Joe Kourieh

[joekourieh]

The Problem with Video Game Difficulty Levels

In thinking about the finer details of my own game proposal, I’ve given a deeper consideration to a contentious issue in gaming: difficulty levels. I admit that as I get older and my available time for gaming gets tighter, I tend to play on easier modes more often. It fits with my ethos for why I play to begin with: I want to win! I play as an escape from reality, where I can be awesome in ways that are impossible in my reality. Real life is stressful enough, when I escape into a virtual world, I don’t want to find even more stress and tediousness there, I want to enjoy the experience. I want to dominate. I’m not so serious a gamer that the sense of accomplishment from achieving a goal increases the more redundantly I hack away at it. Less so actually. There are gamers out there who do feel this way about it, seeking a greater challenge. This includes friends of mine (the same friends who revel in poking fun at me for playing on easy modes), and I respect the attitude of seeking a hardcore challenge. But that’s not for me. The problem lies in the fact that difficulty levels tend to be one-size fits all for every situation, and don’t offer balanced experiences. It tends to be the same equation in all action games. As the difficulty goes up, two things happen: enemy health goes up, and your health goes down. I take issue with this since it’s a missed opportunity for customizing the experience. For instance, I would like an immersive experience where the enemy and I are on level ground. If their strength is too high, it’s frustrating, but if mine is too high, it’s boring. I would like for both of ours to be low, so that the stakes are high without the redundancy of bashing or shooting the same enemy over and over and over just to win. On the other hand, what if I want to bash away at super-strong enemies while not fearing a quick death all the while. The existing dichotomy I mentioned is not conducive to these scenarios. If it were, gamers in my school of thought might not be subjected to the jabs of more “serious” gamers. As a side note, games like God of War 4 are approaching it from a slightly different angle, giving clever names to their choices, such as “Give me a story” for the easiest mode, which allows players to navigate the game with enemies who are more or less props. It’s a neat approach, but still doesn’t do much for customization. I’m not a game developer, so I cannot say why difficulty levels are so rigid, but I can’t imagine innovating on that aspect of things is impossible.

[joekourieh]

A Follow-Up on Mobile Game Controllers

Several weeks ago I got a bluetooth controller to use with my Android smartphone, and it’s been a terrific experience. The particular model I got for 20 pounds seems a good value for the price. I imagine a model that approaches the retail price of a traditional console controller would be a truly outstanding piece of hardware if the ratio of price to quality scales up proportionately. My basic one is reasonably well built but perfectly functional, easy to connect, and likely to last quite some time barring any drops or abuse. My phone sits securely right on top of the controller at a decent viewing distance, fulfilling my super-modern fantasy of having my console, TV, and controller all in one neat package. Pure bliss. The games that support controller use do so seamlessly - in other words, they just work! It feels like playing a real console video game. This is pretty refreshing for someone like myself who hates troubleshooting and fighting with finicky tech more than anything. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve shouted the phrase “Just work!” at my phone or some other device that was making whatever task unnecessarily complicated. The fact that mobile games with controller support tend to require no fiddling or setup whatsoever is incredibly encouraging and makes me want to dive even deeper into the world of mobile games. But therein lies the problem. As I mentioned in a previous post, the entire relationship of controllers to mobile games is frustratingly disorganized. To put it simply, from what I can tell there’s no real categorization for which mobile games support controller use, at least not in the Google Play Store. There’s no way to sort or filter by this designation. And what an important designation it is. For some reason I feel like this awesome technological advancement in gaming is undervalued at this point, something of an afterthought relegated to obscure corners of game feature descriptions and FAQ pages, rather than a prominent selling point. Perhaps I’m just new enough to the scene that I’ve got an undue newbie’s enthusiasm about it, or perhaps I’m part of a small enough market of console-less gamers in exile that it’s a niche selling point just for me. Either way, the huge advantage of using a controller over touch screen, along with their ease of use, makes this seem to me like one of more exciting advances in gaming of recent years, and will factor into my idea development for my individual project.

