So I’ve been playing a fair bit of Minecraft recently, it seems it has ‘clicked’ for me and whatever makes it work for others is working for me too. However, after spending a few days building my little settlement, an underwater tunnel, and a big lighthouse, I spawned a ton of TNT and blew it all to kingdom come.
All my screenshots have disappeared. I don't know where to or why. Have a Pony instead.
And it got me to thinking. I love management and builder games. I’ve put more hours into Sim City than you can imagine. When I was a kid I played so much Theme Park that I saw sprites from the game every time I closed my eyes. When I play an RTS, I am the turtler par excellence, I consolidate, husband, prepare carefully, build an impressive defense, and only then do I launch attacks (Which isn’t really the best way to fight a war but what are you going to do).
Yet at the same time I am delighted by destroying it all. I giggled gleefully as I watched my Minecraft stuff get destroyed; I click the natural disasters like a monomaniacal Bond villain in SimCity; I have been known to use superweapons on my OWN BASES if I’m not impressed by the size of the enemy’s and don’t feel nuking them would cause enough destruction. I don’t really understand where this comes from, but I have a suspicion it’s a major reason I love strategy games so much, as they tend to encompass both building and destroying. I am deeply satisfied by a construction job well done, a base laid out just so, a city which looks both believable and functional. And I’m equally satisfied by watching it all get blown to pieces. Even better, watching it get put back together afterwards! I love how countries can collapse and rebuild over decades in games like Europa Universalis III.
It does lead me to believe that the best game I could ever play would let you build a city like SimCity, then go down to street level like GTA and level the place with Red Faction: Guerrilla’s GeoMod 2.0 whilst calling in superweapons from the C&C series.
There is a lot of talk in gaming, and has been for many years now, about realism. Realism is a holy grail, or at least a magical totem, something which developers are expected to strive for and gamers expected to appreciate.
But this reflexive attitude needs examination, because we actually don’t want realism at all. Or to be more precise, realism is only one path the getting what we really want, which is immersion. Realism has a couple of benefits compared to unrealism (Or perhaps more properly, non-realism), and I will come to those in a moment, but in my experience ‘realism’ is not in and of itself a recipe for a good game, and it may indeed be harmful to pursue it too far.
Let’s start with the benefits of realism though:
A) We have an unarguable, universal blueprint, in the form of… well, of reality. Realism, if pursued, is easier in at least the conceptual sense because we only have to look at the real world to see how things work. As an author I can confidently say that using reality as the basis for a novel is a lot easier than keeping track of all the unique rules you have invented for your universe! And moreover, because it is universal, everyone can see that something is realistic and doesn’t need to learn any new rules. (I know that Reality is Unrealistic but that’s not the point right now!)
B) Closely linked with the above, realism (If we assume it’s executed well) is very consistent and coherent. Cause and effect, relationships between objects and actions, all that stuff – reality is ultimately immersive.
That is what we’re really after – immersion.
This is the most immersive game ever. Fact.
But we don’t need realism for immersion, not by any stretch of the imagination. That’s why we have the term ‘suspension of disbelief’. We need coherence and consistency to be immersed – we need it to be realistic with reference to itself, not to our reality. To a large extent we are also talking about atmosphere, which is something occasionally ineffable. It’s a combination of mechanics, art (as opposed to graphics), sounds, music or its absence, and so forth. It does not require any particular degree of technical fidelity; Pike is plenty immersed in X-Com despite it being 20 years old and having pixels you can individually count. Immersion is not limited to games based in history, or to first-person shooters or any other given genre. Some of my most immersive games are sci-fi, like Deus Ex and X-Com, and tactical or strategy games, like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
Now, there are times when realism is desired. If you’re making a game about the Roman Empire, you should probably do some research, and I will simply refer you back to my post about why mods are great rather than go on a long rant about Rome: Total War, fantastic as it is. The more knowledgeable someone is about a topic the harder it is to suspend their disbelief – so the concessions made to playability over realism and accuracy can end up harming a game. Realistic games have their place – ArmA II is a great example of a game which takes a fairly realistic approach; in that video he scrambles around in the dark for five minutes before getting shot and killed by an enemy he hasn’t even seen. Fun? Absolutely! But I sure as hell wouldn’t want TimeSplitters to play like that! Plenty of immersive games aren’t realistic, but remain hugely engaging to the player.
Then again, that's a strikingly realistic rendition of excellent fashion.
And then again, immersion isn’t always what people want. Earth Defense Force 2017 is a shockingly lacking game in almost every sense – except for raw fun, which it is almost unmatched in. It is the quintessential B-game; bad graphics, voice acting that would make Barry Burton blush, questionable physics, and absolutely rollicking great fun from start to finish. Though I propound the capacity for games to be art, and encourage things in such a direction, not every game needs to be art. Not every movie needs to be Citizen Kane. Sometimes, Transformers is just more fun.
So in short, we have put the idea of realism up on a pedestal, when what we really want is immersion, which is a factor of coherence and consistency. Realism has a couple of benefits in that sense but any break from it will be easily noticed by the knowledgeable, making their disbelief even harder to suspend!
So, to turn this over to you, what games have you found most immersive and why? To what extent do you care about realism, if at all?
Remember when Grand Theft Auto IV came out? Remember the massive critical acclaim, followed by increasing backlash on the part of players who deemed it too negative, too dour, too boring? Well I’ve been playing it again and I’ve rethought some of that, which I had largely subscribed to.
