Author Archives: admin

Cubik 22: right in motion

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According to a phonecall this afternoon, now confirmed by the Perplex City website, the Receda Cube has been found and a Perplex City player is now £100,000 richer. Which explains what I was doing in the conference room of Bradford City FC today giving a PowerPoint presentation about ARGs which had Dan Hon (COO of Mind Candy, producers of Perplex City)’s name on its first page and which I hadn’t known about 48 hours previously, while Dan was in London opening champagne.

What that means—the Cube-finding bit, not the PowerPoint bit—is that the world’s first ARG not supported by a major brand, the first ARG created to generate revenue instead of spending someone else’s, has just proved the worth of its business model. And hurrah, it’s British.

Very serious congratulations to everyone at Mind Candy. Roll on Season 2, reportedly starting 1st March.

Party invite, pretty please?

Second Person singular

Posted by under narrative

It’s official: I’ve had an RPG published by MIT Press.

My author copy of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin) arrived today, and it’s a goodie. Four hundred pages of essays and discussions on all aspects of interactive narrative, story-telling and character in games and games design, written by a veritable B to Z of industry notables, from Ian Bogost to Eric Zimmerman.

Cover of Second Person from MIT

In between there’s the likes of George R. R. Martin, Kim Newman, Jordan Mechner, Chris Crawford and Steve Meretzky—and old muckers of mine like Greg Costikyan, John Tynes, Jonathan Tweet, Ken Hite and Rebecca Borgstrom. (In fact, harking back to the last post, there’s two Diana Jones winners in here, and five members of the DJA committee. Go us.)

I have two pieces in Second Person: a paper on a design methodology for games that create stories as part of their gameplay (e.g. Dark Cults, Once Upon a Time, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen), and an abridged but playable reprint of the latter game. In fact there’s three RPGs in the book: Greg Costikyan’s Bestial Acts is also included, alongside John Tynes’ Puppetland which I had the honour of publishing as a New Style game, back in the Hogshead days. In fact John, Greg and I wrote the first three of the five New Style games. Excuse me if I grin like a Cheshire cat.

Before I saw the book I was a little afraid that its tone would be as dry as First Person (MIT, 2004) which is hard work for those of us who’ve been out of academia for twenty years, and that my piece would make me look like a yokel as a result. I’ve only dipped and skimmed so far, but it all looks accessible for those of us who don’t speak fluent academe, and with really meaty thought-provoking content. I seem to have more pages overall than anyone else in the book—it’s not just Munchausen‘s fault, my paper is one of the longest too—and I’m not yet convinced that I’ve avoided yokel status. But Second Person will still be taking pride of place on my Shelf of Smug for some time to come.

Second Person is probably the definitive work on the development and state of the art in narratology (plus some guff about games that make stories). If you take games seriously then you should at least check out the book’s website which… uh, doesn’t seem to be up yet. Okay, then you should definitely drop $40 on this handsome 400-page hardback. Amazon.co.uk has it for £20.50.

(List of contributors here; introduction as downloadable PDF here.)

Diana Jones Award

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Nominations are now open for the 2007 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming.

I set up the DJA in 2000, mostly out of frustration with the Origins Awards, which at the time were the premier awards in the hobby-games field and which were horribly broken. (They are no longer the premier hobby-game awards, having been eclipsed by the Ennies, but are still horribly broken.) Whereas the Ennies are populist, with multiple winners chosen by votes from the interested public, the DJA was created to be something different - more of a Nobel prize to the others’ Peoples’ Choice: a single winner instead of a spread, chosen from the entire field of hobby-gaming by a (mostly) anonymous committee of games-industry alumni and illuminati. And while the Origins used to have its short-lists chosen by the ‘Academy’ and then voted on by the public (it’s since repositioned itself more along the lines of the Oscars, only broken), the DJA works the other way round: we take nominations from the public, and then vote on them in secret to create first a shortlist and then an eventual winner.

Anything within hobby-gaming is eligible for nomination and the winners have been gratifyingly diverse: Peter Adkison and Jordan Weisman have both received the DJA, as have three RPGs, a boardgame and the charitable efforts of Irish games conventions. It looks like 2007 is going to be a bumper year, but if you know of anything that you believe should be considered for the Award then please let us know about it here.

Gordon Bennett

Posted by under narrative

I’ve recently finished playing through Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004) again. If anything I was even less impressed this time than the last.