[joekourieh]

Using Story as a Reward in Gaming

In thinking about the crucial element of story in contemporary video games, I’ve been considering the method through which story is most effectively delivered. Video games are growing larger and more sophisticated, and so there is more content (some but not all of that being storyline) to lead players through over the many hours they’ll ideally spend in the game world. It seems to me that the most effective style of implementing story into the game is by “rewarding” players with plot as they play the game more. In other words, the more fun they have, the more they get of the main plotline, becoming a positive feedback loop for immersion into the game world. One of my recent favorite big-name examples of this was when I played Far Cry 5 last year. The story was split into three mini-bosses (the main antagonist’s siblings) who governed three sections of the open-world map. The player could travel between the sections at will and basically have a good time – fight bad guys, rescue good guys, and, of course, blow crap up. The clever part was that as you had fun in these three ways, you filled up a meter that would upset the mini-bosses, triggering three main encounters with each culminating in a final showdown. It’s simple, but brilliantly effective: if you build a game world and a set of playing mechanics that are addictive enough, the story can be a punctuation of play, rather than a goal. This is an important distinction from another hated aspect of some contemporary games, the pejoratively named “grind” found in many RPGs, and especially, in my experience, in mobile games. This means doing redundant, repetitive tasks over and over in order to fulfill the necessary criteria to move on in the story, whether by way of an overwhelming challenge or simple roadblock stopping the player from proceeding until they reach a certain level. Smaller-scale but still big-name games like Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Pokemon often do this – “Oops, you can’t come to this city until you’ll finished everything in that one over there.” Why not scale the difficulty level to allow the player to deal with opponents in the order they prefer? This not only feels more immersive but allows for greater replay value. Focus on some way to diversify the experience enough so that a “grind” simply can’t exist, or at least have a story that makes a slight grind worth it. For my own project, I am confident in the latter, but still have details to hammer out for the former. To be continued…

[joekourieh]

Experience: Twine

When our guest lecturer Cara Ellison mentioned Twine as a resource for beginner-level interactive storytelling, I was immediately intrigued as to if and how this could act as an auxiliary feature to more complex projects. My initial dive into it (looking at some basic tutorials and some well made Twine stories) has been very intriguing. To me, it seems that these online, interactive Twine stories could be used as a pitching material to demonstrate the feasibility of a proposed story’s world, or as an immersion tool to give more content to fans of that world once the main story has been published (similarly to how Brian often describes a streaming series’ top fans potentially getting additional minutes of content). In other words, for my story concepts that have fantasy/Sci elements (and thus major breaks with reality that the audience must buy into in order for the story to make sense), a tool like Twine can help provide back story or fill in conceptual gaps in a fun, interactive way. For example, my game concept for my individual project about a scientifically engineered race of merpeople gives enough backstory that we know generally how that race came about, and why they fight. However, the specifics of how they were engineered and the struggle their creators went through in doing so is too lengthy to include in the main story. Perhaps an auxiliary tool like Twine could make a readily available and zero-budget narrative piece to tell that backstory, and set up the world. 

Truthfully, this seems to go somewhat against the most basic applications of Twine that others emphasize: the use of multiple endings offered in a first person immersion story. However, I think it’s a platform that can be used with nearly limitless styles. I would like to play with the idea of having only one final ending, but offering multiple ways to arrive there. I also particularly like the ability of the writer to encode hyperlinked text within the narrative that will grant access to additional descriptions or side-notes. This is a very streamlined method of adding detail, rather than just trying to pack the description into the main story text and hope that it doesn’t become a distraction or engorge the body of the story to the point that it’s visually overwhelming. This is the real benefit of experiencing a story digitally rather than in pure text. I’m sure that Twine isn’t the only tool that offers these benefits, but it is a promising start.

