Can a Role Playing Game be a mirror of your soul ?

I used to find it difficult to kill innocent people, you know.

One of my earliest memories of having a profound gaming moment is of trying to kill a random NPC farmer in the original Fallout. I wanted to try Fallout's famous freedom of choice, where the world and storyline would adapt to choices you make (really adapt, not Peter Molyneux adapt) , so I just walked up this character going about his life and shot him in the kneecaps (V.A.T.S. is so much fun).

His response was game design genius. He immediately pleaded "Please! I have children! " It shook me. I reloaded a previous save, and left him alone.

A simple pre-programmed response from an NPC made me think deeply about myself. And I realized that, even in make-believe world of role playing games, I couldn't willingly hurt innocent people.

What followed was about twenty years of playing RPGs as a paragon of virtue. Ever the hero with a heart of gold. I would always take the "good" choice. Bend over backwards to make sure everything in the world was just peachy, doing sundry side quests that involved rescuing lost sons and daughters, brokering peace between warring factions to avoid senseless violence, refusing monetary rewards for helping poor farmers (of course, the XP was admittedly more useful) and so on.

Some of my favourite gaming moments from RPGs are the emotional payoffs from undertaking arduous and long, though entirely optional, quests just to do the right thing. Helping the ghouls by rrepairing the reactor in Gecko in Fallout 2. Taking the long trek the temple of Ilmater to purify Yoshimos heart and set his soul at rest in Baldur's Gate 2. Sharing a drink and chat with Letho at the end of The Witcher 2, simply because I was tired of all the bloodshed and wanted to avoid any more. All fantastic emotional moments.

Even if this meant forgoing all the cool stuff you got if you played as an evil character (lots of insane powers, equipment and loot in many RPGs is available only to evil characters), I still couldn't bring myself to make evil choices in games. 

And then something interesting happened.

Today, I am far more ambivalent towards the ideas of good and evil. I increasingly believe that it's all simply a matter of viewpoint, and what seems abhorrent to one set of people is perfectly acceptable to another. I hesitate to judge other people's actions (not in a graceful, Buddha-like way, but rather in a more shrugs-shoulders-and-gives-no-fucks way) because I looked deep into myself and saw a person just as fucked up as any other human being, capable of the very acts of pettiness and cowardice and foolishness that I was so quick to judge other people for when I was younger and quicker to jump to conclusions.

And suddenly, it's easier to be a bad guy. Or at least, a neutral guy who does bad things.

The superb ending to the Witcher 2, where you can choose to fight Letho to the death, or talk about things over a beer. Would I have played it differently today ?

Recently, when playing morally ambiguous games like Shadowrun Returns and Sunless Sea, I find that making gameplay choices that affect the game world in "evil" ways are no longer difficult to make for me. In Shadowrun, I play a consummate professional Shadowrunner - what's important is the contract and the mission. Anything that jeopardizes the mission must be dealt with - no time for moral judgements or thinking about consequences. I regularly refuse to help poor ordinary citizens because I don't want to waste time and resources that distract from the main mission. I go through with the mission even if circumstances emerge where I would previously stop and consider the moral aspects of going through with it. Now it's more important to honour the contract and pick up the payment. Because I don't believe the "good" NPCs anyway - my present world view that everybody is equally fucked up helps immensely in making these in-game decisions.

The way that I make choices in games has changed.

And that is most interesting.

Can role-playing games be a mirror of your soul ? 

Does the way I make choices in RPGs tell me at least a little about my attitude to life in general ? Does looking at how I play videogames tell me about what I am capable of in real life ?

Let me quickly iterate here that I only refer to games where there is a moral choice to be made - typically RPGs. I do not refer to games like Call of Duty or GTA which are so often called out as examples of games that influence or cause violent behaviour. That is not a debate I am interested in addressing here.

I am currently a few hours into another playthrough of Baldur's Gate - but this time I'm playing as a true neutral character. So my in-game choices look beyond simple black and white "good vs evils" morals into pretty much "I don't give a fuck about anything other than what is best for me right now "category. I help NPCs if I feel like. I don't if I don't. And I don't lose sleep over what happens to them - because I'm buying into the fiction that they are responsible for their own fates. That's my mind filling in the blanks in the explicit narrative of the game with whatever it likes - the essential fabric of buying into the fiction of a typical RPG world. You invest the world and characters with back-stories and qualities that aren't actually present in the explicit fiction - just so that the world feels more like a real world than like a film set. It's the way we play RPGs, it's why we enjoy them so much.

But what's interesting here is that we can fill in these blanks in whatever way we want. Because what goes on in the gameworld when your back is turned can be whatever you want it to be. Even the most bleak of worlds like Fallout can be imagined to be full of hopes, dreams, aspirations and goodness. Even seemingly prosperous high-fantasy worlds with lush forests and mighty cities can be imagined to be full of perversions, betrayals, pettiness and deceit. And whatever we choose to fill in these blanks with colours our experience of the game.

I don't know about you, but I tend to fill in the narrative blanks with qualities that I perceive in the real world. So earlier on, I used to look at every random filler NPC and assume that they are basically decent, honest, hard working folk. Now, I assume the same NPCs to be greedy, petty, mean and nasty. And this makes them easier to shoot in the kneecaps. Or at least, to refuse to help.

Even more interestingly, it applies only to random NPCs. Not to party members or team-mates. In Shadowrun : Dragonfall, I did a bunch of quests specifically to help out Dietrich, Glory, Eiger and Blitz. I actually got pretty attached to the squad (they're beatifully written charatcters) and was willing to go the extra mile to help them. Which again to some extent mirrors the way I feel about close friends.

