I hate genres in gaming. Anybody who has had a design class with me can tell you, there are few things I dislike more than genre. I have two major criticisms of the current genre system in games:
1) Design Ruts - As soon as a developer or a publisher says to themselves, "We are making an RTS" or "We are making an FPS", their heads are immediately filled with expectations for the genre. Specific little things that those games are "supposed" to have. I.E. resource management in a Real Time Strategy game.
2) Mechanical Classification - The system we currently has classifies games based on their mechanics, rather than their style or substance. As far as I can think of, we are the only medium that does this. Sure, maybe those more technically informed about films might refer to them based on the mechanics of the cinematography, but for the most part a film is referred to by its content. I.E. Drama, Comedy, Romance, etc.
I'm not going to blame the industry for this, or the game journalists, or anybody else associated with the medium. Traditionally, games have only been about the mechanics. Stories, characters, and context were so abstracted that they didn't really matter or could be summed up in a quick sentence. Truly, mechanics were the king.
Chess is about a war between two factions. Super Mario Bros. is a game about a plumber rescuing a princess and so on and so forth. It made little sense to categorize these things by their visual style or their thematic elements.
But now, we do have a lot of these things. Games have themes and visual styles, and I would call for a move away from the genres of yesterday. Naturally, that's an easy thing to say and much harder to do. I don't have a ready made list of categories to classify different strokes of games ; Ian Bogost at Gamasutra wrote this article about a style he would call "Proceduralism". I agree with many of the things he says, and disagree with some of them, but this kind of thinking will be an extremely useful tool for us designers as we go forth in an effort to make something new.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Some Thoughts About Dissapointment
Hey everybody, I hope you all had a good vacation, I finally got the chance to do some concentrated effort on my mod, but that's not what this post is about.
Instead I want to talk about disappointment in games. Friends of mine and critics alike constantly harp on the fact that they are disappointed with a particular new release. The reasons vary from the game was too linear, or it wasn't realistic enough, or it was too unrealistic, or it's story wasn't very good. I've done some pondering, and I think it's safe to say that almost all of these sort of complaints stem from a player's expectations of a game. They expect the game, either from previews or screenshots or just hearsay, to perform in a specific way which it does not. Subsequently, they are disappointed with the title and move on.
The problem with this is that you may miss the entire point the designers were trying to put in front of you. It's like walking into a steakhouse blindfolded and expecting lobster, then being upset that they give you a delicious juicy steak. Sure, maybe it isn't a lobster, but gosh darnit it still tastes great.
Okay, maybe that wasn't the best analogy, but you get the idea.
I know a number of people disappointed with Left4Dead because it wasn't enough "Survival Horror" and was too actiony. Valve never set out to make a survival horror game, they set out to make a great co-op game. An equal number of people were disappointed with Mirrors Edge because it didn't do the sorts of things you'd expect a first person game to do. And I'm sure there will be a number of grumpy real time strategy fans when we get our hands on Dawn of War 2 come Febuary 23rd thanks to its bucking of RTS tradition.
What I'm trying to say here is that as players and designers, it is crucial that we go into a game playing experience with a clean slate. I don't think every time you sit down to play you should be analyzing and critiquing constantly, that negates the point of experiencing the game. But you should at least give it a fair chance to stand on its own two legs.
Instead I want to talk about disappointment in games. Friends of mine and critics alike constantly harp on the fact that they are disappointed with a particular new release. The reasons vary from the game was too linear, or it wasn't realistic enough, or it was too unrealistic, or it's story wasn't very good. I've done some pondering, and I think it's safe to say that almost all of these sort of complaints stem from a player's expectations of a game. They expect the game, either from previews or screenshots or just hearsay, to perform in a specific way which it does not. Subsequently, they are disappointed with the title and move on.
The problem with this is that you may miss the entire point the designers were trying to put in front of you. It's like walking into a steakhouse blindfolded and expecting lobster, then being upset that they give you a delicious juicy steak. Sure, maybe it isn't a lobster, but gosh darnit it still tastes great.
Okay, maybe that wasn't the best analogy, but you get the idea.