Let’s get one thing straight: the runny-shooty stuff is great. It’s a fantastic runny-shooty game. I’ve loved runny-shooty games since the days of Rolling Thunder, which was released in 1986, and this one is a class act.

What I don’t like about Half-Life 2 is the claim that it has a fantastic story, a claim I’ve heard from a number of people who really should know better. Half-Life 2 doesn’t have a story, for any meaningful definition of the word. It has a great environment, it has backstory in spades, it has passable characters, it even manages to have a few themes. But story? No.

Let me illustrate what I mean—and if you haven’t played HL2 and are planning to, there are spoilers here. This is the story of the game:

Gordon Freeman arrives in a strange city and makes contact with a member of the resistance, who tells him to make contact with another member of the resistance, who tells him to make contact with a larger group of the resistance outside the city, including Eli Vance, an expert in technobabble. When a teleporter doesn’t work he must do some running and shooting, and then some driving and shooting, and meets the resistance group who don’t tell him anything useful before they are attacked, though they do give him a better gun. Gordon escapes by running and shooting through a town full of zombies, then some caves full of zombies, then a railway, then some beaches and a bridge and some more beaches. Finally he arrives at his destination, Nova Prospekt, where Eli Vance is being held prisoner. Gordon breaks in with no kind of preparation, plan or backup, does a lot of running and shooting, fails to rescue Eli Vance and learns nothing useful before teleporting out. Arriving back in the city, there’s a fight going on. Gordon runs and shoots a lot before entering the enemy base where Eli Vance is freed through sheer luck. Finally Gordon stops the bad guy teleporting to the alien homeworld, though it’s not really clear why this is important.

That’s not a story. That’s a series of narrative incidents linked by good level design.

“But,” I hear you bluster, “but what about the aliens draining the Earth’s water, and the Vortigaunts being on our side now, and Father Grigori, and the heroism of Dog, and the malfunctioning teleport device, and the G-Man—for pity’s sake, what about the G-Man?”

What about the G-Man? He appears twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. His purpose and function are only hinted at. If you’ve not played the first game then here he is either a distraction or an annoyance. The rest of it is either character-colour or back-story. It’s not plot. None of it is interactive, and none of it affects the gameplay in any way. Gordon Freeman himself, the silent everyman whose face is never seen except on box-art, isn’t a great character: he’s a cypher. Nobody plays the game because they’re interested in Gordon Freeman.

And a word here about HL2‘s cut scenes. I don’t care that you can walk around in them, if a bunch of NPCs are standing around flapping their mouths and you can’t skip past it, it’s just as bad and as a pre-rendered CGI sequence. The first bit with the teleport is purely an excuse to force you to spend an hour running through the city and down the river. The pre-climax bit in Doctor Breen’s office is beyond horrible.

For heaven’s sake, HL2‘s writer Mark Laidlaw is meant to be a novelist. He’s supposed to be good at this stuff. HL2‘s storytelling is wildly inconsistent. And I haven’t even mentioned the point in the last act of the game where Gordon has to step voluntarily into an active prisoner-containment unit in order to travel to the next stage. Twice. And the second time he does it he becomes a prisoner, and we’re supposed to be surprised?

What the game does, brilliantly, is disguise the fact that it has no story. The G-Man’s momentary appearances on far-off structures or TV screens, the recurrence of characters from the first game, the use of backstory as if it’s actual plot—it all makes the player feel like they’re at the centre of a huge unfolding SF epic. In fact they’re at the centre of a series of huge action set-pieces, many of which serve no narrative purpose at all.

If Half-Life 2 was a novel, you wouldn’t bother finishing it. As I’ve said before, the things that video games do best are exactly the bits that most narrative forms (meaning film, TV and books) leave out because they’re dull: travelling from A to B; gaining proficiency; shopping; dressing up; and combat without a narrative purpose. Back in the early 90s when I was novelising video games for Virgin Publishing (under a pseudonym, since you ask), Sega was hugely keen for us to do a book version of their supposed Street Fighter 2 beater, Eternal Champions. The main reason we didn’t was because it was blatant that the game was going to tank, but close behind it was the fact that a novelisation of a beat-em-up would be unutterably tedious, and no fun to write. I know there was a Street Fighter movie. Have you tried to watch it?

What story HL2 does have—which boils down to “Start alone, meet allies, attempt to rescue captive but fail, destroy thing in order to save it”— is basically the same story as Halo, which has a protagonist just as faceless and enigmatic, though with better wisecracks. The difference is that Halo took its backstory elements, put them front and centre, and made an actual story out of them.

