Sometimes Comic Blog

When it comes to morality, there tends to be a distinct dissonance between the real world and video games. For the most part, in video games morality is presented as a series of True or False statements. I can either be good and save the victim from thugs, or I can be evil and join in on the victimization. And that’s if the game is being subtle with its choices.

In reality, morality is based on your actions to thousands of different stimuli, and for the most part is considered grey. But when it comes to programming, the easiest way to present/code anything is to think of it as a series of 1s and 0s, on or off, good or evil. In more recent years, the player is presented a neutral option, but for the most part that comes about through inaction, and usually results in no player rewards. Being all good or all evil results in far more prizes than being indifferent.

The next stage in developing the morality play games would be to introduce more grey into the worlds.

Okay, so here’s my idea for a cyber bullying morality game. It’s a text based game where you’re presented a chat window and an AI and you have a conversation with it. The AI talks as though it’s a pre-teen, so slightly annoying/obnoxious and doesn’t ever really have its facts straight, but is really interested in keeping the conversation going. The way that you interact with it changes its personality. So if you’re nice it’ll be happy, if you try to explain things that it gets wrong it will slowly learn, if you’re mean it’ll become depressed. If you’re mean to it long enough it will eventually commit suicide.

The longer you play with the AI the more you learn about its character. Perhaps it comes from a battered home, or is a spoiled brat. Randomized stats could start the AI out as a low self-esteem mid-westerner with an interest in cooking or a rich southerner who has an abundance of friends but needs a pen pal from another state as a class assignment.

The game ends when the conversation(s) end, either by death, disinterest, arrest (sexually flirting with a pre-teen is illegal), loss of internet access, or some randomized event in the characters life. Later installments could include in the randomized chatter creator a feature that the person you’re speaking to is actually a perv or a cop.

The idea would be that instead of having morality on a sliding scale it would be a circular graph, with multiple overlapping sections. There isn’t good or evil, just a lot of gray. Although based on your actions, the ending you received could be considered good/evil but for the most part would lead to ambivalence, much like online conversations in real life.

There has been talk of getting rid of the whole morality scale in games and to just allow our actions be the deciding factor, much like real life. I feel like that’s being lazy. Without feedback from the game world, our actions would be meaningless, much like in the real life. I think the further we develop our AI characters, the more important it will be for those characters to have multiple responses to our actions, especially since interaction and versatility are two of the strongest characteristics of this genre of art. And for this to work, at least in this point and time, it will require a value scale of some sort.

In the future, I envision companies who specialize in this sort of middle ware, allowing game developers to focus on setting up a story/world and having it populated by teams of programmers working with sociologists. But for now, I guess we’re stuck with saving or stabbing prostitutes.

An Aside: Morality in multiplayer games is a moot point; everyone’s a dick when it comes to playing with other humans.

My best in show from this E3 was surprisingly [b]Castlevania: Harmony of Despair[/b]. The potential seen in this demo sold it for me.

The game plays as half Castlevania half Beat ‘em Up. You’re given a thirty room castle that you must scale in order to get to the boss fight at the top. There are multiple paths to reach the boss, some requiring the help of another character to complete (see: Elevator Switches). There are monsters, traps, chests and candle sticks to hinder or help along the way. For my play through I picked Alucard to get me to the top since, aside from Soma (who was not playable in the demo), he’s the character I know the best from the series, so his attack patterns were familiar and by about halfway through I was able to pull off some pretty nifty combos, be it the extended jumps through mist form, or wolfing my way under enemy attacks. Magic was relegated to Smash Bros. format with one button performing multiple spells based on the direction of the analog stick.

