Emergent gameplay in Far Cry 2 and STALKER4

“Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in games that arise from simple mechanics. For example, in many FPS games the physics of a rocket launcher will cause things to be pushed away from it. For years gamers have been using the propulsion of a rockets explosion below them to increase jump height.”

        There’s a simple explanation, but the article goes on to really neat thing like AI and how awesome AI can affect how you react to the world of the game you’re playing. Hearing a guard talk with his buddy, then crawl away from you after you mercilessly begin gunning them down, makes a game feel less like a game and more like a world. When a game feels like a world, as in Far Cry 2 and STALKER, it lends itself to “living” in that world rather than merely “playing” it as a game. You can play Far Cry 2 as a game by messing around, reloading if you die, etc. etc. The usual stuff. You can “live” in the world by doing a perma-death run: if your character dies, you start over. No questions asked. So instead of just shooting rocket launchers at your feet, you have to pay attention, sneak through the jungle, and be sure not to piss anyone off too badly.

        Simpler, linear games don’t lend themselves to this kind of gameplay. Could you really “live” in the world of Final Fantasy XIII? Not really. The story just doesn’t allow you to do that. You might look at a game with a modern setting, like Grand Theft Auto, and think you could live in that world - but when you try to follow the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto, you suddenly realize that the game was designed for you to speed through traffic because everything is so incredibly far away. That’s why it’s so special that you can sit down with Far Cry 2 and simply be a mercenary in Africa. Whether or not it was designed that way, we’ll never know, but much like rocket jumping, chances are it wasn’t something the developers thought about as they were making the game. It’s just something that happened to pop up.

        So the fact that Far Cry 2 and STALKER have that kind of gameplay are why, in his opinion, they’re some of the most important games of this generation. I absolutely believe that we’ll see more sophisticated games in the same vein, with even more random realism (like guards helping their wounded comrades, or freaking out when they see you and you suddenly disappear into the trees) where simple little pieces of code change the game in a huge way. It’s just a question of when. I don’t know if it will be the norm, though, because it takes a lot less work to carefully restrict a player’s control and influence over the world so that you know exactly what they’ll experience. Pretty much everyone who plays Final Fantasy XIII will have the exact same experience as I did. But no playthrough of Far Cry 2 or STALKER will be exactly the same, and it has nothing to do with things like picking a different character class, race, or gender in the RPG vein. Some people may rush through the game and just play the key storyline missions, while others will do things like perma-death runs and enjoy the game in completely different ways.

        If you think about the way people react differently to novels, or paintings - socially accepted forms of “art” - based on their own personal experiences, you’d be hard-pressed not to qualify these games as art.

Well, it was inevitable, although I’m hoping to reverse it for tomorrow and the next few days. I forgot about my video games and got caught up in the internet again. You know what that means: link dump! I’ll try to provide a bit of a summary so you don’t have to read it all and stuff. I just can’t not share it, that’s all. And I have stuff I want to write for you and for someone specific but I can’t do that if I write an essay about the internet, so I’ll let the guys who wrote about it already take care of that. Without further ado, today’s topic is basically The Web vs The Internet.

        The Web: Your Firefox or your Chrome or your Opera or even Internet Explorer, working through your desktop, or possibly your phone, or laptop, or other somewhat mobile device. This is the HTML and the websites, the facebook and the google and all that. Increasingly, people are just using iPhone apps rather than using their computers for the easy stuff.

        The Internet: The stuff behind the web pages. The ability to transfer data, being connected, the thing that gets your iPhone apps and makes them work.

        So Wired has a bright orange magazine this month declaring that “The Web Is Dead.” Despite the sensationalist cover (how could I possibly avoid looking at that?), when I went online to check out the articles (while I had to look, it was very easy not to buy - sorry, guys) I found out that their true headline was “The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet.” Their argument is that people using iPhone apps rather than an iPhone internet browser to get what they want (facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, whatever online content) proves that The Web is over and the infrastructure of The Internet is the true innovation. I’m not sure where I stand on that. I find the debate over open innovation (open-source, free stuff) vs closed walls (careful control, paying for stuff) much more interesting than their shambling almost-an-argument about how the simple iPhone and iPad somehow disprove The Web as a thing that has value. Read what you like, judge it yourself, and carry on with your life.

        The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet - split into two columns of “we are to blame” and “they are to blame,” which probably looks really nice in print, this article tries to go at their argument from both (?) points of view. Blame ourselves for choosing the iPhone over our PCs, or blame Steve Jobs for being a big fat greedy jerk and making the iPhone. Or something. I don’t recall this even being a debate, or there being any point of view, so this article tries to say some things but ultimately it’s probably more valuable as a source of debate than an actual article. Maybe you’ll see some gleaming diamond of an argument in there that went completely over my head after an hour spent reading other articles.

