Miles Edgeworth’s starring adventure had me concerned for the decaying crispness of Capcom’s legal not-quite-sim series; at least before my shamefully gluttonous yet entirely satisfying playthrough over the weekend.

As much as I adore the Ace Attorney games, I admit they don’t offer much leeway in converting newcomers to the franchise. The presumptuously juvenile anime aesthetics, coupled with the seemingly endless amounts of reading required, can cloud the series’ value to the uninitiated.

Certainly, Capcom’s ability to meld endearing writing and silly situations with otherwise gruesome murder scenarios is an admirable achievement in any medium. And yet Wright and Co. reside contentedly in their niche, making few attempts to engage those who are unfamiliar with the admittedly now convoluted narrative elements of the series. Playing through each Ace Attorney title released thus far first (in order) is an understandably daunting requirement.

Indeed, it’s that sense of necessitated familiarity that drives the series forward, case to case. Despite the changes in pace and space the Ace Attorney Investigations spin-off introduces, players are still investigating crime scenes and cross-examining shifty witnesses in much the whodunit tradition they always have. The difference between the menu-driven navigation of earlier titles and the direct control of Edgeworth in Investigations is, at worst, a pleasing aesthetic shift; at best, it’s a far less cumbersome way of exploring environments.

What exactly obligates myself and other like-minded fans to return for what is essentially “more of the same”? I was reminded mere minutes into my premiere Ace Attorney Investigations investigation; that, through almost a decade of serendipitously bluffing my way to victories in court, there has been a constant compelling factor, greater than any given starring attorney.

Suspense.

Not necessarily the edge-of-your-seat kind, although that particular reaction is definitely one of the by-products of former Ace Attorney composer Masakazu Sugimori’s re-re-re-returning musical piece of the same name.

Like the franchise’s overall grasp of charm, the soundtrack of any Ace Attorney game is as vital as the text, imbuing every scene and character with palatable cues and identity. Engaging with the eclecticly eccentric likes of Dick Gumshoe, Kay Faraday, or Shi-Long Lang in silence leaves little impression; like watching the infamous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho without Bernard Herrmann’s screeching violins, one can understand the situation, but won’t feel the emotional pull.

The aptly-titled “Suspense” is the very centrepiece of the series’ design goals, having appeared in each and every Ace Attorney game since 2001’s inceptive Gyakuten Saiban Yomigaeru Gyakuten on the Game Boy Advance. Despite the improvements in audio technology provided by the Nintendo DS, the very same “Suspense” composition nevertheless rears its ominous tones in Ace Attorney Investigations. Moreover, even though 2007’s Apollo Justice featured its own take on the track, the quasi-reboot still utilised the tried and true version of “Suspense” far more often. Clearly, this barely 36-second-long beat is as resonant as any victorious “Objection” or “Cornered” fanfare, essentially having become the driving force for players to reach those conclusions.

Indeed, as satisfying as a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict is, “Suspense” is what each and every learned Ace Attorney player looks forward to. Ace Attorney Investigations’ designer Motohide Eshiro admits as much:

“One of the most important aspects of adventure and text games for me [is] the ‘turnaround’ point.

“In the Ace Attorney series you always have these surprising twists, sometimes two or three times in one case. You just never know what to expect. That’s what keeps adventure games interesting for me.”

Ironically enough, the prime purpose of “Suspense” is to tip players off to such “surprising twists”. We’ve learned the tropes by now: we can foresee that our underdog protagonist will be saddled with a quirky sidekick, just as we can safely bet on facing off against a self-assured opponent and an oily villain at some point. Every crime has arguably become so calculable, that as well-versed Ace Attorney players we will know the murderer and their methods before even completing our initial investigations.

Or at least we think we do, until that sinister musical cue re-evaluates our hypotheses and has us rushing for the save option; that buzzing nuisance to a well-crafted defence which dashes our assumptions of an easy turnabout at the very last moment.  We await that theme to announce a simultaneously unwelcome and entirely welcome element: heretofore unforeseen evidence; the beginning of a battle wits with smug opposition; a surprise life-threatening danger to our attorney avatars. The motif for criminal (and player) motives, suspense via “Suspense”.

Fans could argue that “Suspense” has run its course in court long ago; that, for both the primitive tune and the games harbouring it, it’s high time for “something new”. And yet, avoiding the obvious retort, it’s that very sense of worrying yet consoling familiarity that makes the track a unique metaphor for the Ace Attorney titles as a whole.

“More of the same” is but the brazen justification of lazy critics for hasty reviews. In a series of games that are derided for their linearity and predictability, it’s astounding that the feeling of intrigue, surprise and, indeed, suspense still manages to grip this would-be ace attorney. It’s the type of perfect harmony a von Karma could be proud of: Decisive game mechanics. A decisive player mindset. What more is needed?

[ Images courtesy of Court Records ]

Most media have a simple genre system. There are horror films and action movies, romance novels and history books. The genres can overlap, but they all operate on the same level.

Videogames have genres too, but they’re a lot more complicated than that. Because games have so many interlocking parts, they can be sliced into groups in dozens of ways – far more than any other medium.

It’s easy to underestimate the complexity of videogame genres when you’re familiar with all the terms. Gamers use a multitude of conflicting terms to categorise games; all of them are useful for some purpose, but the reasoning behind it all can be baffling to newcomers to the hobby.

In this article I’m going to run through the main ways we categorise videogames, beginning with the major forms of genre and moving on to other kinds of divisions. If you’re the sort of person who frequently reads videogame websites, most of them will be familiar to you, but you may have never considered them in combination.