The classic standoff with Urndot Wrex in Mass Effect. I tried my best to reason with him - but to no avail. Today, maybe I wouldn't bother and just shoot him and get on with it. I don't know.

The way I play RPGs has changed to reflect my changing attitudes to the world around me. I don't go out of my way to fuck with people in RPGs, but I no longer go out of my way to help them either. Ditto in real life.

Which makes playing RPGs scary as fuck. Because maybe, just maybe, like really good mirrors, they'll reveal things that I'd rather not see.

Android Game Recco - Card City Nights

 
Card City Nights is a wonderfully imaginative, addictive, and rather odd little card battling game that offers a lot more strategic depth than its goofball graphics suggest.

The game starts you off as a newcomer to the city, and very quickly has you meeting some pretty nutty characters, battling them to win cards, and setting you off on a quest to find the eight 'legendary' cards to win the game. The story, of course, is nonsensical and doesn't really matter, but the writing, should you choose to pay attention to it, is witty, charming and funny.

The core of the game is, as it should be with card battlers, fighting card battles, winning new cards and building the most powerful deck possible. The battle system itself is pretty unique and fun - you lay out cards on a 3 X 3 grid, trying to string together 'combos' to attack your opponent or raise your own defense. It's a lot more challenging than it initially looks. The first few battles are pretty straightforward, but pretty soon you'll discover a wide range of cards, combos and strategies - primarily by the time-tested method of getting your ass kicked by the game's 'bosses' who use said strategies. Soon, you'll be winning tons of new cards and putting together powerful new decks with specific strategies - I've got an attack heavy deck, a defensive deck and a generalist deck already, and I'm only about two hours in.

It's a fun, challenging and rewarding battle system - I say this as a fan of card battlers in general, and MTG and, more recently, Hearthstone in particular.

 

The cards themselves are, simply put, quite insane. A madcap assortment of characters with crazy names and crazier artwork quite unlike anything I've seen in the genre makes it extremely entertaining to collect cards and build decks. 

 

Mobile and tablet gaming is increasingly taking up chunks of my time - offering deep and 'hardcore' experiences that are beginning to rival those found on traditional platforms. Card City Nights is another such title - I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a deep and satisfying strategy game experience on the go.

Card City Nights is available on Steam (PC/ Mac/ Linux) Android, and soon (or maybe already) on iOS - so you really don't have an excuse. Get it here.

 

The most important game design lesson I ever learned

While we designers rarely ignore the mechanics based aspects of what makes our games fun and addictive (aspiration, progression, balance, storytelling etc.) there's one simple rule that I've seen ignored time and again, and indeed have been guilty of ignoring myself.

This one simple principle seems to be a common thread running through every successful (and especially addictive) blockbuster game ever made.

Here it is :

The action that your player performs most frequently should feel like fun all by itself.

To elaborate - the one (or two) things that the player repeatedly does while playing your game should feel juicy, satisfying and fun enough so that just simply performing this action hundreds of times even without any additional context should not become boring.

Let's test this hypothesis by looking at some blockbuster games across genres :


Super Mario Bros - running and jumping
The famously solid and weighty physics behind Mario's basic run and jump make controlling him extremely pleasurable. Just running and jumping around a level with Mario, even without any enemies or obstacles would still be pretty fun.

Diablo - clicking on an enemy
The famously visceral feeling you got when attacking a monster in Diablo - the hugely satisfying crunching, squishing and cutting sounds followed by great death animations - meant that you could just click on enemies all day, making it one of the most addictive games in history.

Candy Crush Saga - matching candies
Love it or hate it - there's no denying that Candy Crush exploded in audio-visual delight every time you made a combo. Every sound and animation is just perfect, and they string together beautifully so that making a series of long combos is a hypnotic experience - regardless of the score, progression and other gameplay mechanics.

Halo - shooting
Halo (or any other top FPS) gets the shooting right. The simple act of firing any of its guns feels solid, punchy and satisfying - the sound, the recoil animation, the overheat animation, the needler trails, all work together to make just shooting a gun a fun experience by itself, even if there are no enemies at the other end.

Farmville - harvesting crops
The core actions in Farmville are another example of using sound and animation to make addictive fun. Harvesting a bumper crop in Farmville is almost a zen-like experience - huge bushels of strawberries or pumpkins or apples (and gold coins) burst out of your screen at every click, giving your brain endorphin hit after endorphin hit.

Angry Birds - launching a bird
Like Super Mario Bros, this one is also all about physics. The superb sense of weight when you catapult different kinds of birds to their doom, with the hilariously perfect sounds, lead to an experience that never gets old, however ,many hundreds of times you repeat it.

Minecraft - digging and placing blocks
The satisfying whack-plink-thunk sounds when you dig through different kinds of terrain in Minecraft, and the comforting thud when you place a block down make the basic actions of the game feel fun and enjoyable. So hours and hours of carving out the terrain and building stuff doesn't feel like a chore - in fact, quite the opposite. It's an addictive, almost meditative experience.



Hmmmmmm. Most suspicious, yes?  The truth seems to be, regardless of genre, that the most successful games make the core action as much fun as it can be. So much that, when you're in the thick of the game, it becomes a trance-like, meditative experience.

I actually learned this the hard way at Zynga when we shipped Hidden Shadows. While we focused heavily on making the hidden objects scenes look great, writing interesting stories, tuning the economy to feel right and suchlike, we dropped the ball on one important thing. In our game (like in many Facebook games), the action that the player performed most frequently was in fact clicking on buttons (in the quests, the game's various menus and dialogs and so on). We failed to make the button-clicking a delightful experience - and this made the game, in hindsight, less addictive. My gut still tells me that a better level of UI polish would have made Hidden Shadows a vastly more successful game than it ended up being. Games like Candy Crush Saga and Farmville 2 get it right - and are more addictive experiences as a result.

