series successful at all.<br />
<br />
Of course, some people will express some degree of incredulity at the notion of the series having "successful" stories, since more than a few players generally came away with the sense that there was no story being told at all. This is somewhat true, but to be more accurate, it's merely a recognition of how flexible the games are with their storytelling. Players can't really be faulted for thinking there's no story, when the medieval fantasy RPG as a genre often trains people to look for very specific narrative markers. When people think of MFRPGs, they think of large-scale games like the <i>Final Fantasy</i> series (which may be a dated example, but remains an example I love for its cultural weight); games like that often sink a lot of narrative material into cutscenes, very direct instances of narrative intrusion into the gameplay experience. There are other ways to achieve similar effects - scripted sequences, for example, which take place within gameplay, but effect situations which cannot be interrupted by the player - but the <i>DS</i>s totally avoid this structure. Other games, meanwhile, have taught us to look in different places for story clues. The <i>Elder Scrolls </i>games have taught us to mind our bookshelves, as the multitudinous in-game books are informative, fun, and can boost our stats. It has long been the case in RPGs that non-player characters populating the world can provide useful information, with the extra tint of unreliable character biases. But the <i>DS</i>s go in a different direction entirely.<br />
<br />
What do you accomplish, as a designer, by doing a whole bunch of work creating a vast, rich, multi-faceted world, only to reduce much of it to verbal descriptions of one or two sentences, buried in an inventory screen? Two things.<br />
<br />
First, you put control in the player's hands. I think that's important for nearly any aspect of a game, and I think a fair number of designers would agree. A game is meant to be played, and the more pieces you give the player to play with, the more rewarding the game. It highlights and explains, moreover, the diverse responses to the story in each game. Many players would say there was little or no storyline at all; others would say there was a fairly complex one. Both are fairly accurate descriptions. I'd hazard a guess and say that the different impressions of the situation are highly motivated by the biases of the players themselves - the narrative system creates a kind of index of players. The players who are more interested in the gameplay system will largely ignore the story, because they're not profoundly interested in it in the first place; those players who <i>are </i>explicitly interested in the story will find it when they look for it. The story is optional, to rather bluntly oversimplify the point. Ultimately, the decision to nestle narrative information in a secondary screen strikes an effective balance: it's readily available, but never gets in the way of playing the game. Unlike lengthy cutscenes, which deliberately monopolize a player's time, this system only gives the player precisely as much information as they want at any one time.<br />
<br />
However, we'll also find that secondly, and more importantly, this system somewhat ingeniously finds a way to bridge the gap between these two stereotyped groups of players (we'll say play-types and story-types, broadly). The specific linguistic form of the "item description" is one particular to video games, and as such, it's wise and effective to make use of it when telling a video game story. It only exists in games, and more specifically, only exists in games which place an emphasis on having a variety of interesting items to collect, match, improve, and utilize in combat. In most RPGs, and certainly in <i>Demon's Souls</i> and <i>Dark Souls</i>, much of the essential activity of the game is in exploring the world, collecting items, and using those items to do more exploring and fighting. By placing narrative exposition in this tiny niche, the designers intimately tied together these two impulses - collecting items, and discovering more of the story. A player whose major effort is in creating a sweet build for a character will invariably pick up some juicy storyline details; a player who wants to learn more of the story will do so by picking up some new pieces of armor or unique superweapons. Neither detracts from the other. Each bolsters up the other. The result is a game experience whose balance is determined by the player, and which will ultimately be rewarding no matter how that balance is achieved (heavy on story, heavy on action).Dan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1803632820372667337.post-32949588438938448022012-09-18T19:34:00.000-07:002012-09-18T19:35:17.831-07:00Understanding the folk process in Irish music.<br /><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><b>The man, the music, and the box: why going back to the
source is important.</b><br />
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[Editor's note: <i>I don't own John Kelly's music, but I've given you a chance to have a listen to it. Also, the concertina I've used for an example photo is one of Jeff Thomas'. He's awesome, makes wonderful concertinas, and his website is http://www.thomasconcertinas.com.</i>]</div>
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Both of my previous entries were about games, but I did let
on that this blog would be about Irish music as well. As such, I’d like to take
a similar tack to those entries, and use a specific example to draw out a
realization which has practical benefits. It probably helps to know a bit about
concertinas, and music theory, to totally grasp what’s going on here, but it
might be fun and interesting if you’re not in the know in either niche.</div>
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A while ago, my friend Armand and I were playing a very West
Clare West Clare reel: the Bunch of Green Rushes. It’s a spectacular three-part
tune in a D mode, with Fs and Cs very fluid in their tuning. We launched into
it…to find that in the very first part, he and I quite spectacularly played the
F totally differently: he played it sharp, I played it flat. The result sounded
like getting stabbed in the eye with a cheese grater. He told me it was sharp,
and I just shook my head, because I’m not talented enough to play the fiddle
and speak at the same time. When we had finished the set, he told me he always
heard the tune played with the F-sharp in the first part. I insisted that John
Kelly played it flat. John was a noted fiddler and concertina player, so Armand
suggested he might have played that note sharp on the concertina.</div>
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<a href="http://midatlanticcce.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/thomasconcertina2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://midatlanticcce.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/thomasconcertina2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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This is where I tried to pull my concertina-player knowledge
on him; it might require a little bit of backstory if you’ve never held a
concertina. See, you’ll take a look at your standard concertina in Irish music
and see three rows: the inside row, the middle row, and the outside (or
accidental) row. The most common layout, by far, is a G major scale on the
inside, a C major scale (one fifth below) in the middle, and relative
accidentals (notes which aren’t in either of those scales) on the outside.
