[thegonzologist]

It is with a heavy heart...

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Here’s the deal. I did something. It might be something brilliant, it might be something stupid. I’m not really sure. I created a website called Stomp. Stomp will be replacing The Gonzologist. Why? Because... only one person really gets to post on The Gonzologist, and that’s me. Doc. While that’s great and all, I’d like to attempt more collaborative and experimental things. If anything, the post volume should go up.

The basic goal is this: get more stuff written, write funnier stuff, write better stuff, and help get other friends--good friends with good writing--published so they can write stuff too. That’s always been the thing: people are like “get a blog so you can show people you have a body of work,” but most of us who do the whole blog thing find that, well, nobody really reads, so we never get any feedback, and we never really grow. Together, a bunch of us writing stuff... well, I hope we might be able to get a bit more traffic flowing.

Dunno how it’ll work out.

I had fun on The Gonzologist, and I’ll port the worthwhile stuff from here over there as I can. You can follow Stomp on twitter at @stompsite.

tl;dr: name change, software change, hosting change, moving to a unified, shorter branding. You’ll still get content from me.

[thegonzologist]

Let’s Talk Ethan Carter

The last time I wrote about a specific game in this way, I did so immediately after completing it. I’m not sure that was a wise decision. I learned a long time ago that it was better to ruminate on a game than to immediately share one’s gut reactions. That doesn’t mean there’s no value to sharing gut reactions, just that I am not entirely happy with how I wrote about Gone Home. Looking back on it, I don’t think it was a waste of my time--something I believe I said in my piece on it. I stand by some things I said, but with the distance of time, I don’t stand with everything.

Feelings are blunt.

They take time to polish.

I completed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter a few weeks ago. It is only now I feel ready to talk about it. So here goes.

1. I’m glad I played it, but there were things about it that bugged me. If you’re looking for a review, there you go. You should buy and play Ethan Carter. No numerical scores here, folks. Just a recommendation.

2. It is not a walking sim.

“Walking sim” is derogatory in some minds. To me, it is a simple genre name. I don’t really understand the emotional elements that come with discussing a game’s mechanical genre. It’s weird when people get really angry at someone who talks about games and says “this is not an RPG” or “this is a walking sim” or whatever.

“Walking sim,” to me, is a genre that often violates the one sacred rule of writing: “show, don’t tell.” Walking sims tend to exposit--that is, they’re more likely to tell the player things, with voiceovers, rather than show the player.

I do not think this is by nature--I think the genre could do more than that, and I think some games do occasionally choose to show where they should. I do, however, think an awful lot of walking sims have a bad habit of relying on voiceover to tell stories they could tell better in other ways.

I think the best walking simulators are exposition-free, like Proteus.

Seriously, storytelling where the story is told at the player is terrible and ineffectual.

This is the problem with walking simulators, but The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is not a walking simulator. I’m just highlighting the genre and what it does wrong for reasons that should become clear shortly.

3. It is an adventure game.

Okay, so, here’s the deal: if you want to tell a story, you need to determine which medium is the best for conveying the narrative you wish to convey. A movie is great for deliberate pacing and framing, a comic is great for letting the audience pore over the art, and a game is great at generating reflection through interaction.

Adventure games tell stories through interaction. What you do matters, in other words. Thing is, we tend to think of adventure games like 2D point and click things. Myst is the major exception, I think, but I’d happily argue that Ethan Carter has more in common with Myst than a walking simulator.

Yes, on the surface, you are walking a first-person person around a world, and every once in a while, this triggers a line of dialog. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter might be framed like a walking sim, but the reality is that this is an adventure game one where you must solve five deaths and... I wanna say five other puzzles.

Alright, so, here’s where I start reviewing stuff that could be considered spoilers.

4. It is a pretty good puzzle game. The puzzles themselves are enjoyable, for the most part.

I will say that I think it fails near the end. The last two death-puzzles are trivial to ‘solve,’ because you don’t really need to solve them at all.

Check this out:

You solve puzzles by locating all the clues, then entering a ‘mode’ where you can see a bunch of images of the past. You must arrange them in the proper order in order to find out what happened. These puzzles, in other words, tell a story. It’s more engaging than some walking sims I’ve played, which basically have notes to find that explain everything.

I really like these puzzles, but the last two are a letdown compared to the first three, where I actually had to think about what I was doing.

5. I think The Vanishing of Ethan Carter wants to be a game that doesn’t hold your hand, which is an admirable goal... except that I don’t think it succeeds.

Here’s an example: to get to the final area in the game, the player must shut off a generator, lowering the water levels enough for them to cross the river. Seems simple, right? In fact, the game even puts the player inside the generator room at the end of the preceding puzzle.

You might be wondering what the problem is.

Well, first, I’m not sure the player has any way of knowing they’re supposed to cross the river. If I saw a building on the other side, I might go “hmm, okay, I need to get over there, but I’m not sure how,” and then I would have a general idea of what I needed: to figure out a way to cross the river.

I feel like some sort of notebook would have been nice. Nothing major, no map markers (EDIT: HOLY CRAP I FORGOT TO FINISH THIS SENTENCE), just a simple “now I need to find...” without explaining how to do it. I think Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura did something like this. (/EDIT) 

Second, the game misdirects the player. The second to last death puzzle gets you past a locked door into a building with an open door. Based on the logic provided by the rest of the game, one might think that this is a way to continue... except it leads to a small dead end area.

I solved the first murder, there was a path, I followed it, that path led me across a dam to a puzzle, and that path led me to the church, and then at the church, the player character, Paul Prospero, stated that he needed to go to the mines. I’d seen the mines on my way to the church, so I backtracked to them. Once I figured out how to get on the mines (more on that later), I went into the caves and solved a murder there. I followed the caves and found myself presented with the fourth murder... then I wasn’t sure where to go.

Third, the game doesn’t contextualize areas for the player well. In a traditional adventure game, players can be like “okay, so I have to look through this screen to figure out what to do.” There are boundaries, in other words. Trying to get into the mines, I had literally no idea where on the map I should be looking. The gate to the mine was locked.

I finally had to look up where to go.

The same was true for the river. Down there, to my understanding, I had two options.

I could go through the door I gained access to after solving the murder.

I could ride the elevator that returned me to one of the earlier areas of the game.

Again, I had no idea what I was doing, no idea where I should be looking, nothing. Even old-school adventure games, which didn’t hold your hand, gave you a basic idea of your needs.

I had even tried approaching the part of the river I was supposed to cross, encountered an invisible wall, and assumed that was simply the boundary of the map.

Maybe this is all just me. Maybe I’m so used to thinking in terms of repeatable systems, that I don’t respond right when I encounter something like “you can lower the water level” (to my knowledge, you can never alter the properties of the map anywhere else), or “if you get close enough, you can crawl in that hole,” (even though, through the rest of the game, I never had to press the interact button to get through an area that seemed too small for me), or “there’s an open door, that probably leads to the rest of the map” (and this one time it doesn’t).

But that’s how I was. At a few points, I had to look up what to do, because I was required to do something that amounted to “scour the environment for an interactive object.”

A lack of handholding is fine. But “just search the environment for an object to interact with” rather than letting players resort to some sort of deduction and logic (”ah-hah! I need to cross the river, but I can’t!”) seems like a must. I mean, maybe it’s just me, but back when I was playing Sanitarium, my favorite adventure game, the protagonist would often vocalize his needs, which helped players deduce what they needed in order to progress.

And here’s the thing, Ethan Carter’s best puzzles do this. They make it easy to understand what to do (’sort this chronology’) but make it challenging to figure out how to do it. The game’s weakest moments are when the player doesn’t know what to do, but the how is as easy as “press this one button to proceed.”

I’m not sure I enjoy hunting for a button. I much prefer trying to figure out how the button works.

6. It turns out this elevator is really just a way to help you find the puzzles you missed. I thought it might move me through the rest of the story, but no, it just returns you to earlier areas of the game to make it easier to get to the missed puzzles.

You might be thinking “why do I care about missed puzzles?” Well... this is the other area where I feel Ethan Carter falls apart. At the physical end of the game, you are presented with a map. This map takes you back to puzzles you might have missed. They’re these entirely missable sometimes-but-not-always-puzzle-things (I didn’t realize that ‘trigger all the traps’ was one--I thought it was best I get out of there and away from the traps), and you are required to find all of them to complete the game.

Funny thing was, I thought that astronaut one was optional until a friend informed me it wasn’t. If the puzzles had remained optional, simply fleshing out Ethan Carter as a character, I think I might have enjoyed it more. Being required to understand the truth was... well, ehnh.

7. I didn’t like the story.

I didn’t like the ‘twist’ at the end, that we were playing the protagonist of Ethan’s last story (and seriously, what a macabre kid), because I tend not to like the “he was a ghost/figment of another character’s imagination all along!” twists. I prefer stories that play it straight.

The entire time, I was trying to solve the mystery of the monster that controlled the family and made them do horrible things while it tried to get to a kid. And then it turned out that what was really happening was that the kid disobeyed his parents, ran off, and accidentally burned to death. I wanted to experience cosmic horror, not a broken lantern.

Also: what a messed-up kid, telling a story about how his whole family murders and tortures each other. You get the sense that they’re not the nicest people in the world, but Ethan takes it to the next level, and it’s kinda creepy. I found myself actually disliking Ethan by the end.

The story’s trying to present to us this kid who’s escaping from his family’s terribleness with storytelling, but when we actually meet them, they seem like pretty normal people who have to put up with this kid that’s drawing pictures of human corpses and fantasizing about all of them killing each other. In fact, when the lantern breaks and Ethan hides from it, the entire family works together to try to save him.