To anyone making games today, I cannot stress this enough - isolate the core action of your game, and polish the crap out of it until it feels like fun on its own. Test prototypes that have just the core action and absolutely no other systems built around it - and iterate until these feel enjoyable to play around with. Your game will be better for it.

Madras Psychedelic - an Interactive story about weirdness, Madras and being lost in an alternate dimension.

For a while, I've been tossing around in my mind an adventure game I wanted to make about Chennai.

The first prototype is finally here - it's called Madras Psychedelic.

This prototype is a text-only (with a few pictures) Twine based interactive story in which I'm testing out the overall feel of the narrative. Check it out here : http://img.sonofbosey.in/game/Ep1.html

Maybe sometime in the future, I'll mock up something with graphics in AGS or something. But for now, I want to see if the narrative works. Is the world fun to explore? Are the characters fun to interact with? Is the story interesting enough?

So I'd love for you guys to play through this VERY early Alpha version and let me know what you think .

Here are some teaser images to give you an idea of what's in there :

Do play, and give me lots of feedback and harsh criticism. It's over here : http://img.sonofbosey.in/game/Ep1.html

Why we're so addicted to Flappy Bird

The success of Flappy Bird seems to have confounded a lot of people, who can't seem to understand why it's such a big deal. As a game designer, I see some very sound reasons (based on core design principles) why it's so darn popular and addictive, despite being so brutally difficult. Here's what I think :

It feels winnable

The objective of Flappy Bird is very simple - "Score 1 more point  than I did last time". That is all. No quests, no story, no faraway goals that seem unreachable or intimidating.

That doesn't sound so hard, does it? Surely you can do it?

Especially since you were this fucking close last time. Right? You only missed by a whisker. So you try again.

Play time is super short.

Each play lasts, for most people, about five seconds or less. Even the best players can't be playing for more than a minute. So where's the harm in trying just once more to score just one more point? So you try again.

Every small victory makes you feel Like A Boss.

Because it's so darn hard, scoring a single point gives you a feeling of epic victory and accomplishment. And the next epic win feeling is only five seconds and one point away. So you try again.

It feels fair

This is important - the basic physics and controls in the game feel solid and fair. So every time your bird falls to the ground, you blame yourself and your lack of skill. Not luck or randomness. So you still believe that you can beat it the next time. So you try again.

So by following four very basic design principles and implementing them well, the designer has created a game that is addictive. A game that people can't stop playing. A game that people talk about and get others to play. I don't think it's an accident - it is at its core a very well made game.

It isn't even the first of its kind - many recent games have achieved success by following the exact same principles. Super Hexagon, for instance. It's just that Flappy Bird takes these principles and distills them to their essence, cutting out even the most basic of embellishments, such as pretty graphics, music or a story. Which is why it works for such a wide audience. And which is why it will fade away quickly - because it lacks lasting value to anyone other than the most competitive of players.

The lesson here for anyone making games is this - the oldest video game design technique (one fun core mechanic tied to a high score ) still works very well.

Brutality! A history of violence in videogames.

If you’re easily offended, you can stop reading now.

Yes, this is a piece about violence in videogames. It’s a look at the most brutal, gratuitous and vile things that you can do to your opponents (and sometimes to yourself) in some of the most controversial games in history.

But this isn’t a rant about how videogames are ruining our children, and turning them into mentally unhinged murderers who run amok, cheerfully decapitating bystanders, neighbours, cousins and school principals (videogames don’t do that, but that’s a discussion for another time and place). Oh, no. This is a celebration of very adult entertainment (not THAT adult entertainment. Drag your minds out of the sewers, if you please) provided by the fantasy violence that is the hallmark of some of the finest videogames ever made.

Violence has always been a common theme in games, even in the old days. Take chess, for instance. Nobody ever accused chess of being a bad influence on tender young minds. But it’s undeniable that it is a game about cowardly, pansy monarchs who send out troops to kill the troops of other similarly spineless despots, while they muck about safely behind the lines. With a little imagination, it’s easy to look at a game of chess in progress and see mounted knights hacking foot solders into pieces, evil priests sexually harassing beautiful queens by menacingly circling around them (sometimes hunting in pairs, like fast bowlers) and a battlefield stained with blood, bodies strewn by the wayside. Uggh. I hope I’ve convinced you to pull your innocent children out of those dangerous chess classes immediately. A most vile and corrupting influence, this game. Turns your children into corrupt generals, murdering soldiers and deviant priests. Shudder.

But I digress.

Videogames, in fact, started off fairly innocently. The very first videogame, Pong, was nothing more than a friendly game of electronic tennis. But it didn’t take very long for the corrupting influence of traditionally violent games like Chess to find their way into videogames, and before long, we had spaceships shooting laser beams at each other, crazed gorillas carrying off pretty girls, and then being attacked by plumbers carrying hammers, strange pizza-like creatures defending themselves against monsters by actually eating them raw, and other such gory goodness. But videogames such as Space War, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man were still perceived as wholesome entertainment - because, like Chess, they hid their darkness behind cutesy-pie facades. Nobody looked at Pac-Man gobbling up a monster and saw it for what it was - cannibalism. Without even the decency to cook your fellow creatures before eating them. (I’m personally shocked that Pac-Man did not set off a wave of cannibalism in the United States when it first came out. Maybe there weren’t enough anti-videogame campaigners at the time to spark it off.)