        The Web Is Dead? A Debate - an e-mail conversation/argument that circles itself, develops a third head, and yet somehow continues to be engaging throughout, this debate (article?) spans a whole host of topics from “open Web” and “closed Internet” to economic factors and the inability of old-school sensibilities to thrive online. I wonder if an important (or so I assume) magazine guy is the right person to debate a paid iPhone magazine app vs a free online website paid for by advertising dollars. He wouldn’t participate in their rush to make money off of an app if he hadn’t already been disappointed with the way TV advertising ideas have failed to turn a profit online. But that’s just a small section of this; I think the core idea is the “dance” or cycle between open and closed, innovation and profit, where too much of either leads to a surge in the other. Too much open, non-profit development and you get a lot of people making money on iPhone apps. Too much closed iPhone development, you get a lot of people throwing their stuff out for free and trying new things.

        How the Web Wins - amidst a radical declaration that The Web is now archaic, one man steps out to let everyone know that people are developing The Web so that it can compete with those crazy kids in the app store. He says that The Web will grow from competition, and simply by knowing someone developing a browser-based game I know he’s telling the truth. Not to mention, as a player of browser-based games, I’ve seen stuff like Ruby On Rails that would boggle the mind of a boy who grew up on HoboWars and other html driven games. It’s a quick read, but he has a point.

        So there you go. You be the judge. I don’t own an iPhone, and I probably won’t for a very long time, so I’m almost entirely removed from this big debate. I still use The Web, and I will for the conceivable future. I know that a lot of people are making a lot of money with apps, but that’s just the way that it goes. I like what I’ve got going here, and I’m not going to spend a large sum of money to change that.

Interview with a senior producer of The Witcher 24

I would title this post after the name of the article, but I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea. This post is, really, about The Witcher and that’s the important bit. The Witcher was a great PC RPG meant to hearken back to the “good old days” of PC gaming. The Witcher: Enhanced Edition was a free update for anyone who had bought the original game, making the game even better and working in user feedback. Now The Witcher 2 is meant to incorporate user feedback even more, to make a bigger, better game and give the people what they want.

In this case, the people seem to want an amazing story with nothing but grey morality choices. No good faction and evil faction, no karma system, no imaginary numbers that tell you just how terrible or nice you are. The first game did this pretty well. But it’s the writing that’s really special. They actually have writers writing this stuff, and writing it in the original Polish and in English more or less at the same time rather than slapping together a translation later on. I know big games like Mass Effect and whatnot have dedicated writers, but for these guys to dedicate their limited resources on some damn fine dialogue and plot sequences is great to hear.

I never buy PC games, simply because I find very few I want to play. It’s just not the form of input I grew up with, I guess. But I’m going to buy The Witcher 2 anyway because I want these people to have my money and make good games and listen to their fans and continue to be awesome.

Do you like A Game of Thrones yet? I certainly hope so. However, if gigantic fantasy books aren’t your thing, HBO is working on a television series. Please watch it and then you will like A Game of Thrones and then you can come back to these links.

Alternatively if you really like languages you’d also be interested in these. The basic gist is that a guy was hired to create a language for the Dothraki people (which didn’t exist in the books per se) for the TV series. Many people are the kinds of nerds who’d want to learn a fantasy language (or probably another, to supplement their in-depth knowledge of Klingon), and so they have rallied to support this new and exciting language. One guy in particular wants to challenge those people by creating an inhuman language that breaks as many of the natural human language patterns as possible. Amazingly enough, the guy who created the language responded, basically just saying that it was too little, too late and also that humans should speak like humans. It wouldn’t really make sense to create an abnormal human language for normal humans.

Fantasy TV in the service of science (part one - the challenge)

The Dothraki response to a call for science in a created language (part two - the reply)

Videogames and the pursuit of harmless entertainment4

Let me make this abundantly clear: I want you to read this, eventually, if you have any interest in the gaming industry, or even any entertainment industry.

I don’t care if you don’t have time for it today. Bookmark it. Check it out tomorrow.

I haven’t been saying much lately but I’ll be back. I’m working on finally finishing FF X. It’ll be the third Final Fantasy game I stopped playing 10-15 hours short of its conclusion that I’ve finished in the past couple of weeks, and honestly, I’m kinda proud of myself. I’ll see how far I am in FF X-2, and decide from there whether I want to move to handheld games or finish that. FF IV Advance needs to be finished off, and I found my copy of FF V Advance that was lost in our couch for five years. I might actually finish them before turning 85.

