So a recurring comment I get about my posts about adventure games has been “It’s interactive fiction! It doesn’t need gameplay!” and… just… wow. Okay, so basically it’s an eBook but with more clicking? And shorter? I’m afraid that this agument doesn’t really hold water. Interactive fiction and adventure games are fundamentally different animals. Interactive fiction in no way tries to pass itself off as a game and uses the program itself to further its story-telling. Adventure games should be a marriage of gameplay and fiction.
An great example of interactive fiction comes in the form of Digital: A Love Story (google it, it’s worth a look and free to boot). Honestly, I really enjoyed Digital. It’s a fun story, hits emotional keys just right, and uses the medium perfectly to draw the reader into its world. It has its hiccups but it honestly is the best piece of interactive fiction I’ve encountered.
Contrast this with, for example, King’s Quest VI. King’s Quest VI, addmittedly, is a notoriously AWFUL game, full of dick moves that instakill the player; copy-protection that can take ages to properly solve, even with the key; and puzzles that require huge leaps in logic to solve. However, it is a pretty good representation of a lot of Sierra adventure games. See, King’s Quest VI is a game. You can win, lose, die (annoyingly) and it includes many things that are obvious outright game elements. There is nothing about it that says “this is not a game” other than the people claiming that adventure games are interactive fiction, not games.
The problem is that a lot of adventure games drifted toward interactive fiction (Telltale, I’m looking at you) and started to ignore the gameplay parts. Sure, a handful of puzzles would be thrown in, but they’re so trivial as to be overlooked in a lot of cases. It’s all very strange because when I look back at old LucasArts games like Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, they did a fantastic job of marrying gameplay and storytelling, though they did have a few gameplay elements I didn’t enjoy. For some reason all that seems to be gone now.
Shit, I’m beginning to wonder if adventure games died just because nobody could remember what the hell an adventure game entailed.
Odds are everyone remembers those old Choose Your Own Adventure books from years back. For those of you who don’t, they were essentially kid’s books that, at certain points, gave you a choice of specific pages to turn to in order to affect the course of the story. In a way these were very similar to adventure games that were starting to, well, exist a few years before then.
A lot of what these books did goes directly against the things I talked about in my “Death in Adventure Games” post a few days back. A lot of the choices you made could end up killing you, whether or not it was logical or obvious that they would, and backtracking was as easy as keeping your thumb in the previous page, which made death fairly trivial. However, one thing can be taken away from these, and that’s the branching storyline nature that they had.
See, most adventure games are, as far as the story goes and the key events you need to accomplish, exceedingly linear. So much so that it’s rare nowadays that even talking to an NPC does anything to affect the events of the game or even your relationship with the NPC. All you really end up doing is pumping them for information in the vain hopes that it’ll help you solve a puzzle. Those aren’t NPCs, those are incredibly obtuse strategy guides.
Hilariously enough, a lot of games actually do make your relationships and conversations with NPCs affect things as well as providing you with information. Coming to mind is every Bioware game ever. While they ultimately don’t have a huge impact on the story, you can actually form functional or dysfunctional relationships with NPCs that may affect how you accomplish certain goals. Yes, the goals are still there, but how you accomplish them is different, and this is something that adventure games really should consider.
The old style of adventure games had their time in the sun and it looks like they’re making a comeback, doesn’t it? Well, not really when you consider that only one company is making them, they’re making them with a really low budget outside of product licensing in a few cases, and they’re selling them for a lot of money for very little content. While Back to the Future: Episode One isn’t a bad game, it feels extremely dated and fairly overpriced, seeing as $25 is getting you maybe two hours of gameplay. Hell, I can see a movie that’s near two hours long for $10 and get pretty much the same level of enjoyment out of it.
These games just don’t feel like, well, games anymore. They feel like really simple, blindingly obvious puzzles. The 9 piece ones you get with a really shitty kids meal at a restaurant. The only difference is that these games aren’t being sold to 4 year olds. They’re being sold to adults who, arguably, should be expecting a bit more out of a game than an incredibly simple puzzle where the only limiting factor to your success is the speed at which you can solve it.
I have a lot of recurring dreams. It’d be nice it my dreams didn’t go into reruns but I guess we ARE in a recession.
It all starts out in this 24 story office building that my father owns (in-dream) and I make a discovery that not only are the elevators prone to failure, but on several occasions some children nearly died in them. Well, I wasn’t going to let this stand, so I marched up to his office to tell him that I was going to sue him. Now, dream-father is a really powerful guy, so most lawyers are afraid to try and sue him, so what I did was introduce myself to one of the many lawyers in the lobby, say “Hi, I’m Daniel Grinton, my father runs this place, want to go meet him?”
Then the trick of it was I would take them up the 24 flights of stairs and slowly explain what was going on, until I reach the 12th floor. Then I’d tell them that I want to sue my father so they don’t have to take the stairs. This happens about 10 times before somebody finally agrees to help, at which point I take them and the families of the two children to see my father.
