A nice cup of rabies

Yeah, I've heard a little about Haze playing with that issue. I will be curious to see how the designers deal with it once you get to the endgame: is the only solution still to spurt hot death from your gun? Or will there be a transformation of the game mechanic from 'first-person shooter' to 'first-person something else'?

Games look and sound a lot better than they used to, but in terms of the fundamental interactions between the player and the environment there's been no change since the 80s. Non-violent interactions are relegated to 'casual' games or even slower-moving games; I really think there's a ton of unexplored play mechanics out there that can be fast-moving, fun, and about something besides death. So many of our big-budget games are programming us to reflexively hurt, and that can't be good in the long run.

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Yeah. And apparently I, and anyone else who thinks that this game is kinda creepy, needs to be educated about how wrong we are in GREAT detail about the intense wonderfulness of ALL the Hobson's choices the game offers you. Ugh.

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Yeah. And thus the medium continues to be inextricably linked to one set of reactions; the games that get the most resources allocated to crafting a deep, beautiful experience are also the ones that have to dig the furthest into this tradition.

This is kinda where I was trying to go with that little bird game I was playing with: I wanted to make something that could get you into that no-mind reflex place... that was about something besides destruction. I ran into some technical and design snags and shelved it.

We give a lot of our free time to video games. Time where we're open and uncritical. I'm getting more and more concerned about the fact that the situational analysis this programs into us is so frequently about destruction.

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Hmm! I get the impression most of those have a pretty juvenile view of sex, unfortunately... but yeah, if anyone's going to be experimenting with that, it might well be someone who's been cranking out softcore porn games, and is getting tired of implementing the easy mechanics again and again.

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It's a very pernicious positive feedback loop. Violence is the easiest way to produce dramatic tension, which draws people people who enjoy that kind of content to gaming and excludes those who don't, so gamers expect that sort of content from games and reject games that don't meet their expectations. This effect becomes most pronounced at the "hardcore" end of the gamer spectrum, those willing to spend thousands of dollars on hardware and games and eat, sleep, and breathe games. The game industry itself is heavily stocked with people from that end of the spectrum, particularly designers. Developers tend to produce what they like to play, this feeds into the cycle.

I like the bird "un-game", and I think it would make a nice casual game if given a way to "win" or "lose". The dramatic conflict could just a never-ending battle against entropy, but that "end" is the only thing missing. It would be an Orsinal type of game, and that's definitely a good thing.

The things you've described are why I tend to gravitate towards games and genres that don't revolve around going toe-to-toe with recognizable people and reducing them to chunky salsa. While the Half Life series games are obviously first-person shooters, they don't seem to revel in blood and violence to the degree of the Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament series.

Your experiences with the Grand Theft Auto series sum up why I refuse to play them, even though they are highly-regarded examples of the open-world genre. It would only be worse with highly-realistic models, animations, and physics.

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Activision's Battlezone was a case where the license actively hurt us. People familiar with the original and expecting an arcade-style vehicle shooter were likely shocked by the pervasive tactical and strategic elements. People unfamiliar with the original would be unswayed by the name we paid a fair amount of money for. We would have been better off giving it some other name, though I have no idea what that would have been. :)

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I agree with you that it's more than just kinda creepy, and I've only been watching people play it. I can appreciate the effort and artistry that went into it, but I'm not in favor of the pervasive darkness of it.

I think an interesting choice would have been to change the flow of the game based on how you play. The traditional guns-blazing "shooter" approach sends you down the "Leadhead" path. Loading up with Plasmids and harvesting Adam sends you down the "Splicer" path. Protecting the Little Sisters sends you down the "Big Daddy" path. Sneaking around and avoiding trouble sends you down the "Thief" path.

I think it would be a lot more interesting if you could fix things instead of just wrecking them, making you a voice of sanity instead of a force of destruction. I like games where you can make allies, and I think that would have fixed a lot of the "me and my gun against the world" aspect of Bioshock. Imagine if you could find a way to cure Splicers, even if you have to kill a lot of them in self-defense at first. You could slowly work your way through the city of Rapture creating pockets of something resembling order. Imagine if you could find a way to make Big Daddies more "human" so they could help you as intelligent allies in your quest to restore order. While Rapture might never be truly "normal", at least you could leave it in a better state than you found on arrival.

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yeah. These are the people who have already had their ideas of what a genre is shaped by every single installment of it; someone at the point of making a pro-level FPS has probably played every notable FPS they can get their hands on. And they've got to make a few straight ones themselves before they can even begin to start questioning the conventions in the name of novelty, let alone moral grounds. If they ever do.

There's probably something to say about the cultures from the games they produce, too. Compare a game from a small and large developer from the US, France, England, Japan... the large Western games will probably all converge on the US market, but the small ones will show off their different cultural attitudes in a lot of subtle ways.

The bird game, as it stands, needs a couple more elements to juggle. I have a few ideas but none of them felt quite right. Or were really too much heavy lifting for Flash.

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circuit-four.livejournal.com

I think it would be a lot more interesting if you could fix things instead of just wrecking them, making you a voice of sanity instead of a force of destruction.

This principle needs to be applied on a much larger scale. If you're not busy today, found a religion immediately please. :)

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I've already got one, even if its practitioners don't live up to its ideals. (Jesus never claimed His way was easy...)