Like, okay, so the dad’s a failure of an engineer, he’s got a domineering mom, and he’s got an uncle and a brother who don’t really understand him and bully him. They’re not the greatest people in the world. And here he is fantasizing about how they’re possessed by something that makes them murder each other in brutal ways. Yeesh.

To me, Ethan Carter felt like one of my own siblings, one who’s stuck in his own fantasies and tries to blow everyone else’s flaws out of proportion whenever he gets called out. I’ve totally lived through the whole “the whole family went out looking for you because you didn’t come to supper like you should” thing.

I’m kinda reminded of Gone Home and how it seemed to want me to feel happy for the kid who ran away from home. It was a disturbing power fantasy

Ethan’s stories kinda come across as genuinely disturbing, and the only real evidence we have of his family is that they’re loving enough to all head out into the woods to find him when he doesn’t show up for supper.

His brother’s “faggot” remarks never felt natural. They never felt like things someone might actually say, but interjections made to help the audience go “see, Ethan’s actions were justified.” Trust me. I grew up around kids who used ‘faggot’ as a derogatory remark. They did it differently. This felt more like “see, his family’s totally bad, mmk?”

I get that the story was trying to say something about stories, but I don’t think it succeeded. My response to the end was literally “okay, so what?" Stories have endings? Okay. So what? If anything, it hampers the story. The monologue about stories kinda comes out of nowhere, obfuscating the story we’ve seen throughout the rest of the game. It is an active detriment to the story.

Each death is themed around the five stages of grief (look at the achievements). This story is Ethan’s last, the one he tells as he dies. Like... this is a game that presents the theme of grief. It’s about grief. So why does it suddenly try to wax poetic on the nature of storytelling (and not really saying anything about it)?

It’s self-sabotage.

8. So... you might be sitting here wondering why I said that you should play the game.

The majority of the text is about what I believe to be the game’s failures. That could give the impression that the game doesn’t work. But it does. Really. There are plenty of puzzles that are absolutely great. Piecing together the death in the caves hit me hard. The Astronaut puzzle is straight-up weird and conjures up this incredible, oneiric sensation that no other medium could replicate.

When I played The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I felt so much exploring its world, through the art direction, through the voice actors’ performances, and through the narrative I thought it was telling. That genuinely affected and impacted me.

The bulk of my playtime, a good three and a half hours of the four hours I played, was mesmerized by this beautiful world and the puzzles I solved within it. That stuff was legitimately great, and I’m glad to have played it.

For me, it felt like the game sputtered near the end. Requiring me to go back through all the puzzles I’d missed (check out Betrayer as an example of a game that does this right), suddenly diverting from a story about grief to talk about stories, and sometimes relying on a logic of “just find a thing” hampered the game, but that might have accounted for 30 minutes of the 240 minutes I spent. Mostly, it’s a great game. And you should play it.

9. It felt weird to me that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is set in the United States, but none of its buildings look American. This is not a meaningful statement or observation in any way, because it’s an indie game made by, like, eight people in Poland, and they used some incredible photogrammetry tech to make their game look gorgeous. It was just something I noticed. “Huh. This doesn’t feel American.” I figured since nobody else mentioned it in a review, I would. I think, if anything, it helped contribute to the dreamlike qualities of the game, and I consider it a positive attribute.

Yes. Again. Go get Ethan Carter. Play it. Max out that FOV slider. Have a blast.

[thegonzologist]

A vocabulary

The other day, I was writing an article. One of my editors took issue with a specific word, and that got me thinking about our critical vocabulary of video games. You’ve probably met those sorts of people who say that “gameplay” isn’t a real word, or “immersion” doesn’t mean anything. Heck, maybe you are that person.

So, I started writing this piece, but then real-life pressures occurred, and I had to put it aside.

Until today.

Today, John Walker at Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote an article talking about various game words, including gameplay, of which he said “Oh, the behemoth of evil wording. It means absolutely nothing.” I used to be a big fan of Walker’s, but this struck me as particularly wrong-headed.

Look, you can use any words you like to write about games in the most effective ways you deem possible. Are there words that have been overused to the point of meaninglessness? Yes. But rather than an imperious “banned words” approach, maybe a “here are superior alternatives to overused words?”

Rather than telling people what not to do, we should talk about problems and how to fix them.

Me? I’m just going to offer a brief list of words and meanings. Feel free to quibble with them as you see fit. Or not, whatever works for you. I’m not picky.

GAMEPLAY

Catch-all term for a game’s interactive elements. Functions similar to “cinematography” for film--great way to give overall impressions of how a game handles its primary element. Yes, it’s broad, but broad words are just as vital as specific ones. For instance, I can say “Thief’s aurally-driven stealth gameplay sets it apart from other stealth games.” I’ve just used the word to discuss the mechanical theme of the experience.

“Gameplay” can be seen as a game’s mechanical philosophy, its overarching approach. Thief is a stealth game where the player must actively listen and avoid making noise. It’s an aural experience. Contrast that with Metal Gear Solid, which is all about simplistic line-of-sight stealth, or Hitman, which is all about costumes and social interaction as a means of stealth.

Each game has a different mechanical philosophy in regards to the same core idea. They each have different forms of stealth gameplay.

Yeah, there are cases when you’d want a more specific word, but it’s helpful to describe an overall approach to something. That’s still a valid way of talking about things.

EXPERIENCE

Word best used to describe the complete package of any given moment in a video game. Essentially a word used to describe the conjunction of a game’s aesthetic presentation with its mechanical philosophy.

This won’t seem like a big deal to you if you don’t care about how video games work, but it’s a vital concept to understand if you want to make games. Everything a designer includes in a given moment contributes to the overarching experience.

Experience is, simply put, a game’s gestalt (two objects put together create something beyond mere addition, like how the letter D and a colon create a smiley face :D) form.

Some games fail because they fail to pay attention to the experience. I’ve played games that have the wrong music for the moment they’re describing, for instance. I’ve seen games that set up amazing, empowering flow, then break it with tonally inconsistent scripted events.

Experience is everything.

GUNPLAY

Specific sub-variant of “Gameplay.” Catch-all for a game’s mechanical philosophy as it relates to shooting. I came up with it, and it’s starting to catch on, which is just the best thing. It’s possible that someone else came up with it at some other point, and everyone’s just referring to their use of the term, but I’d never seen it until I came up with it.

Same basic deal as “Gameplay.” Doom’s gunplay is different than Call of Duty’s gunplay is different than Crysis’ gunplay is different than Halo’s.

IMMERSION

Most people use "immersion” as a synonym for “a state of being engaged,” and while this is technically correct, from a pure dictionary perspective, it’s not how the term has historically been used in games.

The English language has a lot of words that seem identical. “Immersion,” for instance, is practically identical to “engagement.” Both have to do with the idea of being emotionally/mentally deep into something. Of course, they have other meanings as well. Engagement, for instance, can refer to a specific event in time. Likewise, “immersion” refers to the state of being submerged in something.

These alternate meanings color the way we use the words. Sure, they seem identical, but “immersion” is about placing someone within something else--like a living, breathing world.

When you are emotionally absorbed in a game, you’re engaged with it.

When the game works to create a world that you can be absorbed in, it’s immersive.

Uncharted is engaging--it’s exciting and fun--but it is not immersive. STALKER is immersive, because it has living, breathing AI, a dynamic world to explore, and stuff like that. STALKER is about putting you inside a virtual reality. Uncharted is about taking you through an interactive movie. 

In other words, “immersion” is a design approach wherein a game works its hardest to create a world you can become a part of.

“Immersion” is about simulation.

CONTENT

Another catch-all term, content refers to, like... “the stuff you can do in a game.” Usually it’s “stuff you can do.” Like, nobody refers to “that building over there” as content, but they will refer to “that optional mission” as content. It’s a useful word. Dull, sure, but useful.

I’m not sure how to better convey the amount of “stuff to do” in a game. If you’ve got a better way, feel free to let me know.

REPLAYABILITY

This is a weird word because it can be used both subjectively and objectively.

(yes, you can use the word “objective” in games!)

Subjectively, replayability simply refers to whether or not a game is worth experiencing more than once. It’s the same thing as saying that a film is “endlessly rewatchable.” Rewatchability is a concept in film. It’s a concept in games too. Maybe it’s not the highest concept, but it doesn’t have to be. 

A lot of people, especially the ones who mistakenly believe that there’s no such thing as objectivity, seem to think it ends there. The phrase is useless because it is seen as purely subjective, therefore, it cannot mean anything to anyone but the person using it.

Which... uh...

Okay, so, I really like Wolfenstein: The New Order. Part of the reason I like it is that it has two timelines, and you can only play through one in a single playthrough. The New Order has “replayability” because it offers new things to do the second time around.

NewGame+ (which is basically the same thing--offering more stuff to do the second time around) is replayability.

See? Objective use to it. Ta-da!

OBJECTIVITY

Screw it, let’s do this.

People who argue against objectivity will basically tell you that they’re arguing against the idea of a Platonic Ideal--that is, the idea that there is some 100% perfect form of a thing out there somewhere, some method of discussing an experience wholly divorced from our own internal perspectives. These people essentially argue that the only thing that matters is our own personal interpretation of the world around us.

This is silly.

First: yes, awareness is impacted by bias, and you cannot escape valuation through bias.

Second: you can be aware of things in spite of your bias.

Subjectivity is basically beliefs as relating to the personal preference. “I liked this movie,” for instance, is a subjective statement.

Objectivity is a concept that exists independent of the personal preference. “This movie is good,” for instance.

Some people use good/bad and like/dislike as synonymous, but good/bad tend to refer to cultural qualities.