(Don’t forget that it takes 10-15 hours to play through Half-Life 2. That’s a long time to sustain a continuing real-time narrative, not just for a game but for a player too.)

Which brings me to the crux question, much debated: how important is story to games? Is backstory or the illusion of story enough? If you chuck in enough explosions and headcrabs, will anyone notice there’s something missing? That’s a subject which this margin is too narrow to contain. But given that story, games, story in games, games that tell stories and games that create stories are why I’m here, it’s a topic I will be returning to. Oh, you lucky people.

Coming up next in this ongoing series of award-winning games with sucky story-telling: either Black (Criterion, 2006) or The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo, 2006) depending whether I’m feeling in the mood for more violent Eastern European death and ragdoll physics, or gathering nuts in May.

How bad is Final Fantasy XI Online?

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(Explanation filter: I was given a copy of Final Fantasy XI Online (Squaresoft, 2002) for the Xbox 360 a couple of months before I started this blog and, as those who have heard me evangelise the strengths of Final Fantasy VII (Squaresoft, 1997) can guess, my joy was unbounded. This is a description of my first 3+ hours of contact with the game, written as it happened.)

Jesus fucking Christ.

I put the disc in the drive, and the Xbox 360 begins its install of PlayOnline. PlayOnline is Squaresoft’s proprietary system for linking consoles to MMORPGs via broadband, including secure credit-card processing, unique user names, avatars, friend lists and messaging. The thing is, the 360 already has one of those. It’s called Xbox Live and it’s generally agreed to be the state of the art for this kind of thing. PlayOnline is essentially the same system, only more clunky, layered on top of Xbox Live and taking up a large chunk of the system’s storage. How much? About 8gb, or 40% of the 360′s hard-drive.

So PlayOnline installs from the disc, and then goes online to download its most recent updates. This takes a while, but I didn’t time how long. Then you have to register, entering data which is almost identical to the data you’ve already given Xbox Live. The difference is that PlayOnline seems to assume you’ll be entering it via a keyboard. There is no keyboard for the Xbox 360. There is a softkey system (an on-screen keyboard), but it’s not enabled by default. To use it, you have to move the cursor to the field you want to fill, press A, press X twice, then move the cursor to the keyboard. Once the field is filled, you have to disable the softkey system, move the cursor to the next field, and re-enable the softkeys.

The cursor is in the shape of some kind of bird. I think it’s meant to be a chocobo. Which bit of the bird is actually the active cursor is not clear. Clicking it on a field can take several tries. The soft keys are small, the cursor movements are unforgiving, and it is easy to mis-key.

It took me half an hour—I do not exaggerate—to register the game, at which point I sat back and looked forward to some FFXI lovin’. The PlayOnline system begins to install Final Fantasy XI.

First thought: it’s installing it? It’s a console game. Console games run off the disc. That’s the point; they’re instant gratification. What the fuck?
Second thought: AN HOUR? You’re telling me this is going to take AN HOUR?
Third thought: check current time.

When something tells me that a thing is going to take a certain amount of time, I am sceptical. I use the Northern Line, after all.

It takes an hour and ten minutes to install the game from the disc. Finally, I get to see the intro movie for the game. It is pre-rendered and heavily influenced by Return of the King, but my lord it’s gorgeous. And then we’re back into PlayOnline, to enter credit card details and the game’s registration codes, battling against the fuck-awful softkey system again.

A brief word on the registration codes. They are long alphanumeric strings, in groups of four characters. Each group of four needs to be entered in a separate field. Cursor to field, click A a few times, click X twice to bring up the keyboard, enter four characters, dismiss keyboard, move cursor slightly to the right, and repeat. Several times. Once again, this is a console game. It is also an MMORPG with a monthly subscription. And they want to make sure that I’m not using a pirate copy? Or, I’d guess, a second-hand copy? That seems a trifle unnecessary.

And once that’s done the game assigns you a unique user ID—gibberish alphanumerics—and a mail ID, which is more of the same. Then it logs you out. Then you have to log back in by re-entering the user ID it’s just given you.

But it’s a fucking console game.

And after lying to you and comprehensively pratting you around for literally hours, at the moment where you’re thinking that, yes, now, finally, surely one might actually get a taste of some FFXI gameplay, it commences downloading the most recent updates for the game. Not expansions, just updates. Which it reports will take an hour and thirty-nine minutes. And my broadband is far from slack.