So people did not quite get offended by videogame violence for a while. Not until Death Race arrived in 1976.

Death Race was a game in which you drove around in a sports car and ran over innocent pedestrians for points (this makes it even more cynical than the much reviled Grand Theft Auto, which doesn’t explicitly reward this soul-cleansing activity). To make it worse, every time you successfuly ran over someone, a cross would appear, marking the spot where they once stood. People in America were so horrified by this, they even forgot that it was based on a movie featuring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone (a most heinous crime by itself), and started complaining en-masse about how the game was ‘sick’ and ‘morbid’, triggering off TV debates on the psychological impact of violent videogames, and raking up all manner of controversy that eventually caused Death Race to sell many more copies than it would have otherwise.

It’s important to remember that Death Race (and other controversial games of the time, such as Custer’s Revenge and Texas Chainsaw Massacre) featured graphics that were extremely primitive, and a far cry (see what I did there?) from today’s games. If you were to watch a game of Death Race in progress today, it’s highly unlikely that you’d find it even in the least bit disturbing. 

However, you’re unlikely to have that problem with Bulletstorm.

The recent first person shooter from Epic, controversially advertised as “the game your mom doesn’t want you to play”, encourages players to ‘Kill with Skill’ - awarding special points for creative ways of disposing off your enemies, such as lassoing them and then impaling them on metal spikes, kicking them on to live wires and electrocuting them, and pulling them off helicopters and then shooting them in the ass before they hit the ground (I kid you not). This game is so over the top, it makes Grand Theft Auto look like a game of tic-tac-toe. It’s re-ignited the debate over violence in games all over again, and given Jack Thompson one more reason to regret that he’s disbarred in practically every state in the US. 

Bulletstorm is hardly the first game to feature gratuitous violence. The famously controversial Postal featured levels where you generally had to run amok, killing everybody in sight. Soldier of Fortune was the first game to feature different animations when you shot enemies in specific body parts. Manhunt featured a feature where you could kill enemies by choking them with plastic bags over their heads (a feature so disturbing, even publisher Rockstar games, not known for being averse to controversy,  debated it for long before including it. But they included it, God bless them).

But the important thing is this - Bulletstorm and its ilk aren’t meant for kids. The Electronic Software Ratings Board (a body that was formed thanks to Mortal Kombat’s famous spine-ripping, neck snapping fatalities) has had the good sense to rate these games ‘M’ for Mature, meaning that only persons aged 17 or above can play it. And if you’re 17 or above, there’s some incredible good times to be had with extremely violent videogames.

Gears of War 2 features a level where you’re inside the belly of a huge monster, and have to wade through neck-deep blood before using a chainsaw to cut your way out from the inside. The Fallout games feature combat where you can decide whether to shoot that hideous mutant in the kneecaps, eyeballs or head - all to the quite surreal background of cheerful classic hits by artists such as Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters.Many such delights await the player who is capable of enjoying them without feeling the urge to regurgitate the most recent meal.


And let’s face it - we live in a violent world, and there’s little evidence to show that it’s going to get any gentler or kinder overnight. The make-believe violence found in videogames is simply play - an extension of the bang-you’re-dead popgun play we all indulge in as children. Renowned writer Gerard Jones, in his famous book ‘Killing Monsters : Why Children Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes and Make-Believe Violence’, makes an eloquent, well-researched and convincing argument that fantasy violence actually helps children deal better with the many kinds of violence they face during childhood, and as adults later in life. Indeed, children relate to make-believe violence ( such as that found in videogames, comics, cartoons and films) completely differently from how they relate to it in news broadcasts or when faced with it in real life. And this distinction stays with us through adulthood (at least, those of us who aren’t mentally unhinged), which is why we can enjoy violence without indulging in violent behaviour - why we realize that it’s probably not a good idea to respond to a power cut by ripping off a bright friend’s head to use as a light source, or to react to the high prices of foodgrain by spraying bullets around the local Big Bazaar. 


If you still believe that videogame violence is evil and will make you behave violently in real life -  then a piece of heartfelt advice. Don’t play chess.

Grandma Gamer

Or how the gift-request killed the headshot.

Six hours of gaming every day. Signs of serious addiction - such as inability to think of anything else, a propensity to wake up at 3 a.m. to complete an unfinished game quest. Identifying more with game friends than real-life ones (and never mind family - they don’t even figure). It’s enough to drive everyone else in the household nuts.

Grandma really needs to kick her videogame addiction.

Oh? You thought we were talking about teenage boys? Heavens, no. 

The world is seeing the rise of a new kind of gamer. She’s anywhere between her thirties and seventies, and couldn’t care less about oversized orcs, perilous planets, swashbuckling swordsmen, super-soldiers and all the other stuff that have historically defined videogame-cool. She’s far too busy tending crops, caring for animals and making cities look pretty. Yep. That friend on Facebook that keeps asking you to help her bake cakes or build a day-care center? That’s her.  And she’s ushering in a revolution that is shaking the hitherto testosterone fuelled world of videogames at its very foundations.

The growth of social gaming is old news. Powered by the likes of Farmville, Cityville and The Sims Social, games on Facebook and other social networks are perched cheerfully right atop the gaming heap. These games command the kind of following that all but the most elite of hardcore franshises can only dream about. Consider this - blockbuster hit Grand Theft Auto IV has sold 22 million copies in over three years since its release. Cityville has over 70 million people playing it every single month. Pwnage, gamers would call this.

But we’re not here to toss numbers around to prove who’s winning. No no no. That would be like bringing a flamethrower to a food fight.