I know a number of people disappointed with Left4Dead because it wasn't enough "Survival Horror" and was too actiony. Valve never set out to make a survival horror game, they set out to make a great co-op game. An equal number of people were disappointed with Mirrors Edge because it didn't do the sorts of things you'd expect a first person game to do. And I'm sure there will be a number of grumpy real time strategy fans when we get our hands on Dawn of War 2 come Febuary 23rd thanks to its bucking of RTS tradition.
What I'm trying to say here is that as players and designers, it is crucial that we go into a game playing experience with a clean slate. I don't think every time you sit down to play you should be analyzing and critiquing constantly, that negates the point of experiencing the game. But you should at least give it a fair chance to stand on its own two legs.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Some Thoughts about the Wool Over your Eyes
Suspension of disbelief: It refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible. It also refers to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. (Wikipedia)
How thick is the wool you're willing to pull over your eyes? The tolerance level for suspension of disbelief varies greatly from person to person, and as far as the general audience for games go their willingness to suspend their disbelief is much higher than the average non-gamer. I don't think many developers and gamers even realize how far they're willing to go to force their own immersion into a game. Consequently, this affects their designs and limits their audience.
We need to make it so that the amount of suspension needed to be immersed into a game is less than it is now. For gaming I define suspension of disbelief somewhat differently. As gaming is concerned, suspension of disbelief is about masking your mechanics to a point where they are no longer considered systemic mechanics, but merely an extension of the world you are inhabiting. Let me give you an example to clarify what I mean.
In Left4Dead when a player goes to heal another player with a medpack they don't think to themselves, "I'm going to heal Francis because he's down to 12 health, and this medpack will heal him for 75 health bringing him to 87 health, which will increase his run speed as long as he doesn't get hurt again." They think, "Shit! Francis is hurt, I'll patch him up." The less we get players thinking the first way and the more we have them thinking the latter way, the better.
On the other end of the scale, there are mechanically heavy games like Warhammer Online, where in almost all of your choices are based on your knowledge of the game as a system. It quickly becomes, "I'll choose this piece of loot for the +14 weapon skill over this one with +14 initiative." Obviously, there is a demographic who enjoys that sort of nuts and bolts gameplay that involves getting into the nitty gritty of the game system. Diablo 2 thrived off of it.
What I'm saying is that if we want to open our games up to the non-gaming population more we need to implement our mechanics in such a way that they aren't smacking us upside the head with percentages. A game that did a great job of making the nitty gritty mechanics more natural is The Witcher. In The Witcher there is plenty of old fasioned RPG nuts and bolts, but the game makes the compromise (improvement) of not forcing the player to learn their entire system in order to play the game. Instead, I can simply choose to add another dot onto a skill whenever I level up, and instead of describing it to me as "+25% damage per skill point" it is described as "Sinew of Blows" or some such. Leveling the skill then unlocks a new animation that I'll see Geralt perform when I attack next using that skill, making me feel like the character himself has improved and not just his statistics. The descriptor coupled with the new animations that leveling up unlocks makes what would traiditionally be considered a classic skill tree in a more natural playable direction. It's not perfect, but it's trying.
If we can lighten up that wool over the players eyes, we can get more and more people playing our stuff and enjoying it for what it is as a whole piece, not just power-gamers playing it as a mechanical system. Remember, just because you don't mind having your character described as a robot with a number assigned to each skill, doesn't mean the player won't mind.
How thick is the wool you're willing to pull over your eyes? The tolerance level for suspension of disbelief varies greatly from person to person, and as far as the general audience for games go their willingness to suspend their disbelief is much higher than the average non-gamer. I don't think many developers and gamers even realize how far they're willing to go to force their own immersion into a game. Consequently, this affects their designs and limits their audience.
We need to make it so that the amount of suspension needed to be immersed into a game is less than it is now. For gaming I define suspension of disbelief somewhat differently. As gaming is concerned, suspension of disbelief is about masking your mechanics to a point where they are no longer considered systemic mechanics, but merely an extension of the world you are inhabiting. Let me give you an example to clarify what I mean.