Link dump for now folks. Post coming later. I’ll try not to make this too long, because there’s plenty for you to read here.

The Citizen Kane of Gaming: a debate that has been raging across the internet, though you may not have noticed because you may not spend time around people who care about Citizen Kane. Arguments on the subject have largely died down, and I haven’t read anything so amazing it HAD to be shared (in fact I’ve been avoiding the subject because it is a stupid argument often full of stupid people - METROID PRIME TRILOGY IS CITIZEN KANE OF GAMING, SERIOUSLY) but I’ll share these two with you today because they’re not dumb.

  • Rosebud Was His Horse - real purpose of the term “Citizen Kane of Gaming” is a game that accomplishes the same level of mastery and storytelling, but the argument is dumb so stop it
  • Keep On Asking About Citizen Kane - no, argument is worth having, because someone will make a game that good

The Disc Is Not Enough: trying to combat used game sales by making a new game worth more than a used one, and how on-disc DLC is a nice bonus, but not the greatest solution.

Size Doesn’t Matter Day: indie devs declare that short games are good too, some even admit that they may be wrong and that it’s possible gamers at large really do think short games are bad and will hate any game that only lasts a few hours no matter how good it is. There’s a lot to read here and maybe your favourite indie dude wrote about it. Most of these posts contain links to every other post on the subject, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find others to read. I’ll link the ones I read, starting with the one that sent me off to read all of these things in the first place. Check out others and let me know if they’re great!

  • The Long Game - long games can still be good games, even if most people don’t finish them, and long games should still be made for those few people who do make it all the way
  • Judging Games On Length - how and why people start to think length matters in a game, and how it can be hurtful - if you read only one, read this
  • Why Aren’t Video Games Satisfying? - giant video games take forever to do anything good, and sometimes do nothing good at all, aka the argument everyone has against FF XIII, that they shouldn’t have to play a 10 chapters of tutorial in order to get three good ones afterwards
  • Size Doesn’t Matter Day - ramblings on who thinks what, and why, about different types of games and their length - bonus scary thought about getting old and never playing video games ever nooooo
  • Too Short - World of Good dev calls out lazy reviewers who say a game is “too short” and simply lower the score, rather than explaining that it didn’t handle its ending well or that they wish there was more to play

There’s what I read this morning! Now I stop reading for the rest of the day! Goodbye for now!

Jesse Schell on the future integration of gaming and technology into our daily lives. It’s nearly half an hour long, but stick with it. He starts off a little slow - blah blah facebook numbers - but then your mind will be blown. It may not be a huge, catastrophic mind=blown, but when you think about it, you’ll realize just how crazy this stuff is. Maybe you’re freaked out that Big Brother seems inevitable. Maybe you’re excited because you’re going to be the one making this stuff. But if you can watch that and not feel much about it, you clearly don’t know enough about technology.

Speaking of exactly that, fuck yeah to-do list RPG!

I actually had that talk bookmarked to watch for a couple of months and hadn’t gotten around to it. Now I have, and I am glad that article reminded me of it.

In other news, a USB Dongle claims to turn your PS3 into a debug console, allowing it to copy games to external (and internal) harddrive for playback. Not to mention homebrew shenanigans. Will it actually work? Who knows. Either it REQUIRES a debug console, or it makes your console INTO a debug console. The internet can’t quite decide. Anyway, it’s $170 AU, and I’m too lazy to google up a conversion for that, but suffice to say it’s probably not worth your money just yet. Hell, I spent $80 getting an R4 (a thing for pirated DS games) that couldn’t accept a MicroSD bigger than 2 gb. What a caveman I was. Now you get flashcarts with built-in processors, allowing emulation of GBA, SNES, and more, not to mention xvid video playback and e-reader capability. Did I mention that it plays DS games, too? It lets you save text files as walkthroughs and access them as an overlay while playing the game. My god, the future, it has arrived.

Alleged PS3 Jailbreak here. Comments have more info and stuffs if you’re really interested.

Meanwhile, Engadget is disappoint that magical Sharpie is not so magical after all. Reminds me that I should buy some eraseable pens to circumvent my terrible, terrible handwriting. Not that it will improve how I write, but it will be easier to see. Legible? That’s questionable.