The inventory system took some getting used to. The only time you could change equipment was when you ran into a floating book. I don’t think at any point you could pause the game, since this is meant to be played as a brawler with six people, but enemies are pretty confined to their room (most Castlevania enemies don’t wander the halls much anyway). As a person who is very familiar with the series, the inability to pick a weapon best suited to the enemy was a little frustrating, but I suppose in the long run it becomes more about strategy. In most of the chests were money bags, so I assume that in between levels there will probably be a shop system that will allow you to upgrade your armor and weapons. Alucard had his five slot defense and two slot weapon system, but this is not standard in every game, so the potential for separate systems for each character is there. I’d love to see a soul collection tie-in for Soma, and I found a few grappling points for Shanoa that prevented me from going down a completely different path in the map that I played.

The music and sound effects were all classic Castlevania fare, what I could hear of it (E3 is noisy), so I suspect that it will take from previous soundtracks for the most part. And the ability to zoom out of the map to see the entire layout came in handy while I was planning my attack path as well as for avoiding the death laser coming from the boss every twenty seconds or so.

We were only given ten minutes of play time with the demo which I think should be included with the finished product. I probably could have beaten the level in twelve on my own, and with up to six other people playing it could probably be done in ten pretty easily, unless there was a radical upgrade in difficulty. I’m not sure how replayability will factor into this game, I would think that unless there are a lot of levels planned in future DLC that it could get stale pretty quickly. From what I was told by the booth guy (one of about five at the whole convention), there were only going to be ten as of release. With more characters above the starting five planned, let’s hope they continue level creation as well.

Of course look at me, the game’s not even out and I’m already hoping for DLC.

An Aside: A level editor for this game would make or break it for me. It’s fairly boxy in it’s level design already, just give me the ability to snap together premade rooms and I think you’d add a lot of value to the game.

Okay, so I know I’m a noob when it come to the whole E3 thing, but from my perspective, the event is not as cool as what I was lead to believe. Sure the 3DS was ridiculous and awesome, but really, that’s been the only thing worth seeing at the convention. I know they kind of killed it with the “no public allowed” persona that they went for three years ago, but come on! There’s supposed to be 45,000 people here this week and for the life of me, I can’t find them.

That probably explains why I was extended an invitation (the one person who actually dished out $400 to go to this event from what I’ve unofficially gathered by the conversations I’ve been having so far).

Here’s the thing, no one plays “The Deadliest Catch”, so I guess it’s no surprise that the Discovery Channel’s gaming presence is relegated to just two television monitors hooked up to a support pillar to the right of the entrance way. I watched your video on “Man vs. Nature” the video game, and I can tell you this, I bet I was the only person to bother to sit through the entire 1:30 minute video. The Hello Kitty people had a better turn out, and I bet their MMO is way better than the two generation old tech you were showing off. I’m bad at animation and I bet I could do better.

Also, Bethesda, you want people to hype your game, let them into your fucking theme park. I know it’s cool to be mysterious and shit, but you have a t-rex in your booth you sure as hell better let people without a press badge and an appointment see it. I’m sure you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on it, might as well let it get some use. Also, your reveal in “Brink” would have been an actual reveal if we knew what the hell was going on. I mean seriously, is that the mages tower from Oblivion? Because otherwise, I have no idea what’s so amazing about about that place.

Kinect? Like the building set? Cause that requires more imagination than the shovelware that will probably come out with that system. I don’t need a $150 tabbed browsing system that you’re trying to sell me. I’m sorry, until you can provide the holodeck, you’re not going to be able to take away my controller. Not from my cold dead hands.

And don’t even get me started on the Move. You might have been cool three years ago, but at this point, you’re going to have to wait until the PS4 to come out and you bundle that with the system before people start buying that product. The only thing going for it is the two handed capabilities, the Wii mainly focuses on one hand at a time, and if you can corner the two handed motions then maybe, just maybe you’ll be useful. Maybe the Sony is banking on the fact that it needs about three years to catch up, so it would always go through this mocking phase, who knows. Come back to me in three years.

