When I was eleven or twelve, my best friend who still plays paintball and Left 4 Dead with me installed a DOS game on my aging 486 because—get this, dude—it has literally thousands of towns and dungeons and shit.  My first experience playing Daggerfall almost resulted in a glorious Fatality as dozens of quarts of blood fled my loins and shot straight into my cerebral cortex, or whichever part of the brain it is in sullen preteen boys who are really too intelligent to like Isaac Asmiov as much as their parents that’s responsible for really, truly believing that they’d like more than anything in the world to live in Middle Earth.

I am paralyzed by this game's ineffable charm.

Mostly this was because the first dungeon is so labyrinthine and confusing: a big mess of practically unmappable 3D space, it looks like two octopi mating from a bird’s-eye view, and represents a gleeful disregard of 2D norms and an ecstatic, if haphazard, exploration and exploitation of space that characterizes a lot of early 3D games, from Tomb Raider to Warhawk.  No tutorial popups here, and many a Daggerfall neophyte has quit the game in frustration, never to return—defeated by the legendary Privateer’s Hold.  What’s more fantastic?  There really are thousands (or maybe just hundreds, or just a couple hundred, though who am I to count?) of towns and dungeons and shit, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable, aside from the three big capital cities of the game’s twenty or so provinces.  And more fantastic than that?  Every dungeon is more mind-bogglingly complex than the first—and each is unique, though you’d never be able to tell.

Daggerfall is a game that is eternally satisfying, without pause, for hundreds of hours and unlimited decades, right up until the point when you lose your virginity.  It is bright and cheery even in its drabbest holes, a kind of primary-color, low-res 2.5D wonderland that is the illegitimate lovechild of Wizardry’s graphic design and Doom’s architecture.  As a coherent gameworld it doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, and there’s bizarre glitches and weirdness all over the joint, but it’s the same free-roaming kind of fun that kids born after 1990 must feel in their bones when you mention Grand Theft Auto 3.  What I’m trying to say is that the game isn’t perfect by any reliable barometer, but when you get right down to it the gigantic barrel-chested brass balls it possesses (thousands of towns, in DOS, in 1996!) sweeps you over the gaping holes in its design, prompting that virgin brain to fill in all those holes with the bursting confetti of imagination.  After you reach manhood, in whatever way you need, it seems a little vacant and samey, though hell if it still isn’t two liters more fun than Oblivion.

Bethesda grew up with us with the release of Morrowind.  By taking the same amount of love and gumption and constricting it down to a tiny island nation, a mere part of one of the provinces of which there had been two dozen in Daggerfall, we were rewarded with an atmosphere so thick that it stuck to your face just walking from the first town to the second, like a cobweb made of Big League Chew.  As in modern Rome (the real one), there are layers of culture stacked upon layers, each represented by an aesthetically distinct architecture.  Vvardenfell maintains a rich and legitimate and unique history, one that isn’t at least totally directly ripped off from the Tolkien estate, nor any particular real-world, lecture-class bullet-point mythology you care you wiki.  And if the combat was a little sterile and the voice acting a little C-grade and some of the design decisions a little bird-brained, well, you could forgive.

One small facet of Vvardenfell's architectural wonders.

Then came Oblivion.  I don’t know, precisely, what the fuck happened with that, although it has something to do with the XBox, and Halo maybe (which, contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate, or at least I don’t hate people who like it), and a chance for a Little Developer with Heart to finally Make It in the Big City if it could only buckle down and loosen up its simple, backwards country Principles a little bit.  At any rate, you can read the fine review by Tim Rogers right on this here site, with which, as a man who has The Elder Scrolls in his blood the way Mr. Rogers has Dragon Quest in his, I agree to the letter.

The ugliest Patrick Stewart.

That just about brings us to Fallout 3, which is nothing more and nothing less than Oblivion 2 in a Fallout wrapper, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t played enough of one or the other.  The discerning reader will notice I’ve made a big show of talking about Elder Scrolls games but haven’t even mentioned the Fallout series.  The discerning reader is free to draw his own conclusions.

Fallout 3 is still not the holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, though damn my eyes if it isn’t a baby shuffle-step closer.  It’s amazing what that shuffle-step represents, which is to say a huge leap forward in entertainment: for instance, the combat is actually fun compared to Oblivion’s tick-tock grandfather clock monotony, owing mostly to VATS, a competent adaptation of Fallout’s turn-based tactical battle system in realtime 3D.  Press a button, and the action freezes.  Target body parts of your enemy, the number of shots to be determined by the size of your Action Point pool and the AP cost of a single shot with the weapon, press GO, and watch in cinematic slo-mo as your character chugs round after round into that crazy half-armored irradiated wastelander, spent shell casings flying, limbs exploding and careening about the landscape.  It’s satisfying in its way, and never wearies, and you have to do it the old-fashioned FPS way while you’re regenerating your AP.  Generally, this means you’re striking a balance between using your AP wisely and taking potshots while regenerating it in realtime (the game is too clunky and choppy for the realtime FPSing to be any more than a stopgap), which is a nice bit of design, short of, you know, taking out the VATS thing entirely and just making the God damned combat God damned Halo 3 already.