Consider this: lots of people like Justin Bieber, but his music is generally considered to be pretty poor by anyone who knows anything about music. Lots of people like Twilight, but its narrative and themes are considered to be pretty poor by anyone who knows anything about storytelling.

The subjective is personal.

The objective is cultural.

Ever read a really terrible fanfic? You know it’s bad. I know it’s bad. But the author can think they’ve created a masterpiece.

Who’s to say it’s bad?

Culture. 

Throughout millennia of human history, human culture has essentially created a value system that says “this is good, this is bad.” If you know anything about storytelling, you know why Twilight’s romances don’t work. You know that as a cultural artifact, Twilight won’t really last. It may be popular right now.

I enjoy bad 60s sitcoms. I like them, but they are bad. They are by no means hallmarks of storytelling.

To understand this is very liberating, because then you get to stop worrying about whether or not something is culturally acceptable to enjoy. You can just like what you like, because it’s subjective, and be aware that culture may disagree.

Objectivity is fuzzy. It’s essentially cultural valuation. It exists independent of any one person (subjective) and operates through consensus (objective).

Bam.

MECHANICAL DRAMA

Okay, so, I made this one up.

The short version goes like this: drama is what you get when a character wants something, but something else stands in their way.

Jurassic Park: Ian Malcolm does not want to get eaten by a dinosaur, yet a dinosaur is chasing him with the intent to eat him.

Casablanca: Rick is desperately in love with Ilsa, but knows the right thing is to let her go.

X wants Y, but Z is in the way.

Drama.

So, in games, mechanical drama is the idea that Player wants Goal but Obstacles mean that player has to do Gameplay to succeed.

Thief: Player needs to get from the start of the map to the end, but guards are in the way, and the player can’t fight them one-on-one, so the player must sneak past them.

Tropico 5: El Presidente needs to build his city, but the eldritch gods underneath the ocean are sending tidal waves, so he must build a golden statue to distract them.

(that is an actual mission in Tropico 4--possibly one of the DLCs)

I think it’s worth talking about a game’s mechanical drama, about considering whether or not a game does it. Consider the opening moments of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. You walk forward a few feet. A cutscene happens. Walk forward some more. Another cutscene.

This is not involving or engaging gameplay. There’s no mechanical drama. All you did was walk.

Even Gone Home exhibits mechanical drama: You go into a house, but your family is missing, so you explore it to find out where they went. It doesn’t always have to be The Most Dramatic Thing Ever. It just has to exist.

GAME FEEL

Ever wanted to describe the way the Master Chief floats around Halo rings with his weird jump, or how Gears of War characters seem sluggish, yet are admirably responsive? Ever wanted to explain why the off-road racing in Forza Horizon 2 seems completely different from the speedy weirdness

Well, that’s game feel. Could there be a better term for it?

LUDONARRATIVE DISSONANCE

Oh, yeah, it totally sounds pretentious. It probably is. It’s also a great way to describe a fairly common problem in video games.

Problem is, some people seem to take pride in not knowing what it means. They try to hush it when it’s brought up, or roll their eyes. I remember one famous games guy displaying his incredible ignorance by saying “ludonarrative dissonance just means a game has story and gameplay.”

Nah, brah.

Ludonarrative dissonance is the term we use to describe when the story-as-presented and the story-as-played contradict each other.

Like, imagine a game where you are “a kind person who saves whales” in the cutscene, but the story you experience, you have a machine gun and you shoot whales.

That’s ludonarrative dissonance. A game saying one thing and doing another.

It’s a pretty big problem in games, to be honest. As Clint Hocking pointed out in the piece that set this whole idea off, Bioshock presents mechanics that suggest you seek power to succeed, but the story is all “help another person to succeed.” The ideas you play are not the same ideas you are told.

Which brings us to the end.

It concerns me that people suggest that certain words shouldn’t be used. I’ve seen people recommend changing one effective word to a much less effective word--even words that mean something completely differently--without understanding the point.

To talk about games properly, we have to have a good vocabulary. If we go “oh, you can’t use that, because lots of people use that,” we’re resorting to hipsterism.

We are trying to explore and understand and explain things.

We can’t tie ourselves down by ignoring words or using them improperly.

Woo, I’m tired, adios.

[thegonzologist]

so i had read your reveiw of Gone Home and i liked it quite a lot. id been exposed to the game a lot and it was nice to see someone put into words how i felt about it without being super toxic about its themes at the same time. that said i wonder if youve played a game that is often put in the same league of Gone Home. The Stanley Parable. much like Gone Home it is in the "walking simulator" genre but the way it crafts a narrative is super unique and worth looking at if you haven't

I’m about to write about a walking simulator fairly soon. Honestly? Most of the games I have queued up to write about right now are walking sims. Sunset’s another one.

I think I could have done a better job on Gone Home, not gonna lie--I broke my rule about not writing a game until I spent a few weeks digesting it. 

[thegonzologist]

Let’s Talk Violence In Games

If you’ve been following my writing career, you know I really write about shooters a lot. It is safe for you to assume that I really like violent video games. But lately, I’ve noticed some weird responses to the idea of violence in games, and I wanted to address that. So let’s talk about them for a bit, okay?

(truth be told, I’ve tried to pitch other games to dozens of websites, and most people never write back, which is why you’ve never seen me do an article on “the problem city builders face,” or “how to save the RTS,” or “I really like Game Dev Story, dang.”)

(in fact, the only game I’ve really looked at here at The Gonzologist has Gone Home. Up next: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Journey. The Moon Silver and/or The Music Machine. Also I need to write about King of the Wood. And I’ve got some neat things to say about Sunset.)

1. THE RULE

I like snarking about things on the internet. I’s fun to channel Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and make silly jokes, especially at a game that’s so poorly executed that one can’t help but feel a need to derive some entertainment value from their experience.

But at the same time, it’s a habit I’ve been trying to curb; let’s face it, if you don’t know me and you don’t know my sense of humor, it can occasionally look pretty bad. Imagine working long and hard on a project only to have someone make silly jokes about it. It can really bum you out.

Bumming other people out is one of the last things I would ever want to do, so I have one simple rule I do my best to follow.

“Always give a game the benefit of a doubt.”

Truth is, I’ve learned a lot from a lot of different people. Even when I disagree with them, or when they make something I might not personally enjoy, there’s usually something interesting to derive from it. If I shut myself off to an entire design philosophy just because it wasn’t my speed.

To me, there’s a world of difference between “ugh, Dear Esther is worthless because there’s no gameplay,” and “ok i have started journey when do i get my gun.” The latter joke is intended to reflect more on me and the cartoonish version of me I enjoy playing on Twitter, that of ‘Doc, the guy who only likes shooters,’ than on Journey, and I utilize bad grammar to help sell that joke.

To me, it’s funny, but it’s certainly not making fun of Journey.

Don’t get me wrong--there are games I don’t like, certainly, but it’s important to me that I at least give an idea a chance before discounting it wholly. Like, I’m not really into JRPGs all that much, but Earthbound is one of the best games I’ve ever played.

So. Ideas are worth looking at.

2. VIOLENCE IS BAD

If you are a reasonable human being who has lived long enough to be literate enough to understand my writing, you probably know that violence in real life is generally considered a Bad Thing. Furthermore, you are probably not a violent person. You would never think of bringing physical harm to another human being, because you experience things like empathy.

Violence is bad.

There is no escaping this.

3. GAMING AND THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY OF A VIOLENCE PROBLEM

If you pay attention to games at all, you’ve probably noticed that an awful lot of games are about violence, and non-violent games generally aren’t as popular.

(if you really pay attention, you’ll notice that non-violent games like city builders always score lower than violent third-person action-adventure games and get a lot less hype--this may have more to do with the fact that there’s a greater diversity of gaming experiences on the PC than other platforms, and the gaming press tends to favor consoles to the PC, despite the PC being the single biggest platform of all)

(quick example: XCOM 2 isn’t coming to consoles, but THE question you’ll see in every major interview about XCOM 2 is “will it ever come to consoles?” From the mainstream websites, you won’t ever see these questions getting asked, months from release, about, say, Red Dead Redemption or Dragon’s Dogma. You won’t even see them post-release.)

(video games press has a horrible problem with PC gaming--they just don’t hire enough PC games enthusiasts)

Back on track.

Violent games are very popular and very prominent. Non-violent games, not so much.

4. INDIE DEVELOPERS AND VIOLENCE

Conscious of the prevalence of violence in gaming, many developers have struck out on their own to make their own non-violent games. This is great! You know the famous “be the change you wish to see in the world” bumper sticker? It’s good advice, and these devs are out there chasing that and making some super great stuff in the process.

Diversifying games is awesome.

Some developers, however, take this too far. How far? Well, one developer recently tweeted articles talking about how they hoped gamers and gaming would die in agony.

Most developers aren’t so extreme, but there’s this undercurrent of conceit that shines through quite a bunch, and it’s something that I--as someone who thinks we should give any given game the benefit of a doubt--find pretty concerning.

It’s one thing to go “we have plenty of violent games, so let’s try to make other things too,” and another thing to look at violent games with disgust and go “ew, gross.” Especially if that’s followed up with “I hope you die in agony.” Again. Not cool. Never acceptable.

But why is this? Didn’t I just say that Violence Is Bad? Why am I contradicting myself.

5. VIOLENCE ISN’T BAD

I like violence a lot. I am not a violent person by any means, but there is something to be said for standing at an airshow and watching the airplanes fly by and the show coordinators detonating explosives. It’s incredible to feel the blast of heat from the explosion. There’s just something about the chaos and cacophony of it all that’s absolutely wonderful.

