JMC Game Studies Blog

[shadaxthewizard]

Mediation Between Player and Game

Oxford defines Mediation as "intervention in a dispute in order to resolve it." We can apply this definition to video games in the sense that the controller, the interface and even the player character are all barriers separating the player from the game.

I recently undertook an experiment in which a fellow test subject (Doctor Nic Von Luden) and I removed one of those links between the player and the game, the controller. We had one person holding the physical controller, who I will refer to as the "Controller", faced away from the screen while the other focused on the game and gave him strict input directions, who I will refer to as the "Player", we also swapped our roles at multiple points. Essentially we replaced the controller with an auditory input device that occasionally misunderstands you, and has a will of its own.

The simple act of separating the player from any direct physical input drastically changed not only how the game needs to be played, but the way the Player identifies with the player character. Traditionally when playing Zelda, or similar games, I immediately identify with the player character at hand. Since I have direct control over the actions of this player character, I can project myself onto them. When you pass off that control and replace it with a verbal mechanism in which to control the player character that sense of metamorphosis is lost. I no longer felt as though i was link, i felt like i was shouting at him, telling him what to do. My actions felt secondary and the experience had a distinct disconnect.

It was immediately apparent that the years of built up muscle memory was all but useless as we could no longer rely on tiny, precise movements. Another thing that we noticed, and began to immediately utilise was the sense of input lag, as the Players commands took a moment to process before the Controller pressed the appropriate key. As we discovered this quirk it was only a matter of preparing what we wanted to happen slightly ahead of time.

Removing this link made the smallest decisions seem like undertakings of epic proportions as spitting out your command a microsecond too late could spell disaster. It showed that whatever knowledge you may have pertaining to a certain game, you simply cannot beat it without the physical skills you have built up. That is of course, unless you’re competing against other players performing the same experiment.

The inclusion of Smash Bros and Mario Kart in our testing brought an added layer of complexity to the situation. On one hand, you must struggle play the game competently, on the other, you only have to be more competent than your competition. For Smash in particular it opened up a new type of play where you know partially what your opponents are and are not capable of. I knew that nobody would be able to jump back on the stage if knocked off so I used this knowledge to my advantage, trying only to knock my opponents off. The game devolved not into a fighting game, but a strategy game where listening to your opponents actions is key.

Changing this mediator between player and game, in both cases, drastically changed the experience and interpretation of the game. It shifted the perspective of what were fast paced real-time action games into strategy games, as the unreliability of the Controller forced the Player to be strategic and think outside of the box.

[shadaxthewizard]

How The Binding of Isaac Revitalises the Design of The Legend of Zelda

The Binding Of Isaac Is A Wonderfully Warped Old Testament Take On The Legend Of Zelda (S. Totilo, 2011)

The Binding of Isaac, originally released in 2011 and receiving a remake (The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth) in 2014, was created by Edmund McMillen of Super Meat Boy fame. The game is a clear homage to classic video games, in particular those that McMillen grew up surrounded by.

The most obvious parallel to draw upon is that of The Legend of Zelda for the NES. Isaac takes a majority of its core mechanics from the first Zelda, but expands upon them in creative ways that enhance the rouge-like nature of the gameplay. But what are some of the key similarities, and more importantly, differences?

The Layout

While the individual room layout and inclusion of bombable walls, locked doors and spike traps function more or less the same in both games, Isaac expands upon each of these features to best suit the type of gameplay its trying to facilitate.

Isaac splits it’s gameplay up into “runs”, or individual playthroughs as each player will inevitably have to play the game multiple times through, as is the nature of the rougelike genre. Each run is split up into multiple “floors” the player must descend each one increasing in difficulty, at the end of each floor is a boss, and at the end of the final floor you fight the final boss. Each individual floor is the equivalent of an entire dungeon in Zelda. Where Isaac truly differentiates itself is in how beating the game affects your later playthroughs. When you beat all the floors on your first playthrough, you unlock even more floors, these floors have an exceptional difficulty to them but are very rewarding to conquer.

The style of gameplay Isaac offers also lends itself well to the core themes it portrays as the procedural nature of the game entices the player to explore every room and hunt for secret rooms, enhancing the feeling of mystery.