We’re talking about something far more profound. We’re talking about the age of happy. The era of glad. ‘Tis a time to be jolly, hold hands, skip around and generally annoy the crap out of others by being overwhelmingly friendly. And the new gamer chic is the looneytunestechnicolorcandypop aesthetic of the social gaming world.

It’s different, this gamer world. A far cry from the trash-talking world of flying fists, exploding heads, aliens with dubious motives and scantily clad warrior-princesses we core gamers know and love. Violence, anger, sex and mad skillz are being replaced by [shudder] love, caring, playing with dress-up dolls and virtual duplo, and [shudder] being nice to other gamers. You’re not s’pposed to be NICE to other gamers. You’re s’pposed to blow them to bits. Whatever happened to tradition? It was instagibbed by the neighbor request, that’s what happened.

The colourful, happy, bouncy and, crucially, friendly and welcoming world of social games has changed the dominant vocabulary of gaming. Gift requests, helping friends and inviting neighbours are pushing headshots, deathmatches and clan raids into cult status from the cushy environs of the mainstream. This new kind of game is like a big, warm hug. It welcomes everybody. Grandma loves this - which is why she’s taking to these games like a duck to water. And other ordinary people just like her are loving it, too. And you know the thing about ordinary people? There are zillions of ‘em - which is music to the ears of biggie game publishers.

The world has always looked at games as things that are played by ‘gamers’ - as though gamers weren’t human beings but some strange other-worldly life forms. Then somebody (it was probably Will Wright, that wonderfully mad coot) realized that ordinary people didn’t play games because nobody made games that they’d want to play. And they realized that games didn’t necessarily need to be epic adventures that required godlike reflexes in order to be fun. They just needed to be fun, period.

A Sims, a Farmville and a Cityville later, here’s where we are. 

What’s happening here is nothing short of a grassroots revolution in the world of videogames. It’s never been more exciting - all sorts of new games are popping up, enticing newer and newer audiences to generally slack, ignore their duties and spend time playing. Good thing, that.

And while, at first glance, it may seem that gaming’s latest revolution is bypassing its hardcore faithful in favour of the new kids (and grandparents) on the block, all is not lost. The creative, positive gameplay vibe from social games is having ripple effects on hardcore games as well. The result? Games like the phenomenal Minecraft - which can be best described as Lego with monsters. Minecraft is essentially about creative sandbox play - build a world with blocks. They just put the monsters in to make it more exciting for core gamers - but Minecraft at its deep core has more in common with games like Farmville than with any hardcore genre from the past. Beneath its hardcore skin of a first-person perspective and retro graphics is a game that is essentially about building things, and enjoying watching your creations grow, little by little. It’s like playing with toys. 

Be sure - there is a convergence afoot here. According to a report by gaming website Raptr.com, 30% of XBOX owners, who nobody would accuse of being anything less than hardcore, also play games on Facebook, up 10% from the previous year. Increasingly, people are playing a wider spread of games. 

This convergence is actually heading to a happy future where the word ‘gamer’ will stop meaning ‘anyone who enjoys playing videogames’. We don’t have specific words for people who enjoy reading books or watching movies as a matter of course. Sure, we call the obsessive types ‘bookworms’ or ‘couch potatoes’ or ‘Roger Ebert’, but those are outliers. ‘Gamer’ should mean ‘someone who obsessively plays every single game ever released, even Big Rigs’ and not ‘someone who enjoys a bit of Halo and Super Mario Bros on weekends’. And Grandma and her friends are helping us get there.

You know what I want to see? A scene where Grandma spends an hour accepting neighbor invites and neighbor requests, tending to farms and cities, before saying “Maybe I should try that new game about that dear little boy running around with a plasma cannon. My grandson says it’s fun.”  She calls out to the kid, asking him to show her the latest sci-fi FPS. And the kid shoots back “Later, Grandma. Need to harvest strawberries.”

That would be pwnage.

Holy Cow!

A sideways glance at the most stellar performances by cows in videogames.

While playing Rockstar's recent classic Red Dead Redemption, I had a cow moment.

Red Dead Redemption is an action adventure game where you play the role of a former outlaw and cowboy on a quest to extract terrible revenge on his former comrades, riding, shooting and badassing your way to victory. Except, along the way, you occasionally stop to herd cows into their pens. Don't ask.

But back on topic - when playing through the segments where you need to ride alongside a herd of nervous bovines and ensure that they don't wander off the path and fall off a cliff (or get stuck in the level geometry. Blasted polygons.), I couldn't help thinking back to the 80s ATARI 2600 game Stampede, and how far videogame cows had come.  The cows in RDR are awesome, as cows should be. Each one is the end result of high-poly modeling, texturing, dynamic lighting and motion captured (you may now take a moment to reflect on the wonders of cow mo-cap, and visualize a cow covered in those mo-cap sensors. But only a moment. Done? Good.), fluid animation that results in absolutely top-end cows. It wasn't always this way.

Stampede, the first game in which I remember seeing cows, and possibly the first game to feature them as a key gameplay element, was a game typical of the 4 bit ATARI era. Its cows, which you, as a gallant and dutiful cowboy, had to lasso and prevent from escaping, were merely a bunch of pixels. It was only by very skilfully stretching your imagination that you could identify them as cows. In fact, by stretching the same imagination in a slightly different way, you could just as well identify them as alien spaceships, or dune buggies, or your grandmother. Pixel art was cool like that. The context of the game (ably assisted by beautiful hand painted box art tat looked nothing like the actual game) provided the guidance so that players could look at horribly pixelated things and relate to them as whatever the game designers intended them to be.