Core gameplay genre

The most common type of game genre is a descriptor of the most basic rule structure of the game. Examples include 2D platformer, hidden-object game, third-person shooter and turn-based strategy. These labels describes how the game works, often with reference to the visual perspective and the primary game mechanic.

This kind of genre is clear and specific, yet simplistic. It usually describes only the basic structure of the game and not what the game is like as an experience; two games within a gameplay genre can have wildly differing playing styles. For example, a third-person shooter could be oriented towards action (Gears of War), horror (Dead Space) or role-playing (Mass Effect).

Narrative/aesthetic genre

Most games have some kind of narrative, whether it’s as elaborate as a plotted, scripted, voice-acted story or as simple as a visual style; for many games, the narrative is on the surface and easy to spot, while for others, the only “story” is in the gameplay mechanics and can be hard to define in the language of films and novels. Jason Rohrer’s games primarily fall into the latter category, for example.

The genre labels for game stories apply only to what the story is about, not how it is conveyed. Game narrative genres are interchangeable with the book and film genres: science fiction, war, romance, historical and so on.

Experience genre

The experience genre is about the intersection of gameplay and narrative. It describes what the game is like: what the combination of gameplay and aesthetics add up to as an experience for the player. Experience genres often connote a particular set of rules and game mechanics without stating them explicitly, and so they are frequently used as though equivalent to gameplay genres; but this is misleading.

Experience genres usually imply a particular set of game mechanics, but these are not necessarily definitive. Survival horror games, for example, are usually played from a third-person perspective with ponderous movement controls, but a top-down turn-based strategy game could capture the experience of survival horror without using all of the genre’s gameplay conventions.

Examples of experience genres include survival horror and empire-building sim; I would argue role-playing game is also an experience genre, although its mechanics have been fought over so much that it is treated like a gameplay genre.

If the difference between experience genre and gameplay genre is not clear, consider how they can overlap; for example, Resident Evil 4 is both a survival horror game and a third-person shooter. The experience genre describes what you do in the fiction of the game; the gameplay genre describes how you do it.

Player base

Have you seen any of the various surveys that say the average gamer is around 35 years old, likely to be female and quite probably a parent? It doesn’t apply to the population of the Battlefield: Bad Company multiplayer servers.

We judge games by their players – most frequently, hardcore or casual. Difficulty and complexity are the hallmarks of hardcore games, and approachability and simplicity are the hallmarks of casual games.

“Art games”

Not content with arguing about whether games can be art, many gamers demand clarity on exactly which games are art and which aren’t. Needless to say, this is almost entirely subjective; but most “art games” are indie productions.

Indie vs. major

Over the past twenty years, two major trends shaped the game development industry: one, the amalgamation of many publishing companies into a handful of behemoths like EA, Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard; and two, the ever-lowering barriers to making videogames. The big publishers have all the money, but the new crop of independent videogame designers don’t need any money to make a game; game programming software is becoming ever easier to use and ever more widely available for free.

As a result, the industry has hollowed out. A divide has grown between the all-consuming behemoths and the tiny, chaotic independents, with relatively few companies operating in the middle ground. Reflecting this, the concept of “indie games” as distinct from big-budget, commercially backed “triple-A” games has become an increasingly common and important distinction in game culture.

Number of players

A simple distinction, but one of the most significant, is the difference between single-player and multiplayer games. Often a game has both a single-player and a multiplayer element, although the focus is usually on one or the other. Multiplayer can be further broken down into competitive or co-operative, symmetrical or asymmetrical and massively multiplayer or small-scale multiplayer.

Platform

Delivery platforms are uniquely important to games. Whereas a book is a book whether it’s on a page or on a screen, and a film is a film whether it’s at a cinema or on a mobile phone, games differ radically according to their hardware. Whether a game is on PC, iPhone, NES or Dreamcast 2 is an important distinction that shapes the experience of playing. The platform is often the first thing mentioned in the description of a game.

It’s also the source of intense tribalism within game culture, as fans align themselves with one platform or another and evangelise it over its competitors. Game forums are the most notorious for this behaviour, but it’s not just for trolls; many respectable gaming publications are openly aligned to a single platform, including most of the surviving print magazines and the highly-regarded website Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

National culture

Where a national culture noticeably influences its games, the country becomes a kind of game genre. The biggest divide is between Japanese games and “Western games”, although Britain and various European countries have flavours of game design that are distinct from the United States and Canada, while the Soviet bloc is also establishing a distinctive style. South Korean game design is so culturally specific that although its games often have massive popularity within South Korea, they rarely find success in the West.

Interestingly, a game does not necessarily have to be made in a country for its style to be associated with it. Japanese publishers often release “Western-style” games, and vice versa.

So…

Is this a perfect system? Hardly. It’s adequate for casual discussion – you can adequately describe a new game to a friend with reference to a few of these genre labels and some comparisons to similar games, if you know what games your friend is familiar with. But for any analysis of games that requires clear, precise terminology to categorise games, it’s cumbersome.

Academic surveys of games, for example, often struggle to justify why specific games should be included in their survey on the basis of the games’ characteristics. This can be particularly galling in media effects research, when the (often questionable) results of a study on one particular game are generalised to apply to all games or all “games with violent content” – by journalists if not by the researchers themselves – with no regard for the difference between the violence in Manhunt and Advance Wars.

In a future article, I’ll address the need for a more methodical, multifaceted system for categorising games.

What genre of games do you think we need to see more of?