You know what else? I like monster truck rallies. I love watching buildings get demolished. And y’know? I really like going to movies full of explosions and chaos and stuff.

It fills a need.

I think most humans have some sort of naturally aggressive instinct that needs to be fed. I myself am not a violent person. I could never be violent to another human being. But if you give me a bunch of fireworks, or put me behind the seat of an airplane, you bet I’ma do some crazy stuff.

We seek out violent media to fill this need. And, hey, as violence in media has gone up, violence in real life has gone down. I know, I know, there’s that whole “correlation does not imply causation” quote, but that’s only half the quote. The other half is “but it’s damn good evidence.”

I think humans, devoid of technology that lets us be violent, would gravitate to violence. In other words, violent media is a great way to help us work out the kinks in our behavior.

6. ON THE ROLE OF MEDIA

This may sound backwards to you.

It definitely sounds backwards to some people, because they have a view of art that basically says “art should tell us how to be.” That is, they view art as a means of instruction. If you’re familiar with Jonathan McIntosh, for instance, you know that he’s very much advocating for art from a perspective that art should tell us how to behave.

Now, this isn’t inherently wrong. Art does function as instruction. Aesop’s Fables? Totally story-as-instruction.

Where I think McIntosh fails spectacularly is in this incredible narrow-mindedness he displays where he seems to think that instruction is the full extent of media. It’s why his critiques will always fall short to the point of misinforming their audiences: there’s more to media than instruction.

Media is also a form of expression. It’s a way of getting things inside of us and externalizing them, helping us deal. Like, the Epic of Gilgamesh? That’s not a great instruction set for anyone, but it is a powerful story about a creator coming to terms with their own impending mortality and realizing that true immortality is not given by gods, but by our lasting impact on the world around us.

Media is also a form of fulfillment. We want to be thrilled. We want to be frightened. Sometimes we want to feel sad or pumped up or melancholic or even experience the sublime. Sometimes we want to go places we could never otherwise go or experience things we could never otherwise experience. Media lets us do that, at least in some small way. Video games take that a step further with virtual reality.

I’m probably leaving out a lot of other things here, and I’m sorry about that.

But the idea is: media serves a lot of different purposes, so the portrayal of violence within media cannot simply be said to be bad on its own merits.

For instance, one of the best moments I think video gaming has ever produced is in the game Crysotasis, a weird little Ukranian game. In the game, you are able to relive a dead body’s last moments. As it turns out, this includes the slaughtered beef. You get to experience a cow’s final moments. It’s tough, weird, and thought-provoking.

But honestly? Sometimes, it’s just fun to shoot things.

7. VIOLENCE IS GOOD GAME DESIGN

Let’s talk about how violence actually functions in a game. Devoid of the whole moral thing I’ve just spent several hundred words on, let’s just talk about violence from a purely functional perspective.

People are like puppies.

If you’ve ever raised a puppy, you know that they’re generally very energetic and want to do things. It’s really healthy for a puppy to play tug of war or wrestle with its owner, for instance. Puppies need to be stimulated. Players are the exact same way--they come into a game expecting to do something, so as a designer, your job is to basically make the act of tug-of-war rewarding.

It’s one thing to tug a rope, and another thing to tug a rope when someone’s at the other end tugging back. Former boring, latter fun.

Basically, you, the game designer, are obligated to tugging on the rope, to making the encounter engaging in some way.

Violence is a really good way to do this.

It is not the only way to do this (I spent six hours this week mapping out cities and balancing economies for fun in Tropico 5), it’s just a tried and true method of establishing interesting player engagement.

In one of my favorite books on storytelling, Screenwriting 101 (it’s possible this is not in the book and I read it elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure this is where I got it from), the concept of drama is explained as basically being that thing you get when “character wants X, but Y is getting in their way.”

“I wanted a burger, but I only had two quarters, so...”

“She needed to stop the evil Dr. GoodGuy, but he had convinced people he was not a bad guy, so...”

That’s drama. 

Well, games have this too as a mechanical function. I’ve called it mechanical drama before, and I think that works here too.

Think about it like this: you, the player, walk into a room on your way to the end of the game. It is the only direction you can go. A man shoots at you with a gun. Immediately, you understand that you need to stop this man from shooting you. You have a gun. You shoot back. He dies. Congratulations, you are now safe.

The game established a need (get to X), presented a problem (Y is trying to stop you), and gave you a way to deal with it.

We even have this sort of mechanical drama in a game like Gone Home: your family is missing, you don’t know where they’ve gone, so you search the house looking for them. The action you’ve taken is searching the house. It might not be the sexiest action in the world, but it’s still an action of some kind.

Violence happens to be a bit more engaging than searching through a house. There’s not a lot of tug of war going on in Gone Home, so some players can find it a bit dull.

It’s enjoyable and challenging to happen upon your first Skaarj in Unreal and avoid his furious blows while dishing out damage. It’s fun because you have to think about where you are, where he is, where you’re going, where he’s going, where you’re aiming, and where he’s aiming, all at once. You’re keeping track of a lot of data, and the outcome is uncertain. That’s what makes it so tense and enjoyable.

Combat is engaging.

But there’s something else, too: when players act, we tend to want to have some sort of reaction, some indication we did something. It’s why you always have a really nice sound when you pick up a coin in Mario, for instance, or why a headshot is usually met with a satisfying enemy head explosion.

It’s not about “oh man, I blew a person’s head off,” it’s about this “I did an action, and then BOOM, something happened!”

Feedback is all about positively reinforcing player action by selling the impact of that action. You could make a shooter about abstract shapes and have them explode in pretty patterns and generate the same sensation within a player’s game.

So that’s violence.

Easy to understand goals, satisfying results.

7. NON-VIOLENT GAMES HAVE A BIG BOREDOM PROBLEM

I’ve played quite a few non-violent games, and I haven’t enjoyed most of them. I love me some city builders. Flight Sims are just the loveliest things (though I’d much rather have my health back and actually fly real airplanes).

Why?

BECAUSE AN AWFUL LOT OF NON-VIOLENT GAMES LACK ANY SORT OF MECHANICAL DRAMA

I see a lot of developers go “hey, look at all these non-violent movies that are great; why aren’t there great non-violent games,” and, well... it seems to me:

1) Violence is just really popular--see hollywood blockbusters; most of those non-violent films people are talking about aren’t nearly as big as Fast & Furious because of a whole host of factors, from age to culture to class. Of course, in Hollywood, you don’t have that many people whining about why My Dinner With Andre didn’t outdo Aliens at the box office.

2) We should stop ignoring the trading games/management sims/city builders/vehicle simulators/racing game/sports titles/puzzle games/etc that are all non-violent. But this gets back to a lot of these genres being way more popular on the PC, which the games press really sucks at covering.

3) MOST NON-VIOLENT GAMES I’VE PLAYED THAT SUCK?

THEY SUCK

BECAUSE

THEY LACK

MECHANICAL

DRAMA

In storytelling, we understand that drama is kinda a big deal. Like... the biggest deal. In games, we don’t really seem to get that. There are plenty of ways to craft that mechanical tension. Non-Violent games aren’t inherently good or inherently bad any more than violent games.

But violent games tend to appeal more because they come with that sense of drama attached. If you want to make a great non-violent game, you’ve got to think about how to make that sense of tension work.

8. SO BASICALLY JUST DON’T MAKE FUN OF THINGS YOU DON’T LIKE, OKAY?

[thegonzologist]

Hey, anonymous person

You sent me an ask. You said not to publish it. But I wanted to let you know it made me really happy about an idea I was unsure of, so I just wanted to say thanks. ;)

[thegonzologist]

The Big Multiplayer Shooter Conundrum

“We want to make a shooter that is competitive with modern shooters.”

It’s a line I’ve heard time and time again, and it always perplexes me. I don’t want to dis any dev, but, well... 

A common sentiment in the game industry goes like this: “Game X is popular. People clearly want Game X. We should make our game like Game X.”

Here is the reality: those games? The copycats? They die.

Infinite Crisis, Warner Bros’ attempt at Dota 2, is dead. Think of the countless clones of World of Warcraft that died. Consider the Halo killers that all failed to kill Halo. Consider that Activision only agreed to Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare on the condition that Infinity Ward develop Call of Duty 2, and Treyarch develop Call of Duty 3 and World at War.

WoW clones die and die and die again.

With shooters, the big one is Call of Duty. This isn’t an article about Call of Duty, and quite frankly, I don’t play it enough to really give you a good picture of the scene, so I’m not going to talk about why it works all that much.

Anywho.

A lot of devs go “we want to be competitive,” and, in the shooting business, that means “we want to make a game like Call of Duty, because their games are popular, and we want to make lots of money.”

Call of Duty is super easy to begin playing, makes players feel skilled even when they aren’t, and Modern Warfare, the game that set it all off, came out at the perfect time in the last generation, at the point where online console play was ready to become The Big Thing. Call of Duty has brand recognition (which is near impossible to compete with unless you have a gigantihuge marketing budget).

Again, there’s no magic formula here.

They say publishers are risk-averse, but I find myself wondering: what’s riskier than copying someone else?

Think about it. You’ve got a game you like to play. Someone makes a game that is like the game you like. Why would you want to play it? Chances are, it’s not doing anything new, and, well, like all human beings, you tend to be biased towards things you spend time with. Why spend the time or money to learn a new game?

Most people won’t leave a game they like--a game they’ve invested time and money in--for another, similar game.

There is no such thing as a winning formula. You can’t just plug in mechanics from successful games and expect them to work because they’re popular elsewhere.