One gorgeously made Twine story that I checked out and recommend is The Domovoi, based on a folk legend: http://www.bravemule.com/games#/domovoi

[joekourieh]

A General Overview of My Mobile Game Idea

Name: Atlasium

Platform: Android/Possibly iOS

Premise: In a Sci-Fi version of 17th-century Britain, an impossibly powerful element (Atlasium) was discovered under the lochs of Scotland. A race of Scottish merpeople (the Atlasians) were created to defend their precious resource from the corrupted forces of Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army, who are also powered up by the stuff and seek total domination. The Atlasians, who were born human but made into aquatic warriors as infants, have known nothing their whole lives but fighting off the invaders. Only one, their elder, was around to see the creation of their race, but keeps it a tightly guarded secret. The new generation must discover the strange truth of their civilization’s origin as they struggle to beat their enemies back, loch by loch.

Mechanics: A map of Scotland’s largest inland lochs will act as the battle selection screen. This is a game of strategy – the Atlasians are hugely outnumbered, and so troops and their resources have to be directed accordingly (putting more in one leaves the others more exposed, etc). There are a handful of lieutenants who can lead troops in defending a loch during an attack, and one general who provides a massive boost to whichever lieutenant he accompanies. When the Army launches an attack into a loch, a battle begins. This puts the player into a 3D battle sequence in which they play the role of the lieutenant in charge of that loch, fighting off waves of enemies. Battles can be controlled via touchscreen controls or with a mobile controller. The difficult of the battle depends on how much Atlasium resources are allocated to the loch at the time of attack, resulting in more available weapons power-ups, special moves, health boosts, etc. Failed battles result in less resources for future battles, and will necessitate more grinding to gain back those resources. Successful battles result in new resources and additional storyline, told through dialogue cutscenes. 

[joekourieh]

On Mobile Game Controllers

As my experiences with mobile gaming have ramped up, I have been looking into the (quite convoluted) world of smartphone-compatible controllers, in order to find out firsthand just how faithful the mobile platform can be to traditional console gaming. Initially, searching for one of these controllers is jarring. It’s indicative of the bourgeoning nature of the mobile game industry that the accessory market feels a bit like the Wild West, featuring countless different offerings with radically different looks, prices, customer ratings, claims of compatibility, etc. And what’s more, the mobile game developers are entirely complicit in this confused state of affairs, with no real indication of exactly what consumers should seek out for sure-fire compatibility. Games that work with controllers will usually say so, but will muddy the waters with terminology such as, works with “select controllers” (which ones are those???) or “HID-Compliant controllers” (a term mentioned almost nowhere on any product description or review page). The message from the game developers to their customers looking to get the most out of their product is essentially “Good luck!” It’s all a bit frustrating, and once again, exposes the nascence of the market.The difference between this and the console controller market couldn’t be more different, considering that the console controller market essentially doesn’t exist. The console makers provide their own immediately recognizable controllers to consumers, and, even though the cost of console controllers is painfully high, you know they’re going to function, and function exactly as you expect. It’s a supply and demand situation if there ever was one. After-market console controllers are reserved for PC gamers and console gamers so dedicated they have hyper-specific needs that they satisfy with an off-brand product. For a relatively casual console gamer, the thought of trusting some strange company with the vessel between me and my game is anxiety-inducing. But alas, this is an adventure into a strange but fascinating gaming market that I barely knew existed some months ago. As an important side note, according to folks on the Internet you can actually use a console controller from the past two generations (PS4 or PS3 for instance) with an Android phone. I considered trying to pick up an old used PS3 controller and doing this instead, but I decided against it mainly because it requires an additional £6 adapter and a constant wired connection unlike the Bluetooth gamepad. There is also the sheer novelty of it. I genuinely want to see what a third-party controller is like, especially when its specifically designed for this type of gaming. Not to mention, these mobile controllers also come with a mount that holds your phone on top for optimum viewing. Essentially, you can now hold your controller, your console, and your TV all in your hands at once. Now that’s some futuristic s*** right there.And so after some hours of shopping around I took the leap and went with what I would call a safe choice, a KevenAnna Sminiker gamepad marked as “Amazon’s Choice” (so I can blame them if it’s no good) for £20. This is a bit more than I would have liked to pay, but again considering the £50+ you’d pay for a PS4 controller, I can’t complain. I will judge its actual quality when it arrives tomorrow. To be continued.