Although, for a music that’s primarily in D major, that may seem silly, the
layout actually provides an incredibly useful and flexible system for playing
in all the major keys of Irish music, if you’re comfortable going between all
three rows of the concertina to reach all the buttons you need. The thing is,
older players often tended not to cross rows too much – they certainly did it,
but usually only when necessary. Furthermore, many older players learned, or
continued to play, on two-row German concertinas, which didn’t have any
accidental row at all! If you play the Bunch of Green Rushes on the concertina,
the first part very nicely fits into the C row, with a big juicy F-natural
right under your middle finger (and the F-sharp cast off to the G row, under
the relatively uncomfortably left-hand little finger). So I figured, if
anything, John probably played that note flat on the concertina, since it’s a
lot easier to reach.</div>
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Here’s where things got weird. We went back and listened to
the track from John Kelly’s solo album, which includes him playing the Bunch of
Green Rushes on both fiddle and concertina. He plays it on the fiddle with
glorious F-natural notes, and big meaty C-natural as well. But on the
concertina…he plays the note sharp! And in fact, he plays both the F and the C
sharp – which made very little sense to me, since the C-sharp note is on the
third, accidental, row on the concertina, and John’s style very rarely reached
into that row. Now I was thoroughly confused – especially since, in the second
part, the C was fluid, flat the first time and sharp the second. This was
totally at odds with the accepted understanding of how John played the
concertina; while he would normally be expected to play more or less in a
single row at a time, this sounded like he was switching rows quite a bit, and
in some rather unnatural shapes. What was going on?</div>
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<span id="goog_1675171311"></span><span id="goog_1675171312"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a><a href="https://www.box.com/s/a851pif1x157ocd2bov3" target="_blank">Have a listen yourself.</a></div>
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When I finally checked the pitch, and thought about it a
bit, I figured out how he was playing the tune, and why. He was playing the
tune in G, rather than D, and this had totally changed the availability of
notes in the tune, and how he could ornament them. G is a remarkably flexible
key on the C/G concertina; G major and C major overlap considerably in notes,
and the difference – F – means that you can play with the tuning of the seventh
in the scale, which happens quite often in Irish music (in the key of D major, that
would mean the change of C-natural and C-sharp). That means you have the whole
G major scale, in the inside row, and can quickly go to the C row just for
F-natural; John had chosen this layout for the tune, simpler and more flexible
than playing it in D. However, this also made different options implausible.
Whereas playing the tune in D makes F-natural accessible in the first part,
playing it in G means the corresponding note would be B-flat – neither in C
major or G major, banished to the outside row of the concertina which John
rarely used.</div>
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So what’s the big deal? Nothing really. But if you play
Irish music, you know that there are countless different settings of tunes,
many of them with regional connections, or linked to particular musicians.
Usually we chalk up these differences to the “folk process” in general – it’s
true that this music was primarily orally-transmitted, and therefore allowed
for a lot of variation based on mishearing and misremembering. Differences in
regional and personal styles also prompted people to outright change tunes to
suit themselves better, or to suit the needs of dancers. But here’s a very
particular instance of how a setting of a tune changed due to the necessities
of a particular instrument: the Anglo-German concertina, immensely popular in
Ireland during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Especially because
John Kelly plays the tune totally differently on his two instruments, it’s also
a neat example of how musicians negotiated these sorts of problems in the past
– rather than contorting his setting on one or the other to fit both
instruments, he did what sounded the most awesome on either! On the fiddle, he
slides dramatically into big F-natural notes; on the concertina, he hits big
meaty chords on the B-natural, and plays in octaves during the second part of
the tune. Especially for concertina players these days, who have heard a
generation or two of concertina players whose ornamentation, phrasing, and
style was very much based on fiddle and pipes playing, it’s refreshing to hear,
and understand, how someone really plays the concertina with an ear for the
specificities of the instrument.</div>
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To John Kelly!</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/w8tnrb1IhLU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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Dan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1803632820372667337.post-10898796626469907412012-09-02T12:26:00.001-07:002012-09-02T12:26:38.589-07:00The first two hours, part 2; or how I learned to stop worrying and just not play games with too many features.<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<b><span style="font-size: small;">Even small worlds should start big</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>[Expect some degree of spoilers for </i>Lost Odyssey<i>, </i>The Witcher 2<i>,</i> <i>and</i> Skyrim<i>.]</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">So, as per the last post here, we are playing the first two
hours of <i>Lost Odyssey</i> and the first two hours of <i>The Witcher 2: Assassins of
Kings</i>; and then here we are, wondering why we’ve only ever played the first two
hours of the former, while playing multiple times through the latter. Both
games are epic fantasy RPGs, but the player experience is designed from two
nearly antithetical standpoints. I started off by taking a look at the way the
world and story are introduced in each case, since epic fantasy RPGs generally
make the exposition of a grandiose narrative central to the game; this time,
however, I’d like to get a feel for how the introduction of mechanics in a
complex system affects the player.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The thing is, big worlds tend to have big, complex systems
that players use to interact with them. If that’s to be the case, then the
challenge of the first part of the game is essentially doubled: the designer
has to hook us not only the idea of exploring the world, but on the way we’ll
actually be undertaking that task. There are some games with great stories that
never get played, because the system and controls are horrible; there are
others with shit stories which people still play, because the system is
effective and gameplay is fun. (There are notably more games of the second type
than the first, because most games persist in having generally shit stories.)