I still have one day left for this Con to impress me,  but as a layman, who can’t get into the interviews in that sea of cubicles, well, you’ve lost me. If this is the Gaming Cons to end all Gaming cons, man/woman impress me. Cause so far I’ve gone to bed before midnight and not felt like I’ve missed out on anything.

Peace Out.

I’ve been blogging over at destructoid.com lately, and usually I remember to post them in both locations, but I figured if I forgot I could at least put the link up:

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Paul%20Barber

My most current work right now is up over there, but only because of the amount of spam that this blog gets on a regular basis, and the number of active readers that destructoid already has. It’s win win really.

So in the long/short run, if you want to make sure you’re up on my current writings, check out:

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Paul%20Barber

That’s:

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Paul%20Barber

Someday I’ll be big, and you’ll be happy you started following me early.

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Paul%20Barber

I can’t get enough of Red Dead Redemption. It’s like Grand Theft Auto, but with likable characters. There is one thing, well aside from the Wild West setting, that greatly distinguishes this game from the company’s flagship series. And that would be the Bandana.

For the record, I think the Bandana is the best thing ever for role playing your character. Now, instead of good or evil, we also have good people who do evil things, and evil people who do good things.

“Mommy, who’s that black hatted man helping grandma across the street?”
“I don’t know, son, but his eyes chill me to the bone.”

As previously stated, I almost always play good guys in morality games. But I often wonder what would happen if I did the bad thing. In Fable 2, there was a Contraption of Death that you could sacrifice people to, I believe there was an achievement for it if you killed your spouse by it (or at least I’ll tell myself in hindsight), so I took my first husband in the game, the one I’d grown tired of hearing, and killed him using it. The animation was kind of a let down, but the worst thing was that my path to haloness was immediately halted and I instantly sprouted mini-horns. Lame!

If I’d had the Bandana, though, I could have sat around sacrificing the world and still keep my holiness in tact.

What the Bandana does is bring gray to the whole black and white morality scale system. Sometimes good people do bad things. They don’t instantly become villains because of it, and often times they’re for heroic reasons, or accidental button presses if you’ve played any Black Isle games. But with video game morality, it’s often pure black or pure white. You’re either the lover of angels or the killer of children. Now you can do both… to both.

Early on there’s a mission where you have to steal a horse from a deputy to create a diversion so a crazy gravedigger can speak to his ex-partner. I was forced to do the mission so that the story could continue, but at the same time, I was building a relationship to a certain law-abiding marshal that I didn’t want to taint with bad honor. So what do I do? Pull out the trusty Bandana and *poof*. Nobody knows that my duster wearing hero is actually doing something illegal. Although I still had to pay the bounty on my head, which is weird. How would they know who it was when I came to pay it off? Should I wear the Bandana to prove my identity?

Eh, who cares, my honor is still on its way up the scale. And since I didn’t hurt anyone on the mission, I got a fifty point bonus.

All thanks to my trusty Bandana *ting*.

An aside: My horse got ate by a pack of cougars. It made me sad. What’s worse, after I killed those filthy monsters, I went to skin them and accidentally skinned my poor dead horse.

Marston almost puked. I agreed.

Now I can’t bring myself to sell the horse meat. It just sits in my pack on the new horse. I feel it’s a suitable warning for the new mount.

Don’t get fucking eaten by the mountain lions!

God I love this game.

So I’m playing Red Dead Redemption, much like everyone else, and I asked multiplayer friends if they’re a Good Guy or a Bad Buy in the single player campaign. There’s a stunned silence before I get back, “Why the hell would you play a good guy in the Old West?” To which I half heartedly mumble, “… I think you get discounts in stores …”

I’m not going to go into a long diatribe about the problems with moral systems in video games. That’s been done to death. But what I do want highlight is a few good times I’ve had with moral systems.