Fast forward to the early 90s, to the era of the resurgence of CRPGs, and specifically to Fallout. Fallout, a game set in a post apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, featured perhaps the most interesing cows in videogame history - the Brahmin, a two-headed mutated species that the characters in the game used as raw material for delicious (though mildly irradiated) steaks. The Brahmin remained popular with Fallout fans, and, when the franchise was revived after a long gap with Fallout 3, they returned. And now, you could sneak up behind them and tip them over. Awesome. In fact, it's so awesome that the publishers decided not to release the game in India, for fear of offending the millions of people here who ostensibly worship mutated post-nuclear cows. Good move.

Perhaps the most famous appearance by cows in videogames is in the Diablo series. The first game, Diablo, featured a lone cow which would just stand idly by in the town - perhaps providing some bovine serenity as a relief from the mayhem that prevailed in the rest of the game. The presence of the cow without any obvious purpose in the game, however, led to the spread of one of the most famous rumours in gaming history. "Is there a secret cow level ?" asked millions of Diablo fans, frantically trying to unlock the fabled dungeon where the player could take a break from fighting demonic forces and fight demonic cows instead. However, they would remain disappointed. There was no secret cow level. At least, until Diablo 2. Blizzard, like only they can, responded to the fans and actually included a secret cow level in the sequel. If you beat the game with a specific weapon (Wirt's leg - a rather grim club, made up of the reains of a character from the previous game. Don't ask) , you would unlock a dungeon where you could battle hordes of bipedal cattle carrying meat cleavers, and finally beat the Cow King (a contradiction, and also a truly 733t end boss). What more could a gamer want?

After a bit of a quiet period (barring some sensational cameos in the Call of Duty series and in Rayman : Raving Rabbids), cows resurfaced in games and emerged stronger than ever before.

And no game has done more for cows than Zynga's monster Facebook hit Farmville. Thanks to Farmville's massive success, more people have been clicking on cows than ever before - and, unlike in Diablo, this time it wasn't with the intention of killing them. Farmville's cutesy cows have pretty much become the mascot of the game, and, arguably, the mascot for all of social gaming.

In fact, cows are so strongly identified with social games that Ian Bogost, noted game journalist, author and developer, created the satirical 'Cow Clicker' - a facebook game intended to poke fun at what Bogost felt were the most cynical and shallow aspects of popular social games like Farmville. In Cow Clicker, all players could do was click on a cow once every few hours. They could invite friends so that they could click more ften, and buy different kinds of cows. That's it. But, much to Bogost's dismay, people actualy began playing Cow Clicker without getting the joke - they were actually enjoying the game! People have debated and discussed this episode to death in the gaming pess and forums - but I think the whole thing just points to the awesomeness of cows. They should teach this at game design colleges : Successful game design 101. Step 1 - Put a cow in it.

In 2012, the presence of cows in videogames promises to show substantial growth. The game that everyone's playing now - The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim, has more than its fair share of cows, and more than its fair share of funny glitches. Thanks to which, on a full moon night in Skyrim, if you chance to clance up at the moon, you just might see a cow flying over it.  Just before it collides with a Dragon. These are the moments that videogame dreams are made of. And these moments wouldn't be possible without cows.

Ragequit!

Some games just make you want to throw your controller at the wall.

Videogames weren't always this way. They didn't always mollycoddle you with 'easy' modes, automated save points, helpful tutorials and sissy automaps.

Oh, no. 

Back in the day, when videogames were meant for real men (and real women who were real men), one of those cheerful, bright and colourful 8-bit plastic cartridges could bring you to tears. Remember any of these names ? - Battletoads. Ninja Gaiden. Contra. Ghosts and Goblins. Mega Man. Ikaruga. Robotron. Yes? Then you probably also associate these with memories of aching thumbs, bruised egos and walls scarred with the marks of gamepads hitting them at considerable speeds.

Let's start with the infamous Contra, shall we? Three miserable lives is all you had [yes, yes, I know about the Konami Code. But that was for sissies.]. Three stinking lives to get through many hours of utterly devious level design, switching perspectives and relentless enemies raining a veritable bulletstorm around you. And guess what? One hit and you were dead. No namby-pamby shields or regenerating health bars to give you breathing space - you were a one-hit kill for your enemies. I think the first time I ever publicly said 'Fuck' was when I died for the 348th time in Contra. My parents have blamed videogames for my ongoing downfall ever since.

Or perhaps you'd prefer to talk about the maddening, superhuman coordination and reflexes demanded by that most badass of all shooters - Ikaruga? Your ship had two polarities - white and dark - between which you could switch at will. As did your enemies, and their bullets. Using two simple rules - you could be hurt by bullets of the same polarity, but you would do double damage on opponents of the opposite polarity - SEGA created a game of such beautiful complexity and difficulty that it is still spoken of as one of the hardest videogames of all time. You could either master Ikaruga, or you could have thumbs without calluses.  It was impossible to do both.

For the more strategy oriented masochists among us, there were also those deliciously brutal hack-n-slash dungeon crawlers, as they were called. Dungeon Master, Eye of The Beholder, NetHack. You'd spend hours painstakingly creating characters, giving them all sorts of skills and equipment to survive the deadliest of dungeons. Only to then get hopelessly lost in a labyrinth [games didn't have automaps back then - and unless you meticulously mapped the levels on pen and paper, you were doomed]. Or realize that you've misplaced a key that opens the gates to Level 21. These legendary dungeon-crawlers were renowned for taking delight in frustrating players in new and exciting ways every time they played. I once died a pathetic death at the hands of a lowly creature - because it was immune to magical and enhanced weapons, and all my weapons were in fact TOO POWERFUL to hurt it at all. I would have traded all my +5 Greatswords and Maces of Fire for a simple iron dagger at that point. Too bad there were none in sight (or in my inventory). Permadeath. Grrrrrr. Okay. Let's start over. This time - I'm keeping an iron dagger in my inventory for emergencies. And maybe I need a thief to backup my battle-mages . . .