I’m an unabashed old fart; young to some, but increasingly decrepit in a gaming culture dominated by the sub-35 demographic. In my day, we argued about the relative benefits of Apple’s sixteen dithered colours over CGA’s four-colour palette. Well, not really – anyone with any brains knew that the Apple was better, even if it was frequently fuzzy as hell. Still, it was a simpler time. Games were normally built around a single mechanic; sometimes they even did it well! You could fit anywhere up to thirty games on a single 140KB floppy disk (back when they were still tangibly floppy!), and 640×480 was considered “hi-res”.

Still, as simple as they and we were, it was also a time of breathless revolution: without any hyperbole, there hasn’t been such a great proliferation of new ideas since. Like the little bear’s porridge, the ecosystem was just right – the cost of entry was low enough that any yahoo in their garage could potentially create the next big thing, and the ground was fertile enough to support any wacky idea. Have a great idea?  Code it on the weekend! Keen developers often got their entry into the industry that eventually made their fortunes by writing short games for Nibble, and the like. And it’s not like the implementations weren’t impressive – some solutions are still around today. Procedural generation, for example, isn’t something new: Elite did it back in 1984, offering a universe with 2,048 unique planets and a wireframe 3D flying engine, all in less than 100KB of compiled code.  The moral dilemmas offered in Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect can trace their roots back to Ultima’s move away from pure combat to moral and ethical exploration. And, while Demons Souls is the current golden child of action-based punishing exploration game design, how many remember that Sword of Kadash did it first in 1984?

Things moved fast, too. Looking over release frequencies of sequels during the 80s is an educational experience – not only did almost every release typically re-invent itself from the ground up, they were also often published on a yearly cycle. Every Ultima used an engine rewritten from scratch specifically for that release (the exception being Ultima VII parts 1 and 2 which, if you believe Origin, were always intended to be two parts of one story). We had M.U.L.E., we had King’s Quest, and we had Starflight – the industry was so young, no-one knew what was impossible.  Much like the Cambrian explosion, those early days of development were a raging fire of creativity, the results of which we’re still capitalising on today.

Here’s the thing though: how important are these artefacts of a bygone era today? I’m probably the wrong person to ask – given half a chance, I still play many of them. And, for a historian or archivist, it’s a moot question: they existed, therefore they’re important. However, I wonder – how much can a modern designer keen to cut their teeth on their first commercial project actually learn by studying (and playing) the games of the 80s?  How important is a contextual grounding in the industry?

I’d like the answer to be, “very”, but I have my doubts. While these ‘old’ games defined the vocabulary and design ethos we use today, most of them are borderline unplayable by modern standards (as Michael Abbott experienced when getting his students to play some of the classics). Film students still watch Hitchcock and, if they have any taste, still consider him a great director with information to impart. You’d think that interest in history would carry over to the relatively analogous study of games, but for whatever reason, that doesn’t seem to be the case; research into design focuses either on relatively recent games or too-frequently repeated specific examples. SimCity, Super Mario Bros, and Zelda all feature heavily, but where’s Murder on the Zinderneuf and Kampfgruppe? Courses and discussion that revolve around the body of work as a whole that was created in those days are few and far between. And, when they do exist, they focuses almost exclusively on the consoles – they ignore the rich history of the Apple II, the Commodore, the original PC, and the Spectrum, four platforms which, between them, probably did more to define modern design than Nintendo, Sony, and Atari combined.

I believe there’s still lessons to be learned by studying and playing the classics. I believe that it’s fundamentally important to have a strong grounding in the history in which one designs and writes; the twisted thing is though, I can’t explain why it’s important. Often, their mechanics are somewhat broken, their graphics pitifully archaic by modern standards, and their difficulty punishing; by comparison, modern games are a marvel of design, similar to comparing the Kitty Hawk to an A380. And yet surely, if it’s been done before, isn’t it important to know about it and understand how it was done?

Studying the past is like studying ideation, the process by which ideas develop. Within these games, one can see creativity germinate, grow, and often fail. One can tangibly see developers going down evolutionary dead-ends and, by doing so, learning from them and re-defining their ideas into some that’s “genetically” competitive. It’s more than that though – modern directors are lauded for their subtle references to historically important films. Authors gain literary cred by paying homage to Steinbeck and Milton. And, while we seem to be going through a minor resurgence in replicating older games (such as the neo-retro Mega Man 9 and the Wizardry-esque Etrian Odyssey), design still seems to be focused on replicating rather than incorporating. It’s a great step forward, but it’s still a small niche that’s doing it – it just seems to me that one can’t reasonably chart a path when one doesn’t know where they’ve been.

Is it important to properly understand the entirety of the history of our industry? I don’t know. But I’d like to think so.

Adventure games are the bastard stepchild genre of the medium. Sure, once upon a time they were cute, but somewhere in-between all those irritating deaths and those irrational mindgames, they somehow became as welcome as a fart at a funeral.

And yet, like Lazarus, they live on. To anyone interested in building a greater appreciation of gaming as a medium generally, they’re important; for many years, adventure games were the staple. Forget about your FPSs and forget about your RTSs – back in the day, most of what was available were magnificently mindbending masochistic experiences, and we liked it that way, damnit!

This week, we’re taking a look at five games that, if played, should help build a basic appreciation of some of the high points of the genre; unlike many other examples, these still hold up today. It’s not an exhaustive list and nor are they the best of the genre. However, they’ve had enough of an impact that as far as staples and meme creation go, they’re among the strongest.

Monkey Island

The Secret of Monkey Island is the poster-boy of good adventure game design; it stands out among adventure games for its relatively logical puzzles, its excellent use of humour, its strong art direction, and its excellent pacing. If you haven’t already played the re-release on 360, PC, or iPhone, you’re only hurting yourself.