It… doesn’t go well. When I tell him what I’m doing he just kinda smirks and goes “Right, whatever.” and kills the lawyer. Like, right in front of me and everyone else. Using a ray he shot out of his hand. Uh… what? So everyone freaks out and runs out of the office but me. I stay and I tell him that I am going to keep bringing lawyers until he either agrees to get a proper elevator maintenance team, agrees to appear in court, or the lawyers’ families and the police start noticing that they keep vanishing. He just laughs and explains how he wouldn’t even need superpowers to exact control over this city. This freaks me out and I run out of the office.
So I keep running, at all the way down the stairs there are these weird women in white dresses and masks trying to stab me that I have to avoid. I make it to the lobby and on to a bus which drives off just in time for me to escape. I ride it for like an hour before it drops me off in the most ghetto part of town. So I ask these two women for directions and… thats’ when shit goes weird.
First, the conversation is all going normally and I’m getting a good idea of where I can go, but then my heart sends a psychic pulse (apparently my heart is mechanical) that originated from a command my father issued and the old ladies thing I’m a racist who’s going to try and rape them. Instead of being scared, they chase after me, throwing rocks and bits of sidewalk at me until I give in and start pounding on an apartment door begging to be let in.
Thanks to the age difference, and me being far more healthy than the crazy old ladies, I’ve got a good lead on them. So the door opens and this girl about my age opens and asks me what I want and I start pleading with her to let me it. She also doesn’t recognise who I am and my father didn’t send another psychic pulse so she ended up trusting me and letting me in to stay the night. I get inside and my god, her apartment is super ghetto. And I mean super ghetto to the point that somebody has stolen the door off her oven and all that’s left is the electric range.
Still, I just look around and assess everything and make the best of it. The girl is a cute, snarky, misanthropic, fairly witty girl with black hair, making her a 4/5 on the “girls I typically get along best with” scale. So I stay the night on her counch that has no cushions until the next day where she wakes me up and tells me I could have just folded the couch out into a bed. It’s always at this point I wake up.
I haven’t had this dream in like 10 years, wonder why I’m having it now.
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
It’s you, tumblrbot. You are my favourite inanimate object.
I’ve ranted a bit about adventure games in the past, mostly involving how they rarely involve any gameplay, require huge leaps of logic, and often dick you over without any real warning. The last two are the most notorious, reducing what should be logic puzzles to basic trial and error. This is one of several things that killed adventure games and, honestly, I’m not too sad to see the genre reduced to a shadow of its former self. I remember in Dark Seed how if you forgot to leave all the doors in your house open you could get a game over almost immediately. It was a dick move and there was no foreshadowing for it at all.
On the other side of that spectrum are the games where it was/is impossible to die. Whenever I say that people seem to think that I believe that the dick moves are a good alternative, even though I just said the exact opposite. I’m a firm believer that death in games, especially adventure games, could be handled well if they bothered to extend the gameplay past the standard point and click mecahnics. Of course, people say to that “BUT THAT MEANS THEY WON’T BE ADVENTURE GAMES ANYMORE.” I’m sorry, is there a reason this one genre should be exempt to innovation?
But back on to the topic of death. The main thing that brings this up is the new Back to the Future game. In it, there’s a scene where you’re getting shot at. Now, in a movie when somebody is getting shot at there is typically a bit of tension because they may, well, die. However, in Back to the Future, you can (and I’ve done this) leave that scene running while you get shot at for half an hour. This quickly takes it from tense to hilarious to pointless as all the tension drains out of the scene. It doesn’t even have a knockback effect where it just bumps you to an earlier point in the game. It just seems… pointless.
So how could death be handled effectively? Well, first off, it shouldn’t be to punish the player because he forgot to grab a shower curtain over an hour ago. Next, it shouldn’t be to punish the player for taking action that seems like a logical course of action given the circumstances but isn’t what the game wants you to do. It should also not involve the player dying because you expected them to perform a split-second action without warning or not finding a single pixel in time. Really pixel hunting as a whole should be ignored. These are the ways you SHOULDN’T kill the player.
So when should the player die? That’s actually a little tricky, but I’ll try and state it as best I can. The player should die only in situations where they clearly violate the game rules. Is there a situation where a player has been reminded that he needs to tether himself to a cable when walking outside of a spaceship? Make it so that if he doesn’t and fails to use his emergency jets in time that he drifts off into space and dies. Is the player being chased by a horrible monster that wants to eat him? Make it so that if the monster attacks him X amount of times (X being a number at the very least more than once) that he dies. However, make sure to train the player for situations where if he fails he might die.
But above all else, make sure that the death is both interesting and in a situation where it matters. If a player dies, don’t make it because he tripped over a rock or something. Make it like Thayer’s Quest (in terms of variety, not gameplay) where each death is accompanied by a fairly elaborate death scene. Also, don’t kill the player outside of a situation where he may actually die. That’s the easiest way to kill all tension in your game. It’s the easiest way to trivialize death, which takes all the fear of death out.