Or, on the other hand, there are plenty of mechanically fun games that people
will put down because they’re just boring.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">This issue is central to both <i>Lost Odyssey</i> and <i>The Witcher
2</i>. LO takes place in a huge world mishmashed from magical and mechanical
elements, with apparent social and political structures in place maintaining
and overseeing that complicated system; meanwhile, it has a conventional
turn-based RPG interface system, attacking, defending, using special abilities,
and using items. TW2 is a more conventional world, drawn very deliberately from
late medieval and early modern source material in eastern Europe; to balance
that out, though, we have a fairly unique action RPG interface, which demands
some complex balancing of potions, items, spells, and swordplay, both in and
out of combat. In a certain sense, TW2 has a more complicated mechanical system
than LO – at least, it has one with which most gamers will be less familiar (if
only for the single craziest reason that potions cannot be used during combat).
And yet, because of some dubious design decisions early on, my roommate and I
found TW2’s system easier to navigate, even though both of us are used to LO’s
<i>Final Fantasy</i>-style mechanics.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Two points demand consideration: one, the streamlining of
tutorials, and two, the availability of actions early on.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Both games have player tutorials, although it’s notable that
TW2’s tutorial was retroactively added only after players had complained. We
were playing the Xbox port, the Enhanced Edition, which included this little
extra bit to ease us into the game. Without passing judgment on the issue of
hardcore gamers, hardcore games, and how balls-crushingly difficult a game
should be right from the get-go, I do want to give CD Projekt Red some credit
for making one design decision (no tutorial, dropping a player into combat
early on) due to some principles and beliefs about their players, and then
amending that decision when given the chance (added a tutorial as DLC, or
including it automatically in the Enhanced Edition available on the Xbox).
That’s ballsy in and of itself: getting feedback from players, especially about
a touchy subject like difficulty of what’s billed as a kind of “game for
gamers,” and then incorporating that feedback, goes a long way towards making a
good game experience better. So points for you! But we should also note that
they didn’t give ground willy-nilly, like Rosecrans at the battle of
Chickamauga; they added a tutorial, and it’s an optional one, which takes the
form of a discrete episode chronologically separate from the main quest.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">It seems stupid to make such a big deal of it – the game
asks, would you like to play the tutorial? Yes or no – but since this post is
about observing the differences between two games who take different approaches
to these things, it really struck me how vast of an experiential difference
arose from the option to play the tutorial, or to skip it, and to have the
tutorial as a single wholesale unit. My basic take-away from the fact:
tutorials should be discrete episodes, and they should be optional.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Who likes tutorials? It’s very rare that a player will
remark, “Oh yeah, man, that tutorial rocked my socks.” More often than not,
it’s, “Man, that tutorial was just annoying and awkward and still confusing and
fuck that tutorial.” Does TW2 avoid that? Does it make a tutorial that’s
enjoyable and informative?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Kind of, not really. It does achieve something pretty
upfront and basic which seems necessary insofar as having an attitude about
tutorials, as a designer. Let’s all agree on something. Tutorials break the
fourth wall. Period. They have to contend with the problem of interface, not
only in navigating menus but in many cases literally teaching the player which
buttons to push, where, when, and how. That’s never going to be a unique,
beautiful, streamlined system. It’s always going to be kind of shitty. Since
that’s the case, why don’t we more often go for broke the way that TW2 does? During
the game, sure, I want to be really into the game experience, but right at the
get-go, fine. Ask me outright if I want a tutorial, and make that tutorial as
blatant as possible. TW2 clothes its tutorial in the pleasant skirt of a
totally meaningless story: your boat has sunk in a little marsh, and you need
to walk to the arena to compete for some prize money. No biggie. It doesn’t
have any pretensions about being a training sequence, as though Geralt and I
are learning the same skills at the same time; it doesn’t have any pretensions
about being well-written or incredibly fun. But amazingly enough, I damn well
appreciate that. What the tutorial from TW2 tells me is, quite literally,
Geralt knows what the fuck is going on, and the game is going to be more fun if
you don’t make him look like a floundering douchecanoe. That’s what I love
about it: it has a clear goal, gets to that goal as efficiently as possible,
and then takes its hands off your shoulders to let you ride (and maybe tip
over) on your own.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The tutorial works by giving you a series of small tasks and
text prompts in rapid succession. As a general rule, I’d say avoiding text is
preferable, but the decision to give you written on-screen directions and