If you do, you end up with Halo 4. You end up with a WoW clone. You end up with Infinite Crisis.

If you copy someone else, your game fails.

Remember any Halo killers? Probably not. An awful lot of ‘em popped up after Halo, but not one actually managed to pull it off. The best Halo killer was the disappointingly bad Killzone franchise, which has released four genuinely bad games and one good Vita game. Don’t ask me how that works. Killzone only sells because it’s the only first-party exclusive FPS series that Sony still publishes.

The game that finally killed Halo’s top dog streak was Call of Duty 4, which wasn’t a Halo killer at all. It wasn’t anything like Halo. It was a completely new thing--the fourth entry in its series, no less--and it barely managed to dethrone Halo. 

Players don’t want what they already have.

Not only that, but most players will stick to what they know.

Sounds like a paradox, I know. Players will buy what they know--which is Call of Duty--but they won’t buy off-brand Call of Duty, which they don’t know, even if it’s identical to Call of Duty. 

It’s not a gaming-specific thing. Just go grocery shopping and see what brands you find yourself wanting to pick up--most people will go for the brands they’re familiar with. Some will go for what’s on sale, but most will go for what they already know. They will buy their favorite brand day-in, day-out, and anyone offering the exact same product is out of luck.

So... let’s say you invent a cool new MP mode. Do you think you’ll grab attention? Probably not. It sucks to have to say that, but honestly, look around. Nobody’s out there playing Syndicate or Far Cry 4 or whatever. People are comfortable. They know what they like.

It takes something incredible to change that. Something disruptive and enticing.

Call of Duty offered super-fast, never-ending combat. Borderlands 2 came in and offered Diablo-styled loot. Payday 2 offers complex, co-op missions. Destiny is... well, Destiny.

Again, I know this sounds contradictory.

Nobody wants off-brand versions of their favorite products, so you have to offer a different product, but your product has to be worthwhile.

Samsung realized they couldn’t directly compete with Apple, so they went with big screen phones, and voila, they found success with that. Gearbox didn’t try to clone Call of Duty, they went with a Diablo-esque FPS, and that’s how they found success.

When you clone Call of Duty, you end up with games like Homefront and Medal of Honor.

So. That’s the first half of this article. Take a break. Get something to eat. Come back when you’re ready, because it’s time to talk indie games.

Ever hear of a game called Ravaged? How about Insurgency? Verdun? Primal Carnage? Wickland? Nexuiz? Depth?

I’m betting most people haven’t. They’re all indie FPSes. They’re all trying to scrape out a piece of that same FPS pie. Some, like Insurgency, do their own thing. Ravaged reminded me of Battlefield when I played it.

The big problem with multiplayer shooters is this: you need other people to play with.

If you’re an indie with no budget, then the question becomes “how do I keep a sustainable multiplayer population?” Truth be told, I’m not sure that’s actually possible. Multiplayer games are comparatively easy to make compared to singleplayer games--just look at how quickly SP mods die on moddb, while MP mods keep trucking--but it’s a lot harder to keep them alive. Anyone can play an SP game whenever they’d like. An MP game requires more people--usually a lot more. 

How do you manage to make an FPS that people want to play, much less one that people want to play enough to sustain?

That is the big question. Looking at the most successful shooters on Steam, two potential options come to mind. The first is to start using loot drops--TF2, CS:GO, PD2, and Borderlands 2 all rely on this.

The second is to push co-op play: PD2, Borderlands 2, and TF2 (sorta) all have this element.

Co-op needs a lot fewer people to sustain: you just need a couple friends. Loot provides an incentive, sometimes monetary (hi Valve loot drops), for players.

But there is no formula, no magic bullet. There is no right way to make a multiplayer game.

All I know for certain is this: nobody wants what they already have. 

[thegonzologist]

What (Might) Come Next

I am a big film fan. If I want to read about movies--about how they work--I am pretty well served by the internet. I can find great criticism. I love criticism. I love writing criticism. I love that process of revelation, of reading something and coming away from it with a deeper level of understanding. I love the understanding that comes with writing criticism too.

Understanding How Things Work is super cool.

And film folks have plenty of that.

Not so for games. I recently had an editor tell me “I’m not really interested in criticism; I hire reporters.” Mike Diver at VICE recently said “We’re almost less interested in the games themselves – what they do when you press A, how difficult a boss is to kill – and more interested in the hows and whys surrounding their places in our lives, and people who play them.”

And that’s fine. Cultural criticism and human interest stories are fine.

But... my immediate response to that quote went something like this: “uh, vice, you do know that what happens to us when we press A is something almost nobody talks about, right? And it’s pretty important.”

Games are interactive. As such, they require us to take action. In taking action, we are affected in some way. Exploring and understanding how games work--how they work on us--is a vital element of talking about games, and unfortunately, most publications aren’t interested in that kind of games writing. It is, after all, super high level stuff that requires dedication and focus. I’ve put like 50 hours into this four-part Fallout series, and I’m nowhere near done with it.

People want to publish “How Kickstarter Saved This Developer” and “Why games about cops and robbers are bad” more than they do the other stuff. Which... well, it’s understandable. I won’t say it’s fair (because fair would be an even balance of everything), but it’s understandable. A lot of reasons go into that. People want to publish that stuff. No problem there.

The problem is this weird “criticism isn’t that important” stuff.

I mean, look my articles almost do just as good traffic, if not better, than the human interest stuff. I certainly get a lot more comments than the average article, and most of them are pretty great. Go to any developer’s website, and you’ll see fans talking about mechanics all the time.

Because, well... fans are totally hungry for this stuff. People like reading about games and understanding how games affect them. One of the best comments cI always look forward to receiving is “I liked this game, but I didn’t know why until I read this piece. Thank you!” I love those comments because that’s the kind of feeling I want to have when I’m reading other peoples’ criticism. I love that.

Heck, some of the best YouTubers out there, like Noah Caldwell-Gervais and Ahoy are successful precisely because they talk about why games work.

There’s a hunger for this stuff. People want to read it.

But there aren’t that many outlets for it.

Thing is, I have plenty of acquaintances who talk about games, who want to talk about games, who have smart, smart things to say about games. 

I feel like they deserve an outlet.

I feel like we deserve a place to read and write about how games work. What they do. Why they do it.

A lot of these folks don’t have the audience they deserve. They’ve got their own personal blogs. If you’re anyone like me, you know how hard it is to remember to check a dozen blogs a week. I guess you could think of this as a sort of co-op blog. Nothing big, nothing major, just a bunch of us talking about games and how they work and sharing that in a single place that’s easy for people to access and share.

I’ve got other things I’d like to do, other means of criticism, some which are pretty goofy--along the lines of Old Man Murray--but... yeah. A place to talk about how games work and how they work on us, ideally done in an interesting way. Most of the criticism I have seen has the unfortunate problem of being academic--and by academic, I mean intellectual, and by intellectual, I mean inaccessible, masturbatory, and deliberately obtuse.

Good criticism is about making other people smarter, not trying to be so smart nobody else can understand it. To me, a great deal of existing criticism is trying to hard to sound smart that it forgot to have anything worth saying long ago, which is a problem.

So.

This project, then, would be about discussing what makes games tick, utilizing an approach that empowers the readers.

It helps writers and it helps the audience. Cool.

The way I envision it in my head is this:

Step 1: Actually have a working website

Step 2: Start getting articles written and published

Step 3: Start streaming and talking design on the weekends, then editing those videos down and publishing them on Youtube or something.

I’d eventually love to be able to talk to do interviews with actual devs, not about the personal human interest element so much as the “what do you do/what are your thoughts on design/why do you make the decisions you do/what do you hope to accomplish” sort of thing.

Long story short: I see an underserved area of games writing that doesn’t look like it’ll be served any time soon. I’d like to grow it into a cool collaborative project.

Obviously, this is my Patreon-supported blog. I don’t know if getting that set up means I’d make it into the Patreon-supported blog. Heck, I don’t even know if this project will ever happen. I’ve got so many other things going on.

But we’ll see, right? At the very least, I can try.

I’d rather not do it without asking ya’ll what you think, though. So, yeah. What do you think?

[thegonzologist]

I took down two articles, and I felt I owed you an explanation for that.

A few weeks ago, I lost my job. Short version is that my boss had me work with mold, I got sick, and she sent me an email saying “tasks we need completed aren’t being completed, so we’re going to have to hire other people.” She promised, when she hired me, that she wouldn’t let me go for mold issue, yet that’s exactly what she did to me.

Anywho, about the same time, Tale of Tales, a game developer, wrote some stuff that I personally felt was pretty uncool. Like, I don’t care who you are, telling people that they should go die is just not great. So I took ‘em to task.

I think it’s important to talk about behaviors in the industry. We talk about fans all the time. It’s super uncool, for instance, that the Call of Duty Community Manager has to go under armed guard at a hotel somewhere because of balance changes he’s not even responsible for, for instance. 

Likewise, I think it’s important to talk about how devs act. Whether it’s a developer threatening to kill Gabe Newell or Tale of Tales telling gamers to go die in agony, it’s uncool and it needs to be discussed.

But...

I dunno. As much as I feel it’s absolutely important we have a conversation about people in gaming and what is right to do and what is wrong to do, and as much as I look at those two pieces and think that what I said in them was worth saying, something in me feels like I said what I needed to say, it was out there long enough, and now I don’t need to have it published anymore.

If I feel the need to revisit them at a future date, I will. If anyone would like to have a conversation with me about the subject, that’s fine. But I think the real reason I wrote them was for my own benefit, my own need to lash out at someone. The reasoning might have been good, but the motive behind it wasn’t.

I hope you understand.

