A little late coming, but here is my short selection of photos from the 2011 Game Developer Awards at GDC in San Francisco. Still searching for a good photo of Tim Schafer…a lot were fuzzy from me laughing so hard during a slow shutterspeed.

More photos can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davefeltham/sets/72157626729961146/

Trying out the Flickr WordPress plugin.

During our visit to Vancouver Island last year we were enjoying an ice-cream on the beach of the Strait of Georgia when some paddle boarders came by, just as the sun was making it’s way down.

1. Publicize Do not Disturb Times
2. The bathroom isn’t always for business, it is also for quiet time.
3. Be firm but friendly to get your point across. A raised eyebrow for emphasis.
4. Never pick up after other people or they will never learn.
5. You will always become your parents.
6. Whenever you have a craving, the food in question is almost always taken by someone else.
7. Your attention is always wanted. Close your eyes and breathe before snapping. And also wear short sleeves.
8. Discuss grown-up things in a separate closed room.
9. You will never get nap time.
10. There is always time for random goofing off.

Mafia: City of Lost Heaven. There’s a game that can call up such praise and such indifference in the same forum topic. Released originally on PC in 2002 (and then ported poorly to the PS2 and original Xbox), the game was brushed aside as a Grand Theft Auto knockoff. But the similarities end with that  it’s a 3rd person open world City game, and I’d argue that Grand Theft Auto IV was heavily influenced by the cinematic storyweaving that the Illusion Softworks (now 2k Czech) team did here.

But this article isn’t about Mafia, it’s about its sequel. Mafia II, released this year, was, for the precursor’s fans, more of the same, but ‘Next Generation’.  It tells the story of a young man pulled into the mob in post-war America, a story that pulls threads from Goodfellas, Sleepers, American Gangster and the bible of mafias, The Godfather. And this is where the game shines: Mafia II tells a tale that builds 3 dimensional characters, that creates an intriguing story that has you sympathizing with Vito, with Joe. You cringe at some parts and smile at others. It is an interactive film about one man’s life in the mafia.

What about for those not familiar with the original City of Lost Heaven?….is this a game for them? Actually I’m not sure. And this is the problem that Mafia and it’s franchise will always have: where is its audience? Its gunplay, while fun, doesn’t live up to it’s competitors; it doesn’t really have a gameplay hook; it’s the only one of it’s kind that tells the type of early 20th century mafia tales us boys like to read about, but is that enough to pull in the ranks? Probably not.

On the surface Mafia II is nothing special. It doesn’t play with the big boys for combat; it lacks an interesting hook or twist on content; between the linear story and unbalanced boss fights it doesn’t, at times, seem to understand what it’s audience wants (I get now why reviewers didn’t feel that it was open ended: I think I started every mission being told to get somewhere really fast!). But the sad thing is that Mafia II  really is special. Like Red Dead, it brings to life a world that none of us lived in. A world that had just raged war; a world optimistic for it’s future; a world at peace. The game opens with you coming home from the war in the dead of winter. I was in awe when I was given control. This was like being in my home town, Toronto, on King Street at Christmastime. It is busy. People are bustling forward, eyes down, bursting with packages and bags. Someone’s car has broken down and nobody is helping her. A vender is selling hotdogs and the steam and smoke from his cart blocks the view behind him. There’s construction somewhere…the next street down maybe? Sounds like they’re ready to be done with their shift and want to go home to a warm meal. The snow gently sways and floats in front of me and somewhere Bing Crosby is crooning to a room full of hushed girls.

That’s pretty phenomenal that a game can get that kind of environmental emotion from just one scene.

So you don’t play Mafia II for anything new in gameplay or combat. You play, like its father, for a great cinematic story and great characters. You play for the best character in the cast, the city of Empire Bay.

Why I never played Bully

I never got around to playing Bully: it was a PS2 port and when I was gathering games to play on my newly purchased Xbox360, the last thing I wanted to do was play a previous-generation game on the ‘Next’ Generation.  When my interest had finally peaked after numerous industry recommendations it was impossible to find in the stores.