Take Red Dead. When you’re “honorable”, you generally have to try not to kill anyone if you can help it. In my game, this means a lot of prostitutes die while I switch to the lasso and try to hog tie a guy with a gun. Whoops, guess they shouldn’t have short changed them, or whatever they’re yelling about before they start beating the crap out of the girls. Although I have to admit that an equal number of bad guys get thrown from my horse over a cliff while I attempt to bring them back to jail, which I think is kind of worth all the effort.

Fallout 3 is one of the few games where I felt the balance between good and evil perks worked well. You could either kill a bunch of vampires and steal all their stuff, or you could help them and end up with an ability to get bonus health off of all the blood packs laying about. Bad = money, good = presents. Pretty decent trade off in my book.

Not really a moral system, but I loved being a “good guy” in Prototype. I went out of my way not to eat civilians, and only take out guys who were attacking me. I’d avoid bumping into pedestrians, and the one time I ate one was when I found a character model that I found more interesting to look at than Mercer’s Emo/Goth hoody (what can I say, I’m vain).

Speaking of bumping into people, is everyone in Red Dead a basketball player? Give someone the slightest nudge and they flail their arms wildly before doing a prat fall. I swear these people must be top heavy.

Fable 2 was an interesting one. Good and evil were kind of blah, but I thought it was hilarious that depending on what kind of foods you eat pretty much determined your level of corruption. Apparently the beef and pork in that world was tainted *ba dum tish*. Although I was a little annoyed that I had to be corrupt to be fat, I just wanted to play a good aligned bear, the craggly skin really threw off appreciation for my character… although that may have been enhanced by my, “husband in every port” mentality. What, no open relationships in the world of Albion?

There are two reasons why I play good in video games. For one, you tend to get more dialogue out of characters if you don’t shoot them dead. And two, it’s the same reason I play gay (if it’s an option), I’m generally a nice guy, and forcing myself to play evil doesn’t come naturally. I feel bad for the imaginary characters that I hurt. On the other hand, I have no problem playing an established evil character, so long as the story and the game tells me to. I can fail the Milgram test if the plot dictates it so. But when you give me the choice between good and evil, well then I’m good baby.

Last week in my article on Romantic Comedy Video Games, I made mention that another difficult genre to recreate in video game format would be Documentaries. So guess what I’m talking about this week. First things first, a definition of Documentary:

Documentary – “Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.
n. pl. doc·u·men·ta·ries – A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.” (thefreedictionary.com)

From my own previous experience, it’s easy to say that video games could make a great virtual museum. I remember as a kid, playing edutainment games that were essentially a Wolfenstein clone, but instead of Nazis running around in corridors, you’d have paintings on the walls with little plaques containing information on the artwork, usually just a name and date. I also used to play with the Encyclopedia Britannica cd, looking through all the timelines and video files included on the disk. But these are not Documentaries.

To a certain extent, Eternal Sonata is a documentary of sort. Well, parts of it are at least. In between chapters, the game would offer short little stories about Chopin’s life. Included were pictures of various real world locals that may or may not be a part of the biography that they were telling. Although once these chapter breaks ended it went right back to the fictional drama of the game. These’s breaks were documentary style, but not at all interactive.

A note should be made about the difference between Documentaries and Historical Fiction. Many many shooters are doing an excellent job at Historical Fiction, or fiction that tends to be historically accurate. Much like sports games, World War II FPSs are often about accuracy. With sports the idea that the more accurate the simulation the better the gameplay. The same can be said for WWII shooters. And while historically accurate, it’s hard to say that the average shooter is a Documentary. You almost always play as a fictitious military personnel fighting along side real historical figures, but often in non-historical missions. Very close to the idea of a Documentary, but not quite.

All of this back story is nice, so say me, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. Are Documentaries possible in an interactive medium? Adding historical (contemporary and before) film clips to games is an easy task, one that has been done in a number of times, but that’s all they are, film clips. Does player control create an atmosphere that is at odds with the Documentary style?