Here I shall be nice to the game: Much of the voice-acting is better (though only marginally, and only relatively).  The main plot is not stupendous nonsense, although the pacing spirals out of control there in the last third and the ending is stupendous nonsense.  There are children in the world, even a whole townful of precocious ones who will shoot you, which is more or less required for Fallout Fans but nevertheless cheering in a 3D game, a format marked by almost universal childlessness.  Faces run the gamut from “fairly ugly” to “maybe attractive” instead of “disgusting” to “hideous.”  Some of the architecture is truly inspired: the skeletal Washington Monument, the headless Lincoln Memorial, the shredded outer rings of the Pentagon that arouse fleeting mental images of 9/11.  There’s a nameless little bunker in a random part of D.C. that was obviously occupied by someone who went clearly insane, with neat geometric book-stacking, plungers stuck to the wall Darkwing Duck-like, and retail mannequins and lawn gnomes arranged in compromising positions.  The game never sends you to this bunker, nevermind giving you a big glowy tutorial text-box telling you to do so.  There’re a lot of little atmospheric, unobtrusive touches like this, and along with the slightly-more-satisfying combat, it adds up to a marathon’s worth of miles beyond the glossy dead New Zealand travel-brochure-space of Oblivion.

For all that, though, Fallout 3 is the goofiest little big game I’ve ever played.

Fallout 3 is a living, breathing gameworld of infinite possibilities because people poop.

By “goofy”: when you arrive at a place called Big Town, a guard stops you at the front gate to give you a little talking-to and intimate heavily what the Main Quest for This Town shall be (a common trope).  It seems Super Mutants are continually attacking Big Town and carrying off its citizens to who knows what fate, and the villagers (Big Town is, ironically, not a big town) have little will or training to fight; they are demoralized.  Within the town is a goth girl named Bittercup, who despises the townspeople and keeps lukewarm a depression of constant, feigned profundity.  She informs you that, sometimes, she goes wandering out in the ruins, scavenging.

In a lesser game—say, a common JRPG—this statement would amount to little, either flavor text or at most a pretext upon which Bittercup would offer you trinkets for sale.  But every time you visited Big Town, there Bittercup would be, tooling around in the same tight circle like a dog on a chain, never to be seen out in the wastes that she allegedly explores.  Fallout 3’s NPC Schedule (or whatever the term for it is in the Oblivion engine) is cleverer than that, though: lo and behold, you can find Bittercup out wandering the ruins, and at night no less, which makes a certain satisfactory sense given her vampiric (meant in jest, not to be confused with Fallout 3’s actual vampires) predilections.  (Of course, a truly great game would see Bittercup actually scavenging the wastes, such that the little ammo boxes and medical kits you find improbably lying around would progressively be depleted as the game world spun.  This lack, though, is something I don’t quite fault the game for; it represents one or another ultimate goal of the “freeform Western RPG,” for better or worse (can you guess which?), and I can’t bring myself to criticize a game made before the Mayan apocalypse of 2012 for not overcoming what’s essentially a technical limitation.)

This is all very nice, of course, unless you happen upon Bittercup out there in the wastes before the first time you enter Big Town—since all the dialogue remains exactly the same.  Not only does Bittercup refer to “here” and “this place”—meaning, of course, Big Town—while standing in the middle of what may as well literally be nowhere, but what’s worse, your dialogue options clearly make contextual reference to the Situation in Big Town, the one you don’t know about because the guard of the front gate hasn’t yet given you the handy cliff notes version of his people’s woes.  It’s a sloppy oversight, and all the goodwill and aesthetic capital the game may have built up erodes, not instantly, but quickly in its wake.  Instead of the lonely feeling of scraping by in a post-apocalyptic hellhole, I’m on a badass, 22^nd-century Pirates of the Caribbean ride, with real live synthetic humans replacing those stiff foam-rubber automatons, but one of them has a malfunctioning speech chip and keeps saying the Declaration of Independence over and over again.  (Giddily, this is more or less sort of the culmination of an actual quest in Fallout 3.)  What is there to feel but whimsy, and perhaps a wisp of melancholy?

I just met you, sure I'll fiddle with the atomic bomb in the middle of your populous village. (Choices.)

The game is unfortunately full of such moments.  Here’s another, from the same questline even: having rescued some of Big Town’s captured citizens from the Super Mutants, you are thanked, but then complained at: the Mutants will be back in short order, and the villagers will suffer the same fate without help.  At the time, the game offered me the following options in response:

• [Science] I could help you fix up those broken combat robots to fight off the Mutants.
• [Small Guns] If you have guns, I could train you how to use them and defend yourself.
• I’ll fight off the Mutants myself, and they won’t bother you any more.
• Go fuck yourself et cetera, evil option.

Aha! said I.  That’s nice.  The game is allowing me to use my character skills, normally useful only in baldly game-mechanical situations (combat, electronic lockpicking), to represent the kinds of things my character knows and can use to help these people, along with the requisite good and evil choices for people without the proper skills (can’t let anyone not complete every quest just because of a stupid thing like what choices they made).  So I chose the Science option, which sees little enough use otherwise.

From then on, each person in town gives you the same canned lines, without even opening the dialogue dialog: “Are you going to teach us how to use the robots?”  “The robots are in the junkyard, in case you’re wondering.”  They even helpfully stroll over to the aforementioned junkyard, loitering there, awaiting your robot-reviving magic.