Why I wanted to play Bully

Obviously the main reason was because it was a Rockstar game. While I’ve said before how I’m not a fan of GTA III, Vice City or San Andreas, the last 2 outings from Rockstar have been quite good. On top of that it’s from the usually quiet studios of Rockstar Vancouver and Toronto (though my understanding is that Toronto just worked on the port and had nothing to do with the design of the game). The idea of Grand Theft Auto, but in high school, has a certain appeal. And if you look at the timeline of Rockstar games, this is one of the games that comes in between the previous generation outings of GTAIII and Red Dead Redemption. This game could very well be a stepping point.

And my first impressions were…

Well…there’s one thing you can say about games that have come out in the last 3 years, and that’s developers have certainly learned how to successfully allocate textures and polys. But that’s a little unfair because Bully was intended for a previous generation and the port was slated to be simply a console-porting, nothing new. So I swallowed the ratty textures and blaring polygons — but then was slammed with simplistic level design and a poor sense of place. I was pretty sure at this point that I wasn’t going to be able to get through the rest of the game.

Why I finished it

I persevered…and though the design of the game was simplistic I realized that this game was actually filling a hole, a need, that I hadn’t realize existed. Apparently the inner me was dying for some RPG-like action game that didn’t involve guns or swords. I mean Bully is a game that has absolutely ZERO deaths in it. Is that a first in the last 2 generations of games? It could very well be. But once the world opens up and the game gives the player some progression in what they can do, opening up jobs, stores and a variety in places and sidemissions, I really started to feel a rhythm in the game. I didn’t necessarily want to know what was going to happen with the story, as the story is probably the weakest aspect of this game. I desperately wanted to get 100% and get all the easy-t0-get achievements. There’s something to say about actually achieveable Achievements that don’t force you to go online. Most of all I wanted to win.

What I hated

A late-in-the-game Stealth Mission. Nothing screams last generation than having a new level that introduces a new, poorly implemented mechanic like Stealth, or taking away your weapons. I also didn’t like that the game lacked a Saturday or Sunday: sometimes I felt like this game was mimicking the limits of my own personal time in Real Life. And finally the story: the purported antagonist was missing through literally 1/2 of the game!

Bonus Points For

Teaching me some Geography and including a rhythm-based music class.

Why you should play it

I’m not sure you need to. Bully does something that very few games are able to do: remove the need for guns, killing or adult jokes and have an involving and fun game. It provides a cool spin on the GTA formula and some fun aspects of childhood made into devilishly fun game experiences. But this game is hardly a must-buy because time has not treated this game well at all: it falls to the trappings of design implementations that we, as an industry, have learned don’t work and ignores the emotional involvement that so many games achieved.

SENSE OF PLACE
In Oblivion I felt like I was in Cyrodiil: the forests were living entities, the land huge and varied and I felt like this place could exist … until I arrived in the sparse cities and talked to citizens. With it’s forced and unflattering conversation camera, stilted voice acting I was immediately pulled out of the world. In Fable II, a game that is very similar to Red Dead Redemption on many fronts, the situation was the same: look at a character or try and ‘interact’ with one and the game made you very aware that that’s what it was: a game.
Red Dead Redemption is the exact definition of Verisimiltude in gaming. Like Oblivion, the land feels alive: animals are everywhere, the locations varied. Mexico at night feels very different from the bleak and bleached Mexico of the day. The beautiful stillness of Tall Trees and the northern reaches of the mountains is an awe-inspired sight: Sometimes I fire up the game to just travel up there.
Each town has its own character: McFarlane’s Farm has a barren sadness about it; Armadillo is a gutted but alive dirty monster; and BlackWater has the sterile and ordered foreshadowing of what many cities later in that century would become. And one of the main things about Red Dead Redemption which sets it apart from other games that try and capture the feeling of a living town, sandbox-style or not, is that each character feels internally connected to the city. Any cityboy will tell you that you can stop in the main artery of a street of a city they are from and point out characters and formulate how they are connected to the city. Not even Grand Theft Auto IV or what we did in Mass Effect 2 did this to the extent that Red Dead Redemption did. GTA IV had far too many characters that were just background noise: they didn’t have any more life than the flags hoisted on the flagpoles of hotels in that game. They were there to make the city feel alive, yet they didn’t feel alive at all. In ME2 the characters you could talk to in Omega felt completely connected to that location, but the other characters felt stilted and were no more alive than the neon signs that buzzed around. In Red Dead each character had a purpose in that city and you got to know these characters the more you visited these locations. Now the reduced number of pawns compared to GTA and the simplistic interaction compared to ME2 helped in that: the team could develop the personalities of these characters — what they did and when — a lot easier and without as much overhead. But Sam and the team at Rockstar were smart: it isn’t what you say to characters, that establishes relationships in real life, it’s how you interact with them.

