To My Most Loved Games/I will write them a Haiku/This Title is One

Shadow of the Colossus:

Mountain Monsters wait

Slaying to save my lady

Misguided mission

Braid:

Tim chases girlfriend

Time flows like spilled water

Best ending ever

Portal:

Esoteric Meme

Space flows as mobius strip

The cake is a lie

BioShock:

Unchecked morals make

Superpowers marketplace

Ayn Rand is still wrong

Contribute your own Haikus to your favorite games in the comments section!

Braid and the "Modern" Gamer

*This post contains spoilers about the game Braid, probably the biggest spoiler ever*

Recently, I've been replaying some old games, as you might now (please, please know that about me. It means you're paying attention and you love me). Braid was one of those games. Playing it again reignited my love affair with that masterpiece, and I began to pester my cousin Ed into playing it.

He played it and he loved it, like any reasonable person should. I was so excited for him to get to the end for one of the best twists I've ever seen. I tried to temper my excitement for it. My language tends to become very hyperbolic when I love something, so I'm worried that about overhyping everything.

I was disappointed when he beat the game and totally missed the twist. It's not because Ed isn't an intelligent and insightful man, because he is. Much more so than I, at any rate. It was because he doesn't play games as much as I do.

First a little expository dialogue. Braid is a game that plays with the mechanics of time. Speeding, slowing, reversing are all in there. One of the things that makes Braid so great is how the concept of time, and the gameplay mechanic itself, are infused into the story. So at the end *last spoiler alert warning*, when your character is helping the princess escape the villain and get back to her house, you have no choice but to play the entire sequence backward. Everything gets turned completely on its head. Rather than helping the princess into the safety of her home, she finds you looking at her through her bedroom window and tries to escape you. The sequence gets an entirely different meaning when simply played in reverse. If none of this makes sense, just watch this video. (Jump to :25 if you're THAT impatient, sheesh)

The first time I played the game, I was freaking out. Totally flipping the F out. I couldn't believe what was happening. Here I thought I was the hero the whole time, and it turns out I'm the unwitting villain! Chasing after a relationship wasn't endearing, it was obsessive and damaging to her. My character was a stalker.

So why did Ed miss this? He brought up something that I wouldn't have thought of without his perspective. It's because he is used to an older style of gaming. A style where the story and gameplay elements are almost entirely separate. Playing a game was simply a matter of "Play the game, watch the story, play the game, watch the story" over and over until the end. He wasn't looking for meaning in the final time reversal, he was just waiting for it to be over so he could keep playing. He was viewing it as a gameplay element rather than a story element.

I'm a good example of a "modern" gamer, as Ed put it. I'm versed in the styles and techniques of modern independent and art gaming. I was actively looking for meaning in the gameplay itself. So when I saw how things were unfolding as the rewind button was held, it seized me.

I think this points to something very significant about the current state of gaming. Games are getting closer to being art (I would just argue they already are). The same thing happens with film. Someone who has studied film is much more able to pick up on the nuances and techniques the director uses to imbue meaning. Someone who is watching films for the first time might not see these things. It's not that they are unintelligent, just unfamiliar.

Right now, the percentage of games that I would consider "art" is very low. But then, so was film when it started.

Feminism is the idea that female video game characters can kick a lot of ass.

Women and gaming is something I'm very, very interested in. I love to see women in front, in, and behind games. This is quickly becoming much more normal, but the stereotype that videogames are just for boys is going to persist for a long time.

There aren't that many games with female leads, but they run the gamut from acceptable (Faith in Mirror's Edge), to questionable (Lara Croft in Tomb Raider), to downright offensive (Princess Peach).

I just finished playing Mirror's Edge for the third time. I was struck be how well the female half of our race was portrayed. Faith is the game's main character, a "runner". Runners deliver packages in the locked-down dystopian future by running them over rooftops. This is because all other channels of communication are surveilled.

Faith is not a stereotype in any way. She's strong, and strong-willed. She doesn't have enormous breasts. In fact, she's not sexualized in any way. She doesn't even have a love interest. The story of the game is simple. Faith is trying to rescue her sister, who was framed for the murder of a prominent politician. That's it. No being rescued by men, no whining, no unrealistic bodily proportions.

*spoiler alert* The finale of the game has Faith rescuing her sister from a crashing helicopter. It's pretty moving because it's something you rarely see in gaming. No epic world-saving, just a woman rescuing her sister. If the character was male, you wouldn't think anything of it. By simply making the character female, it's pointing out all the expectation women are saddled with before things even begin.

I saw this a couple years ago and it made me furious. An asian reader on Kotaku adjusted the image of Faith (above), to this:

The reasoning given for this "adjustment" was that Western developers tend to define Asian beauty from their own perspective, and not from an Asian one. That argument seems fine for about 2 seconds, and then you wonder why a character has to be designed by ANY standards of beauty. Why does this female character need to be sexualized? Why can't her body simply be the tool she needs to perform her goals effectively? Hanging from ledges might be a little difficult with those huge boobs.

I was livid when I saw this. The developers made a very deliberate effort to downplay physical beauty and avoid inexplicably sexualizing the character (the story never calls for it), and here a fan tries to undo that progress completely. One step forward, two steps back, huh?

The original article that had me so hot and bothered.

VVVVVV is the name of the game.

I'm pretty sure it's actually pronounced "The Letter V Six Times", but that's beside the point. Or is it the point?

I've been replaying a handful of smaller games (Portal, Braid, VVVVVV). They may be small games, but they have BIG IDEAS! There was specifically one challenge in VVVVVV that I promised I wouldn't subject myself to when playing it a second time. Quickly: In VVVVVV, you can only move left or right, and change gravity up or down. The whole game is tied to these simple mechanics.