At its core, The Secret of Monkey Island represents the blueprint of what an adventure game should be. It’s accessible, it’s well-written, and it features extremely strong characters. And, in an amazing display of design, it doesn’t sacrifice puzzle difficulty to achieve any of these – Monkey Island’s an enjoyable romp even for an experienced puzzler. If there’s one adventure game you should play before you die, this is probably it.

Day of the Tentacle

If there’s a second adventure game you should play before you die, it’s probably Day of the Tentacle. Designed by Dave Grossman (now at Telltale Games) and Tim Schafer (of Full Throttle, Psychonauts, and Brütal Legend fame), the game’s just simply bizarre. It features giant hopping tentacles, psychotic medical students, and time travel. And, that’s in the first 30 minutes!

Here’s the thing though – even with all the insanity, it works. And, it works brilliantly – the puzzles are almost all spectacularly logical and consistent with the universe. The writing and timing is excellent. And, if that’s not enough, it even featured its predecessor, Maniac Mansion, as a fully playable game on a computer within the game – genius!

Day of the Tentacle is what you graduate to once you’ve finished Monkey Island; the fact that it hasn’t been remade yet is a crying shame. It’s the game that for many, defined the peak of the genre. Regardless of whether adventure games are your cup of tea or not, not to experience it is like deliberately avoiding ever playing Halo – the only thing you’re doing is hurting your own breadth of experience.

Sam and Max Hit the Road

Sam and Max Hit the Road comes a close second to Day of the Tentacle, except instead of tentacles, it features a psychotic rabbit and a trigger-happy detective dog on an investigative roadtrip around middle America. The humour is equally as excellent and the environments are at times slightly more bizarre, but the single thing that holds this one back is the scale of it. It’s big, big enough that while the gametime is significantly extended, the puzzles become at times hair-pulling. It’s still eminently possible to beat it without a walkthrough, but it’s difficult enough that many never completed it without the use of a walkthrough.

Still, it’s a tight example of an excellently designed adventure game that’s just this side of a Mensa-level challenge. If you really wanted to see how masochistic adventure games could get, feel free to crack open Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy – let me know when you solve the Babelfish puzzle on your own. Actually, don’t bother – I’ll probably be dead by then. Sam and Max‘ll give you a taste of where adventure games sometimes went without beating you into quivering submission. The thing is, it’s such a good game, you probably won’t even mind the frustrating bits. At least, not too much.

Grim Fandango

Grim Fandango’s another product of one of gaming’s most accessible auteurs, Tim Schafer. At its core, it’s the story of the main protagonist’s voyage of self-discovery. Of course, being Schafer, the main protagonist is a Mexican reaper who works for the Department of Death and who’s side-kick is a mechanic demon. No, not a demon mechanic – a demon who’s also a mechanic. Yeah, Schafer’s got somewhat of an over-active imagination …

Even though it was a commercial failure, there’s a few reasons people keep giving Schafer money to develop new games. This is one of them. The characters and their motivations are real, the environments fascinating, and it’s more than a little emotionally moving; there’s probably not a better gaming example of film noir around. Just be warned – when you get to the forklift, look up a walkthrough. Trust me.

Riven

Ah yes, the wildcard of the lot. Many would expect Myst, but to most, Riven had the more developed world. Riven, despite all its pacing flaws, offers a singularly unique experience – very little of the world is explained and almost all must be interpreted. However, unlike other more abstract games, everything you see when playing has a reason for existing. It’s often not important to the plot or the overarching story, but the environments and tools have stories in their own right, accessible to those who are willing to spend the time reflecting on them.

The puzzles are consistent and not overly punishing, but the pacing is a known point of contention; this is very much a game to be savoured. Despite this, it’s still among the best examples of a world-creating adventure game and, for any gamer worth their salt, very much worth experiencing.

Maths is hard. Well, it’s not really, but many people, for whatever reason, decide that it’s too hard for them. Unfortunately, sometimes they go on to use that lack of knowledge to do damage to not only themselves but the industry in general. Enter Kotaku, stage left.

About a week ago, Kotaku ran a poll to see how many of their readers owned a high-definition TV and, for those that didn’t, asked why the respondent hadn’t upgraded yet.

There’s a variety of issues with this survey. It can’t be generalised to anyone other than Kotaku readers because it’s biased by self-selection and there’s no way of knowing the socio-demographic characteristics of those that responded. The numbers don’t match, given that 2,929 respondents said that they hadn’t upgraded to HD but 4,614 respondents gave their reasons why they hadn’t upgraded (a response rate almost twice as high as it should have been). Even worse, no attempt was made to cross-reference the two surveys by IP or session to provide some level of error control. The available responses were limited and the language introduced bias – the Wii was singled out as the single console-based excuse for sticking with SD (despite the PS2 still having a significantly greater footprint). On top of that, no allowance was given for the market that owns a large standard-definition panel, a product which made a significant proportion of sales in international markets for the first half of the last decade.

In short, the survey was fundamentally flawed to the point where without careful wording, the odds of misleading the reader were extremely high. However, that’s not the problem.

The problem isn’t that journalists aren’t statisticians; why should they be? That’s like complaining that the designers behind World of Warcraft aren’t Nobel Memorial prizewinners in economics – after all, the game deals with macroeconomic systems, doesn’t it? While it’d be great for everyone to be experts in everything, it’s just not realistic. However, what we should expect from those who have a certain level of credibility is an acceptable standard of insight and quality control. I sincerely doubt that Crecente or Totilo would feel comfortable letting someone with little to no editorial experience choose future writers for Kotaku. Assuming that’s true, why should it be different for a profession in which they haven’t been trained?