Finally, in a bit of hypocrisy, don’t force a player back too far if they die. Eventually they’re going to have to make it past the scene where they keep dying, so don’t make them play out everything leading up to that scene. I know this seems to conflict with the whole “don’t trivialise death” bit, but really, how long is that monster going to chase you? How many times is somebody going to shoot at you before they either run out of bullets or finally hit you? It gets downright silly in a few stories that you can just indefinitely survive a life or death situation.
But seriously, really, don’t kill the player because they drank out of a cup that you didn’t tell them was full of poison. It’s bad form.
This contains spoilers but it won’t affect your enjoyment of the movie since it’s not like the story was any good to begin with. You are a bad movie. There’s no denying it. You fail at being an effects showcase because we have to put up with bullshit philosophical ramblings and you fail at being a philosophical movie because you never bother to explore any of your plotlines. You also fail at being an action movie because there’s never any reason for me to care about what’s going on. Let’s start with Quorra and the ISOs. You know, these big important people who spontaneously formed in the Grid and are going to change everything forever? Yeah, uh… they suck. They are, effectively, the worst MacGuffin ever to grace the screen. At no point, other than being told we are supposed to care about them because they’re important, are we given the impression that they’re supposed to be important. Show it, don’t say it, movie. Maybe we’re suppose to care because Clu wants them all dead? But Clu wants a lot of things dead! Anything that doesn’t fit his example of a perfect system is worthless to him. Speaking of, Clu wants to invade the real world, but there’s a biiiiit of a problem there. The ISOs are also important because they can enter the real world, but if Clu can send an army to the real world, that ALSO makes the ISOs seem less important. That’s right, the movie itself is making its own plot elements less important.The ISOs are now not only not important because of the fact that they don’t show us why they’re important, but one of the reasons they may be important is invalidated by the plot. In fact, the entire invasion plotline makes no sense at all! There’s going to be a HUGE bottleneck as there’s only one point of entry for Clu, which he hould know thanks to the disk. But if that’s the case, his invasion would be pretty much impossible since he’d get his shit wrecked as soon as he exhibited any outward conflict. “Hey, there’s a bunch of guys here! Oh, they started to attack shit. Good thing they’re all coming from a single point of entry so we can end them.” It’s a smart villain doing something stupid. Another reason the ISOs seem less important is because of Castor. Castor may or may not be an ISO, but if he ISN’T an ISO it makes the ISOs less important. He went from a number-processing program to a nightclub owner, which is really an expression of free will. If that’s the case, why was he able to do this at all? I thought it was the ISOs that could learn, adapt, and think for themselves? If Castor does it and he’s not an ISO, it’s one less reason to care about the ISOs as a whole aside from the genocide angle. Some people have tried to use “Clu killed Castor after he helped him! He must have been an ISO!” But that’s wrong. Clu killed Castor because he outlived his usefulness and they were trying to show that Clu was a villain. Except that by then we already had a bunch of stuff showing that Clu was evil and a villain, so this just made him look like kind of a jerk and inadvertantly inserted YET ANOTHER way for this movie to make even less sense. So basically all the ISOs have now is the spontaneous generation inside a computer and the triple-helix digital DNA. So apparently this makes them immune to all disease and super-important to medical science. Except that no real conflict is introduced because of this, so it all seems kinda pointless. If the ISOs all die then all we REALLY lose are some potential benefits to medical science somewhere 20 years down the road? Okay, well, let’s look at another movie for this. In the movie Medicine Man with Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco, a species of ant is discovered that secretes a fluid that can cure cancer. In the first act they try and find what’s been curing cancer in the natives to no avail until they discover that it was these ants. It’s a fast acting cure that, if it could be properly harvested and synthesized, could cure cancer permanently. We know cancer. It has its place as a real world villain. The fact that it cure’s cancer is a BIG DEAL(tm). The tension is ramped up when the ant colony is in danger due to a logging effort. If the ants die, we lose a cure to something that kills thousands of people every year! That’s a good MacGuffin. Shitty movie, but good MacGuffin. The ISOs don’t have that. All we have is one character telling us that they’re important, another character who wants them dead for unrelated reasons, and another character who wants to get the last remaining ISO into the real world. That… uh… that’s great. Why do we care again? Oh, right. Because we were told they would change everything. We’re not actually shown any examples of how this will happen, but damnit somebody said it so it must be true! that’s a shitty MacGuffin. Shit movie, shit Macguffin. The even worse thing about all this is that you can remove ISOs from the story entirely. If you remove them from the story you instead end up having the plot being a race to stop Clu from invading the real world. Ignoring the bottleneck issue for a moment, that’s a decent way to put something big at stake. We don’t even have to SEE the invasion for that. We’ve got Clu’s (admittedly tiny) army ready to fuck our shit up and start killing people. All of a sudden everything is a lot more tense, especially because we aren’t being forced to focus on the incredibly poorly implemented ISO storyline. You know how focusing on stupid shit that nobody cares about because it was so poorly written and then shoehorning in boring, no-tension action scenes pretty much made the Star Wars prequels unwatchable piles of shit? Yeah. That’s exactly what this movie is doing. Fuck Tron: Legacy.
I’ll be mirroring my blaaagh here as soon as I get the time to mirror everything here.