The Items

Another mechanic Isaac lovingly borrows from Zelda are the Items. While items like Keys, Bombs and Hearts function almost the exact same in both games, and there are easter egg items that Isaac goes out of it’s way to make clear reference to such as the Red Candle, Ladder and Power Bracelet, that it where the similarities end for the most part.

In Isaac each floor contains an locked item room, behind which may be a damage or speed buff, or a triggerable item, or a huge stack of bombs, etc. As you venture further down to later floors, these items increase in usefulness.

What sets Isaac apart is in how each item synergizes with each other. A big promise that McMillen made when during the development of rebirth was  that every item would seamlessly synergize one another, meaning that you could pick up a laser beam item and a homing item, and you would have a homing laser beam. The creativity of some of these items really shows when you venture to the lower floors and have accumulated a large amount of items. This mechanic creates an opportunity for more player choice, as two items which may be fantastic on their own, together could ruin a run. This adds the opportunity for the player to make a tactile on the spot decision, and greatly expands upon the players arsenal.

The Bosses

Isaac’s bosses are another layer of random generation within each floor. While Zelda’s dungeons had hand picked bosses for each level, gradually increasing in difficulty, Isaac’s bosses are picked within a pool of available bosses for that floor. This method keeps the level of difficulty fair for the player while also adding in an element of suspense to each boss encounter.

Where this differs is in the inclusion of final bosses in Isaac. The final bosses all represent a final hurdle a player must overcome to beat there run, while there are smaller random elements within each fight, the overall structure is the same every time.

In an effort to pay homage to one of gaming’s greatest adventures, The Binding of Isaac borrows basic core mechanics, expanding upon each of them to add a hint of randomization and therefore greatly improving the games replayability.

The Binding of Isaac has brought the essence of the original Zelda to a new audience of players with an ever decreasing attention span, with new gameplay features that beautifully compliment that audience.

References

Holmes, J., 2011. How to  take The Legend of Zelda and make it your own. [Online]  Available at: https://www.destructoid.com/how-to-take-the-legend-of-zelda-and-make-it-your-own-206710.phtml  [Accessed August 2019].

Mukundan, R., 2017. Procedural Generation in  Games. [Online]  Available at: https://medium.com/@rajeev90km/procedural-generation-in-games-9642b71d70bc  [Accessed August 2019].

Totilo, S., 2011. The Binding Of Isaac Is A  Wonderfully Warped Old Testament Take On The Legend Of Zelda. [Online]  Available at: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/09/the-binding-of-isaac-is-a-wonderfully-warped-old-testament-take-on-the-legend-of-zelda/  [Accessed August 2019].

[shadaxthewizard]

Mansion of Madness and Depth vs Complexity

When discussing the structure that makes up a game, one can easily fall into the trap of overusing certain phrases or identifiers, one of which is complex. A lot of discussion is had around the topic of complex games whether talking about narrative or gameplay, and the term is often used in place of depth.

When we talk about the complexity of a game, we are discussing something fundamentally different to the level of depth it provides. For example, a game such as SUPERHOT has very little complexity, especially in its earlier stages, yet the game allows the player to use the simple mechanics at hand to create intensely deep strategies at how to approach each level. This exponentially grows to its logical extreme by the end of the game, giving the player truly deep gameplay with very simple mechanics and systems.

Complexity in itself is not inherently bad in game design, although the complexity needs to be delivered by a slow drip feed of information as not to overwhelm the player, take Civilization or any MMO/MOBA for example. Watching someone who’s adept at one of these games is akin to watching magic. These games offer incredibly deep gameplay, but at the cost of having a slightly higher bar to entry for a less experienced player. Most games in these genres do a decent job at slowly giving the player more and more mechanics and information to play with. On the other hand, sometimes complexity becomes a barrier which walls off a possibly very enjoyable, deep experience. This was the experience I recently had with the table top RPG, Mansions of Madness.

This is the part where I would typically write about the gameplay, narrative, etc. Except I have no idea how any of that plays out, as I didn’t get up to that point. My experience with Mansions of Madness boils down to reading the, quite thick, instruction and setup booklet, laying down the board in as cohesive a manner as we could figure out, and after a few hours of bewilderment promptly giving up and going on my phone.

I have no doubt in my mind that this game has a great level of depth, as well as an engaging narrative and gameplay waiting to be unearthed, but the perplexing amount of setup and mental gymnastics required to simply understand how to start the damn game was not worth slogging through. These problems may be fixed in the 2nd edition of the game, which bypasses the initial setup by replacing the game master with an app, hopefully so as the concept and initial story read did intrigue me.