Let’s look at some of my experiences as an example. I visited Armadillo a lot in the game: how could you not — it was the center of New Austin and had the most varied amount of shops.  I took to playing poker just about every night and one of the people in that poker game was Herbert Moon. Well wouldn’t you know that the bastard was always winning. And wouldn’t you know that at 10am when I would get up from those drinks and that poker game and go pick up some chewing tobacco from the local shop he would voice his usual hateful anti-Semitic comments. When he was robbed — and he was frequently robbed — I had to stop myself before helping him cos I was sure that that smug bastard was always laughing about  my bad poker playing. “Too bad about that game last night Marsden.” But yet I always helped him. I hated Herbert Moon, yet I always looked forward to seeing him at our poker games.

Now let’s look at how this relationship was established. I never had a conversation with him. I never did a mission with him other than random robbery events. My interaction boiled down to him simply being at a poker game, and the game being coded to react to me if we did, and if he won (which he always did). It’s a small thing, but I felt like I had more of a connection with him than I did with any character in Oblivion.

The game is filled with reaction: reaction to what you did, do and where you went. If I went the righteous path, there was a simple change in how people reacted to me when I arrived. As I progressed through the game, the newspaper boys and the townsfolk would react and comment on some of my larger actions or the events that were happening in, say, Mexico. If I shot a lot of Elk in Tall Trees, it would be some time before more Elk showed up. If I accidentally shot a civilian in a shootout in a town, a lot of the townsfolk would run, like in GTA or sometimes they’d come and inspect the body. But occasionally a gunslinger would pull his gun on me.  If I didn’t holster, he’d start shooting and I’d loose honor if I killed him. One time I lassoed and hogtied a woman (for a certain achievement, it was completely out of character for me) and because I didn’t have my gun out, and it was in a bar, one of the guys in the bar started spitting at me and came up and cuffed me in the ear as I was carrying the woman out.
The point is: the world is alive and reacts to you, through scripted events in the story, and through dynamic reactions. The characters are given little nuances and combined with the high quality of voice acting, models and animation they feel alive. They feel alive. You don’t need long conversations with random people to make people seem real; to pull you into the world. In fact that is so unlike the real world that involving yourself with an arguing couple about what to do with an unborn child pulls you out. Small details that might seem unimportant details like lighting, camera work, voice acting and virtual acting all combine to help keep the player grounded in your world. Red Dead Redemption, while being a game that had very little to do with the citizens of the world has managed to keep that grounding, to keep the player so immersed in the world through a reactive world. And it’s that reactiveness that gamers, critics, and fans will always be referencing in games to come.

(The next article on Red Dead Redemption will focus on gameplay immersion and diversity)

Thanks Jameson!

http://jamesondurall.blogspot.com/2010/06/what-does-game-designer-actually-do.html

With the arrival of Alan Wake this week, a game that claims to be deep in the horror genre,  ’Horror Games’ are once again on the tips of every gamers tongue. And while this game has yet to reach my hands, and I’ve yet to make a judgement, I’ve been thinking about, and investigating, the types of Horror Games that have been released over the last 2 decades. And while taking an in depth look at each of these games is beyond the scope of this article, a cursory glance and criticism of some of the more popular horror games begs to be written.

Take Dead Space. On paper it should be the type of game made for me: mutated creatures, space, death by dismemberment. Silent Hill too. But these games fall to the same problems that so many horror films fall victim to: because they don’t know what horror should be, they try to recreate the elements of what current pop-culture tells us what a horror movie (and game) should be. They don’t understand or know how to shock the psyche of the gamer, and because they are trapped by the very definitions of what a modern game is, they contrast their frightening jumps with a lack of anything happening at all.