[joekourieh]

Interactive Experience: “Fort McMoney”

I was immediately attracted to this project upon finding out it revolved around Fort McMurray, Alberta, since I have a Canadian friend who worked there some years back as one of the innumerable contract laborers of the oil sands industry. For that reason, I knew going into it that I was not a truly impartial reviewer of the game’s real draw and level of entertainment. I had a bias toward wanting to see how they handled the content, and wondered if said content was intriguing enough to attract and captivate those who knew nothing of Fort McMurray. It seems to have done that, since it had release events in several countries. However, being that its big claim to fame was a Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Interactive Production Produced for Digital Media, it’s difficult to judge whether “Fort McMoney,” for all its originality and character, was a Canadian phenomenon or something more wide-reaching. Regardless, the mechanics of this interactive documentary are interesting. From what I can tell from my several hours spent playing, the designers seem to overestimate the complexity of their format. The very first thing that a new player experiences is a sprawling breakdown of all the different aspects of the game. With the combination of exploration, interaction, collection, influence, and social media sharing all shoved in the player’s face within seconds of opening the site, the developers run the risk of overwhelming those who log on looking for something even remotely similar to previous documentary experiences – especially those, as I mentioned, who have no prior knowledge of the subject matter. It would be better to follow the lead of many of today’s most complex video games, and roll out individual features gradually as the player progresses, so they can actually process the more advanced features once they’re familiar with the more basic.“Fort McMoney” tries exceptionally hard to be original, and in that way I think it opens the door to a range of different innovations in informative documentary film. As I see it, any one of the different mechanics listed above would enhance a traditional documentary substantially, especially considering that this flashy project was developed for the relatively low price of just over half a million pounds (when converted from Canadian dollars). My personal favorite feature that’s integral to the interactive nature of “Fort McMoney” is the choose-your-own-adventure-style interviews with locals, putting the player in the seat of the journalist. However, at the same time this feature frustrates me as a former journalist, since it is limited in its scope of possibilities, constricted by the number of questions you are allowed to ask during the interview and, of course, the specific questions that the film crew recorded. For this reason, an interactive documentary is inherently a double-edged sword – it gives the player the chance to ostensibly guide the interview practically, but offers no real freedom in guiding it emotionally. Perhaps this feature would work better in a single long interview rather than a myriad of small ones, with a more deliberate sense of “flow” to the interview rather than a flurry of different topics discussed fired off randomly. Furthermore, the interviews of “Fort McMoney” are generally clunky, with brief blackouts between each question. In order to gain full immersion, they need to be looped better in order to keep them life-like, rather than feeling like a bunch of clips stitched together. On the big scale, the multi-episode initiative of the project ends up coming off clunky as well, since the “episodes”, from what I can tell, end up as different paths dropped into the same story world. Though a player immersed in the world from episode one might be able to differentiate these (possibly even eagerly anticipate them, if the developers are doing their job well), new players will become as lost in this vague mix of updates as they are in the immediate deluge of available game mechanics. In the future, purveyors of interactive media of any kind need to keep all players, new and old, informed clearly of what content is available to them. This seems to be a side-effect of interactivity in traditional media styles: as content is added, the portal into that content becomes convoluted. As a long-time gamer, I recognize that complex content offerings are terrific, but without a streamlined and easily digestible delivery of that content, many casual users will feel turned off.“Fort McMoney” was an odd experience. Fun, informative, and powerful, no doubt, but also frustrating. The key for anyone looking to truly analyze it on the whole is to take a step back and think about whether you would have enjoyed a nice long, regular old documentary about the same subject, without all the bells and whistles. If you can answer that, you can answer the question of whether this project is a sign of things to come, or just an interesting experiment. Perhaps there is some yet-to-be-discovered middle ground between the two.