One possible form of documentary interactive media is the surveillance camera. A person watches actual events taking place, in real time, and at their control is the angle and zoom of the camera. The player decides what they watch and for how long. Taking it one step further, what if we mount the camera onto a movable stand? Now the player can move around the environment and view the work from many different perspectives, receiving a more “true” experience. The final step in this scenario would be to attach an arm to this jaunting camera. Now the player can interact with objects in the environment outside accidentally bumping into them with our mount.

But here we run into a problem, one that has been debated for decades within the genre. The player now has the ability to affect the outcome of the documentary. Are we okay with the non-partial observer in this genre? Sociologists are of two minds on this topic. One side thinks that observation without interaction is the truest form of documenting a situation, while another group calls that bollocks and says that the only way to truly document something is to interact with it, and that even by putting up a camera to record with no physical contact at all is still a form of interaction.

For the purposes of interactive media, even a documentary would require interaction, it’s in the name. But the question is at what level of interaction are we actually playing a game? Is a camera with only angle control enough?

There is a movement, in the broader realm of animation, to use professional modelers when recreating archeological dig sites for presenting to the general populous. Currently, an archeologist will take a summer course in 3D modeling if they want to display their work as a 3D model. Studies, such as Digital Archaeology (http://www.digital-archaeology.com/), are trying to change this.

Taking it to the next level, which Digital Archaeology is starting to do, it is possible to create factual representations of real world space that a character could then walk around in. The “goal” of these games would be to explore every nook and cranny of the local. It wouldn’t take much to add voiceovers to these games, so that as the player walked around they’d get information about real events that took place in history. It could even be possible to recreate events with characters, rather than showing film footage. So long as the player always stayed in control, and the information was correct (to the best of our knowledge), would these then be interactive documentaries? Or would they just be dynamic dvd menus? Perhaps those Wolfenstein clones from my childhood were early representations of documentary video games after all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. I know, I know, wrong month, but still, I’ve also been thinking about different genres in other mediums and wondering how they translate to video games. There are some that work extremely well; Action, Horror, Westerns. But I’m not so sure about others; Documentary, Musicals, Romantic Comedy. So combining those two topics, today I’m going to speak about Romance in video games, and whether or not is it possible to make a Romantic Comedy in the video game medium.

Video games actually have a leg up on most mediums when it comes to telling a love story. Video games, much like novels, have a lot more time to develop relationships. In movies we’re often given montages of people falling in love, detailing twenty dates in two minutes. But with the expanded time in games, anywhere from eight to eighty hours for the characters to fall in love, we could see every single date the characters go on; follow their love story from start to finish without fast forwards.

Take Final Fantasy VIII for example. This one is my favorites in the series because of the love story. Ignore the broken battle system for a minute if you will (tents into curaga into the HP slot for the win), the love story in this one is ridiculously complex thanks in part to the fifty plus hours it is told. A brief summery, the two main characters, Squall and Rinoa, fall in love over the course of a rebellion/moon monster invasion, which would be ho hum in and of itself if not for the kicker of this story, that they are actually living out the love story started off by there parents, which we are privy to in bizarre waking flashbacks. This brings up questions of whether or not Squall/Rinoa are actually in love, or are they being manipulated through the DNA of their parents? Are these two love stories, one that failed and one that flourished? Or is this actually a single love story told through two generations.

So romances are possible in video game format, but what about romantic comedies? How would the game play work? Would there be a simple misunderstanding mini game, a common scene in the movie version of a Romantic Comedy? Could you have an FPS comedy? One scene that translates well into video games is the last minute dash to the train/plane/bus that one of the lovers is leaving on. You could probably get an entire game out of one/many couples racing to meet each other at the last minute. Although where does the comedy aspect come in?

I’ve seen several top tens on the subject of couples in video games. Weirdly, the two highest ranking couples in most of these lists are Mario/Peach and Mr./Mrs. Pacman. Two couples whom I’m not sure have ever shared an onscreen kiss in a video game are considered the most romantic couples of all time in video games? If we had games that actually focused on love as the main aspect of the game play, and not rescuing the damsel, would there be better examples of video game love?