Anywho, in the coming weeks, I’ve got not one, not two, not three, but four pieces on Fallout coming.

I’m quietly puttering away on video content, but this documentary class is kinda kicking my butt. Obviously job searching has eaten up a ton of my time. This four-part Kotaku piece is something I’ve never done before. I sent in some pitches to PC Gamer, so I did a bit of prep work for that. I’m about to send some pitches to other folks.

I feel really awful about failing to get to a lot of the games I’ve been asked to cover. I plan to play and write about every game that you’ve asked me to write about by September. So that’s... what, Blood, Wing Commander 3 (iirc?), Sunset, The Moon Sliver, and Realms of the Haunting, if I remember right. 

(if I’m missing something, or if there’s a game you really think I should cover, let me know!)

In addition, I plan to write about Journey (I liked it, but not the way you’d expect), Forza Horizon 1 & 2, Arkham Knight, and The Witcher 3. I’d like to write about the concept of “national games.” I’ve got plans to explore “the great big shooter problem,” as well as “the great big city builder problem.” I’d also like to talk about the problem with Far Cry 2 that nobody has talked about.

I’m hoping to talk about shotguns.

But before I do any of that, I need to talk about my big upcoming plans.

[thegonzologist]

Now, I'm not complaining about long posts, (Just reading one of them someone I follow reblogged brought me here to start reading the rest of your things) but might I suggest using Readmores more often for long posts?

Yeah, I’ve been meaning to do that. I do. Also to start tagging my stuff and adding photos. I might go back through and tweak them to edit in August.

[thegonzologist]

Can Women Be Strong?

Betteridge’s law of headlines says that any headline with a question mark can be answered with “no.” Well, this headline can be answered with a firm “yes.” So why did I pick it?

I’ve been getting a lot of comments on my Steam review of Borderlands, the Pre-Sequel, a game I criticized because of its portrayal of women. Here’s the most relevant excerpt:

Most of the insane mission givers in the game are men. Scratch that, I think it's all of them. Whether it's a guy who blows himself up or a guy who wants to kill his wife or a guy who enslaves a female computer 'cause he can't get any, the men of The Pre-Sequel are generally crazy and bad. The only male playable character at launch is a man so obsessed with machines that he becomes one. So the characters the game launched with two white women and two robots. TPS' women fare much better: it's the female computer who rolls her eyes at the men in the game, heck, if I remember right, she's the character who makes the stereotypically huffy "men" comments in TPS. The villain, Zarpedon, is the most sympathetic in the series--she is doing something we try to stop, but she's doing it to save the universe. She also wants to pay for her daughter's health. We're the bad guys. The woman trying to rid herself of her psychotic husband apparently runs a gang and, like Zarpedon, runs this gang with matriarchal efficiency.

Playing through the game, the only “bad guys,” the only truly irredeemable people, are men. Males are, to put it bluntly, supremely handicapped throughout the Pre-Sequel. Women are much better off. Even when they do something wrong, there’s a tragic backstory or something that explains why. It’s always sympathetic. Always.

And this bugs me, but not for the reasons you might be thinking.

It bugs me because it says “women can’t be strong.” The only way the Pre-Sequel can give us strong women is to make all the men as insane and stupid as it possibly can. The Pre-Sequel’s straw men exist solely to prop up the women, because, apparently, the women of the game cannot stand on their own.

For them to be strong, others must be weak. That bugs me. That bugs me quite a bit.

Alien’s one of my favorite films in part because of Ellen Ripley. She works so well because she’s on equal terms with everyone else on the crew. Her strength exists because of the person she is, not because of the person they are. Ellen Ripley isn’t strong because of Dallas’ shortcomings or Ash’s whole being a cyborg thing, she’s strong because she chooses to be.

A heroine who is strong because everyone else isn’t? That’s not actually a strong heroine. In fact, the message being sent is: “women can’t be capable unless the men are handicapped.” It says we have to gimp men for women. It accepts that women are weak unless the men are cartoons.

And that? That ain’t right.

Can women be strong? The Pre-Sequel says they can’t. I believe they can.

Here’s a humorous comparison: ever watched a bad 80s action movie, where the only sane person is the protagonist, and everyone else has to be really stupid to make the hero look good? At best, they’re considered mindless fun. But most of us agree that yeah, it’s way too easy for the hero to be heroic, which means he’s not really heroic at all. It’s mindless pablum.

The best action movies, like Aliens (yes, moving through the series now), give us awesome characters like Vasquez, Apone, and Hicks. They put our characters in situations where they might not win--where we’re legitimately worried for their safety. Once again, Ellen Ripley proves to be a strong person, not because she just happens to be better than everyone, but because she chooses to face down the alien queen in a power loader and beat it up.

Her internal strength is what makes her such a great character.

An Aliens film where all the marines were as weak as Gorman just to show Ripley off wouldn’t have been a classic the way Aliens is. That, to me, is The Pre-Sequel. It gives women power the way a bad 80s film does.

I’d like to see more Ellen Ripleys.

[thegonzologist]

Thoughts on potential for innovation regarding haptic feedback? We have rumble, force feedback steering wheels/joysticks, the Falcon... but current haptics are limited and the advanced ones are bulky. Even imagining some unforeseen giant advancements in haptic technology will it add much to games? Are there areas remaining that could be improved by better haptic feedback, or any significant mechanics or genres that might open up?

I want to give you a cool, thoughtful answer on this, but I don’t have one. I will say I’m bummed out that there aren’t enough force feedback joysticks on the market--they’ve kinda died out. I think space sims will fuel a renaissance, but Microsoft basically canning Flight Simulator really hurt the sim community, in my opinion.

I think that haptic feedback could improve the quality of gaming experiences... but I think it would--and has--done so in a way similar to, say, 3D gaming. In other words, it’s cool, but I’m not sure it’s THE FUTURE or anything. But I don’t really know.

[thegonzologist]

Tags in general would be nice. Would probably help you get more exposure.

will do

[thegonzologist]

Hi there! I love your blog and the content you create, but plz - can you tag your texts as "long post"? Scrolling through it is killing me ;) Keep up the good work!

Would it help if I used screencaps to help break up the spacing of the piece? 

[thegonzologist]

A Kinda Totally Useless Judgement of DOOM

So, here’s the deal. I’m a freelance games critic who focuses on mechanics and does his best to offer in-depth mechanic of how games work, which is great... when I’ve actually played the game I’m talking about. So I’m always somewhat anxious to talk about a game I haven’t played.

At the same time, I am a consumer. The DOOM trailer at E3 was designed to get me, a consumer, to buy the game. Its entire purpose was like “hey. You. Ready thy wallet.” So it has an intended effect, and I have a response to that effect, and I want to share that response.

So I’m torn. As a critic, I can’t, with any honesty, criticize (not necessarily negatively!) a game I haven’t played. As a consumer, I totally should say something about how the advertising made me feel.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to talk about what I saw, with the understanding that this lengthy thing up top does a good job explaining that I have no real idea how the game works, just an impression based on an advertisement that told me “this is what the game feels like and this is what you want.”

So I’m not criticizing a game I haven’t played.

I’m criticizing the experience the advertisement tells me I will be playing.

Which is awesome, because I am excited. Man, DOOM looks incredible. So incredible that I’m capitalizing all the letters and imagining it being said with the thunder of a thousand storms. I really want this game, but there are some hangups too, and I want to talk about those.

The big feedback a lot of old-time DOOM fans had, based on what I saw, was A) the game was too slow, and B) some of them didn’t like the pinatas.

Here’s what I saw:

A) This game looks pretty in motion. Some of the raws make it look like a step down from Rage, but, hey, it’s the game’s first showing and it’s nowhere near release.

B) Holy crap, Mick Gordon’s soundtrack sounds amazing so far. He did Wolfenstein’s which was superb, but this one sounds all-out metal, and I love that. I would love it if Bethesda started dropping MP3s to hype up the game as part of their marketing strategy. It worked great for Dishonored.

C) Double jumping and mantling offer super cool movement options that really beef up the game’s arsenal of tactical opportunities.

D) OH MAN THOSE GUNS. SO BEEFY. SO MEATY. SO MUCH KERBOOM. IF THIS PLAYS OUT THE WAY IT LOOKS LIKE IT WILL, ID WILL REMAIN THE REIGNING CHAMPION OF GUN FEEL (they were briefly dethroned by Monolith’s FEAR in 2005).

E) Why did people think the game looked slow? It wasn’t the movement speed. That was pretty darn fast. Did look like there were separate sprint/notsprint buttons, and I’d rather sprint all the time.

Remember how some older games actually had “run all the time” as an option? I liked that. Fallout 3/NV/Skyrim have “toggle run” where run is the default (because running all the time is way more fun) and you have to press caps lock (lol binding) to walk? I think they have an additional super-sprint feature as well.

Anyways, yeah, running all the time would help the game seem faster, but that’s not the real reason the game seems to be slow to some people.

F) BULLET SPONGES.

Okay, so...

Here’s like... “how to make best shooter 101.”

1) move fast 2) look fast 3) have guns that feel powerful

make them sound good

animate them super nice

make them kill enemies fast

enemies should respond strongly to getting hit--don’t show me depleting health bars, show me enemies feeling actual impact

enemies should communicate their feelings (see: FEAR)

4) have lots of tactical choices 5) have lots of enemies to choose between

Basically, the best shooters have you killing lots of enemies quickly and having them respond with showers of blood and guts.

Some shooters extend the length of enemy lives by drastically increasing their HP. Some go even further than that by only indicating damage through diminishing health bars. This has the negative effect of interrupting the flow of the game, and, in video, makes it look really slow.