It’s only maddening, you see, because there are no robots in the fucking junkyard.

“Are you going to teach us how to use the robots?”

“The robots are in the junkyard, in case you’re wondering.”

Fuck each and every one of you little shits.  Did I mention how cathartic it is to slo-mo bullet-decapitate folks in VATS?

The whole God damned game is halfway.  There’s the beginnings of all these good ideas, but not a one of them is completed.  It’s such a big game, you say.  They can’t have gotten everything.  And at least it’s better than Oblivion, which didn’t have the beginnings, ends, or middles of any ideas except purely terrible ones.  It’s a step forward, no doubt, but the “big game” excuse lost its luster after I lost my virginity and tried playing my hundredth game of Daggerfall.  Rockstar solved the problem by actually spending the trillions of teeth-aching dollars to fill each and every inch of their humongous quasi-New York with fleshy, intricate detail.  Bethesda themselves solved the problem by just making a smaller game, the lovable and satisfying Morrowind.  Somewhere in between the last two Elder Scrolls games, the lure of the money of the kind of people who loved Bioshock led Bethesda to this place of public obscurity and muddy madness.

I’ll tell you what: it’s consoleification, is what it is.  The seemingly inevitable march of the home consoles into PC gaming’s market share has been the cause of a lot of consternation on the part of fragile-testicled nerds who seem to think that designing a game for a control pad instead of a keyboard means that it will be less “complicated.”  They will go on to describe a “complicated” game as one “where you can do anything you want, man.”  Let’s forget that this distinction, once moderately true, is barely breathing these days (Grand Theft Auto 3, standard-bearer for an entire generation of consoles, retains more of the free-form spirit than even the best efforts of the old guard of simulationist PC designers—Freelancer, I’m looking at you).  In this one case, it’s all CRPG and wargaming nerds’ worst fears come to life: UI marked into pointless subdivisions for analog-stick navigation; less complexity; less writing; more direction; no subtlety.  There’s no reason any of these regressions had to occur on the shift of focus to consoles—Morrowind, the brow-furrowed hero of this article, was also released on XBox to wide acclaim.

Because BIGGER is MORE EPIC.

No, it’s the sheer bigoted fear of Bethesda executives, or designers, or Bethesda somebodies, that made this game and its prequel Oblivion into these mishmashes of nonsense.  Turns out, Bethesda is fragile-testicled as well; they took the unfounded fears of the PC nerds to heart and made them the distasteful platform upon which to build Western RPG Console Supremacy.  Let’s be clear about this: the creators of Oblivion and Fallout 3 used message board complaints of the PC hardcore as marketing data, and then created a game based on this “data.”  A self-fulfilling prophecy of shit.

Bethesda: I understand that you want a piece of that XBox action.  That’s cool.  It’s a new age, man!  Games can release simultaneously on PCs and on consoles and be great on both.  When you do so, please stop imagining “PC gamers” and “console gamers” as two distinct “demographics”; please stop imagining that you can only please one to the mutual exclusion of the other; and please, for God’s sake, stop deciding that the one you stand to make the most money designing for is represented entirely by hat-backwards former high school wrestlers.  All the data I’ve been able to collect suggest that those people don’t even exist.  I promise that if you make a good game, instead, people will still buy it.

All images property and courtesy of Mobygames.

(Thus the indignation over Roger Ebert’s game-related comments. Electronic gaming’s would-be defenders somehow combine smug disdain with a curious undercurrent of desperation in their rejection of Ebert’s scorn. Yeah, sure, Ebert doesn’t “know” games. Nor need he: the guy’s job is to know movies, and he’s spectacular at it, a necessary consequence of which is that he’ll never see gaming except in terms of how it fails to live up to the standards of cinema. Stop wasting his time and ours with litanies of refutations and counter-examples.)

Regardless of the ubiquity of Let’s Play clips on YouTube or the occasional cutscene theater bonus disc, the experience of playing a game cannot even be approximated by watching a recording of gameplay footage. At best, watching such footage can call up the memories of play in that game’s former players. Or, for audiences familiar with other games of similar structure, such videos can help them imagine what playing that game is like.

Likewise, videogames are not books, or plays, or dance. The distinction’s more obvious in these latter cases, and therefore maybe less necessary. My point being here just that the experience of interacting cannot meaningfully be synopsized into another medium without fundamental alteration to the nature of the experience.

So: games ain’t movies, or music, or prose. Fair enough. Yet let me propose that, despite all the distinctions between these different media, useful parallels may be drawn between them. Parallels which can inform the acts of criticism and creation.

Braid may not be a poem, but I don’t think it’s invalid to compare it to poetry.

(Although actually, I think Super Mario Bros. has the superior claim, with its 4-stage levels forming 8 “stanzas” and its rhythmic patterns of obstacles and enemies, never really seen elsewhere in the series. If Braid suggests free verse, SMB suggests a sonnet cycle.)