This game, my experience with it in particular, can be taken as a case study about a multitude of topics; Tutorial Design, QA testing or even Game Literacy, but this experience perfectly encapsulates my understanding of the difference between depth vs complexity.

[shadaxthewizard]

Control Schemes and Ape Escape

“Today, if you don’t understand the controller, you’re not able to enjoy video games... We expect the Revolution controller to become the standard in video game controls.“ (Satoru Iwata, 2005).

This was a quote made by the former president of Nintendo about the new upcoming console, and what we now know as the Wii. The quote seems dated today, knowing the rise and fall of motion controls, but during the mid-2000′s it really did seem like motion controls would take over the world. It’s not difficult to see why either, they we’re for the most part, intuitive and easy for anyone to pick up, no matter their skill level. But the novelty of motion controls died off once people started to get frustrated by their lack of precise control. This lack of precision was not the fault of the control scheme itself though, but rather lazy developers who didn’t know where to best utilize the technology. Simply look at motion controls newest iteration, VR, where a much finer precision is possible while retaining the intuitive nature that comes with motion-tracking. While most devs follow the currently most popular control scheme for their game without giving a ounce of thought to the matter, there are some that like to experiment, creating an experience that’s unique. That’s exactly what I would like to commend Sony Computer Entertainment Japan (now Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan) for doing in, what is in my opinion, the greatest PS2 trilogy series, Ape Escape.

The Controls

The first Ape Escape in 1999 is famous in no small part due to the fact that it was the first ever game to require a dual analog stick controller, but utilised them differently to how one would today. As the game came out during a time where collectathon style games reigned supreme, it kept the standard movement and camera controls of the time, that being moving with one analog stick, and changing the camera with a shoulder button. The other analog stick (right) was used as a way of instantly choosing a direction to swing whatever weapon/tool you had equipped. On top of this the game moved it’s jump to one of the shoulder buttons while using the 4 face buttons as hot-swap slots for different equipable items.

In practice this resulted in a much more intuitive control as the developers implemented gestures for different attacks where previously different attacks would’ve taken up another face button. Using the face buttons as item slots also allowed for faster gameplay, as there was less fumbling around in menus.

Player Interaction

The controller is a gateway into the realm of games, when fully immersed it becomes an extension of the player, when poorly designed, it pulls the player out of what could be an otherwise incredible experience. Ape Escape took a vital step in the right direction, experimenting, and finding a way to fully utilise the controller in a way that best compliments the gameplay they were going for.

[shadaxthewizard]

Defining Hacks, Mods, Cheats, Bugs and their relationship to each other

This model was originally pitched by Doctor Nic Von Luden (Dr. Nic Von Luden, 2019) using the combined efforts of the JMC Game Development Class and I will be further developing it myself. To avoid confusion i will strictly be relating each of these 4 terms to games.

As far as I have seen, there is plenty of discussion and documentation detailing and defining these 4 different terms, and if you dig, you can find forum threads of dedicated fan-bases breaking down each term and relating them to one another, but as far as I’ve seen, there is no definitive model for defining the relationship between Hacks, Mods, Cheats and Bugs. But before I get into how each term relates to one another, I will first give a clearer stand-alone definition of each term.

It helps if each term is defined in as bare bones a manner as possible, this way we can relate them more easily.

Defining the Terms

Hacks Hacks can be defined as anything that alters the source code of a game. This can be digging through and changing the games files, but it can also be as simple as terminal commands.

Mods Mods are any sort of modification to the game that alters the intended experience. This is standalone from a hack as you do not need to alter any source code yourself to create a mod. For example, you can modify a game purely by the actions you choose to participate in. Playing Grand Theft Auto, but without killing anybody and  following traffic laws is a modification to the game which doesn’t require altering anything about the games written code.

Cheats Cheats are any method of play that is intentionally beneficial to the player that also breaks the established rules. Cheats are most often associated with multiplayer games as a way of giving said cheater an unfair advantage in some way, but can also be applied to singleplayer games. Cheating doesn’t necessarily have to involve a Hack or a Mod either, one can cheat by using fully intact mechanics a game provides. One key example is difficulty sliders. If you temporarily make the difficulty of a game easier for a brief moment to get past a difficult section, you have broken the rule you established with yourself when starting the game and have thus cheated yourself.