Games back in those days lacked many features that make them so accessible today. No 'save' concept, for starters. If you died, and saw the dreaded GAME OVER screen, you started again from the very beginning. You had limited 'lives'. You had no tutorial levels - you had to actually read physical manuals to learn even the basic controls. You didn't have adjustable difficulty levels. Life was hard for gamers back then.

So why, then, do we insist on continue playing these games that mock our efforts to come to terms with their challenges? Why are we so willing to go through the humiliation of finding that our skills are so hopelessly inadequate that we're unable to do what, judging from their online boasts, other players accomplish quite easily?

Because, gentle readers, games are, at their very core, learning machines. And there's nothing that the human brain enjoys more than the mastery of a new skill. And, if you keep at Ikaruga or Contra long enough, you'll suddenly find that what was until now a seemingly impossible task is suddenly so easy, you are left wondering how you could possibly fail at it. It's beautiful, this thing that gamers call 'flow'. Suddenly, your mind sees a pattern reveal itself, solutions and strategies suddenly become obvious, and, before you know it, you're breezing through a series of challenges like a seasoned pro. "Look, n00bs, this is how it's done!" you sneer. The difficulty peels away, and you're flying (think of the first time you mastered riding a bicycle without trainer wheels). Until - BUMP! - you hit the next difficulty spike. And the process begins again.

The playing of difficult videogames is no different from any other sphere of human activity in which people attempt to master chellenges. In a sense, Contra, skydiving and cross-stitch are all the same. Okay, maybe not cross-stitch. 

Which is why difficult and hardcore videogames will never really go away. Recently, after a brief lull, they've made a great comeback. Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy,The Witcher 2, Trials HD and Legend of Grimrock are all modern games that have a retro core where difficulty is an integral part of the experience. These are games that offer the players the heady reward that only a truly challenging game can offer. Sure, you can complete Mass Effect 3 or Skyrim or Uncharted 3. But only the most hardcore of players can claim to have conquered Dark Souls or Trials HD. Legend of Grimrock even offers a 'hardcore mode' where it disables the automap. And you wouldn't know how to cast spells in the game unless you actually read the manual! How's that for retro? The ad campaign for Dark Souls featured a video commercial with the tag-line "You Will Die" - followed by a montage of different deaths a player can experience in the game. Old classics like Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun are seeing re-releases on multiple platforms. The Indie development boom, combined with an ever-growing market of freshly-minted gamers looking for more hardcore challenges, has resulted in a mushrooming of difficult and hardcore games. Ironically, this is happening at a time when most publishers of big-budget blockbuster titles are all trying to done down the difficulty of their games to appeal to a wider audience. Lolwut?

So keep 'em coming, game developers! We need 'em hardcore and brutally hard games. We need the next Contra. The next Radiant Silvergun. The next NetHack. We need some good old fashioned difficulty - just to balance out the sissy stuff like Farmville, Angry Birds and Call of Duty.

Game Over.

Gamer Journal : Deus Ex, Rage and From Dust

A weekend spent fighting the evil forces of socialization and trying to get in some game time. Moderate success.

Here's the report :

Deus Ex : Human Revolution

Finally got to spend some quality time with the augmented edition I bought. Mixed feelings.

It's Deus Ex - so we do have an interesting story. The augmentation system seems interesting and well thought-out. The stealthing is pretty decent. The conversation / persuasion mechanics are also pretty cool.

But here's what I didn't like :

1. The gunplay is all over the place. The game bumps you into third person view when you're in cover, and back into first-person when you pop out of cover. This makes for some very awkward moments during firefights and leaves you scurrying about frantically. The whole cover / shooting system is poorly implemented, and the level design doesn't help - forcing you into situations where you can't play purely as an FPS, nor purely as a cover shooter. The entire combat experience is frustrating and clunky, and also unavoidable. Sure, if you're really, really good, you can sneak through entire levels - but you'll eventually come across a boss fight that you can't avoid. It's pretty bad design - directly impacting the core experience.
2. I'm about seven hours in, and the gameworld is unconvincing. Walking around Deus Ex's Detroit, I never got the feeling that I was exploring a city. It felt more like a movie set. Wandering around a gameworld, you need to feel that the world around you is real - the places and people should feel like they've been here for ages before you arrived, and go about doing their thing even when you aren't around. A living, breathing world. And there are plenty of games which do it perfectly well - Red Dead Redemption, New Vegas, GTA to name a few. But Human Revolution fails here. I never got any feeling other than the fact that I was exploring a game level with game characters. Perhaps sacrificing the free-exloration in favour of separate levels with loading screens may have lent a sense of distance between locations and fleshed out the illusion better ? But as it stands, Detroit in Human Revolution is simply too small and claustrophobic to be a convincing open world.

I'm about seven hours in, and I'm staying with it in the hope that it gets better. 

RAGE

Boy Oh Boy! I'm enjoying this one.

Got it running on my desktop - runs beautifully with everything maxed out on my Core i9 powered rig with a two-year old GTX 295 2Gig card, on Vista (yes, yes, I know). Sure - still has some random pop-in (but not nearly as much as on the lapop) and occasional tearing, but nothing that breaks the game.