No More Heroes 2, and Final Fantasy XIII

On the 26th of January, 2010, No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle was released in North America for the Wii. I purchased it with glee, and played it for around ten hours before realizing that I simply could not complete the strength training minigames near the end of the game with the basic Wiimote. It didn’t feel smooth enough, the buttons were awkward. So I stopped playing the game and waited for the release of the black Classic Controller Pro on April 20th, the release date of Monster Hunter Tri. This I also purchased gladly, an investment perhaps. Yet I never picked up No More Heroes 2 until this afternoon. August 17th, 2010, I managed to finish No More Heroes 2 in a matter of hours. An hour, or more, of that was spent collecting money to pay for strength training, and then practising constantly in 30 second bouts of painful 8-bit torture. When I finally maxed out my strength, the remaining bosses fell in quick succession. The second form of the final boss was brutally irritating, but not difficult. Certainly nothing compared to the true final boss of the first game. Thus, with sore biceps from hours of frantic waggling, I’ve finished a game I’ve owned for nearly eight months.

        Next step is to read the four Destructoid articles I bookmarked analyzing the metaphors in the game.

        After that? Looks like I might be exploring the abandoned ruins of an advanced civilization in Final Fantasy XIII. Last night, I thought I was done with the game, and felt that another dozen hours of grinding on top of the sixty I’d already spent on the core storyline might simply be a waste. Sure, there were missions and bits of flavour text to collect, but why would I spend time increasing numbers in a digital world I hardly care about? Trophies aside, there would simply be no reward. Not to mention the guilt over time wasted. Yes, I know I haven’t unlocked any of the ultimate weapons. I haven’t even killed a nigh-on immortal dinosaur whose little toe is twice my height. Fighting ten random battles to gain one stat boost, one out of some two dozen left, would be such a huge waste of time in exchange for being able to say that I had nothing better to do than collect digital trinkets. There are, to my knowledge, no flashy, secret bosses in Final Fantasy XIII. At least not like the secret bosses of old. There are enemies with obscene amounts of health, and there are missions that require you to defeat enemies with obscenely high stats, but aside from the correct choice of party members there is rarely any preparation involved. The fact is that these things aren’t difficult; they don’t require any amount of skill. Just an investment of time, so that your numbers are big enough to take on the numbers of the enemy.

        Thinking of the endgame in such a negative way was depressing for me, especially because I really liked the rest of the game. Fully prepared to hate it and shut the game off for good, I looked up a guide to the endgame content to see what I had left to do. I knew there was a mission that unlocked chocobo riding, so I tried to look for that. Only it was in an area I had never heard of. Wait a second - in an almost exclusively linear game, I missed an area? It must just be that it was so unimpressive that I forgot its name. So I set out to find this area and complete the couple of missions I actually wanted to do.

        Imagine my surprise when I walk over the top of a hill and see the sun rising over the cracked and shifted concrete remains of a Gran Pulsian city. Imagine New York City after a devastating, cataclysmic earthquake. Roads thrown upwards to create cliffs, buildings toppled, street signs sticking out randomly from the ground. Flying above it all, giant birds, larger than a full grown man. If you’ve seen Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, take some of the ruins of Midgar, mix it with the desolation and industrial look of Edge, and then craft a playable area out of that. That’s what I would have missed if I had quit Final Fantasy XIII without giving it another chance.

        I didn’t even go in to complete my mission. I back out, saved my game, and turned off the system and went to go run errands. I’m saving it for tomorrow when I have more time.

        I don’t believe I’ll grind my way through all of the post-game content, but I will do what I can at my current power level. When I run into an enemy that’s just too powerful for me, I’m done. If I’m lucky, I’ll get enough experience points from the missions up to that point to pull through without having to spend time grinding.

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        Yesterday, I planned for this to lead into a discussion of “worth” and “value” in terms of how free time is spent, but a bit of work on that topic has led me to believe that this is better split up so it isn’t excessively long. I will work on posting that tonight, or sometime tomorrow. It’s all very meta because then the worth of time spent on writing for tumblr comes into play and stuff. See you next time, folks.

        Oh, and I read those articles about No More Heroes 2 and that was cool but there were supposed to be seven and only four were finished. Oh well. I know what that’s like. I also read about comorbid depression in children with ADHD, which will get its own post after I post fewer giant posts, and about the impossibility of “converting” homosexual into heterosexuals. Also has a sentence about the belief that homosexual relationships are somehow different from heterosexual ones. Article from Psychiatric Times here.

        Oh, and if you actually read what I wrote about essays a few days ago - note the passive voice. Note it and notice how hard it can be to figure out what they’re saying, how you may feel tempted to skip through the fluffy bits that don’t actually present or evaluate any actual information.