Bugs A bug is any unintentional/unexpected error with the game.

A bug can be almost anything as long as it’s behavour was not manufactured and is purely unintentional. If a specific section of a game is intentionally created to look like a bug then it contains the aesthetic of a bug, but is not one itself.

How Do They Relate?

The simplest method to understanding their relationship is by grouping the terms together. For example: Hack-Mod.

A Hack-Mod would be defined as something that alters the source code in order to modify the game. An easy example of this would be going into the source code of a game and changing the colour code of an object. You have hacked into the source code of the game to modify it, hence, Hack-Mod.

Let’s try another one: Bug-Cheat.

A Bug-Cheat would be something that uses a Bug found in the game to Cheat. A very easy example would be an item duplication glitch.

Now this is very easy to understand, so easy that we can graph in in a plot chart.

Using our examples from earlier, we can mark the red dot as “Hack-Mod” and the blue as “Bug-Cheat”, reading the x-axis first.

While at first glance this seems sufficient and simple, it limits us to a measly 2 term relationship. For instance, using this graph, how would one plot a Hack-Mod-Cheat?

Further Defining the Rules

To be able to create a functioning model of higher tier relationships, we must first ground the rules of how any one string of these terms can be created.

Rule 1: Bugs must always fall on the beginning or end of a string.

Rule 2: Cheats must always fall at the end of a string, unless that would break the first rule.

Rule 3: Mods may fall anywhere within a string, unless that would break the above rules.

Rule 4: The first Hack in a string must always be followed by a Mod.

Using these rules let’s examine a few strings to see what they mean and if they are applicable.

Mod-Cheat – Modifying the game, in order to cheat. Hack-Bug – Not Applicable. Missing a Mod since hacking the game would always modify it. Hack-Mod-Hack – Altering the source code (files), therefore modifying the game, in order to access the source code (in-game terminal). Cheat-Mod – Not Applicable. You cannot Cheat in order to Mod a game since the act of cheating requires you modify the game first. Bug-Hack-Mod-Hack-Cheat-Bug – Fixing a bug, by altering source code, therefore modifying the game, in order to access the source code, in order to cheat, but in turn creating a bug.

Knowing these rules better we can create a more in-depth graph.

This graph can be used to plot a line for any string. For example this is the line for a Bug-Hack-Mod

And the insane Bug-Hack-Mod-Hack-Cheat-Bug that I mentioned before would be graphed like this.

The Meaning of Any of This

I honestly have no idea. This concept is interesting and clearly requires some more in-depth analysis on a much higher level. As it is now it’s just a concept with a ridiculous amount of flaws. These graphs currently have no inherent meaning and neither does the act of relating Hacks, Mods, Cheats and Bugs. It’s a cool concept though, so we have that. At the very least this can be taken as a case study for my very own declining mental state as I had to rewrite 75% of this due to tumblr crashing.

Luden, D. N. V., 2019. Doctor Nic Von Luden's: Compendium of Game Analitica. [Online] Available at: https://doctornicholas.game.blog/ [Accessed July 2019].

[shadaxthewizard]

Game Communities and the Surge of Indie Popularity

It’s no doubt that we are in the golden age of independently developed video games, and we have been for the last decade. But what caused this rise in popularity, specifically with titles that grew to absolute cult status such as Five Nights at Freddy’s or Undertale?

The internet age has drastically changed the video game industry. The rise of indie games to a cult status is one such change that has undoubtedly had a massively positive effect. The most drastic rise to fame in recent years is without a doubt Five Nights at Freddy’s. This point and click horror title became so insanely popular within as little as a few weeks almost solely due to the exposure given to it by popular internet figure, in this particular case, let’s players. This created a feedback loop that led to musical parodies, memes and most importantly, theories.

It’s hard to describe the nature of the internet when it comes to solving a mystery, it seems to imbue this thirst for curiosity that seemingly can never be quenched. Shortly after the release of the first FNAF game, the internet flocked toward different YouTube personalities searching for more answers about the game, many users being directed to Game Theory.