reminders is actually fine here, because again, the tutorial is set apart from
the game experience itself. If, eight hours into a game, I had to read a bunch
of written directions overlaying my screen, I’d feel pretty unhappy about it,
because I was really getting into the world and enjoying it. Even relatively
early into a game – if I start it, get the basic controls down, and then
immediately find myself deluged with new directions – I’ll be quite resistant
to text direction. But if your tutorial is totally up-front with itself, and
tells you, “Hey; this isn’t the game, this is just a way for us to teach you
how to play the game,” then I’m totally fine with it breaking a few “game
design principles” for the sake of efficiency. By leading in with the option of
the tutorial, the game weeds out people who don’t want a tutorial, and as a
result, the people who do want one get a pretty good one. It seems so simple,
but I don’t know that it ever occurred to me so directly before this. If your
players have chosen to play the tutorial, rather than having it foisted upon
them will or nil, then they won’t complain about it if it’s not a majestic
wonderland of edutainment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">It’s not often that intensive, story-driven fantasy RPGs can
take cues from fighting games, but I will say this much: the best tutorial I
have ever played was from the Xbox Arcade game <i>Skullgirls</i>, a cartoony fighting
game with a lot of style. Although fighting games as a genre do tend to have
tutorial modes, the tutorial system for <i>Skullgirls</i> involves an intensive,
multi-chapter mode for learning everything from basic movement skills to
advanced combat techniques. It’s so totally set apart from the game that it
feels like a mini-game, or series of micro-games, unto itself. It’s so blatant
about its tutoriality that you don’t mind it. And amazingly, it very
effectively teaches you the astoundingly complex combat system of <i>Skullgirls</i>.
The experience served as a devastating litmus test for what I once thought was
appropriate for games. If people can learn to be good at Skullgirls, then
whatever infinite crystalline snowflake of a game you’ve created can definitely
be taught just as well. It may not be seem great, but giving your players a
whole bunch of information all at the once could be the best way for them to
actually retain that information. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Maybe it has something to do with the brain goes into crisis
mode, but TW2 basically just told me, “Get out of your boat, collect some
ingredients, and make that dude a potion,” and I DID. Granted, I figured out
more of the system as I played through the game, but the basics of every part
of the game – potions, combat, menus, gear – I had right from the beginning.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Lost Odyssey</i>, on the other hand, takes the opposite route –
one which is much more frequently employed, in my experience. It was clear,
from the scope of the menus and buttons, that the game had a lot to offer with
its fighting system. At the beginning though, we could only attack or defend.
We were dropped into a battle, we hacked our way through, and then, when we
found a ring, we discovered – calloo, callay! – we could equip rings for
special abilities, the first of these being a timed-attack reflex system. The
menu told us so by interrupting our game to point out to us precisely how to
equip a piece of loot, select its abilities, and employ those abilities in
combat. It was, frankly, annoying, and worse was seeing the other menu buttons
which were grayed out, unselectable, or had no entries yet, because I knew I
had more moo-interrupting-cow tutorial moments ahead each time the game decided
I needed to know something new.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I told you in my last post that I had trouble getting into
LO’s whole world, characters, etc. What doesn’t help is the game stopping that
experience constantly, to tell me it’s a game, before leaving me to go back to
playing. There’s a bit of a representational problem in this design. You’re
breaking the fourth wall a lot in most turn-based combat RPGs, since seeing
time bars and menus of actions during combat is obviously not “realistic;” but
that system still adequately suggests how a person might actually fight, by
taking time to prepare oneself, to wait briefly, to choose one’s next move
carefully but quickly, and then to act. There is no representational analogue
to the magical omniscient narrator fairy who pops in to tell you how to put a
ring on your finger and know how to do a thing. If it had better results, I’d
let it slide, but the fact really bugs me that an inefficient, and un-fun, and
ineffective system persists in being employed by plenty of designers out there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">This line of discussion is leading steeply into my second
realization: tutorials are streamlined most efficiently by giving the player
all (or most) of their relevant abilities in the beginning of the game.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“But wait!” we might cry. “This flies in the face of every
experience most of us have ever had! How many of us have turned off a game
because we were overwhelmed by information and ability, and how many because we
found the game was too slow in giving us more information and ability?” And in
a certain sense, that’s true. You won’t necessarily lose gamers on account of
making a system that’s very deliberately simple, and only gives them one new