We see some of this in the Doom footage. The Mancubi especially seem to take a ton of damage before dying, and the number of monsters on screen at any given time isn’t that high.

I tweeted someone at id about this and heard back that difficulty balancing hadn’t happened yet, so I don’t want to be too harsh on id, but I did want to explain why you might hear that it’s “slow.” In the footage, the player moves along at a wonderfully brisk clip, then an enemy shows up, and the game slows to a crawl until the enemy is defeated or the player runs away.

Someone linked me to footage of the original Doom and said “this is what real Doom looks like.” What I saw was a much smoother experience because the monsters tended to die quicker. I think it felt as if the player had more health as well--it seemed to diminish quickly in the new game’s footage.

So, basically: the game seemed slower because of the way the pacing was broken up. Wasn’t actually slow, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the game feels a lot smoother closer to release, especially if the enemies respond more like they did in the original game.

G) That shotgun range looks really bad. You can see the player flub one of their first attacks in the footage, and it would seem that the shotgun’s range is at fault. I didn’t play, so I can’t be sure.

A lot of devs do shotguns like: short range, high damage up close. They say it’s risk-reward, but what it ends up being is a gun people don’t use that much because assault rifles are more optimal, and that sucks, because shotguns are some of my favorite guns to use, in real life and in video games. I tend to judge a shooter by its shotguns.

If you go back and play Doom, you’ll notice that shotgun range is super huge in comparison to modern shooters.

In Doom, the shotgun range was long, and this was counteracted by rate of fire. Up close, you’d kill guys in one hit, and the hit feedback--the blood and guts--was fantastic. At further ranges, the gun still did some decent damage, but it functioned more like... how do I put this...

Basically, the shotgun’s cone of damage up close only hit one guy, but it seemed like all the bullets at once, so he died.

Further away, the bullets spread out, and it was like shooting a pistol at multiple targets at once. Where the pistol was fast and only hit one enemy at a time, the shotgun was slow and hit multiple enemies. So you can shoot lots of guys slowly or one guy fast. Or you can get up close and shoot one guy fast.

In other words, the shotgun never felt useless, it just felt inviting close up combat, or an interesting alternative to the pistol at range.

H) Once again, this is all based on some video designed to make me want the game. I’m basically contrasting the experience I want as a player with the experience the video designed to make me want the experience provided.

Haha, weird sentence.

I) OH MAN THAT MODDING SUPPORT LOOKS INCREDIBLE. I USED TO MOD ALL THE TIME BACK IN THE DAY, AND RAGE’S MOD TOOLS WERE TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE. SO EXCITED FOR DOOM’S MODDING.

J) Not excited for Bethesda.net. Would rather just distribute this stuff in the Steam workshop, yo.

K) THOSE FINISHERS

L) DAT CHAINSAW

M) The Cyberdemon looked kinda cartoony compared to everyone else, like he belonged on a Blizzard box.

N) Nobody seemed quite as mobile as the enemies in Rage. Fingers crossed for creative enemy movement.

O) The multiplayer looked faster than the single-player, which made it look a bit more inviting, despite me preferring single-player.

P) THAT TRAILER EDITING. SO GOOD.

So, uh.

That’s it, really.

I’m pretty excited about what I saw, but--based entirely on what I saw--I’d like to see better shotgun range, more enemies, and lower overall enemy health.

I’d much rather drive down to Texas and spend some hands-on time with the game and just chat with the devs about it and better understand their wants and goals.

And, not gonna lie, I’d like to get up close and personal with the canceled Doom project, because that actually looked kinda interesting despite not seeming like Doom at all. Seems like a fun subject to write about. Yeah, yeah, I know there’s supposedly some drama there. Really curious about the concept, how it came about, and why id elected to go with this current game (which honestly does excite me more; I just like abandoned concepts).

[thegonzologist]

All The Rage Bits That Got Cut

So, I wrote a Rage piece. A bunch of it got cut. I saved it and put it here. It may read a bit funky, but, whatever. I thought it was cool.

Bethesda’s E3 conference revealed the long-awaited footage of id’s upcoming Doom. Watching it, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to Rage, a four year-old id game that got a lot flak. Last week, I dove back in. Minutes became hours in the blink of an eye. I had a blast. When I was finally done, I sat there, with just one question on my mind: why doesn’t Rage get the love it deserves?

So, first, a little context. id games are conscious of one simple truth: in a first person game, movement is king. In fact, I suspect one of the reasons that multiplayer shooters are often more popular than their singleplayer brethren is because players spend a lot more time moving in the former than the latter. It’s just way more fun to zip and zoom around a map than it is to stand still, poke your head out for half a second, get hit, and have to duck back into cover.

A game like Doom lets players take a few hits and encourages them to search for health packs, keeping players on the move at all times; modern shooters reduce player health significantly and regenerate player health, meaning that it’s a better idea to stand still behind cover and simply wait until your health has recovered. Exploration equals motion.

Additionally, Shooters like Quake or Doom featured enemies that fired more slow-moving projectiles, which players could dodge, further encouraging movement around the map, as opposed to modern games, which use instant-hit weapons that push players into cover.

id games were about other things too. They had multiplayer, especially deathmatch. They pushed graphics to the limit. They facilitated modding; some of the all-time great gaming experiences, from Brutal Doom to Team Fortress began as mods of id games.

Then Doom 3 showed up. For technical reasons, Doom 3 had to have much smaller maps, which naturally meant it was harder to strafe. Doom 3 maintained most of the series’ horror elements, powerful weaponry, and even some degree of enemy dodging, but the lack of room for effective strafing and the general pace of the game made it feel more like System Shock 2 than a game made by id.

Where ambushes had been a core component of id shooters, audiences now treated them with disdain, referring to them as monster closets. It makes sense: an ambush in the original Doom could be countered with player movement. An ambush in Doom 3 often led to unavoidable damage, especially for inexperienced players.

By 2011, the time of Rage’s release, according to some fans, a “real” id game hadn’t been seen in twelve years. Doom 3 was seven years old.  Fans were ready for id to come out swinging. Unfortunately, the industry had moved on from the days of Doom. Rage entered a world that expected the impossible: a game that could satisfy old and new standards alike. It was released in a world where shooters were supposed to tell stories and offer unprecedented player freedom. After its release, programming legend John Carmack pointed out that the industry expected a game more like Fallout or Borderlands than Rage.

Reviews were unkind, to say the least. Many complaints centered around the fact that multiplayer was a racing game, not deathmatching. Oh, the cars! Rage had been pushed like the next big id shooter, but the main game ended up spending vastly more time behind the wheel than on foot.

Rage wasn’t what was expected, but does that make it a bad game? It certainly had its flaws.

The first, and most obvious flaw, is Rage’s story. I say first because it’s the first thing any player encounters. Rather than introducing its villains, the Authority, Rage simply has characters mention them. In the five hours since I started playing Rage, the only traces of the Authority I’ve actually seen are two locked-up, out-of-the-way buildings.

Compare this with Half-Life 2: You wake up on a train. Weaponless, you witness the cruelty of the enemy Combine first hand. They talk like jerks and beat people, then make it personal by forcing you to clean up after their garbage. One particularly affecting moment draws you in as a helpless man is being mercilessly beaten, but one of the Combine soldiers closes a door, blocking your view. You can’t even watch. Half-Life 2 has plenty of storytelling problems, but its first level sets up the conflict between you and the Combine perfectly.

Rage seems distinctly conscious of Half-Life 2 throughout the experience. Its much-maligned ending, on a pure gameplay level, is better than Half-Life 2’s. However, Half-Life 2 has stakes. Real, personal stakes. Eli and Alyx Vance are in jeopardy! The cowardly Doctor Breen is escaping! I still haven’t forgotten that. With Rage? Honestly, I have no idea. I know I was sticking it to the Authority and the final cutscene had me manually opening all the vault things, but where was the personal connection? Who was I really doing this for?

That quote about one death being a tragedy and thousands being a statistic is good storytelling advice: when it’s personal, it matters. It affects us. When it’s “do this thing to stop the bad army from hurting all the people,” it loses its sense of meaning.

Pure gameplay is great, but because games are about taking action, most people require some motive to fuel the effort they expend. This is especially true as graphics become more lifelike. It’s one thing to shoot a few pixels on the screen in 1997, but another to shoot a realistic-looking human being in 2011. We need good reasons for taking action. Rage never really provided one beyond “people are attacking, so attack them back.”

The focus on cars didn’t help the game much either. For the first several hours, Rage spends the bulk of its time focusing on shooting, which is excellent. Story aside, it’s still a really good game at this point. The combat is delightful, and the missions take every chance they can to send you into combat. Then you get a car.

At first, it’s just a quick way to establish distance between outposts, but pretty soon, the drives start to take a lot longer. The combat gets old quickly. On-foot shooting in a first-person shooter takes into account the player’s environment, a host of unique weapons, and enemies with distinct, interesting behaviors. When driving, all you have to do is point yourself in the right direction and pull the trigger. Most of Rage’s driving spaces are wide and open to allow for a car’s turning radius.

Car combat can be fun, as evidenced by the Twisted Metal series, but at the same time, car combat games tend to have a limited lifespan. It gets old quickly because the combat options are lacking. Rage’s car combat was particularly shallow--you have two basic weapon types for the majority of the game, not counting the occasional consumable item like mines. This means that most encounters play out the same. It gets old fast.

Rage is a content-heavy game; my first playthrough took 20 hours. Rage has a wide variety of minigames, quest, car races, and the like, which is fantastic, but they’re all shallow. There’s only one level of Mutant Bash TV, a combat minigame, for instance. The game lets you repeat it as many times as you want, but it’s the same map each time. It’s indicative of the game on the whole: lots of minigames, little variation. You can play a shallow card game with two different people, for instance, or a minigame that consists of clicking one button to roll dice.