It may look like I’m picking on Plunkett here – I want to make it clear that I’m not. He does good work, he had a good idea, and he ran with it. The problem is that this is an endemic issue, not only in game-related journalism but generally; it’s also one that’s incrementally damaging the reputation and sustainability of the profession. People read news because they trust it. They read it because it’s entertaining. They read it because more often than not, it’s right. Every time an article goes up that generates hits but is rapidly debunked as misinformation, the long-run credibility of the publication and industry in general is damaged.

The single biggest point of differentiation between a commercial news entity and, say, this one, is the level of financial commitment behind it; the rumours of hookers and blow behind the scenes here, despite being somewhat cool, are vastly overstated. We don’t have the money or resources where they do and yet despite this, they ran an editorial article that they didn’t fact-check with someone who had professional experience. It’s not like statisticians are hard to find, either – after graduating, we tend to cluster. See what I did there? Cluster? Anyway …

Every time something like this runs, the point of differentiation between the commercial publication and the volunteer writer narrows. We write sporadically and we don’t have their finances but we’re competing for the same set of eyeballs and we’re legion; if the quality of output on a commercial publication is no better researched or considered than your average blogger with a SurveyMonkey account, where’s the value proposition? Kotaku’s made some giant steps towards decent editorial content lately. Unfortunately, running something like this simply cheapens all the good work they’ve done so far. Maybe not to the majority of their existing audience, but definitely to anyone with a high-school level stats education. In an industry desperately struggling to survive and remain financially viable, you quite simply can’t do this. Ever. The costs of failure are too high – have a look at the gradually decaying empire of the mainstream press sometime.

A lawyer gives bad advice, they get sued. A doctor misdiagnoses and they end up with a malpractice suit. A project manager mismanages and they get sacked. But a journalist? They write a badly researched article and while nothing happens to them immediately, over time they kill the industry by a thousand cuts.

So what’s the answer? Basic journalism 101 – if you’re going to run an editorial on a specialist topic, make sure you either understand the content or talk to someone who does. Open response surveys can still be extremely useful, it’s just important to understand their limitations, design them correctly, and accurately present their results.  And, whatever you do, don’t imply that because there’s a high level of response, the results must be reasonable. Nothing gets a statistician more riled than a bad application of sampling theory. Seriously.

You can count on it.

Hands up who has spent at least five minutes agonising over a decision in a game. Fifteen minutes? An hour?

It’s strange, isn’t it?  Even when a choice has little or no impact on the rest of the game, it can still have plenty of emotional pull. We don’t want to get it wrong, especially if it affects other people – determining the fate of an NPC can drive a certain kind of gamer to insomnia and put a game on hold for days.

When I had to choose the fate of an entire species in Mass Effect, I went through three straight cups of tea before I made the choice.

Mass Effect is full of tough choices; they’re part of the reason people love the first game (god knows it’s not for the combat). Where Halo’s all about the shooting, Mass Effect’s about making decisions – you decide where to go, what to say, who to help, who to foil, who to kill and who to spare. And you decide how much of a bastard you’ll be while doing it. It sits very much within Sid Meier’s philosophy that a good game is “a series of interesting choices”; even the lacklustre combat is more about choosing between skills and upgrades than it is about aiming.

If you’ve played it, you’ll appreciate the consternation people are feeling over Mass Effect 2’s revisionism if your save file from the original game is unavailable. I sympathise with that anxiety, although mostly I’m just pleased that Bioware has allowed this continuity in the first place – too many sequels ignore the choices you made in their predecessor and rewrite history to be more convenient.

(I’m just bitter because I never agreed to work for the G-man.)

Choice in games is important; it’s one of the defining characteristics of games, the definitive characteristic according to some. Anti-games crusaders decry it as the dangerous difference between films and games. Games reviewers praise it or lament its absence. Developers seek new, more exciting, more meaningful ways to provide it to players. Marketers hype it up in pre-release time with grand, often exaggerated rhetoric. Academics speculate on its psychological influence.

It’s a big deal.

Bioware obviously understands this, because they did a lot to make Mass Effect feel like a galaxy full of choices rather than, say, a corridor full of sons of bitches. And it works – you often feel as though you’re affecting the story instead of being an impartial observer. But at a structural level, you’re not: it’s an illusion. You’ll go through all the same plot points regardless of what choices you make along the way.

This is typical of story-based games, and it’s easy to see why – it’s wildly inefficient for developers to create truly branching story paths for pre-scripted games, so the result of your choices is usually something like a small modifier to NPC reactions or a cosmetic change to your avatar. The game usually gives you no way to proceed without carrying out the hero’s quest.

BioShock is one of the few games to acknowledge this restriction and address it directly. The power to choose is the major thematic concern of BioShock, and yet throughout the game choices are forced upon you. Whether or not this complements the narrative or, as Clint Hocking has argued, undermines its message, the way in which the game forces your decision is uniquely videogamey: there’s nowhere else to go. If you disagree with the course of action presented to you, you do it anyway simply because there is nothing else to do other than quit the game or wander the space aimlessly.

There are a few exceptions to this predestined videogame story model, from the exploration-based vignettes in Fallout 3 to the more open social narratives of MMOs. One interesting example is a game series that uses almost entirely predetermined plots: Grand Theft Auto.

The Grand Theft Auto series has a paradoxical story structure; each game in the series is designed to be completely open, from the freedom of travel around the city to the lower-level mechanics such as the negligible penalties for dying or being arrested. The game encourages the player to take risks and break laws – the missions that form the story nod at this freedom, allowing the player to pick from two or three missions available at a time and to undertake them in their own time. But aside from slight variations in the order of missions, the story arc is almost entirely pre-set. Grand Theft Auto IV, for example, presents only three big decisions during its central plot, only one of which alters the missions that follow in any substantial way; arguably none of them make a significant difference to the story arc of the protagonist, Niko Bellic.