piece of data at a time; they may find it tedious, but they will rarely find it
unusable. However, that’s hardly an argument for such a system being the best,
or even particularly useful. Especially in the context of a story-driven RPG, a
tutorial should contribute to your experience of gameplay and story at the same
time. When it comes down to it, we’ve had too many games that somehow convince
us that a veteran of military service still hasn’t figured out how to parry and
counterattack until just now, or that a graduate of a magical academy knows
only a few rudimentary spells, just for the sake of forcing upward progression
through the game.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">It is, admittedly, important for some sort of upward
progression to exist; it’s a huge part of why gamers play games. Particularly
in the case of MMORPGs, where you want people to play for a long time and keep
paying subscriptions, ideally, the deep psychological satisfaction of leveling
up or acquiring a new ability can be a deadly weapon. But in certain types of
games, and especially in action RPGs, you have fundamental design concerns
which conflict with this model: in some games, the acquisition of actual skill
as a player, and in some, the vaunted importance of the player’s ability to
choose and develop a character and playstyle. As was the point of this comparative
project, this is an observation I would only make in directly comparing two
games, but I found it much easier to deal with TW2 for the simple reason of
knowing what I could do. At the beginning of the LO, you can do nothing but
attack and defend. You’re some kind of insane warrior with the ability to leap
dozens of feet into the air, destroy huge electro-magical tanks, and mow down
trooper after trooper wearing full plate armor, but your martial
skill in gameplay is limited to swinging your sword or blocking with it. You
can’t do anything else until you’ve learned how to do it, at some arbitrary
point defined by the game (oh, immediately after this battle ends, you find a
magical combat ring? HOW INTERESTING).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The problem? When you only give your player limited
abilities, what you’re literally doing is limiting their playstyle, and forcing
them to play the game in the way you want them to play it. You’re reducing
player choice, and shunting them down a small number of paths. Players
naturally rebel against this impulse. Big arrow point to the right? They want
to go left. Character supposed to die? They’ll try to sequence-break. Or, if
you give them no options, they’ll a) begrudgingly follow along or b) turn off
the game because I’m not a part of your system, man.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">What I happily discovered about TW2 was that, even though
there was clearly a level-up and advancement system, all the basic assets of
that system were already in place. You already know all the spells that Geralt
will know right at the beginning, and they all already do what they’re supposed
to do; they simply get stronger and more effective over time, as would
naturally occur with regular use. This had a particularly interesting effect:
it meant that my skill as a player and Geralt’s skills as a character actually
advanced along similar arcs. From the start of the game I understood that I
could use one spell - which, for lack of
recollection, I will call the Force push – to stun an enemy and then one-shot
them. My combat style gravitated towards this system, using a spell to halt
enemies and then my sword to quickly dispatch them. As I went through the game,
my Force push got stronger, to the point that I could stun four or five enemies
at once and one-shot all of them before they recovered (which was awesome).
That’s only a smallish example. The availability of playstyle options from the
beginning also means that I’d have had no problem changing gameplay paradigms
if that system stopped working. Again, it might not be something we think about
too much, until it becomes evident from a game that does it right, but frankly,
it’s much better to have a playstyle that develops in reaction to the world,
and to the player’s abilities, than one that develops in reaction to arbitrary
new information and new abilities. Or maybe it’s not, but damn it, it certainly
seems like it is to me. Again, we can appreciate the value of unlocking
something new, and how it positively affects the player, without building a
kind of deus ex machina ability system that drops new stuff for us on a
semi-regular basis.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">In fact, one of the best examples of balance
here, in my mind, is the discovery of shouts in <i>The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim</i>.
Some people went through whole chunks of the game using only regular combat
skills, stealth and magic to get through their missions, deliberately putting
off the main quest. Then they discovered that holy crap Dragonborn I can shoot
fire from my mouth, and all of a sudden the balance of the game changes pretty
meaningfully (no-mana-cost spells, just a recharge time), as does the player’s
combat style in relation to that change. It’s intense, it’s awesome, it’s tied
into the story quite intimately – and it happens once. Not a million tiny
times, without any storyline justification (you found a magic ring that you can
use in combat! Now I’ll teach you how to wear rings because you apparently
understand how to weave the fabric of the universe, but not fingers). Once.