In Left4Dead when a player goes to heal another player with a medpack they don't think to themselves, "I'm going to heal Francis because he's down to 12 health, and this medpack will heal him for 75 health bringing him to 87 health, which will increase his run speed as long as he doesn't get hurt again." They think, "Shit! Francis is hurt, I'll patch him up." The less we get players thinking the first way and the more we have them thinking the latter way, the better.
On the other end of the scale, there are mechanically heavy games like Warhammer Online, where in almost all of your choices are based on your knowledge of the game as a system. It quickly becomes, "I'll choose this piece of loot for the +14 weapon skill over this one with +14 initiative." Obviously, there is a demographic who enjoys that sort of nuts and bolts gameplay that involves getting into the nitty gritty of the game system. Diablo 2 thrived off of it.
What I'm saying is that if we want to open our games up to the non-gaming population more we need to implement our mechanics in such a way that they aren't smacking us upside the head with percentages. A game that did a great job of making the nitty gritty mechanics more natural is The Witcher. In The Witcher there is plenty of old fasioned RPG nuts and bolts, but the game makes the compromise (improvement) of not forcing the player to learn their entire system in order to play the game. Instead, I can simply choose to add another dot onto a skill whenever I level up, and instead of describing it to me as "+25% damage per skill point" it is described as "Sinew of Blows" or some such. Leveling the skill then unlocks a new animation that I'll see Geralt perform when I attack next using that skill, making me feel like the character himself has improved and not just his statistics. The descriptor coupled with the new animations that leveling up unlocks makes what would traiditionally be considered a classic skill tree in a more natural playable direction. It's not perfect, but it's trying.
If we can lighten up that wool over the players eyes, we can get more and more people playing our stuff and enjoying it for what it is as a whole piece, not just power-gamers playing it as a mechanical system. Remember, just because you don't mind having your character described as a robot with a number assigned to each skill, doesn't mean the player won't mind.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Some Thoughts About Provoking Thoughts
I've had some difficulty coming up with something I thought important or interesting enough to write about first. I was reading this Gamasutra article which lists the editors top five indie games picks of 2008. The list itself is interesting, but what caught my attention was the little summary at the bottom with regards to their number one choice, I wish I were the Moon:
"...this indie title goes to the core of what is fascinating about independent games today. At its best, they're different, they're evocative, they're poignant, and they make you think differently about yourself and your life."
I immediately thought to myself, what makes these traits so inline with Indie Games? Why aren't triple A titles considered part of this domain as well? It would be foolish of me to say that this is the oppinion of the entire industry, but it certainly is something I've noticed more online and certainly amongst my peers. The idea that indie games are reserved for the art and making statements, with triple A titles being reserved for more light hearted fun.
In contrast to the above sentiment, there was also an interview posted with Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin of Castle Crashers/Alien Hominid fame. What was interesting about this was where the interviewer asked them what was up with all the pooping animals in the game. His response was:
"I didn't want people to take our game seriously. You know, like that they're thinking that there's some kind of statement that we're making in any form whatsoever. People will do that. I think that the more we show people that, we're just having fun and want them to have fun. "
So here's a guy on the indie side of things saying, "Hey, we just want people to have fun." and here's me wanting to be on the triple A side of things saying, "Hey, why can't we be serious?" Where does the disconnect stem from?
I think part of it stems from the fact that publishers, while being more acceptive of statements than they used to be, are still scared of upsetting customers. So, the biggest outlet for those kinds of games are on the indie side. So now there is this perception that indie games are for art and triple A games are for fun and thats the way things are.
I don't know if there is a solution to the developers vs. buisnessmen debate, only compromises that fall on either side of the scale, but a big step in the right direction is getting ourselves as an industry out of this rut of "This is what an indie game is, this is what a triple A game is, this is an FPS, an RPG, an MMO, etc. etc." The more we fall into that trap, the less we can do with the medium.
"...this indie title goes to the core of what is fascinating about independent games today. At its best, they're different, they're evocative, they're poignant, and they make you think differently about yourself and your life."