The unusual thing about the missions of Grand Theft Auto is that they are set within the context of a normal life. There are a multitude of things to do as an alternative to the succession of heists and murders offered by the main story – unlike most games, there’s life outside the quest.

In GTAIV and its expansions, you can turn down the shady offers to work for various crime lords and decide to make a living as a taxi driver instead. You can shoot pool or go to the pub with your friends, surf the internet, write to your mum, court a potential girlfriend and make new friends on the street. You can listen to the radio. You can watch TV. You can play a videogame.

You can live and work productively for a year in Liberty City without ever breaking a law. You probably won’t, and it wouldn’t help you to complete the main story, but it’s entirely playable.

What that means is that the choice to engage in the main story missions is more explicitly a choice. Unlike Mass Effect, BioShock and the vast majority of narrative games, engaging with the story is a decision that has to be made while you play the game, not something that you do by default. It adds a dimension to the ultimately tragic story arc told in each game’s missions and cutscenes. If you’re saddened by how the life of Niko or Johnny or Luis turns out, you can share in a small part of the guilt – after all, unlike most game characters, they could have stayed home and watched TV.

Most game-based storytelling is facile at best.  Be honest - we all know it’s true. But, not all – games do exist that stand on their own as examples of what the medium is capable of. Often, they’re no better than an average book or movie. Sometimes, thanks to their level of interaction, they’re incomparable. Irrespective, recognising them and learning from their strengths is important, as it’s the only way we’ll learn how to tell better stories.

Up until the half-baked (and too quickly shipped) Ultima VIII and Ultima IX, the Ultima series was arguably the RPG series by which all others were judged.  Even Final Fantasy, for all its mechanical variability, doesn’t come close – where Final Fantasy has fundamentally become three different games developed by three different teams released under the same banner and linked by chocobos, Ultima was one of the few series that managed to maintain plot, playstyle, and character continuity while still completely revamping and extending the engine between releases.

Ultima VI was a watershed game for a variety of reasons. It introduced weight as a factor in inventory management, one of the first games to do so. It was the first Ultima to move to a 3D-isometric view, an extremely advanced feature for the time. It was the first Ultima (and one of the first RPGs generally) to move to an interface that could be mouse-controlled. And, it was the first Ultima to offer a single-sized map with no explicitly bounded loading areas, allowing the player to walk straight from the wilderness into town without any scaling.

For some quick context, the Ultima series was defined by three trilogies. The first three were known as The Age of Darkness and focused on the rise and fall of Mondain, his lover Minax, and their bastard lovechild Exodus. By and large, they were mainly characterised by the now extremely familiar “seek and slay the evil wizard” narrative. It was in the second trilogy, The Age of Enlightenment that things got interesting; Richard Garriott, frustrated with this simplistic approach to storytelling and uncomfortable with the ethical implications of encouraging gamers to steal food as a matter of course when playing, decided to go in a totally different direction. Ultima IV, in an extremely bold move, didn’t feature any classical antagonist at all – the primary enemy was your own lack of virtue. Garriott, in what can only be called an extremely ballsy move, decided to make a game in which the focus would be on the logical and philosophical importance of ethical actions within a civil society.

Ultima IV, released in 1985, broadly dealt with the achievement of eight virtues and becoming the Avatar, a spiritual leader and example to the world. It culminated with you recovering the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, a tome containing the answer to all questions. Ultima V, released in 1988, dealt with the ethical implications of how good intentions could be unintentionally turned to evil; extremist application of the eight virtues in the absence of the true king creates an oppressive society characterised by revolution and state-sponsored civil rights abuse. The game culminates with the rescue of the true king and collapse of the Underworld in which he was trapped. And, picking up right where Ultima V left off, Ultima VI (released in 1990) dealt with the unexpected consequences of positive actions – on returning to Britannia, you find a sudden increase in the number of gargoyles (a known monster from the previous games) streaming from the remains of the Underworld, waging war and taking over the eight shrines of virtue.

Doing what you do best, you gradually defeat the gargoyles, chasing them from each of the eight shrines and eventually fighting them back to their homeworld, a land on the other side of collapsing Underworld. On learning to converse with the gargoyles in their own land and their own language, you discover a confronting truth – your actions over the last two games have been the cause of the gargoyles’ migration. They’re not entering Britannia out of racial aggression, as previously believed, but out of desperation; by taking the Codex and collapsing the Underworld, you set off a chain of geological reactions that is gradually causing their world to collapse. In chasing your own self-actualisation and disrupting the natural state of the world, you’ve unknowingly been committing xenocide and dooming their race to extinction. Not only is it a hell of a punch given your own self-righteous beliefs by this point, it’s also a marvel of storytelling in games.

The most recent analogous series that’s offered such an embedded level of continuity between sequels is Mass Effect. However, think back – in 25 years, it’s hard to think of another series that’s not only held characters, geographies, and interaction systems largely consistent between three sequels, but has also made the continuity not just a side-line service for fans but the focus of the main plot.