Game Theory was one of the biggest pushes for the success of FNAF and the rise of similar titles. This was also known by the developer of the game, Scott Cawthon. What came in the months following the release of the first FNAF title was a rapid surge of theories from multiple different YouTube personalities, each gaining hundreds of thousands, even millions of views in some cases. The internet ate it up. Now any other game would’ve ridden the hype train to it’s death, overstimulating the community and eventually dying off to become a decently successful but ultimately lost indie game, similar to the original Slender. But the Scott Cawthon was no ordinary developer. The second game in the series, promptly names Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, was released in November of the same year, a mere 3 months after the release of the first title. This immediately reignited the community the first game had received and led to even more let’s plays, memes, music videos and theories. Scott Cawthon did this 2 more times with FNAF 3 releasing in March of 2015 and FNAF 4 in July 2015, making 4 releases within the span of a single year.

Very clearly Scott Cawthon had a keen eye for what the community his game had created craved and delivered on this consistently. This mass of attention for such a long period of time got the attention of the wider spread games community and eventually other hit games were released that took advantage of many of the same tactics as FNAF, the most prominent being hidden details and lore sprinkled throughout parts of the game, enticing players to come together as a community and facilitated online discussion and theory crafting. Two titles that achieved this cult classic status following in the footsteps of FNAF were Undertale and Doki-Doki Literature Club, though there are countless examples.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is an example of how the community behind a game can sometimes be more interesting than the game itself. What started out as a little horror game in a last ditch effort to save a developers dying career after years of monetary failure, turned into one of the biggest cultural phenomenons in recent memory. It spanned multiple titles, spin offs, copy cats and inspired countless other indie developers to delve further into leveraging the community behind their games.

[shadaxthewizard]

Diegesis and Virtual Reality

The concept of diegesis has been gaining traction in the game sphere for the past few years. Titles such as Dead Space and the Metro franchise have dabbled in creating a diegetic user interface and The Stanley Parable plays with the fine line between diegetic and non-diegetic narration, but rarely, if ever, is diegesis a topic of conversation when discussing Virtual Reality.

VR is currently sitting in a strange early development phase where developers and designers are still figuring out how to appropriately take advantage of the medium. An early hurdle to overcome for VR development was the user experience, or UX, in particular user interfaces and HUD’s.

When talking about the design of a main menu to be diegetic or not we also must talk about whether it is meta-diegetic or spatial. Surgeon Simulator is a good example of a spatial diegetic main menu, where you navigate with you hand to select different options from a clipboard. (Andrews, n.d.)

Superhot VR is a great example of a spatial diegetic main menu in VR.

But what I really want to talk about is what tends to happen in most current VR games, a main menu that is both non-diegetic, yet spatial. For example this is Beat Sabers main menu.

It is a traditionally designed, non-diegetic user interface which by the simple nature of being in VR, has become spatial. This calls into question the very nature of diegesis as one could argue that the main character of Beat Saber is the player themselves, which would in tandem make this menu diegetic, as it pertains to the game world itself.

This goes further when discussing different elements such as sound, rules or mechanics. Since the player is also seen as the main character in games such as beat saber, all elements could be considered diegetic in a sense, from the mechanic of swinging your sabers, to simply pausing the game, since everything seen by the player exists in the agreed upon game world, the void you stand in.

This can be further explored when defining the difference between operator acts and machine acts as something that would traditionally be a non-diegetic machine act couldn’t possibly become diegetic in VR, but all operator acts suddenly become diegetic, despite the design of the game. (Iacovides, 2015)

The concept of diegesis was originally never conceived to be explored within VR or even games, so when the advances of new technology allow us to place ourselves in the shoes of a story’s main protagonist in such a surreal manner, we must look at the concept of diegesis in a completely new light, what is the game world and what are the means by which we define it? Is there a difference between the player and the character whom they become and how does this alter what we know to be diegetic? It’s an exciting time to be exploring the field of game design and theory.

References

Andrews, M., n.d. Game UI  Discoveries: What Players Want. [Online]  Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4286/game_ui_discoveries_what_players_.php?print=1  [Accessed July 2019].

Iacovides, I. &. C. A. &. K. R. &. C. P.  &. J. C., 2015. Removing the HUD: The impact of non-diegetic game  elements and expertise on player involvement.. [Online]  Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309606029_Removing_the_HUD_The_impact_of_non-diegetic_game_elements_and_expertise_on_player_involvement  [Accessed July 2019].