That’s it; one big change to the game mechanics, everything else you have to get
up front. At the very least, we can appreciate that any further big changes
need to be…er, small, for one thing, and for another, storyline-derived. More
or less any <i>Final Fantasy</i> game gets the picture. Because party-based RPGs
introduce new abilities by introducing characters, you always have a certain
leeway in giving people more stuff. The problem arises when your cast of
characters is waaaay too big, for both story and gameplay purposes, and it just
feels like being nitpicked by meaningless people with useless abilities. In a
way, this provides a good size test for a project. Could you introduce most, if
not all, of your characters and abilities quite near the beginning, and still
reasonably expect the player to succeed with them? If not, maybe cut some shit
down.</span></span>Dan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1803632820372667337.post-6568516284250070382012-08-11T21:34:00.000-07:002012-08-11T21:34:17.509-07:00The first two hours; part 1.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting in with a
friend as he began two RPGs in one night – one eastern, one western. For
whatever reason, my roommate decided that it was high time he began playing
<i>Lost Odyssey</i>, which he’d owned for some months without ever opening, just at
the instant I’d showed up with <i>The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings</i> in hand. We
cranked up the AC, poured out some good beer, and gave each game around two
hours of intro playtime to get a decent feel for each. Both games have gotten
good reviews – both games were noted for having great stories, in particular.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So why have we played through <i>The Witcher</i> four or five
times, without touching <i>Lost Odyssey</i> since?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are plenty of discussions about the differences
between western RPGs and JRPGs, but I really wanted to sit down and think about
why such a disparity in play experience took us to such dramatically different
ends. My friend was playing, and I was watching, but I still found it difficult
to navigate the intro to <i>Lost Odyssey</i>, whereas <i>The Witcher</i> felt pretty solid,
right from the get-go. For that matter, it might be noteworthy that plenty of
gamers have found <i>The Witcher </i>to be turgid and over-difficult (Zero
Punctuation’s review was fairly accurate in its assessments, even though I
disagree with the conclusion). So why did my friend and I have that negative
response to <i>Lost Odyssey</i>, but not <i>The Witcher</i>? Let's start with that question.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And maybe, ideally, we could get some nifty game design
worthwhiles out of the experience.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[<i>Editor's note: I can certainly appreciate and anticipate the comment that these games are totally different, trying to accomplish different things, etc., and that same comment is true of the varied other games I reference in the article. The main decision to compare </i>Lost Odyssey <i>with</i> The Witcher 2 <i>was the literal fact of having played both of them in the same night, and the rest of the examples simply come from my experience. That experience is limited, so example and counter-examples are expected and welcome.</i>]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Expect <b>spoilers </b>for the first hour of Lost Odyssey, The Witcher 2, Final Fantasy 7, Kingdoms of Reckoning: Amalur, and Knights of the Old Republic. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Big worlds start small</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Evidently, both <i>LO</i> and <i>TW2</i> take place in vast, wonderful,
lovingly-crafted worlds full of heroes, heroines, assholes, and common folk,
all wending their way through a complicated superstructure of magic, mundanity,
mechanics, politics, and general mystical hoo-ha. There’s a lot to deal with in
both instance: tons of characters, all with particularities to their
relationships, belonging to different organizations which themselves have
particularities to their relationships, and a world with some basic rules and
attitudes that are totally different from our own. In any medium, that’s a
serious issue to overcome, and in a game, even moreso, since most people come
to a game expecting to experience “fun” more or less consistently.</div>
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Because I’m an idiot, I thought that a comparison to a
different medium might actually shed some light on this question. For those of
who you know that <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> is a book, you might also recall from
having read it that it is fucking gargantuan. There really is an entire world
crammed between the two covers of the red leatherbound edition which I expect
any sci-fi/fantasy fan to own, padded deliciously with a whole slew of
appendices on kings’ dynasties and how each chieftain of the Rangers died
(wolves, evidently). But do you also remember how <i>LOTR</i> begins? It’s really
tiny: a domestic drama. Two birthday parties, and one guy complaining about how
his in-laws are trying to get his house. Everything that happens subsequently,
from meeting elves to fighting off millennia-old servants of an exiled demigod
to running barefoot up the side of a mountain, begins with the story of two
tiny dudes eating and drinking with their friends and family. There’s a number
of reasons why this works, one of them being that it allows for appropriate
expansions of scale through the book (you’ve got more room to up the ante with
each successive challenge), but more important to the question of how a new
visitor experiences a huge world, it’s small enough to digest altogether. First
off, you only have to deal with three really crucial characters at once –
Bilbo, Frodo, and Gandalf when he shows up – and second, their relationships
and troubles are things we already understand. Instead of giving you a whole
huge chunk of world at once, we get a single sliver.</div>
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How do our games hold up to the same principle?</div>
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<i>LO</i> begins with a big epic battle, chock full of all the
awesome things that should push all our awesome buttons. Dudes in big clanky
fantasy armor are tossing around huge swords while towering robot tanks crush
guys, while reinforcements are begin driven up in what look conspicuously like