For an even closer comparison, consider the tabletop roleplaying game. Tabletop RPGs have been around a little longer than the modern video game, but their success has been more limited. Their existence stands more immediately in Video Gaming’s shadow. Roleplaying enthusiasts have put forth dozens of theories about the ways players interact with each other and the framework of rules and behaviors the game embodies. Among these ideas is a concept (first articulated in these terms by Ron Edwards) that puts forth that most people roleplay to satisfy three connected (yet competing!) drives:

• Gamism is the desire for competition, for triumph over adversity, and for the successful realization of one’s goals within the framework of the rules;
• Narrativism concerns the process of using the framework of the game to tell your story and create dramatically interesting scenarios;
• Simulationism follows the desire for realism, verisimilitude, and a rejection of concessions to Game or Story that would breach those ideals.

What intrigues me about GNS perspectives (as they’re collectively known) is that, while many videogames attempt to satisfy all three goals, it’s easy to pick out games which emphasis just one or two.  Pure gamism: Tetris. Pure narrativism: Storyteller. Pure simulationism: World of Sand. Gamism plus narrativism: Shadow of Destiny. Gamism plus simulationism: Off-Road Raptor Safari. Narrativism plus simulationism: …Façade, maybe?

That’s just the beginning. Next time, we’ll start cross-pollinating our adaptations to generate hardy hybrid theoretical models.

A last desperate act.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare¹ is a game about exactly what it says it is: what it means to be a soldier in the Year of Our Lord 200whenever it came out, 8 probably. For the first time in history, a majority of the people fighting in an honest to God war grew up playing videogames that play at war. The rock solid geniuses over at Infinity Ward have, in response, made the first and only game that really captures the zeitgeist of the Bush Years, probably—hopefully—without realizing it.

The brilliance of MW is that it turns the usual videogame oo-rah power fantasy on its head by subversive measures and actually entertaining gameplay. It stands out best as a contrast to Bioshock, which wore its “lol videogame” on its sleeve and managed not to say anything about anything in the process.

MW is one long series of failures. There can only be one conclusion to draw from the game’s presentation: that violence begets violence.

• Navy SEALs fuck up and allow a nuke to be detonated in a populous Middle Eastern city. OOPS.
• A Marine platoon’s heroics to save a downed helicopter crew result in all of their deaths, including the player character’s. OOPS.
• Flashback level with hardened stealth-snipers in ghillie suits climaxes in “assassinating” a guy who we know is actually still alive, meaning the mission failed. OOPS.
• Attempt to capture a terrorist for information results in cornering him and him blowing his own brains out. OOPS.
• Torturing a second terrorist for information produces none at all; instead his cell phone rings by happenstance, we get our info from the call, and then our fearless leader shoots the prisoner in the head. OOPS.
• Our constant pressure, coupled with our constant failures, have pushed Big Boss into a corner but simultaneously empowered him to take control of ICBMs, which he launches. OOPS.
• (To the team’s credit, they do succeed in one thing: preventing the nukes from detonating.)
• At the end of the game, every single one of the named characters is cut down like a dog just to give you the opportunity to shoot Big Boss in the head and get airlifted out in critical condition. OOPS.
• As we now know from MW2 previews, killing Big Boss (the entire point of MW1) was worse than futile, as another Big Boss instantly filled his shoes, and this one is even crazier and more brutal. OOPS.

A big mistake.

In fact, the smooth, pincer-like appeal of the game’s combat is slowly encroached on by an eventually overwhelming feeling of fear. Many people have complained about the arcadey nature of the respawning enemies: push forward to where they’re spawning from, and they’ll stop. The idea, though, is to impress upon you the utter lethality of combat. You must stay within your teammates’ field of fire. Since they are actually quite effective at protecting you, you form real bonds with even the anonymous soldiers that fill the ranks. But you are the point man; you must move forward. The longer you wait the more of your own men die, simultaneously making you more vulnerable and more guilty (since you allowed your comrades, who were preventing you from being vulnerable, to die). You must push, but not push too fast, or they won’t be able to cover you effectively. Every level is this same delicate balancing act played out over a different environment. Hence there are small waves of mounting fear—gotta move, gotta move—within each setpiece.

As the game rolls on towards its Sum of All Fears conclusion, each of these wavelets punctuates a boiling, subterranean dread. The giddy joy of each combat encounter chafes more and more with the realization that nothing these men are doing is accomplishing anything —even when they “succeed.” Their banter starts to sound wild-eyed and irrational. By the time the main characters were joking about the beers they were gonna drink together once they got home, during the chase scene at the very end of the game, I knew they were all dead men.

Contrast this with Bioshock, an incredibly clumsy attempt to upend power-fantasy videogames by explicitly telling the player he’s a tool, but simultaneously allowing him to actually win/succeed (therefore proving that he is not in fact a tool) while continuously undermining itself with its own less-than-entertaining mechanics. It’s silly, shallow and insulting by comparison, and self-contradictory to boot. (Players commit heinous acts of violence at the behest of someone they don’t know all the time, it’s almost like they’re MIND CONTROLLED, GET IT, now let’s also talk about the SERIOUS MORAL CHOICES players will have to make in our genius game, which is not actually choices plural, and which has no actual moral dimension, but wait wasn’t the point of our plot that players have no choices, nevermind here’s Ayn Rand.) Perhaps most importantly, by misunderstanding its own nature so thoroughly, it actually limits the subject matter of its (unilluminating) commentary to the least interesting thing—videogames—since no one with a brain could ever be fooled into thinking it was actually a critique of something like a philosophical system. Meanwhile, MW, by virtue of the combination of its self-understanding and the sheer entertainment of its minute by minute gameplay, uses games to talk about something important—soldiers and modern war—rather than being limited to talking “about games.”