I immediately thought to myself, what makes these traits so inline with Indie Games? Why aren't triple A titles considered part of this domain as well? It would be foolish of me to say that this is the oppinion of the entire industry, but it certainly is something I've noticed more online and certainly amongst my peers. The idea that indie games are reserved for the art and making statements, with triple A titles being reserved for more light hearted fun.
In contrast to the above sentiment, there was also an interview posted with Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin of Castle Crashers/Alien Hominid fame. What was interesting about this was where the interviewer asked them what was up with all the pooping animals in the game. His response was:
"I didn't want people to take our game seriously. You know, like that they're thinking that there's some kind of statement that we're making in any form whatsoever. People will do that. I think that the more we show people that, we're just having fun and want them to have fun. "
So here's a guy on the indie side of things saying, "Hey, we just want people to have fun." and here's me wanting to be on the triple A side of things saying, "Hey, why can't we be serious?" Where does the disconnect stem from?
I think part of it stems from the fact that publishers, while being more acceptive of statements than they used to be, are still scared of upsetting customers. So, the biggest outlet for those kinds of games are on the indie side. So now there is this perception that indie games are for art and triple A games are for fun and thats the way things are.
I don't know if there is a solution to the developers vs. buisnessmen debate, only compromises that fall on either side of the scale, but a big step in the right direction is getting ourselves as an industry out of this rut of "This is what an indie game is, this is what a triple A game is, this is an FPS, an RPG, an MMO, etc. etc." The more we fall into that trap, the less we can do with the medium.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Who is this guy?
I think it's important that I introduce myself if I expect anybody to take anything I say seriously.
As far as the basics goes, my name is Ray Ortgiesen and I'm enrolled at Champlain College as an Electronic Game and Interactive Development major. Like most people in the industry, or wanting to get into it, I've been playing games as long as I can remember and I've been making games since not long after that. I don't know how many board games and card games I came up with that I made my parents play with me, but I still have a stack of what were essentially home made Yugioh cards sitting in my closet. I started doing some mod work around 13 or 14 with Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. I don't want to try and make myself out to sound like I was some child prodigy. The first level I remember getting to properly compile in Jedi Outcast, I spawned in on the ceiling, I had the room scaled so improperly the player was clipping through it awkwardly, and it was lit as if the sun was in the center of it. Hey, you've got to start somewhere.
Long story short, I kept up with it and here I am now, in college, still making games. (Though I expect these ones to come out a little better than my ill-fated Yugioh knockoff.)
Beyond that, I really pride myself on playing just about any kind of game you can find. As a designer, I believe that it's really important to expose yourself to as many games as possible, both good and bad. That's not to say I love every genre of game. I don't. But I have played them all, and I at least understand why people do like them.
Outside of games, I also play guitar, scuba dive when I can find the time, and read alot.
There you have it, now you have a general idea of who this guy is who is writing his ideas about games.
As far as the basics goes, my name is Ray Ortgiesen and I'm enrolled at Champlain College as an Electronic Game and Interactive Development major. Like most people in the industry, or wanting to get into it, I've been playing games as long as I can remember and I've been making games since not long after that. I don't know how many board games and card games I came up with that I made my parents play with me, but I still have a stack of what were essentially home made Yugioh cards sitting in my closet. I started doing some mod work around 13 or 14 with Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. I don't want to try and make myself out to sound like I was some child prodigy. The first level I remember getting to properly compile in Jedi Outcast, I spawned in on the ceiling, I had the room scaled so improperly the player was clipping through it awkwardly, and it was lit as if the sun was in the center of it. Hey, you've got to start somewhere.
Long story short, I kept up with it and here I am now, in college, still making games. (Though I expect these ones to come out a little better than my ill-fated Yugioh knockoff.)
Beyond that, I really pride myself on playing just about any kind of game you can find. As a designer, I believe that it's really important to expose yourself to as many games as possible, both good and bad. That's not to say I love every genre of game. I don't. But I have played them all, and I at least understand why people do like them.
Outside of games, I also play guitar, scuba dive when I can find the time, and read alot.
There you have it, now you have a general idea of who this guy is who is writing his ideas about games.
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