Convincing and empathetic narrative in games is hard; while often longer than a typical novel, the information density is a lot lower. “Show, don’t tell” is the best mechanism for delivering stories, but in a medium characterised by (until recently) generally unconvincing character models and sophomoric concepts, that’s a lot easier said than done. The second Ultima trilogy nails it, not because it has more text (Lost Odyssey has it beat on that one), nor because it’s a more convincing world (Oblivion, natch), but because the negative consequences of your positive actions are so delayed and yet so pivotal. By the time they occur, the sudden feeling of remorse you experience is real – even though you thought you were doing the right thing (and, to your people you were), you realise that your own racial prejudices have meant the wholesale slaughter of equally sentient beings for no real reason. Those who you thought were mindless creatures since Ultima I were simply another race trying to get by. In the end, you realise that the universe is more than just your world, and that all actions have positive and negative consequences, even if they’re not immediately apparent.

Not bad for three games released over 20 years ago – it’s a scale of storytelling not often replicated in the medium. And, it’s worth remembering and learning from.

The Good

Games for Good

It’s a dangerous world out there. Not only is it filled with snakes, spiders and Steven Seagal, it’s also got a hefty population of grandparents with a seemingly endless supply of embroidered hankies to dish out at any present-giving opportunity. Like gift-laden suicide bombers, they lay in waiting, their payload dressed up as if it were just one of the many wrapped offerings under the Christmas tree. Maybe this is where the phrase it’s much better to give than to receive came from. It may be true when it comes to receiving gifts from the elderly, but it’s not always the case. The two can be equally gratifying, as OneBigGame have shown by allowing us to purchase Chime – developed by SingStar studio Zoë Mode – on Xbox Live Arcade. Not only does ’sixty per cent or more’ (whatever that means) of your 400 MS points go towards kid related charities, but it’s also a fantastic game which mixes music and puzzles even better than Lumines did. It’s like paying to be part of a fun run for charity, only it’s actually fun.

The Bad

Tiny Text on Old TVs

Alright, all this seemingly hyperbolic talk about Mass Effect 2’s brilliance has to cease. Now this 51cm 4:3 standard def box is not only serving as a reminder that my TV’s been in for repairs for four-and-a-half weeks. It’s also rubbing in my face the fact that, not only am I too much of a graphics whore to play through ME:2 in anything less than 720p, but that even if I could overcome my lust for graphical fidelity I wouldn’t be able to read through the game’s reams of text. Like Dead Rising and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, ME:2’s written content is near impossible to decipher on a standard definition television. I should be happy that at least I have Chime to get me through this week. But it’s kind of like sitting at home messed up on acid and making patterns with the carpet squares in your back room while all your friends are out at bars drinking and meeting new people. It’s great fun, but nobody really understands how cool it was apart from you.

The Rose-Coloured Memory

Retrogaming Is Ugly, But Sometimes Fun

A good childhood memory is an incredibly fragile thing. I can still remember how excited I was about the release of Robotech on DVD. The thought of all those deep personal stories alongside Zentraedi Warships and Veritech fighters blowing the crap out of each other with missiles that spun around for no apparent reason was, I thought, going to be great to relive. After rushing out to buy the Season 1 boxset, I slid the first disc in only to discover that what my memory told me was a space opera full of epic battles and cool technology was, in fact, a terrible mess of bad dialogue and poor animation, and those ‘personal stories’ made even my life look exciting.

Having destroyed my memory of stitched-together-anime for mid-80’s Western audiences, I’ve since been meaning to completely obliterate the fond memories of games I thought were amazing before my brain had fully formed. Gamesradar – which also lead me to Abandonia among other places – recently published a list of 30 commercial games that are now free to download. Remember the moment you once thought, “wow, this almost looks real. I don’t think graphics will ever get any better than this?” Well that statement was uttered by the same kid that believed a magical giant bunny came once a year to hide eggs made of chocolate around their house. Most have aged pretty poorly, but at least some of the gameplay is still pretty intact, unlike our crushed youthful innocence.

There’s more to digital distribution than just online sales – being able to instantly buy and (sometimes) play games online is only a part of the puzzle.  Where the game runs, where the game is stored, and how you “own” the game are equally important. Steam, Good Old Games, and similar services are the simplest model; by and large, they replicate bricks and mortar stores by providing a catalogue and a distribution system (in their case, the internet). As a category, these “Games on Demand” system are most likely to be the dominant model for the foreseeable future.

That’s not to say they’re the only model. The badly termed “games as a service”, for example, abstracts the whole concept of property and hardware requirements and shifts all processing and storage server-side. In effect, the gamer either licenses or rents a game and receives nothing more than an A/V-stream – their savegames, their purchases, and even their computation lives in the cloud. OnLive has been the most public in this space.

It’s a neat idea – instead of only having one real opportunity to upgrade your console per generation or having to spend significant amounts of money upgrading your PC, the client-side device only needs to be able to consistently stream and decode video at an acceptable resolution. Generational hardware upgrades could then be incremental and capitalise on economics of shared infrastructure, reducing marginal hardware costs by exploiting the fact that not all gamers play games at the same time.  Similar to sharing internet capacity, the provider needs only use a single “server” across multiple gamers. Plus, the provider can offer a theoretically infinite catalogue with no install time required – everything’s instantly available in the cloud. All you need is an internet connection with sufficient bandwidth and a (relatively) dumb box to handle the streaming and provide gamepad connectivity. Cool, hey?

While it’s entirely possible these streaming services may actually get some traction and provide a credible alternative,  I have my doubts. Here’s why, in a nutshell:

• Latency
• Cost
• Pricing

Latency

Streaming a graphically intensive game is tough, very tough. Latency isn’t really an issue in games like Bejewelled or Dragon Age: Origins, but in action-heavy games, it can be a killer; most bands struggle to play well together if there’s more than a 30 millisecond delay between instruments, and 80-100 milliseconds appears to be the absolute upper limit of what’s acceptable to a twitch gamer. On top of that, there’s now a general expectation that the minimum “standard” for full-featured gaming is a minimum 720p resolution (the Wii notwithstanding) and we’re rapidly approaching the point where 60fps is an expected feature.