In Dead Space you are alone, trapped on a space-ship infested by aliens that were once human. The ship is quiet, but occasionally monsters jump out at you. That’s the premise, but here’s the problem: what is horrific about humans turning into monsters, if you’ve never met these humans before. What’s terrifying about a quiet spaceship if you’ve never seen it bustling with activity? What is at the core of good horror is context: the Dog Monster at the beginning of The Thing is terrifying not only because it is grotesque, bloody and just strange to the crew of Outpost #31, it is because it used to be the dog that we were introduced to at the beginning of the film. The Norris monster is absolutely terrifying because shit man, that was Norris not 3 minutes ago! In Dead Space there is nobody in the ship that I can connect with: every human I connect with is done through glass, or through communications and video recordings. Nobody is left in the ship and I have no context as to what this strange place was like before. Ridley Scott’s Alien introduces us to the Nostromo as a ship that is fully functional and we see it running in its day to day. So when an alien infiltrates the crew what was safe is now unsafe: it is the predatory grounds for something to which we the audience have never seen before: and it’s in the area that the characters deemed safe.

But it’s not just about giving context. Alien, Jaws and The Thing and any H.P. Lovecraft story all have a deep-rooted theme that the situation is exploiting. Alien is the fear of the unknown; The Thing asks what would you do if you couldn’t trust the  people you were trapped with; Jaws looks at our fear of sharks. What theme is Dead Space or Condemned trying to explore? Most of these games seem to be trying to mimic what was succesful about successful horror movies.

Dead Space and games like it also fall prey to what they think will heighten the fear of a game. In a movie you always fear for the survival of the main character – in Alien it’s Ripley. In a game the point is to survive, so the player knows that there is never a danger of the main character permanently dying. Instead Visceral Games and developers like them relying on ammo and save point mechanics to heighten the fear: you will always be afraid of not having ammo and you’ll have the fear of having to redo an entire section of a game because you cannot save your game except where the developer tells you to. Unfortunately this goes against the root of all sound game design: never frustrate the player. And really it doesn’t make any logical sense: if the player is conserving ammo, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having the player kill all creatures with the weapons you provided? And why on earth would you punish a player by having them repeat, sometimes over and over, a long section of gameplay that really, you only intended them to play once?

While a poor game in implementation, I think Alone in the Dark had the idea right when it comes to weapons: if you have the player create the weapons themselves then you elevate the fear not by running out of ammo with which to kill your enemies, you limit the player in what they can build by what parts are available to the player. Sorry, looks like you can only attack this creature with a can of spray and a lighter. Pretty brilliant when you think of it. And Dead Rising had the same idea: the entire mall is full of weapons you can utilize, so the fear doesn’t come from will you have enough ammo to get rid of these monsters that you must kill, it’s will this item I just picked up be enough to take out the zombies that are attacking me. Unfortunately Dead Rising’s mechanic and enjoyment was completely exorcised by it’s horrible savepoint system; a system in which you must run to the bathroom to save over your only save point. For many it drove players away because the mechanic was taxing and drove you out of the gameplay.

We’ve seen many attempts at getting horror right. And some fans of Silent Hill or Resident Evil might argue that I just don’t get Survival horror. My counter-argument is that Survival horror, based on Japanese minimalist and psychological horror, doesn’t have a place in games, especially in the current market where action reigns the dollar. The point of a game is to entertain, and you can’t entertain if you don’t have anything happen. And by no means do I think that the solution is to go with the current fad of slasher horror: Rockstar’s Manhunt showed that the gaming community had no interest in that. Instead we need to look where a player feels the safest and jump them there; we need to look at building up relationships with other digital actors, and literally rip them apart. We need to take those situations and make important thematic messages about environmental degradation, a collapsing economy, war, universal health care and poverty because the best horror movies — Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Jaws, Nightmare of Elm Street —  do just that. Right now our industry is trying to find it’s footing and discover what is a money maker and what is not, and until they do there won’t be many publishers and developers willing to risk the money the way that George Romero, FW Murnau and John Carpenter did.