Videogames as reality as videogames.

¹ I’ll refer to this game as “Modern Warfare” or “MW” rather than the traditional “CoD4” in light of the fact that Infinity Ward, progenitors of the Call of Duty franchise and developers of 1, 2, and 4, don’t own the rights to the name “Call of Duty” and are calling CoD4’s sequel simply “Modern Warfare 2” while Activision runs Call of Duty into the ground with some other shit developer. In retrospect, “Modern Warfare” is a better name for the first game anyway.

On a base level, an obvious comparison between videogames is available: Braid is to time as Portal is to space. It is capable of—no, it actively changes the player’s perspective and fosters new ways of thinking about the world. For this experience alone, Braid is well worth playing, but it further reveals itself to be intricately more (or, you may feel, less) than the sum of its parts. I reacted, as I find myself doing with most any work that so requires interpretation, on an intellectual more than an emotional level, and yet Braid is a very emotional work. It may take time to see it, as it did for me, but I believe this to be an earnest and sincere expression.

Upon first experiencing the final action-puzzle event, I was inspired with the presumably intended awe and horror but also rage. If it weren’t for that meddlesome, distracting text framing the gameplay, this lovely, clever, unassuming platformer could have accomplished a simple and elegant feat of storytelling. Instead, I felt, it is wrapped in convoluted, analytical prose that stinks of pretense (and I am not one to use that word lightly). Let me describe the changes necessary to create my ideal version of Braid: No cloud rooms. That’s it. No cloud rooms with text (or alt-text) about Tim leaving his woman to see a movie and then invent nuclear weapons. Just get rid of it.

What’s left?

Each “world” introduces a new mechanic whose symbolic value is sufficiently self-evident. You can rewind time; there are some things that cannot be undone; time and space are horizontally intertwined; intentionality projects into the future; a wedding ring slows time with proximal projection; and time moves in reverse. Then comes the climax of the game with its brilliant use of time manipulation to set up a helpless rescue attempt that, when rewound, reveals the villain of the scenario to be the true rescuer… and vice versa.

That’s all I wanted the game to be, once I had seen it all. I wanted less than there was. Braid takes the eternal Super Mario Bros. meme “sorry, but the princess is in another castle” as vague metaphor and mantra for (endlessly?) seeking the meaning or purpose in our lives—or so went my initial interpretation. I enjoyed the literal understanding that I just played the role of a guy who left his wife because she was too comfortable and followed an idealized stranger home to stand outside her bedroom and watch her sleep. Anything else seemed to be trying too hard.  The text seemed to be trying too hard.

I left the game alone for a month and came back to review the text. It hadn’t changed, but I came to realize that staring directly at either the framework or the gameplay was less interesting than blurring my vision between the two. There is something vague but rewarding to be found there. It reminds me of my long-lost idealistic and melancholy youth. Or whatever.

Tim is exceedingly self-centered and delusional. Within a society of people, he is a kind of monster—borderline sociopathic; almost evil. But he is also merely a sympathetic and somewhat adolescent romantic searching for… well, not a girl exactly, nor a hydrogen bomb. He is not building a castle of memories as a summer home for his mother. To try to pinpoint this impressionistic story would ruin it. Of course, it’s entirely possible (likely, even) that I just don’t get it. That’s okay; you probably don’t, either.

Braid is contemplative and a little nebulous. I still think it pretentious and inelegant, and I am still a little angry with it as a missed opportunity for exemplifying storytelling through the mode of gameplay; it succeeds in this, but that it also presents framing text implies uncertainty over whether the gameplay is tenable on its own as a story, which undermines the achievement.

But it would be hard to pretend myself righteous in taking such a view; we must entertain the possibility that the framework is intended not as a compromise but as a valuable addition.  Given the confidence of David Hellman’s art and the revelatory, nonsequential structure with which Jonathan Blow presents Braid’s thematic “worlds,” it would be irresponsible to dismiss the prose so easily.  Braid’s narrative, whatever we think that may be, wholly involves at least four layers: the aesthetic, the textual, the mechanical, and the structural; plus one hell of a final set piece. Not all of its design may be to my taste, but I am pretty sure that this is the first true videogame poem.

I think we can all make time for that.

The direct result of input; the immediate properties of avatar behavior caused by the player.

Avatar is used for lack of a more all-encompassing term for the in-game agent representing the player’s will. It is meant here to include the unseen “body” (regardless of that body’s physicality) of the player character in a first-person shooter, the cursor in a real-time strategy game, and the indicator denoting the current menu selection in a role-playing game.

A lack of input is here considered a form of input, including both intentional pauses within a sequence of commands and a protracted idle period.

The result of input and the properties of those results are two different things.  The latter are important for mechanical texture, which will be discussed following elaboration upon and defense of this definition.

Illustrations:

Essentially, imagine Mario in a vacuum, so to speak. Picture a barren world that consists of nothing but a straight line representing the ground, and play Mario. Everything possible within this scenario represents mechanics, and the qualities of these mechanics can be said to include momentum, gravity, and so on.