The complicated part is that fixing things and wrecking them often look a lot alike at first. The difference between a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon and the same scalpel in the hands of a killer is intent.

Imagine being a child undergoing major surgery for a life-threatening condition. You're going to a strange place with strange people, put on a table in a room full of scary machinery, forced into unconsciousness, then cut open. You might not survive the operation, the operation might not work, and you will suffer pain and incapacitation for some time even if it does work. However, the alternative is death, so you have to go through it anyway.

Going back to Bioshock, the "restoration" path should be the most difficult but most rewarding. It is easier to destroy than to create, but creation is ultimately more satisfying. (At least you have something to show for yourself.)

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ff00ff.livejournal.com

Moon tanks of the seventies!

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Ahahaha... :D

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There have actually been advancements in realistic conversational AI, but they tend not to find their way into AAA titles for consoles. There's an indie game called Facade, it's somewhat of an experiment, but it does a good job of simulating human interaction. It's an approach I hope more games will play with, but it's not a selling point for the average AAA console player, it won't immediately push units like next generation (expensive) graphics tech will, so I doubt it'll happen anytime soon.

The problem of simulating moral choices and interactions to this extent in an RPG (let alone a game like Bioshock, where the development costs for tacking on parallel tracks would be astronomical) is so much other data is dependent upon your choices, the developers would just be buried in flags and conditions for every single conversation. Most of the REALLY good dialogue I've seen in games depends on the game having a fairly structured and linear storyline (Planescape: Torment) or freedom at the expense of everyone in the gameworld sounding alike or parroting the same responses (Morrowind/Oblivion). Baldur's Gate would be somewhere in between. If you play the same RPG multiple times, it starts to become very apparent how simply structured most RPGS are, where your moral choices trip a switch and affect a couple conversations, but not much in the game really changes. It's a tough problem. I come down on the side of a strong story, go-anywhere-do-anything games rarely live up to their promise for me.

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Probably the biggest, best selling single genre for video games is non-violent: sports games. And racing games are non-violent as well, you have an entire generation of kids raised on Mario Kart and Gran Turismo. Football, baseball, and golf games continue to be the killer apps for the "non-geek" console owner set. Wii sports alone has sold millions and millions of Nintendo's system, and it looks like Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games will be similarly huge.

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Sports games aren't on my radar at all. They require something I just don't have: knowledge of the sport. The rules are never explained anywhere; you just know how the game goes.

Which is pretty annoying for someone like me who's never played any of them:

"What the fuck is going on?" I bitched, playing Wii Golf. "Why does it keep skipping me?" "That's the way golf works!" I was told. "The player furthest from the hole gets to go next." "Oh, so I'm penalized for doing the best by being bored? This is crap." "That's golf."

After watching everyone else flail around in the sand trap for a while, I sat down. I was bored. People were mildly pissed when it finally came to my turn and I had to stop drawing, scrounge around for the controller, and take my shot.

I may dislike FPSs and beat-em-ups but at least they tell you their goddamn rules. Sports games just tell you what button to push to smack the ball and expect you to already know the rules.

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Sports games aren't on my radar at all. They require something I just don't have: knowledge of the sport. The rules are never explained anywhere; you just know how the game goes.

For the most part, they're not on mine either, but they are non-violent, late hits in football games aside. I know of more than a couple gamer friends of mine with children who lean heavily towards buying sports games and all-ages titles because they want to game with their kids, but know that GTA and Resident Evil are inappropriate. On the other hand, a lot of sports games do require some knowledge of the sport, but about everyone can get into Mario Kart! I wish there were more pseudo-sports games in the vein of Speedball/Cyberball. More action/grit than a board game or a casual game, not as violent as an FPS. And there's always skateboarding games, which are abstract enough that they're fairly self-explanatory with instant feedback.

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I'm in the small set of not 'about everyone' - I played Mario Kart once, with my animation school roomie, and found it to be a really painful, awkward control experience. But I am obviously not normal.

I was in the kitchen putting together a pizza pondering a reply that went into the fact that pretty much any sports game I've encountered lacks a narrative, and a meta-narrative, beyond '[sport] is fun!'. Which was sort of part of my objection to Bioshock in the first place - that its message, as embodied in what remains after you play it for the third time and skip all the cut-scenes, is 'violently destroying semi-human things in the nastiest fashion possible is fun!'.

Also there would have been something about my disinterest for sports/simulation games coming from the fact that they model activities well within the reach of anyone, as opposed to activities firmly in the realm of imagination.

Also there probably would have been a rambling bit about the two narratives found on the surface of any game with a 'story': the story found in cut-scenes, and the story embedded in the actions the user is allowed and encouraged to take in the game - there may be a subplot of 'if you kill little girls you get the bad ending' in Bioshock, but the meat of the game is sure still about killin'. Also there might've been something about the values communicated underneath a game's narratives in the conditions for success - go grab that install you have lying around of Virtual Villagers, for instance: what does that game tell you is Good for the Tribe by dint of success/failure conditions? Consider Lemmings as a communist parable, consider Sonic the Hedgehog as a parable about both the joy and danger of moving so fast you lose control.

But I'm too tired of talking about video games, after yesterday, to go into any detail on this. So I'll leave expanding it as an exercise for the reader. With the implied suggestion of reading Bioshock and/or its demo on this level to understand my reaction to it.

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