That’s where I am as I write, somewhere in that 99-minute period. Actually I’m watching Criminal Minds on TV, and after that I’ll watch Lady Vengeance, and then I’ll go to bed. I have given up any hope of playing FFXI tonight, or indeed anything else. While the Xbox 360 can multi-task its gaming functions, downloading in the background while you play a game, here the downloading isn’t controlled by the 360 but by PlayOnline, which uses the rest of the console’s massive processing power to play a music loop. FFXI‘s music loops are okay, suitably evocative of rich fantasy landscapes, epic battles and quests into legend. PlayOnline’s is a maddening jingly-jangly loop of piano pap.

I haven’t played a single minute of this game yet, and already I loathe it and its publishing company. I am going to play the fuck out of it for a month and then uninstall it, so that Squaresoft and PlayOnline don’t get a single extra penny from me.

(Update: I played it for less time than it took to install. It’s dreadful.)

Why Italics Are Important

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Back in the mid-90s when I was publishing the journal of games design and criticism Interactive Fantasy, Greg Costikyan wrote us a paper called ‘I Have No Words And I Must Design’. It’s a great piece of work, much referenced and republished since, but there’s one footnote in it that is generally overlooked by all except the most anal games bores, pedants and typography geeks. And yet I think that footnote is one of the most important things that IF published in the whole of its run, because it goes right to the heart of how we see ourselves.

What Greg pointed out was that the names of games should take an initial capital as standard, as the names of books, paintings, plays or films do. He’s absolutist about this, insisting that chess and backgammon should be Chess and Backgammon just like Tetris and Carcasonne, and I quibble with him there (he argues that Beowulf gets a capital B though it’s a product of folklore rather than a known author, but Greg, Beowulf is the hero’s name). And unfortunately he’s no editor or layout geek, or he’d know that titles of major works don’t just take a capital, they take italics.

Apart from that, he’s got something huge.

When the title of a work appears in italics, whether in print or on the web and whether it’s L’Etranger or Leprechaun 2, it indicates that it has a certain status and deserves to be taken seriously. When we don’t italicise the titles of games we’re indicating exactly the opposite—that we don’t think our chosen field is worthy of the same respect as more established forms of cultural expression.

Maybe we don’t do it consciously, but whatever the reason every time we drop in a careless reference to ‘Space Invaders’, ‘The Sims’ or ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ without acknowledging even tacitly that these are works of significance—social, cultural, commercial, artistic, whatever—we are not just doing ourselves and our culture a major disservice, we also collude in the slightly sneering way that games and gaming are regarded by the wider critical world. It’s a tiny thing, but it’s a very big thing too.

[ctrl]+[i]. You know it makes sense.

So what have you been working on, James?

Posted by under roleplaying games, Spaaace

I’ve been working on quite a lot, thanks for asking.

My current major project is publicity for the forthcoming Crime Scene game for the Office of Criminal Justice Reform. I designed the game last year, and it’s due to go live in early March. Right now I am writing five blogs for five in-game characters, which interweave to create an ongoing narrative that sets up the game’s back-story. The blogs are here,
here,
here,
here
and here.

I’m working on a revised edition of my game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Hogshead, 1998) as well as Dragon Warriors (Dave Morris/Oliver Johnson; Corgi, 1986), and the first edition of my much-delayed D&D-parody Frup, originally due to be released in 1995, for my new imprint Magnum Opus Press.

Those unable to wait for the revised, expanded Munchausen can find the original game reprinted in Second Person (MIT Press, 2007), along with a paper by me on story-making games, and much more good stuff on the subject of roleplay and storytelling in games.

Plus some stuff I can’t talk about yet.

Wii want Wiinformation

Posted by under consoles, technology

In all the hubbub and furore about the commercial success of the Wii, its strengths as a games machine and its viability against the PS3, one thing’s been missed. Nintendo is about to snatch a huge crown out from under the noses of Sony and Microsoft. While the Xbox 360 and PS3 fight it out to provide the best online play, movie downloads and iPod playback in the name of being not games consoles but Home Entertainment Centres, the Wii is making a stealth approach on the position of market leader in a different space: the Home Information Hub.

When you switch on a Wii, you see a brief text screen and then you’re at the system’s front end. This is a grid of 12 boxes like massive desktop icons, six filled and six waiting for downloads either from the Virtual Console (retro games) or in the form of ‘channels’. Your out-of-the-box Wii already has two (Photos and Forecast, meaning weather), plus the News Channel (not up yet but video here) and the optional-download Internet Channel. That leaves space on the main screen for five more. Scroll right and there’s another grid of 12 boxes waiting to be filled—and another, and another.