steampunk coffins. The player-character shows up and starts kicking ass and
taking names, except all the enemies are faceless evil robot-men with no
identities, so he basically just kicks ass until the sky turns to lava and
everyone dies. And yet, interestingly enough, between the two vast armies and
their tanks and artillery pieces, the numbers of actants in the opening battle
sequence could not begin to approximate the number of fucks that I <i>could not
give</i> about what was happening.</div>
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I understood the basic cues I was given – guys in black
armor with red eyes, guys in gold armor with…faces, one dude who’s a third the
body weight of everyone else and has his midriff exposed like a teenage girl
but still ruins everyone else – but they were nothing other than
internally-consistent cues which presented the basic shape of a totally generic
epic sci-fi/fantasy world. It feels especially ruinous saying something like
that, since <i>LO</i> received some stellar praise from reviewers regarding the
uniqueness of its world and the emotional beauty of its story and characters,
but frankly, I want to talk about the effects of design decisions, and the
effect of the early design decisions in <i>LO </i>was that I never saw any of that beauty in
the first two hours of the damn game. <i>LOTR</i> begins with a sequence that invites
you into the home of a main character, and rather than confusing you, only
makes you care about them on purely human terms: they have family
relationships; they celebrate birthdays; Bilbo is happy to see an old friend
again. These are totally mundane facts, but they give you the most rudimentary
basis for caring about the larger events which will later happen. <i>LO</i> doesn’t
give you that at all. Instead, it plays precisely into the human problem of
large-scale mechanized warfare, a spiritual problem which we have understood
for centuries – if you see row after row of identical-looking, uniform-clad
soldiers, it’s harder to think of them as unique, living people and easier to
think of them as bullshit sword-fodder. So even though we understand the basic
visual cues of good guys and bad guys, we have no real basis for assigning good
or bad to either side, and they’re really interchangeable for all intents and
purposes. The addition of the player-character to that equation did nothing to
change that balance, because I still had no understanding of who he was or why
he did what he did. The bigger the introduction got, the smaller my interest
became.</div>
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What’s particularly intriguing about this fact is that <i>TW2
</i>also begins with a huge epic battle, but it treats the subject in a totally
different way. (Firstly, I’d like to point out that I played the Xbox version
of the game, which includes an optional tutorial to be discussed a bit further
on.) The intro to <i>TW2</i> definitely isn’t perfect – it starts with text, for the
love of God – but it very quickly strikes our key points by taking the reverse
approach to the same big-battle set-piece. Instead of introducing us to very
broad-strokes groups, good guy army and bad guy army, without giving us any
real human referents for their attitudes and actions, <i>TW2</i> gives us a handful of
primary and secondary characters clustered together. We begin with our
player-character, Geralt, in prison, with two rowdy guards keeping watch. We’re
subsequently introduced to Vernon Roche, our captor and interrogator, who eases
us into remembering the big battle at LaVallette Castle. That’s it – two major
characters (Geralt and Roche), and two minor characters (the guards) who teach
us more about the major characters by gossiping or remarking on them. It’s
tight, informative, and not overwhelming. Even though we don’t understand what
Geralt’s doing in prison, or who Roche is, there’s just enough mystery to not let us know, but
still let us care.</div>
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We then get to our big battle scene, in flashback, but the
treatment is totally different than in <i>LO</i>. We begin with characters, and only
gradually work our way into actual combat. It’s certainly difficult to keep
track of everyone, but it’s made much easier by two simple decisions which the
developers wisely made. One, each character (or character cluster, like the
mercenaries you meet near your tent) has a few unique relational details which
let us situate them. We learn in the opening conversation that Geralt
and Triss are lovers, and servants of Foltest. Geralt saved Foltest from an
assassin. Geralt is a monster-slayer by profession. Foltest is about to fight a
battle to recapture his children from their mother. That’s all the salient
information, and we get it all literally in one conversation, which primes us
for the whole prologue. Two, each important point is reiterated multiple times
before we jump into combat. We’ll hear from Geralt, Triss, and Foltest that
Geralt is a monster slayer, that he saved Foltest from an assassin, that he’s
carrying on with Triss, and that this battle is about Foltest sleeping with
someone else’s wife. It strikes a useful intermediary position between the
mundanity of <i>LOTR</i> (in-laws, birthday parties) and the totally alien experience
of <i>LO</i> (huge battle with robots and tall hats). Someone saved someone’s life;
someone’s sleeping around; possession of children is in question. Those are the
same basic situations we see in our own world, and they let us stabilize
ourselves in a way<i> LO</i> doesn’t. Like I said, we can understand basic visual cues
from <i>LO</i>’s opening (gold armor, good guys, black armor, bad guys), but we can’t
really understand why anyone is good or bad, much less our player character. We
can immediately begin digesting and responding to the world of <i>TW2</i> because we
have enough material to form opinions about it. Foltest is a king who slept
with a nobleman’s wife and now has to deal with the consequences; maybe we
think he’s an okay guy or not, but at least we can begin deciding that for
ourselves given the basic facts. We know Geralt doesn’t like the situation, but
that teaches us about Geralt as well.</div>
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We might also rename this principle, or at least frame it
differently, by saying that <i>LO</i> tries to build a world from the beginning, but
<i>TW2</i> builds characters instead. It’s a huge difference that gives us a reason
(or doesn’t) to actually keep playing and see more of that wonderful world.