This part is so insanely difficult. The first time I did it, it took me approximately 550 tries over the course of a half-hour. But the instant retry aspect of it is what keeps it from becoming overwhelmingly frustrating. If you had to wait a few seconds after you died, or had to answer a "Retry?" question, the game would be broken.

The game's creator, Terry Cavanagh, said that he wanted the challenges of the game to stand alone. He wanted the challenges themselves to the the only barrier. No artificial barriers like a finite number of lives. You can make the simplest game incredibly difficult by limiting the number of lives or tries you get. In this way, VVVVVV is only about the obstacles, and nothing else. This kept me completely captivated despite the fact that I died 1200 times by the end of the game. 1200 times!

This is the reason I completed that ridiculous challenge again. I knew that I would never get too angry. But an interesting thing happened. I was able to beat it in about 100 tries this time. This was because I still had the muscle memory I cultivated the first time through. This challenge was so ludicrous that the only way to beat it was to program the movements into your fingers. By the end, I could probably do much of it with my eyes closed. Like playing a musical instrument, it was all about rhythm and timing, and that slowly meshed into my fingers over the course of 550 attempts. It also wasn't quite as thrilling the second time, though. The more insurmountable the task, the greater the euphoria once completed. It wasn't so insurmountable this time.

I urge everybody to play this game. It's fantastically fun, and available on PC and Mac. At least try the demo out!
VVVVVV

Extended Interviews

As much as I wanted to put all the complete interviews in the episode, I just couldn't justify the time it would take. That's what the internet is for! No time slots or requirements, I can do whatever I want!*

Freddy was awesome. He was a super bright guy who loved making stories through games, and had a very good working knowledge of how to put them together with the programs given. I had a great time talking to him; the conversation was hilarious.

When I asked all the kids if they wanted to be interviewed, I thought I got to all of those who raised their hands. I did not. I unintentionally skipped over Erik. A little while later, he caught me going out the door and, with a demanding tone in his voice, said "I thought you were going to interview me!" I apologized and told him that I would interview in him a little bit. This is that interview.

I also got a chance to talk to Nicolas Cage!

And finally, here is the extended interview with Tori. It was really encouraging to see some girls in the class. I got to talk to her about what types of games she enjoys and wants to eventually develop.

I had a really great time talking to the kids about videogames. I feel very optimistic about the future of gaming.

*Well, I can't do ANYTHING... but you know what I mean.

The Monetary Value of Games is UNDER ATTACK!

Over the past few months, I realized something about myself. My fill of a game depends pretty consistently on how many hours I've put into it. In other words, I feel satisfied with a AAA title once I've played about 20 hours of it. That means if the game is 10 hours long, I'll play it twice. If it's 20 hours long, once. More than 20 hours? Usually I won't finish it, as was the case with Grand Theft Auto 4.

Length is a strange issue, especially with gaming. Length can be almost completely unrelated to experience in the game. Some games are padded with monotonous chores and take 50 hours (most RPGs), others are a densely packaged, transcendent 3-hour run (Portal).

Portal is a perfect example of how the experience of a game completely determines its value, both in terms of length and price. When Portal first came out, it was $20, and took about 2-5 hours to complete, depending on your pacing.

The pricing of games is a controversial topic. Most publishers and developers like to think their games are well worth the $60 you pay for a new copy. You'll hear the argument, "Well, considering the amount of entertainment you get in games, $60 is a good value". They're speaking about game length, of course. Do you want to talk about why this argument doesn't make much sense? I do!

Let's say the average, 2-hour movie costs $10 to see. That's $5 per hour. How much would that make a 12-hour game cost? $60?! Right on! You're good at math. Actually, I'm good at math, since I'm not interacting with you at this point. Now you might be thinking "This is dumb, because the value of a movie isn't in its length." Now say that thought out loud to me. Holy carp, you're right! Then why the hell does this argument even exist? The value of a game has nothing whatsoever to do with its length, just like with movies.

Besides, games vary wildly in length, movies don't really. They're mostly between 1.5 and 2.5 hours. Games can be 5, 7, 12, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 50, 60, 80, or 100 hours long. Time is irrelevant anyway, because puzzle games are infinitely long, the same with something like The Sims.

Why am I spending so much time on this point? Because of how fuzzy this whole issue is. What is the value of a game? I guess it depends on the experience. Something like Uncharted 2, I have no problem paying $60 for. It was an amazing experience, one I would gladly pay EVEN MORE for.

Games miss an opportunity movies are built around. There isn't, so far, a good way to experience a game one time for a smaller amount of money. With a movie, you can go see it a single time for $8. This is pretty low risk, so even if the movie turns out to be butt, you don't feel too bad because it didn't cost you THAT much time or money. Games aren't this finite. This is why renting a game isn't a very good solution. You only have so much time with it (a week), and you probably won't complete it in a single night. You really don't have a clear idea of how long it'll take to finish. So you're spending $8-$10 to maybe or maybe not play a full game.

$60 is just too much for a single item. People will pay it, but at the expense of other games. I simply cannot afford to buy all the games that I would like to, so I have to choose the games I want the most. This is why making a game is so risky. People can only buy so many games, so they have to be really selective. This forces gaming companies to play it safe. It's damaging the whole industry!

For me, I think the most reasonable price point is $30 new. I don't have nearly as difficult a time paying $30 for something as I do $60. I would probably end up spending even more on games in absolute terms because I wouldn't struggle with each purchase. Is anybody listening to me?!