A mechanic represents an ideally replicable cause–effect relationship. Every time a command or sequence of commands is given, the same mechanical result occurs independent of non-player influences such as situational elements—the series of button presses that causes Mario to run and jump will give a different result if a pipe is in his way. Whenever the same command yields two different results, something extra-mechanical is interfering.

This definition excludes the immediate effect of Mario bumping a block, falling upon a koopa troopa, or touching a fire flower. However, after touching the fire flower, a new special mechanic comes into play, which is a mechanic that becomes possible only under a set of abnormal conditions, such as possessing a powerup or standing atop an open pipe. In other words, special mechanics are mechanics in context. They are still mechanics, but they are not core to gameplay. Special mechanics still exclude both Mario’s effect upon the world and the world’s reaction to Mario. Hence, what happens to a fire flower when Mario touches it and how it affects Mario (the transition to special mechanical circumstances) are not mechanics.

Metroid is about special mechanics.

In a traditional Japanese role-playing game, moving the party around a map is a mechanic; the transition to a random encounter is not. Interacting with a townsperson is a mechanic; any speech that results is not. Moving or scrolling through a battle menu is a mechanic; an ensuing attack is not. Selecting a potion is a mechanic; the restoration of hit points is not.

In a real-time strategy game, pointing the cursor at a spot upon the landscape and clicking issues a move order; this is a mechanic. The subsequent behavior of any selected units is not.

Pausing a game is a mechanic, but the fact of the game being paused is not.

Defense:

This definition might seem overly strict, but this meaning of the word offers the most solid and clear differentiation possible of the concrete, tactile aspects of gameplay and the rules governing the world’s response to player actions. This allows the term mechanics to mark the line between self and other—the behavior of the player and the behavior of the game—which is a very important foundation for critical language.

A strict definition also helps in talking about texture, which is experiential language for how a mechanic feels, consisting of graphic, audio, and feedback (such as a recovery delay until another action can be executed) components. Texture is very important to how many people talk about videogames, but it is easy to conflate attempts at descriptions intended for mechanics with those intended for wider gameplay structure. A narrow definition of mechanics ought to help in this area.

In Castlevania (classic, NES Castlevania), the inability to change trajectory in mid-air and that the avatar stops moving when attacking with the whip are mechanical expressions that can be referred to as limitations, but it is also true that the ability to jump at all might be called a freedom. Every mechanic of every game incorporates limitations necessarily inasmuch as it has been defined from unlimited possibilities.¹ Some game mechanics tend to be perceived as restrictive, while others as liberating; the inability to change movement during a leap in Castlevania is no different categorically than the inability to exceed Mario’s maximum jump height, but players respond differently to the mechanics of each game because they are subconsciously compared to natural human capabilities. This characteristic of players’ intuitive reactions to game mechanics represents an important component of texture, but it is important to recognize that these are subjective judgments.

This exploration is adaptated from an earlier discussion on the selectbutton forums.

¹See Prolegomena to Any Future Game Design for further discussion of limitations in mechanics.

At its most fundamental, gameplay (the play of a game in the most immediate sense) is determined by the restrictions built into the movement set and the response of the avatar—that is, the mechanics. “Restrictions” is the most important word here. If you close your eyes and imagine up an original videogame for yourself, the possibilities for your protagonist’s movement are totally limitless; it is your job to define them narrowly, or else your gameplay will fail to cultivate a relationship between player and level, self and other. An avatar must have some form of weight, or else it will seem thoroughly detached from the spaces which it inhabits. A game takes identity through these unique limitations of its mechanics, just as we mortal humans are most easily defined by what we are not.

For those who are disinclined for whatever reason to parse out a solution to this particular puzzle, I would like to present a compilation of interactive fiction (IF) titles, the tools necessary to access them, and a wide assortment of documents that are of practical, historical, theoretical, and critical import.

Originally intended as a celebration of the thirty years between the original ADVENT (1976) by Will Crowther and Don Woods and the close of 2006, this collection has been expanded and revised through 2008—including not only a broader catalog but also new versions of some older works as well as the latest software releases. The Magic Word features a carefully considered collection of well over 1000 individual titles, beginning with early progenitors Eliza (1966) and Hunt the Wumpus (1972). All XYZZY Award winners and high-ranking Annual Competition entrants to date have been included. Unfortunately, the majority of the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls catalogs have been omitted due to their enduring commercial licenses. Infocom games can be purchased in collections through Activision, Inc., but Magnetic Scrolls games are sadly out-of-print.

The common label “text adventure” may have been appropriate in the 1980s but is often misleading when considering the work of today’s non-commercial community. Many of these titles are more story than game or puzzle, and great experiments continue to occur in areas such as conversation, player-narrator relationships, world simulation, emergent solutions, metatextual conceit, narrative structure, perspective, user interface, and multimedia presentation, to name but a few.

Invoking The Magic Word is simple:

1. Download the five-part zip file here (432.52 MB total).
2. Extract IF.zip.001 using an application such as 7-Zip.
3. Browse to the interpreters directory and install Gargoyle (Win) or Zoom (Mac).
4. These interpreters can open most of the included IF files!
5. Be sure to read Info.txt to learn more.