Videomaker, 2016. Applied Cinema Studies -  Diegetic vs Non-Diegetic Explained. [Online]  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd0kQLD7JS8  [Accessed July 2019].

Weir, G., 2008. Opinion: Grim Fandango And  Diegesis In Games. [Online]  Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/112122/Opinion_Grim_Fandango_And_Diegesis_In_Games.php  [Accessed July 2019].

Winestock, N., 2018. VR & diegetic Interfaces:  don’t break the experience!. [Online]  Available at: https://uxdesign.cc/vr-diegetic-interfaces-dont-break-the-experience-554f210b6e46  [Accessed July 2019].

[shadaxthewizard]

Skyrim and World-building

I don’t think anybody would doubt the beautiful landscapes Skyrim has to offer are simply dripping with layers of narrative world-building, It’s the kind of game one can spend thousands of hours in and not even come close to seeing all of it, an astonishing feat of video game history.

While I could go on for far too long singing Skyrim’s praise, what I find more interesting to look at is how one small but absolutely vital part of Skyrim makes all the wrong decisions when it comes to world-building and shaping the players expectations of the story and themes to come, I’m talking about the ever crucial opening sequence.

Skyrim, for the most part, conveys themes of heroism, freedom, exploration and so on. So how do we convey these themes to the player as quickly as possible? By having them sit idle in a cart of course!

The anti-climactic feeling upon starting Skyrim is stunningly terrible. Sat idle in a cart, the players first experience is an jargon filled exposition dump, serving to inform the player of the world. Now this may work in some circumstances, it allows the player to slowly take in the information and landscape around them, but Bethesda chose to place this sequence in quite possibly the blandest area of Skyrim they could find. Not only that, but while the player is enticed to look around at their surroundings they are suddenly called upon by the other characters in the cart, which makes the player feel as if they’re missing out on crucial dialogue if they stray the camera too far from the characters.

Soon enough you are brought to the town of Helgen, where you are to be executed (since you are a prisoner, par for the course of an Elder Scrolls game). Finally the game builds some tension, you start to see a village and it’s people and how they’re affected by a raging civil war. As you reach the end of the line you exit the cart and the tension builds again as one of the prisoners riding with you is shot in the back trying to flee. Finally it’s your turn, you step forward, awaiting your fate when.. Nope!

All the tension they they had finally built, crumbles in seconds due to the character creation menu. From this point we now know that our character will survive, it actively crushes any forward momentum the story was building to. This disappointment is compounded when the following section of the game is a slog through an underground cave serving no more as a tutorial to get the player used to the controls and mechanics of the game. Finally after this sequence is over, the player emerges from the cave to be set free to roam the expansive and lore rich world of Skyrim.

This is an excellent case study for how to bore and disengage a player from your story and world, but how could it be done better? Possibly by having the player freely explore a small, yet contained area where the mechanics can be taught over the course of the opening act. Instead of dumping jargon in the players face, which will inevitably go right over their head, you could have this information scattered throughout this area, utilizing the world and level to tell the story. Instead of telling the player the names of each of the great divines why not place monuments or statues of each figure. Instead of telling the player about the civil war, why not show it. Have a public execution where the player is simply allowed to watch. The disappointing fact is Skyrim does both of these things and much more throughout the rest of the game, it simply insisted on hand-holding the player through a very guided tutorial level for the first portion of the game, instead of trusting the players sense of curiosity to seek out the information for themselves.

[shadaxthewizard]

Minecraft, The Magic Circle and Emergent Narrative

"Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational” (Huizinga, 1938).

The Magic Circle is a concept floated around whenever the subject of story telling comes up. It is the ritual we use to momentarily suspend our disbelief and transport ourselves to another world for the sake of being immersed in a story. Many different cultures and mediums had their own take on the magic circle, the glow of a campfire, the opening of the curtains etc.

Games in particular have a strong connection to the Magic Circle. Other art mediums are largely passive in nature, when one reads a book or goes to see a film, the journey is for the most part, start and finish with very little interpretation beyond that, and while two people may get a vastly different outlook after finishing a book or film, their experience, that is to say, the information that they took in, was identical. This is not the case with games. Two players of the same game may take away two completely different experiences when they put the game down, simply due to the nature of interactivity that games allow.

Another concept that is almost foreign to other mediums is Emergent Narrative, the idea that the player is able to forge their own story from the content given in the case where a story may be absent, and with that, I would like to talk about Minecraft.