A Wii desktop. My Wii desktop, in fact. Would you believe there's no other images of one on the net?

I believe Nintendo’s intention with these channel-spaces is to make the Wii a one-stop at-your-fingertips centre for all the information you want at the touch of a button or flick of a Wiimote. When you think about whether you should take an umbrella, or what happened in the cricket, they want your primary source for that information (and by primary I mean easiest and fastest to access, most convenient and after a while instinctive) to be the Wii. It won’t download movies, it won’t hold all your MP3s, but barely a day will pass without you consulting it. That at least is the intention.

I’ll go further. Wii channels you will see before long will include: sports news; business news and share-price checking; travel news which remembers your regular journeys; family health; food, diet and fitness, probably tied to the shopping channel and maybe even to the fitness section of Wii Sports; and (longer shots these) online grocery shopping with delivery in association with a major supermarket chain; online pizza delivery; and more.

How can I predict this? Because I’ve been here before.

Six years ago I was part of 3Com’s short-lived internet appliance division. We brought one product to market, called Audrey. With 50s styling and a 10″ touch-screen, Audrey was a cross between a grown-up Palm Pilot—more of a family organiser than a personal one, it could sync two Palms and combine their calenders and address books—and a dedicated net-machine, with IR keyboard, web browser and a sweet email client that would record and embed audio and pictures at—literally—the touch of a button. It was, in a word, sweeet.

Audrey. Gorgeous, wasn't she?

But it was more than that. Directly below the screen was a dial, like an old TV. Settings corresponded to six basic information channels, updated regularly throughout the day so that whenever you touched the dial, you had access to information no more than a couple of hours old. And those channels were, in rough order: weather, news, sports, business, showbiz news, and space for us and users to add more. To people who remember five paragraphs up, this may sound a bit familiar.

One of my jobs was choosing and creating the information channels for the European launch, so I was intimately involved with this end of the business. And while the Wii is very far from an Audrey knockoff—Audrey didn’t play games for a start—I recognise many of the thought processes underlying the look and feel of the Wii’s interface design. Time-to-data, for example. An Xbox 360 takes 22 seconds to boot, even with no disc in the drive. To get to its desktop the Wii takes less than half as long, and that includes pressing the (A) button to synch the Wiimote.

This is crucial. The Wii is not the only device that can give you this kind of information on demand. Opera Widgets and Firefox Extensions can put this functionality in your browser, as can Google if you’re prepared to type a couple of words. Avantgo will put it on your smartphone or PDA. The Apple iPhone will have it built-in, judging by the early screenshots. But the key point is the time between demand and delivery, and it’s my bet that the Wii will beat all of them on speed and ease of accessibility.

(This was something Audrey did astonishingly well. It had an instant-on, and though it was pre-broadband it logged onto our server five times a day to get updates, so the information you saw was never more than a couple of hours old. If Nintendo is smart—and the name it’s chosen for the Wii’s internet connection, WiiConnect24, indicates it has been—the Wii channels will do the same. In other words, when you want the weather forecast the device won’t need to retrieve it from a server because the latest update will already be stored on board.)

Nintendo clearly considers time-to-data so crucial that it’s done away with any Wii splash screen at startup. This is, if you’ll pardon the geek-pun, revolutionary. When was the last time you switched on a console and didn’t get the brand-name front and centre? By removing its own logo to save a couple of seconds of load-time, Nintendo has signalled that it considers the Wii to be more than just the next generation of games machine. That may turn out to be its biggest play of all.

Why ‘Cope’?

Posted by under game design, narrative

I’ve learned a lot from video games, but ‘cope’ is the best lesson: basic, profound and absolutely to the point.

My schooling came from Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991), the original, not just a classic but a masterpiece of every element of game design. For those who have never played it, the game starts with a race through the Green Hill Zone, a pastoral loveliness, and moves into the Marble Zone which is slower and more puzzly, involving tunnels, lava and more accurate jumping. Then you’re into the Spring Yard Zone and within five seconds you’ve run into a spring that’s catapulted you off a bumper, onto another spring and you’re hurtling through the air, upside down, completely out of control, completely off the deep end. And there, suspended in the air, is the game-creators’ advice:

sonic1cope

As life-lessons go it beats “Sorry Mario but the princess is in another castle”, don’t you think?