If you are new to interactive fiction, I suggest beginning with The Dreamhold (2004) by Andrew Plotkin or Mrs. Pepper’s Nasty Secret (2008) by Jim Aikin and Eric Eve; both titles were designed specifically to introduce new IF readers to the traditional conventions of the medium. Additionally, if you come from a videogaming background, I suggest Gun Mute (2008) by C. E. J. Pacian as a useful entry point. The Interactive Fiction Database—with its user reviews and recommended lists—is a helpful resource for deciding where to go next!

Please contact me or leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback. Puzzle-oriented games can be great fun as cooperative exercises, so it would be nice to play some in tandem!

But what is the experience of playing a videogame?  Well, in Mario games, we feel momentum and its effects upon our joyful leaps, contrasted with the tight, deadly circumstances of perilous floating platforms and a veritable zoo of odd creatures that all share the common ability to end our fun with the slightest touch.  Shadow of the Colossus is at bottom about lacking control as we rely upon the navigational intelligence of our stead and clumsily flail about landscapes or up giant beasts, tripping over our feet or desperately holding on as we are tossed about.  Bionic Commando is simply defined by the inability to jump.  And when we play a role-playing or real-time strategy game, we feel the physical push and pull of navigating the user interface and menu systems while developing an indirect aesthetic awareness of the crunch of a sword blow, the indistinct bubble of a water attack, or the way in which our units interact (or don’t) with the playing field.  These visceral experiences actually take on the qualities of what would in other media be called theme, as they are both pervasive and often mirrored or paralleled by the wider game structure or narrative.

At its most fundamental, gameplay (the play of a game in the most immediate sense) is determined by the restrictions built into the movement set and the response of the avatar—that is, the mechanics.  “Restrictions” is the most important word here.  If you close your eyes and imagine up an original videogame for yourself, the possibilities for your protagonist’s movement are totally limitless; it is your job to define them narrowly, or else your gameplay will fail to cultivate a relationship between player and level, self and other.  An avatar must have some form of weight, or else it will seem thoroughly detached from the spaces which it inhabits.  A game takes identity through these unique limitations of its mechanics, just as we mortal humans are most easily defined by what we are not.

Take the NES Castlevania games, for example.  Once the player has launched into a jump, directional movement cannot be changed.  This trademark hook combines with a slow walking speed and the fact that attacking causes the character to stop moving, creating a stiff feel of movement around which the levels have been designed.  Those bobbing medusa heads would pose little threat in many other platformers, but here they are a special nuisance due to the way in which the player character is knocked backwards if hit by one.  This is why Grant is such a useful acquisition in Dracula’s Curse; his freedom of movement greatly reduces the danger of falling into pits and even allows entire portions of stages to be circumvented.

What happens if the player character gradually gains a greater freedom of movement and environmental interaction?  You get Metroid, a sophisticated game in which the level design is based entirely upon the contrast between early and later avatar capabilities.  Despite the open environments, many obstacles are entirely insurmountable at first, which forces the player to explore elsewhere, sticking to the intended upgrade path to gain abilities until blockades encountered long before suddenly are easily traversed.  Dangerous enemies essentially serve the same function as these environmental obstacles inasmuch as they both confront the player with the intention of halting progress, but both players’ experience and developers’ thinking categorize them separately because typically one is passive while the other is aggressive; one stationary, the other roving; one unthinking, the other reacting with something meant to resemble intelligence; etc.

Part of Metroid’s brilliance is that it recognizes that the environment and its enemies are one and the same challenge by furthering its primary device, the slow development of exploratory freedom, to address enemies and difficulty by seamlessly integrating another means of controlling the player’s advancement: the progression of power, a device which had been developed in games like Zelda and Dragon Quest in order to prevent the player from wandering early into areas intended for later in the game by filling them with enemies whose strength was on a different order of magnitude.  Metroid players are rewarded for especially thorough exploration with optional powerups that have been carefully hidden within walls, tunnels, and secret rooms, making it easier to survive dangers; this increased survivability burgeons further exploration, generating a loop of positive reinforcement that illustrates the united impedimental purpose of the hazard and the impasse.

When seen in this way, it is no wonder that sequence-breaking is such an honored pastime: what greater satisfaction could there be than to forcibly escape the intended path of progression by cleverly defeating the level design directly?  In Metroid, a game about becoming stronger and more able, the principles of level design are extrapolated to become the shape of the entire game’s narrative structure; through sequence-breaking, players reject the career that has been planned for them, all the while overcoming dangers beyond their supposed league through sheer skill, without depending upon the powerups that would have chained them to the designer’s plot.  This requires a remarkable fluency in the game’s mechanics, its level design, and the relationship between the two so that structural cracks appear—cracks so fine that the designer was never aware of them. We witness here a form of performance art that eschews established guidelines, shrugs off imposed limitations, and declares, “I am clever and skilled beyond what you had expected, and I will find my own way without your help.”  Especially interesting is the implicit recognition within this act that the same quest-designing, dungeon-mastering god is simultaneously responsible for the placement of hindrances and help alike.¹

And this is a busy god indeed, as all of these elements have been designed around the established limits of player freedom.  Survival horror games, for instance, used to (and often still do) feature characters that controlled like tanks; because of their clumsy movement and lousy combat abilities, one or two zombies were enough to pose a threat to the protagonists of Resident Evil.  More recently, titles like Resident Evil 4 and Left 4 Dead have allowed player characters to move much more freely, and key to their success is that they maintain tension by pairing these freer, more dexterous capabilities with far more numerous and challenging enemies.  Just as the hero of a novel ought to be both challenged by and capable of besting its dramatic conflict, the limits of the player’s movement and strength in a game must always be met by appropriate obstacles and foes in order to provide tension.  Freedom and power must be equal to and equaled by the obstacles and dangers that meet them.  Player = antiplayer.  This is the basic equation of game design—one which must always be carefully balanced.