While not totally absent of any embedded narrative, we can safely say that Minecraft isn’t dripping with story like much of the fiction we consume. The open world sandbox is more concerned with giving the player a wealth of tools to create the world before them. There are few titles that can maintain such a massive player base like Minecraft has over the last 10 years, this is in no small part due to the versatility the game offers, as well as the stellar interpretability it offers players in terms of emergent narrative. In no other game can you be part of a bustling city growing in wealth and power, or a lone warrior lending a helping hand to the nearby village, or a scientist finding a solution to world hunger, or a clan of vikings hunting for food, or, well you get my point. When it comes to the amount of possible narratives one can create Minecraft has every other game beat, and this is only possible due to our fondness and love for the Magic Circle.

This Magic Circle allows us to transport ourselves away from this world, even if only for a moment, giving us room to breath in this era that is often too fast paced for its own good, for without the ability to play, the ability to create stories and the ability to have fun, what is the point?

References

Huizinga, Johan., 1938. Homo Ludens. s.l.:s.n. [Accessed June 2019].

[shadaxthewizard]

How Breath of the Wild makes you FEEL like a hero.

A detailed discussion and analysis on how The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s gameplay, level design and progression mechanics make the player feel like a hero.

Teaching the Player

With a game as expansive as Breath of the Wild, there are bound to be mechanics that are new to most players and as a result, these mechanics will have to be taught to the player. Now game could take your hand and specifically guide you through a disjointed and mechanical feeling “tutorial” as was the case in the Zelda games of yesteryear, but BotW does not do this, instead Nintendo opted for a fluid and dynamic approach to teaching players about this new world, they incorporated the tutorial within the world itself, giving subtle hints to new mechanics and allowing the player to put 2 and 2 together for themselves. There are 2 particular moments in the early game where this strategy is employed that I love.

The first is the starting cave, the very first environment in the game

The purpose of this cave for the most part is to set up the story, tell you some exposition and to give you some pants. But one moment that is incredibly overlooked is this first ledge. This ledge is used as a gate for the player, a way to teach them how to use a vital mechanic of the game without saying a word. You see, for the player to exit the cave they must climb up that ledge and therefore they must learn about the climbing mechanic. This is so subtle that no player would recognize this is a tutorial yet it manages to teach the player about a vital mechanic with no dialogue, prompt or any recognition that this is what Nintendo intended.

The second moment is not long after you exit the cave. You will stumble upon a small cabin in the distance, near this cabin are 4 key things; an axe, trees, a chasm and the old man, your “guide” through the beginning of the game, cutting down one of the trees. These things are set up in a such a way so that you will encounter them naturally as you wonder through the world. As you reach the old man he will call for you and tell you about a certain technique to get a tree to fall in the direction you want by cutting it a certain way.

The genius here is that it is never stated that you can cut down a tree to cross the chasm, you simply see the elements and the game leaves the player to figure the rest out. This is so important to the games feel, as it gives the player a sense of true accomplishment for figuring out the puzzle and makes them feel smart. This kind of design is scattered everywhere throughout the game from its level design to its core mechanics, but in particular its physics and chemistry engines.

Physics and Chemistry Engines

Nintendo carefully crafted the physics engine for BotW, but they also came up with a fairly unseen concept in the realm of games, a chemistry engine. If a physics engine dictates how objects influence other objects movements, a chemistry engine dictates how an objects state influence another objects state, for example, fire can change the state of anything that’s not currently on fire to light it on fire, and water can do the opposite. In practice it makes for game where player choice is at an all time high and makes for puzzles that can be solved in a multitude of ways.

My favourite example of this chemistry engine is in the use of electricity. In one of the Divine Beasts (the main dungeons of the game) there is a section where you must find 2 electric balls and place them on 2 corresponding pads to open a door, but by this point in the game the player has surely encountered a lightning storm. In a lighting storm, any metallic weapons or armour you have equipped will cause you to be struck by a bolt of lightning, clearly showing that they can carry an electric charge. Now any player could put 2 and 2 together and try to drop a weapon on the floor near one of these electric balls and surely enough, it carries the electric charge, get enough metallic objects to stretch this charge to the other pad and the door will open without the need to find the other ball.