It looks great, the world seems huge, and the gunplay and vehicle combat have a nice, solid (and slightly old school) feel to them. Which is kinda why I like it. RAGE isn't the most thought-provoking or innovative or cleverest of games, but it nails the fun factor. Driving around and killing things is great fun in RAGE, and isn't that what a shooter should be? It's the exact opposite of Deus Ex, in that it's a game that doesn't try to do too many things, but keeps it simple and does it well.

Five hours in - just reached Wellspring and completed a few quests. Loving it so far. Oh - and Wellspring actually feels like a real place - with personality, a history and a sense of life. Again, nails something that Deus Ex fails to do. Plus - RAGE has a (barely) hidden tribute to Fallout. \m/

From Dust

Just got started with this one - on XBOX. It's rather beautiful to look at, and features some interesting terraforming mechanics. Reminded me of an ultra-modern Populous variant. But I played only past the first tutorial level, and so can't really comment on how good the actual game is. More soon enough - plan to spend more time with this by the next weekend.

P.S. Stopped numbering the episodes. It was foolish to begin doing it in the first place. So hence. Er. Ah.

The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle is here

What are you waiting for? The best deal in gaming returns. The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle is here. Pay whatever you want and get three great Indie games - two of which [Frozen Synapse and SpaceChem]  are among the most critically acclaimed titles of last year.

Frozen Synapse is like X-Com meets Chess meets Tron

SpaceChem. Like Chemistry, but harder. And more fun.

ShadowGrounds : Survivor - a nice looking top down shooter with plenty of blood.

Trine - three character puzzle action with gorgeous graphics.

What's more, pay more than the average price, and get the Humble FrozenByte Bundle for free - it includes the brilliant Trine, Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds : Survivor, an interesting prototype of a game called Jack Claw, and a preorder of the upcoming Splot thrown in, too.

Hurry on up and grab it.

Gamer Journal Ep 3 : Everlands HD is a deceptively deep strategy game.

Spent a couple of hours playing Everlands HD on the tablet. It's a brilliantly addictive little strategy game - with gameplay that is far deeper than its cutesy animal fiction suggests.

Gameplay proceeds by placing pieces on a hexagonal grid and capturing the opponent's pieces. Each piece (animal) has an attack and defense power, and some additional properties like bonuses, initiative and powers. Based on these simple rules, Everlands HD offers an engaging and addictive experience. If you have a droid or iOS device, well worth a try.

A few design takeaways :

Fiction layer
Like most games, the fiction layer in Everlands HD has nothing whatsoever to do with its core game mechanics. If, instead of cute and colorful animals trying to rescue the forest, it featured marines, tanks and aliens in a bleak wasteland, the game would appeal to a completely different audience with absolutely no change in gameplay. Designers sometimes get too caught up in the fiction-gameplay dynamic and end up making games that lack tight focus. My take ? Nail the gameplay and you can always rewrite the fiction.

Winnability
Everlands HD is challenging but fair. You will lose repeatedly but always try again - because the game clearly demonstrates that :

1. You lost because you made mistakes, not because the game is unfair.
2. If you play more, you will improve.
3. If you play skilfully, you will win.

It's a design principle that makes for great games when followed.

P.S. This is the first reasonable length post typed out entirely on my tablet. Typing on the Xoom is pretty neat if you're using a cool little app called Thumb Keyboard.

Bigfatphoenix's Gamer Journal - Ep 2 : Cave Story, NOVA 2

Caught up with an old classic last week - Doukutsu Monogatari's astonishing platformer, Cave Story. It's an all-time classic, and the PC version is completely free, so you have no excuse not to try. Grab it here - and don't forget to install the English translation.



It looks like a fairly innocuous 2D platformer at first, but stay with it for a while, and Cave Story offers an excellent experience - an austere, surreal and emotional story that is quintessentially Japanese, rock-solid platforming mechanics that make it great fun to run around and shoot all sorts of weird monsters, and some very imaginative level design.

However, the take-away mechanic for me from Cave Story is the run-and-gun leveling mechanic. Your gun levels up as you rack up more kills, and starts firing off increasingly powerful kinds of blasts. However, take damage and it will lose levels, and get back to firing wimpy pellets. It's a mechanic that rewards 'being in the zone', something classic skill gamers will instantly recognize. You grow more powerful as you play more dexterously, evading scores of enemies and racking up kills. Lots of games do offer similar ideas - the special meter in fighting games, for instance - but the powered-up weapons in Cave Story are so much fun to use, it's a genuine incentive for high-skill play (Man, the return of classic skill gaming is something that delights me no end.)

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Also tried out NOVA 2 for Android on my Motorola Xoom. The Tegra 2 powered graphics make this unabashedly Halo-like FPS look pretty stunning. Take a look :

But crap controls. All three control schemes provided are simply too unwieldy on a tablet device, at least for me. It's clearly been designed for smaller phone screens, where I can see the twin-touch or the gyroscope controls working fairly well (due to the smaller screen real estate, as well as the device being far lighter) - but it's a horrible mess on tablets. I've seen a bunch of reviews on the Intertubes that rave about how great NOVA 2 is on tablets, but I simply cannot see why. I'll try again a few more times to get the hang of it and see if there's something I'm missing (also because the game itself looks like it could be a lot of fun) - but colour me skeptical for now.

A couple of points, then :

1. I hate on-screen analog sticks. They suck. They're a cop-out. Deal with it.
2. I'm not sure about shoehorning existing game designs control schemes from one platform on to others which use completely different control paradigms altogether. Shouldn't we be thinking "how do I make games that would be fun on tablets?" instead of "how do I put Halo on a tablet?" ?