But notice here that challenge is presupposed to be essential in a successful game.  Should it be?  Well, games that are “too easy” are typically criticized as such, as though they are lacking something; a game without adversity is at bottom a story without a conflict.  Perhaps we might say that an unchallenging game is merely busy-work, much like a rote, insubstantial task given to a child by some unimaginative teacher.  We grow—be it through learning, honing, or creating—only when challenged to do so; by a question, by an obstacle, or by others.  With nothing between ourselves and our goals, we would never improve.  Sometimes we create our own challenges or challenge the challenge itself.  Sometimes we reject the equation.  Sometimes we sequence-break.

Serious gaming² is always either busy-work or self-improvement.³ In a time when more and more videogames are being developed to appeal to everyone from the “hardcore” to the “casual” (the one-size-fits-all approach), when the guidelines for progress are written into the software itself through pop-up tutorials, mandatory cutscenes, and unlockable difficulty modes rather than woven into the level design, we need to remember and in turn help to remind the industry why we do what we do.

Game design is a necessarily holistic enterprise that must emphasize at all levels a singular core idea or set of ideas, for it is through the central formal mechanics that the player will experience all of the game’s content.  Entire genres are born from well thought-out gameplay concepts.  Consider for a moment how long the RTS genre had been around before Relic so deftly embellished upon it with the cover system and destructible environments of Company of Heroes, and then consider how simply this new idea is integrated into and thoroughly transforms the mechanics of play as units are repositioned on the battlefield.  A good core mechanical idea like this can be transposed to different perspectives or sometimes even genres and still work just as well.  Imagine these ideas in a 2D sidescroller: the sprinting and knifing of Call of Duty 4; clamboring across rooftops with the contextual interactivity of Mirror’s Edge; charging and hiding behind cover as in Gears of War; rapidly dodging and fighting as in Godhand; and getting around by firing portals at distant walls while an AI overseer gradually reveals herself to be a murderous bitch.  These 3D gameplay concepts are all solid enough to remain successful in 2D; in fact, Flash examples of some already exist.

If a game has such a strong central mechanic, the rest is all level design; and as long as there is a satisfying interaction between the basic gameplay elements and the level design, everything else is just icing.  A truly exemplary game embellishes upon its core idea gradually, trusting players’ intrinsic curiosity to guide them as they encounter more complex dangers, puzzles, and rules.  Being an active participant in this kind of learning process is one of the most satisfying aspects of gaming.  We don’t need a string of tutorials or the ability to change difficulty settings on the fly in order to play Super Mario Bros.; the first stage teaches the player, one thing at a time, about enemies, jumping, stomping, running, etc.⁴ Not everyone finishes Mario; the game’s later challenges require quite a bit of skill and coordination.  But so what?  Unlike passive media, videogames are not about receiving a complete experience from start to finish.  They are about self-improvement, expression, performance, and participation; if a player does not engage all the way to the end of the game, that does not necessarily indicate a diminished experience.  One would think that accepting “Game Over” as an end to the narrative of play would be seen as perfectly valid, given the phrasing.

It must be conceded that this is a tough sell from a business perspective.  However, a game obsessed with apologizing for the parameters of its appeal in order to preemptively widen its market appears weak to all potential consumers.  There are too many others available for informed buyers to be interested in a title that lacks confidence in its own merits, and inevitably players will find that, for every design choice that they enjoy, another seems incongruous and made for a differently-minded crowd.  Even if such a release finds broad success, its customers are likely to come away feeling that the franchise or even the developer is wishy-washy.  If a title is honest about its identity, a player who gives up on a challenging game may well have purchased it with just such an expectation in the first place.  What’s so terrible about making a niche title, anyway?  Isn’t that the key to success—finding a niche and filling it well?  Is it naive to think that consumers will reward courage and integrity?

When developers become fixated upon players seeing everything that they have made, two terrible losses occur: they dismiss the inherently emergent characteristic of the videogame experience whereby the final product is the result of a partnership between designer and player; and they tack on devices external to the core mechanic and sometimes even outside the mode of gameplay itself for the sole purpose of artificially expanding the game’s accessibility, watering it down in the process.

When a work of art strives to be everything to all audiences, it ceases to be anything at all.

¹This fascinating observation is uniquely developed in the original Silent Hill, and I look forward to explicating that game at a later date.

²“Serious gaming” is meant here as goal-oriented activity, as opposed to “just playing around.”

³Whether that self-improvement is in itself busy-work—that is, whether or not good gaming has any value outside gaming itself—is a topic for another time.

⁴For a brilliant comparison of Super Mario Bros. and Half-Life 2’s teaching through level design and visual language, see this article.