[joekourieh]

Early Thoughts On Mobile Gaming

For the video game lover with a busy schedule, mobile games can be a good part-time alternative to traditional console gaming. The costs of consistent console use nowadays are modest, with a new game usually released at $50-60. This may sound pricey at first, but considering that a big name title at this price offers dozens if not hundreds of hours of high-quality entertainment, it can be a less expensive hobby even than frequenting the cinema. And while it is a perfectly good hobby for its devotees, due to that low price tag it can pose a major distraction for some of us who budget are time (such as graduate students). However, mobile games are a compact, low-commitment way to satisfy the itch for interactive entertainment. With this in mind, I’ve perused some of the highly rated games on the Google Play Store over the past few months. Here are some general thoughts.

Choices: The initial shock of getting into mobile gaming is at the sheer volume of games available. The list seems endless, with hundreds of titles even in just the upper level of popularity for each category. It seems that every time I open the Play Store I’m instantly sucked into a list of never-ending recommendations, and run the risk of spending more time browsing the selection than actually gaming. Though the selection of console games is also vast, players tend to know what they’re looking to invest their time and money in, at times even counting the days until their favorite series or developer drops their new release. On mobile, it’s a free-for-all, and can get overwhelming, especially considering that the categorization of games is far from precise.

Gameplay Mechanics: Without a doubt the most obvious drawback of mobile gaming is the lack of a controller. As games have become more and more complex, users expect more and more features, and that means more and more stuff to display on screen. The latest action/adventure console games tend to have enough icons and info displayed around the HUD to make inexperienced users’ heads spin. This can be a real problem when a game of that caliber comes to a smartphone. With on-screen real estate so precious for displaying vital data, the last thing you need is two big thumbs hanging about, blocking the view. It becomes awkward having to find just the right position for them. Furthermore, on-screen “buttons” only exist visually, often requiring a quick glance to coordinate a tap. Though this doesn’t matter in turn-based games, in the action games I tend to favor, every second counts, and having to locate the buttons each time you need to activate one is a far cry from the instinctual, almost bionic relationship of the gamer and their console controller. Though the entertainment value is there on mobile, it still doesn’t quite sooth the itchy fingers that drive gamers to pick up the sticks each day.

Playability: With many of even the best mobile games that I’ve played, the thrill only tends to last a day or two at most. The root cause of this is that, obviously, only so much quality content can be packed into a game platform that usually only reaches a GB even for a big game. Compare this to the routinely 50 and above GB console games, and it’s obvious why the mobile offerings are ephemeral. However, my experience with the games is not marred by running out of content altogether, but hitting roadblocks in quality content. For example, the developers of RPG-style games may self-sabotage by increasing the difficulty level too quickly in fear of players flying through it, which then forces them to “grind” repetitively through basic levels to advance at all. Worse yet, some games may offer a gradual increase in challenge but skimp on story, leaving little incentive for players to continue, especially considering the legions of games available as a constant alternative. It makes me wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for the game to have a balance of only mildly challenging gameplay with a strong, original plot that does eventually end altogether before the file size becomes too large. The fact of the matter is that players will stop playing sooner or later. The question is, as a developer, would you rather it be because the game ended, or because they got bored midway through? These issues exist for games on all platforms, but for free mobile games, they are magnified significantly.

Price: That brings us to one final but supremely important point: through my entire initial dive into mobile gaming discussed here, I have not spent a single penny on them. For this reason I suppose I am myself part of the problem facing the evolution of mobile games. Besides being tightfisted in general, I still think of mobile games as unworthy of spending money on. It’s an astonishing contradiction: I consider myself a gamer, have spent thousands over the years on console games, and now want to earnestly explore the world of mobile games, and yet I still scoff at the idea of paying for one, even just a few dollars. There’s something to be said about being insulted by the idea of microtransactions (as in small fees that players can pay in order to advance more quickly through a game or enhance their abilities in-game), but a one-time purchase for a game is something entirely different. It’s simply paying for quality content. And even in today’s economy in which entertainment companies are getting increasingly creative in finding revenue sources, it’s still worth just paying them for a better experience. My next step is to put my money where my mouth is, and judge whether it’s worth it for the part-time but passionate gamer. To be continued.