This is not an isolated example either, the player can utilize the chemistry engine throughout the entire game, creating endless opportunities for clever puzzle solving, whether its shooting an arrow through a fire to light something in the distance on fire or using the physics engine to roll a boulder down a cliff, taking out a group of enemies that may be too strong for you at that point in the game.

These moments in isolation are very clever and give the player a sense of achievement, but when placed throughout the entirety of the game as they are, it creates this feeling of you growing as an adventurer, immersing you into a story that doesn’t hold your hand.

Weapon Durability

This is by far the most contentious mechanic in the entire game, with the fanbase being split on Nintendo’s decision to implement this mechanic, but in my eyes, it is essential to the progression of the game.

Breath of the Wild foregoes one of the most used mechanics in any modern open world game, an XP and level system. This benefits the game in one major way, difficulty progression. Generally there are two ways an open world game will handle enemy difficulty. Either there will be sections of the world that are gated off and unreachable or the enemies in the world will scale with the players level, BotW does not do either of these things, instead it splits the world up into sections filled with appropriately difficult enemies, while allowing the player to stumble into these areas at any point in the game. BotW substitutes the need for an XP system by having its weapon system, and vitally the durability system, tied to progression. As you adventure forward through the game, you will stumble upon tougher enemies with better weapons and armour and acquiring said weapons and armour will then allow you to fight even tougher enemies, and the cycle continues. This will happen throughout the game as you venture into tougher areas and fight tougher enemies. What areas and what enemies and can and should take on is largely defined by your weapon collection at any given point.

This mechanic is largely responsible for how a player ventures throughout the world, as the need to keep your weapon stock high is always vital. If the weapons never broke, there would be no need for players to fight encampments of enemies or search for hidden loot, they could simply glide to whatever area they need to be at, do objective A, and leave. But the weapon durability dictates that the player must be calculated and always aware of the weapon stock they have on them, encouraging exploration and discouraging skipping content, when the main way of gaining new weapons is also the cause of those weapons degrading you are constantly starved for more, encouraging the player to engage in more fights and therefore constantly and slowly having the player gain better gear, “leveling” the player.organically.

It also allows for much more calculated fights, deciding whether an encounter is worth the risk, and damage to your current weapons based on the weapons the enemies are using. It can also influence how you engage a group of enemies, for example if you are running low on weapons the player may want to engage the enemy with the best weapon first so you can then use it yourself. Nintendo also reinforces and encourages this kind of calculated decision making before engaging in a fight, as often the area around the enemies will have traps, be it a boulder on a hill above, or a flammable barrel next to the enemies.

This drastically changes how the player explores the world, as in a traditional open world game the player is able to brute force a high level enemy by taking their time with a low damage weapon and eventually killing the enemy, granting them with high level weapons and loot at the beginning of the game. This is not really viable in BotW as the lowest level weapons also have the lowest durability so instead the mechanic encourages the player to make their way through the world organically, taking lots of detours.

Why does any of this matter?

First and foremost I love great stories, and stories that take advantage of the medium they are told in, and too many games fail in this aspect, but my biggest gripe is when the gameplay seems to actively distract from the story of a game, Bethesda is a big culprit of this. For example, in Skyrim you are a essentially the chosen one, fated with saving the world from a great threat, while the gameplay generally consists of you doing anything from completely unrelated quests to placing a bucket on a shopkeepers head and looting him dry.

This is where BotW gets it right, there isn’t a moment in the game that feels like a waste of time. There are only 2 objectives the player must complete to finish the game; finish the tutorial island on the Great Plateau and kill Ganon, everything in between is optional. Of course while the player can run into the final dungeon almost straight away, they will be abruptly killed by the overwhelming monsters in the area, and therefore must get stronger. This makes every moment in between feel like you are making the most out of your time. training and getting stronger from activating the Divine Beasts, making the final boss easier to defeat to simply adventuring through the world getting better gear, and every mechanic and level design decision Nintendo made is in favour of this grand feeling that reinforces the narrative instead of distracting from it, as simple as that narrative may be.

References

Arin Hanson, Dan Avidan, 2017. Breath  of the Wild - Game Grumps. [Online]  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82qSnN9eFE  [Accessed June 2019].

PlayFrame, 2017. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the  Wild - #1 - With Level Artist Josh Foreman!. [Online]  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV5MB3q_UOU  [Accessed June 2019].