Ignoring the bandwidth requirements, in that 80-100 milliseconds any streaming service will have to go through the following processing chain: Player Action -> Transmission -> Game Logic (AI, Sound, etc) -> Image Rendering -> Image / Sound Compression -> Transmission -> Image / Sound Decompression -> Image Display. That’s a lot to fit into a single time-constrained path given the vagaries of operating over a public packet-based network. Get it wrong, and you’ve got some very unhappy gamers.

Cost

Within this service, effective delivery means minimising the individual time components within the overall processing chain. Dedicated hardware and smart coding will help with some of these, but the transmission path is a key bottleneck – not only is the routing outside of the control of systems operator, but it needs to be traversed not once but twice! It’s all well and good to minimise the total path by locating the hosting environment closer to the gamer, but that’s not cheap – fundamentally, that means maintaining a dedicated data centre in potentially every city where the service is offered.

While the labour costs alone make that a highly debatable proposition, what happens when there isn’t critical mass to warrant setting up a datacentre in a given city? Given the staggering lack of Australian-based MMO server farms, the odds of any such service actually making it outside of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo (where population figures suggest a large enough market to make such a service sustainable) are slim at best.

Pricing

Similar to digital print, most people’s expectations about likely discount levels for digitally distributed goods rather than physical goods is vastly overestimated. It’s an understandable assumption – they’re digital, so there’s no physical cost beyond storage. Bandwidth is cheap compared to air distribution and physical manufacturing, and while there are diseconomies of scale associated with storage costs, games catalogues aren’t anywhere near the point where serious diseconomies kick in yet.

History’s shown otherwise, unfortunately. When online book stores launched, many had an expectation that they’d be buying all their $19.95 books for under $5. As time has shown, that’s just not the case, and there’s good reason for it; the entire industry is built on a certain level of return.

With games, the retailer’s margin on a typical $80 game sale in Australia is easily under AU$10 – RRP may be upwards of AU$110, but I’m betting that few games actually sell for anything near RRP. Physical manufacturing and distribution costs may add in another $5-$10 or so when amortised across the full shipment. So, out of that AU$80 software sale, there’s only AU$20 of “slack”, AU$10 of which the distributor will probably be wanting to re-appropriate for themselves.

Modern games are expensive to make, and developers and publishers have a certain level of profit expectations. Streamed games may have the potential to offer a cheaper alternative to physically distributed goods, but the reality is that the final retail pricing differential is likely to be marginal (if it exists at all).

So where does that leave us? It’s possible that such a service may actually get off the ground (anything’s possible), but the odds are against it. Assuming the technical hurdles are properly surmounted (a big assumption) and assuming there’s sufficient demand to make it a global offering (an even bigger assumption), it’s still caught in the same trap as general digital distribution – the value’s in the catalogue. And, getting a decent catalogue is hard in its own right.

These aren’t trivial challenges – much like the Phantom, I’m betting that interest in services like OnLive will be equally as ephemeral.

The Good

Games speaking in their Native Tongues

We can handle foreign films in their original spoken forms, so why is it that we have an inability to immerse ourselves in the multiple languages that could appear in our games? Even Avatar, with its make-believe lexicon, had large chunks of its spoken audio translated into text (albeit, via an incredibly horrible font).  Thankfully games like Metro 2033 are proud enough of their origins and feel strongly enough about their settings to offer up the ability to play in their original language, in this case Russian. I may be the only one, but I long for a day where localisation returns to its written roots – except this time sticking within the bounds of English grammar.

The Bad

Growing up in an pre-Geek-chic age

Lou Reed’s desire to be black paled (if you’ll excuse the pun) in comparison to mine mid-way through my school years. And while his lust for more melanin was based on the 1970’s version of who he wasn’t, I was lapping up the machismo filled mess that was late ’80s hip hop culture. School projects on the Black Panthers, bootlegged NWA cassettes, an LA Raiders cap; I was as street as a Frankenstein-esque creature composed solely of bits of Bloods and the Crips, brought to life by some Onyx turned up to 11. Unfortunately for me, I grew up in a time before rappers wore t-shirts with geek culture related prints. A time in which being a nerd and rhyming over breakbeats were mutually exclusive, no matter how you drew your Venn diagram.

Nowadays things are different: I never dreamed of a day when someone would mix rhymes and game soundtracks together, but I recently discovered Vinyl Fantasy and Ocarina of Rhyme. Listening to some of these tracks I’m glad I grew up in the hip hop era I did. It’s not that they’re bad, in fact there’s some great mixes in there. It’s just, listening to hip hop during that time period, I was forced into the harsh realization that I was a pale, geeky, half-Greek/half New-Zealander Australian. Actually, looking at that written down, there’s no wonder I was confused about who I was supposed to be.

The Sightly Less Useless Peripheral

Wii Speak comes up for air again

Just the other day I picked up Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii. Sitting flush with the game case in the oversized cardboard packaging was a piece of hardware I figured I would add to the box filled with tangled wires that I rather romantically term “gaming ephemera”. It may not be a completely useless addition to my roster of peripherals though, what with a new game announcing support for the mic - Monster Hunter Tri’s European incarnation promises to use Wii Speak to allow chatter between players. Unfortunately, I haven’t been feeding my Japanese gland enough Pocky lately, so I can’t muster up enough energy to care too much about the actual game. But, it’s great news to see that I haven’t completely wasted my money on the device. Maybe I’ll sit the tiny grey gadget on the top of the pile and hope for a compatible game that I actually want to play.