Many of the side missions are simply a repeat of missions you’ve already played, this time in reverse. It’s not to say they aren’t fun--because the combat is great--but asking “haven’t I been here before?” can get a bit old. It’s a game with lots of content outside of the shooting, but the content never seems fleshed out.

all the combat stuff went here

I can’t help thinking what a proper Rage sequel would be like. Fixing the story is easy--introduce a compelling reason to keep playing at the start, and provide plenty of great character moments to keep things going. John Goodman’s character and his small settlement is pretty interesting. Maybe we could get to know the characters.

Fleshing things out shouldn’t be too hard either: Mutant Bash TV could have additional maps, and possibly even permutations to help the older maps feel fresh. Characters like Loosum Hagar, the wingstick teacher, could offer the protagonist different wingstick challenges. More unique cards and card-players would help--The Witcher 3’s Gwent is one of the most compelling aspects of the game, for instance.

The biggest challenge, I think, would be in regards to cars. Rage, in some ways, bears a resemblance to the Zelda series, with an overworld for cars and dungeons for shooting. It’s a neat mix, but the boring car combat would have to feel compelling to make the overworld worth playing in.

But the shooting? The strategy? That was as close to perfect as any game has been. Going towards a healthpack-driven solution to encourage more strafing would help things a lot, but beyond that, it was fantastic.

Ultimately, it might not matter. id’s full attention is directed towards Doom, which is looking pretty good. Based on the all-too-brief E3 presentation, the combat appears similar to Rage, but faster and more brutal. The game slows down whenever the player starts shooting, enemies being somewhat sparse and soaking up bullets like a gentle spring shower, which may spell trouble, but I haven’t spent any time with the game, so I can’t be absolutely certain. It looks pretty great.

[thegonzologist]

Is there room for more innovation in gaming on the scale that we have seen in the past?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: I’m going to answer a question with a question!

(cue audience groans)

So, what is innovation? In games, this tends to be a mechanical function. In storytelling, this tends to be… well, a mechanical function, but storytelling mechanics and gameplay mechanics are different things. Let’s run with the former first.

Okay, so, mechanically, innovation is basically “here is a human action, and here’s how we represent this behavior.” Mechanics are tied to controls–in some cases, that’s tied to specific button prompts. Like, hey, I push forward on the stick, and my character walks forward. I press A and he jumps.

Sometimes there’s a degree of automation, like, I click on a dude, then click on a building, and he goes into the building and makes bread and boom, now my population has a baker.

At the absolute bedrock level, this is how games work.

Game innovation first stems from control types, but waggling controls and kinect don’t work so well because most people want to play games–especially ‘core games’–for extended periods of time. Physically strenuous gameplay mechanics

Other developers have tried touch screens. While cool, it’s kinda weird to have your hands obfuscating the very thing you’re trying to look at while you play. Works great for 2D games, especially when they emulate board games, but doesn’t make as much sense where you have to keep your fingers on the screen to move the camera, as in Dead Space Mobile (which, while not great, is something I’d gladly pay for on Steam).

Many game peripherals use standardized controls as well–Guitar Hero can be played on a traditional controller; the bespoke plastic controllers don’t TRULY change a whole lot. The form factor is different, but the buttons are the same. On a traditional controller, you have sixteen buttons.

With a mouse and keyboard, things are slightly different. You can go for more menu-driven approaches, because mice are quicker. Genres like the RTS work better there. Mouse speed also changes the way shooters work–makes them quicker, more vertical, more engaging. A shooter played with a controller is a pale imitation of the real genre. It’s like a racing game played with the arrow keys.

So, right there, you’ve got some constraints. Controller innovations have largely found that balance between easy to pick up and understand and complex enough to allow a wide variety of behaviors. Suffice it to say, I’m not sure we’re going to see many more control innovations until we get some significant technological changes going, and I think controls driven by physical activity like running or waggling are going to go the way of the dodo.

This brings us to cameras.

All video games are “video” in some way, which means that they all have “cameras” of some kind. Not actually cameras.

1) Text2) 2D3) 3D4) VR (which is 3D)

All mechanics are contextualized within those camera types. We figured out how to walk in Zork by typing in directions. In Mario, we used a joystick. With 3D games, we use a mouse and keyboard (or a joystick). It’s mostly the same in VR.

So now we have a way to interact and a camera to use. The combinations of controller and camera create a basic framework for all innovation to follow.

Now we’re on to mechanics.

So, we know how to move. A genre was invented for running and jumping. Another genre was invented for driving cars. We’ve got genres for martial arts, for shooting, for fishing, for playing sports, for solving puzzles, even for talking to people.

Mechanics, in other words, are representations of human behavior through controls and cameras.

This is why I said “no” earlier. Most of the “innovation” we had through the 80s and 90s were just game designers figuring out how to represent basic human interaction as technology changed. When we had 2D, we figured out how to move in 2D. When we developed 3D, then we thought about moving in 3D.

At one point, there was no car game. Then someone invented car games, and now we have that.

So a capital-letters HUGE portion of innovation in games was just developers figuring out ways to represent real human behaviors. It’s hard to create a brand-spankin’ new genre of gameplay mechanics when most of the basic human behaviors have already been covered, you know?

Like, I’m hard-pressed to think of any form of combat that hasn’t been represented in games. Or sports. Or vehicular travel. A lot of this stuff can be abstracted into gameplay mechanics and already has been.

So looking at innovation as a product of mechanical representation of human behavior, we’ve kinda… mapped out most basic human behaviors now.

It’s not really fun to be, say, a garbage man or change a baby’s diapers, so this stuff isn’t often represented in games. A lot of ideas have been made and just don’t stick because, well, they’re not that fun. The challenge of dodging monster attacks and firing rockets at them is inherently enjoyable. Going door to door to tell people about the Jehovah’s Witnesses isn’t.

Don’t get me wrong: there are some barriers to be surpassed. A big one is basic social interaction. We’ve got games like The Sims that try this, and plenty of RPGs or action games have conversation systems, but real social human interaction–especially things like say, being a con artist, are really hard to pull off. Body language is huge in social interaction, and we don’t have a good way to mechanically represent that stuff yet.

So… that doesn’t leave us with much. Most innovation revolves around representing objects and giving them some form of human behavior to pull off. And we’ve already kinda… done most of that, I think. I think we’re coming close to a wall where the large-scale innovations are slowing down.

It’s a lot like film: most of the basic camera moves and story genres have already been figured out. The “innovations” have been expended. Creativity now comes from the individual movies themselves rather than simply doing something that has never done before.

…Which brings us to storytelling innovation.

On one hand, there’s a lot of room to grow.

On the other hand, we’ve got tropes for just about everything.

Creativity often comes from the juxtaposition of tropes more than anything else these days, I think. A lot of storytelling is ultimately about reflecting reality so we human beings can process it. Like, we stell stories about underdogs overcoming huge struggles to help us deal with our own personal struggles. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl saved my life because it gave me the opportunity to beat the unbeatable.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories ever written, is about coming to grips with mortality. Other stories are about falling with love, dealing with disappointment, and so on and so forth. Storytelling is… usually about something real, even when it doesn’t seem like it would be.

The best stories can tell you about Cthulhu and use him as a way to deal with real human fears and problems.

So… it’s kinda hard to create something that’s totally 100% never been seen before, because we’ve got millennia of human history covering most human behaviors.

But, still, people create stuff. I’m sitting here with a bunch of notes for a story taking a protagonist from a movie like Tangled or Frozen and wondering what she’d be like if she was Hercules. Fundamentally, nothing new there. Bubbly girl, genderbent hero, etc. But… I dunno, bubbly super strong girl? Been done? Maybe. Who cares? My story won’t be like anybody else’s.

So…

I guess what I’m saying is: we’ve figured out most of the ‘big’ things we’re going to figure out. Most media does this fairly early on in its development. Novels haven’t changed all that much, nor have comics, or movies, and so on and so forth.

Innovation… isn’t really that big a deal. 3D movies weren’t a great idea, and smell-o-vision was awful. Kinect never made the splash Microsoft hoped it would. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have plenty of skeptics.

The bedrock–controls and cameras–don’t have a lot of places to go. It’s not like we have an unlimited number of dimensions for our cameras. We’ve got 2D and 3D, first person and third person. We’ve got most vehicular driving down, most forms of combat, most sports, most human behaviors in general.

We’ve already laid most of the groundwork.

The old saying goes that there’s nothing new under the sun. I’m not so sure about that, but… y’know, at some point, all the notes on the musical scale were figured out. There was a hard limit and there’s no real point to trying to invent new notes.

It’s how we use ‘em that matters.

Put another way: we’ve figured out the letters and sounds to make an efficient language. We’ve got most of the themes created for us already. We’ve got the words too. But does creating new words, letters, or themes really matter in the long run? Nah. I think we can mix and remix these things to create all sorts of cool stories.

I don’t think innovation is that big of a deal. I think that we’ve spent years being marketed to and taught that innovation is the be-all, end-all, like creating something new is inherently good, regardless of what it is. I don’t think that’s the case. Most ‘bad games’ I’ve played are bad precisely because they’re trying things that common sense says would be a terrible idea. They do innovation for innovation’s sake, regardless of whether it’s worth doing.

So yeah. I don’t think we’re going to ever have the same kind of scale of innovation we did, because that’s how all mediums go. Kinda like drawing: you block out all the big stuff, then you work on refining the smaller details.