Maybe it’s not a piece of advice particularly useful to just anyone making any
game, but for any narrative game – especially epic sci-fi/fantasy RPGs, for which
the narrative is a focal point of the game experience and a major draw for your
players – it can be a crucial stumbling block when handled poorly.</div>
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Think about <i>Final Fantasy 7</i>. It had a large cast of
well-drawn characters, each of them with a rich backstory that could be
explored ad infinitum later into the game; however, it began mostly with Cloud
and Barrett running around fighting Shinra soldiers together, to destroy a mako
reactor. There are a few conversations between them about the reactors, Shinra,
and mako energy. Barrett makes it clear he doesn’t trust Cloud and Cloud seems
blasé about the state of the world, in it only for pay. Sure, they come off as
archetypal at first, but at least that serves as the basis of a relationship
between the two characters, the world, and us as players. If the developers had
instead dropped Cloud into the whole massive world with a looming extraterrestrial
threat on the verge of ruining the planet, we would have been lost. Sephiroth
and Aeris, two of the more memorable (and ultimately, more important)
characters, are quite alien, and don’t make for relatable introductions to this
place. Instead, terrorism, corruption, and ecological damage offer us points of
comparison to our own world, and the broad-strokes portraits we first get of
our characters again allow us to start forming opinions about them right away, since <i>their</i> opinions about events and ideas allow <i>us</i> to form opinions about them as people.</div>
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By contrast, we might consider a more recent attempt at a
fantasy (action) RPG, <i>Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning</i>. The game has a really
juicy opening, well-conceived, well-written, and well-executed. Yet in spite of
all that, it never seems to have the proper effect of drawing the player into
what’s happening. We see in an opening cutscene that the evil Fae king,
Gadflow, has waged war on humanity for his god, only to find that our character
is a soldier killed in battle with his forces. The character wakes up in a pile
of bodies beneath a gnomish laboratory, only to discover that Gadflow’s
warriors are assailing the laboratory. We quickly find that this place is the
Well of Souls, run by gnomish scientist Fomorous Hugues. All of that is well
and good, but like <i>LO</i>, we don’t much care, unfortunately. We see a couple of
people we don’t know, being killed by other people we don’t know. Cloud
professed not to have any emotional investment in his mission to blow up Shinra’s
mako reactor, but at least we knew enough of him to know about his attitudes
and opinions, and how they contrasted with Barrett’s. The only real characters
in the beginning of <i>KOA:R</i> are the player character, who just returned from
death and has something in the way of nil for a personality, and Fomorous
Hugues, who appears briefly and then jets off. There are no character
interactions which ground us in the world – everything is strange, and nothing
wonderful enough to draw us in on sheer essential value. The most compelling
people in the prologue of the game are the two gnomes who banter with each
other while wheeling your corpse down a hallway!</div>
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Even the intro sequence to the first <i>Knights of the Old
Republic</i> game managed a decent balance here. Although the prologue was spent
fighting off a Sith attack on your Republic ship, you’re immediately awoken by
a fellow soldier who tells you to find Bastila Shan, the Jedi knight on board,
who’s crucial to the Republic war effort; as soon as you open your bedroom
door, Carth Onasi, captain of the ship, contacts you and tells you to head to
the bridge to aid the soldiers there. Bam. The developers wasted no time in
introducing you to both of the major characters who would form the center of
your entire experience on the first world of the game. Even though you won’t
see Bastila’s face for hours, you hear her name over and over from the second
sentence of the game onward, and since much of the game’s story hinges on your
relationship with her, that’s a smart writing decision. It’s especially noteworthy
because the game comes from such an established IP, and the devs could easily
have gotten away with a fairly generic Sith vs. Republic and Jedi battle.
Instead, they gave you a Sith vs Republic and Jedi battle, but framed it around
the three main characters – you, Bastila, and Carth.</div>
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I called this first part “big worlds start small,” and by
that I meant not to introduce too much of a world in the very beginning of the
game. I might tweak that notion by instead suggesting a more nuanced approach:
do your best to balance introduction of ideas with the introduction of
characters. <i>Lost Odyssey</i> introduces you to a whole war, two huge armies,
strange technology, magic and mages, a natural or magical sky-rending
cataclysm, combat moves, item mechanics, and navigation before you know a
single person’s name. In <i>The Witcher 2</i>, you know Geralt, Roche, Triss, and
Foltest literally before you can take a single step (although you do have a few
dialogue options before that). Those are totally different ways to begin an
epic story in an epic world, and one immediately turned me off, while the other
kept me going on another three plays-through. Especially when a big demographic of players only has so long to decide whether or not to play a game - two hours to decide whether or not you like a game can be fairly luxurious for some of us - making a deep connection right away can make or break the sixty hours of RPGing that follows. <i>Lost Odyssey</i> may indeed have a wonderful story in a beautiful world filled with heartbreakingly real characters, but I'll never know, because it lost me, barely ninety minutes in.</div>
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Next: "<b>small worlds start big</b>" - at least when it comes to mechanics and tutorials.</div>Dan Accardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03326745215123987312noreply@blogger.com0