A quick list of things that are integral for any Romantic Comedy:

1. Both love interests would have to be in seventy percent of the game.

2. More often than not, they’d be meeting each other for the first time at the beginning of the game.

3. A more mundane setting. Exotic love story locations work, but the time for falling in love would need to be condensed and generally precipitated by action to increase the tension leading to love.

4. Witty banter is a must.

5. The characters must have fallacies that form the bond that leads to love, I know, this is a tough one for video games.

So how would that translate into a game? Let’s take a crack at it:

I imagine a co-op game, online only since a large part of romantic comedy would be ruined if the players could consult each other in-between rounds. The best match up would be randomized servers, to give it an authentic meeting-for-the-first-time feel. It takes place in a big city, there has to be a chance for missed encounters and varied locals for dates. There’s chat between the players, but there probably should be some prompts which are written by professionals, people in romantic comedies are almost always more clever than their real life counterparts. And maybe a Wheel of Romantic Handicaps, such as one character is poor and has a limited selection of dating locals. Money and time management would be key elements of the game play. And every game would end with a mad dash to catch the other player before they leave the city for good.

So there you go, my Romantic Comedy is a futuristic co-op dating Sim. I feel like I cheated a bit because I don’t think my game could have a single player component. Much like dating, it works better with more than one player… although that gives me an idea for an expansion, group dates… What do ya’ll think? How would you make a Romantic Comedy Game?

Looks like I forgot to post this a few weeks back when I completed it.

Yay post-modernism!

I’ve been thinking what makes Video Games different from other mediums of Art, and I keep coming back to the idea that we, the audience, ask Video Games to lie to us, above any other medium.

For all intents and purposes, when we play a game, we become that character, that’s one of this medium’s strengths. But would you play a video game if the main character was you? With all your strengths and weaknesses, all your faults and foibles? We ask for the lie of being better than ourselves in order to enjoy what the game has to offer. Since we are, in effect, the main character, are all actions made by the player the truth? If I go out of the way to make my Fable character gay, while another player makes them straight, what is the truth there? If characterization is an amalgam of other people’s evaluation of that character, what does that say if in one instance a character is nice and in another he’s evil? When I play Prototype, I go out of my way not to kill civilians. I’m pretty sure I’m one of the few people who do that, especially since there’s a perk that gives you more power if you’ve overfed before battle. Now who is Alex Mercer?

When we watch a play, we know we aren’t the characters on stage. We may identify with them, but we do not control their actions. And if they portray their roles dishonestly we often fault them for it. One of my pet peeve plots are what I call “Body Snatcher” movies, for obvious reasons. If all the characters are all lying to me because in the end they will turn out to be aliens, what do I care about their motivations? If Blorzak as Tim, unbeknownst to me, pretends to fall in love with Sandy then what do I care about that relationship if in the end Blorzak eats Sandy? This is worse with a long running television show because the lie could be told for thirty episodes instead of thirty minutes.

But this is an inherent strength in Video Games. The better the lie, especially in the character I control, the more fun it is to play. Would I rather be myself, who can jump about a foot and a half off the ground, or Mario, who can manage ten times his own height?

As games try to become more Realistic, in at least looks, are they creating a better lie? A lot of discussion gets thrown around about the uncanny valley. Is the main problem not that the characters become unrealistic or robotic, but that the lie becomes too easy to spot? If Art is about expressing some kind of truth, and I’m not saying that it has to be, where does that leave Video Games? The more truthful the game gets, the less fun it will be to play. The Portal Gun is way more interesting than a musket. Halo is more fun than Passage.

And that’s the crux of the matter. Gamers have to decide whether it’s more important for a game to be fun than to be honest. Do we like being lied to? Artists have to decide if it’s possible to be fun and honest, or if they care that bad game mechanics are worth it for expression.

Do we want the lies?