Let me be clear, I think GTA4 is a masterpiece either way. It’s vast, brilliant, important, and though the humor is a bit less stark, still has plenty of laughs. Now, I appreciate that those who loved San Andreas (i.e. those who played San Andreas) would possibly miss the craziness which that game became, especially in the endgame. Understandably so: Stealing jetpacks and airplanes was hilarious, and the antics of CJ (Especially when he was terrifically obese and dressed as a truck driver) were just insanely enjoyable. I still think San Andreas is the better game, and I think given the iterative return to craziness in The Lost and Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony, that Rockstar listened to the reaction from the public.
I'll have a number nine, a number nine large, a number six with extra sauce, a number seven, two number forty-fives, one wit' cheese, and a large soda.
But in replaying GTA4 I’ve been playing along with what it asks. I’ve been using the subway to get around, taking cab rides, going on mandates with friends, all that jazz. And it works. It really does. When I got into the mindset it really started to all click into place in a way which it hadn’t before, however much I had enjoyed it. Last night I was doing the mission The Snow Storm, where an attempt to retrieve a ridiculous amount of coke goes very south. I had an epic, massive chase across Algonquin (The game’s stand-in for Manhattan) which ended with me disappearing into the subway to avoid the cops. And when I rode that train across to Bohan (The Bronx), with the sun coming up and the city bathed in dawn light, with barely any health left, the bag of coke slung over my shoulder… I really felt the game in a way I hadn’t done before.
So to give this post a point beyond my own reflections, have there been any games which you have really had to adopt a particular mindset to fully enjoy? Anything where you’ve gone back with a new approach that really meets what the developers had in mind, and found it better? Or am I all alone here?
It’s too hot today for my brain to really work well, so instead of the ideas I had for today’s entry, I’m just going to write about something I love in vidya.
Mods.
I don’t mean any particular mods – though there are morethana fewworthtalkingabout – but just the whole idea of mods in general. Now, there are occasions when mods can be vital. A game which ran out of funding for example, and which gets tidied up and refined by the modding community. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines is the first example that springs to mind. They can take the rough edges off any game, wherever a player feels balance is off or something doesn’t work quite right. Now, this isn’t to say that developers have an excuse to be lazy, of course! But sometimes reality ensues and things don’t quite work out as one would hope – and mods can help reduce the impact of that.
If only someone could mod out the sewers :(
More than this though, they are a source of content. I like SimCity4, but without sites like SimTropolis I’d have stopped playing it long ago. As it stands people are still putting out content every day for the game, even though it’s seven or eight years old now. And you can see real talent among the modders: the PEG team, the HKBAT team, the NAM team, and so on. They’ve done some truly impressive, amazing things given the constraints of the game, and they deserve much credit for it. In fact, modding is one of the better ways into the games industry these days, it seems. Make a solid mod and you could end up getting noticed by designers. And it is, ultimately, a great way for the communities around videogames to emerge and find each other. I know that there are names of people who worked on stuff as long ago as Morrowind who I always keep an eye out for, because their new mod for New Vegas, for instance, is likely to be great. That’s more loyalty than I display to most of the people who makes the games themselves!
What about you guys? Thoughts on mods? Any in particular that stand out in your mind as worth mentioning, and as examples of what can be achieved?
So I’ve decided that every now and then we should tell you about games worth playing that you may have missed the first time around (Much like Pike’s classic Videogame posts over at Clockwork Hare). This is the first one of these.
The Warriors
Come out to plaaaayy-eeayyy
This right here. It came out of nowhere, it was based on a cult movie from 25 years previously, and it was on top of that a brawler game, in the tradition of Streets of Rage and Final Fight. Not exactly the hottest genre in the middle of the Noughties.
And it. Is. AWESOME! It’s brutally violent, hilarious, chaotic, and absolutely ridiculously fun to play. It’s great by yourself but even better with a friend, so if you can get a friend and a copy of this game, I urge you to sit down and bro-op through it, because it truly is an awesome time. It’s a little hard to pin down what it is that makes it so great. I sympathize with Troy Goodfellow’s position that simply saying something is ‘fun’ is a copout, and yet – it is. It’s ‘fun’ in a manner which I have a lot of trouble defining. It’s not a complicated game, nor a deep one, but it is deeply amusing and engrossing.
Just a short post because I can’t brain good after so little sleep. Here’s an idea I’ve been bouncing around for awhile and I thought I’d throw it out there to see what you all think of it!
The premise is a co-op game, most probably in a horror setting. It wouldn’t work in couch co-op, which goes against everything I stand for, but sacrifices must sometimes be made. The basic idea is that the players don’t always necessarily see/hear/etc. the same stuff. The game should be fairly spooky and slow-paced, interspersed with dangerous, violent action. But, imagine, for instance, that you’re slowly walking down a hallway when suddenly your buddy goes completely nuts emptying his clip at NOTHING AT ALL. Or you keep hearing enemy noises around the corner, down the hall, in the next room – and your bro hears nothing at all. Or you’re forced to split up for a short while and afterwards you’re invisible to each other, or you appear as monsters to each other. It could be hard to do this well, especially if it’s unsubtle or plays on such ideas too much and it becomes routine. But occasionally, here and there, a chance for something weird and spooky to happen would be neat.
Fair warning: This post is going to deal with some unpleasant issues, such as the Holocaust, concentration camps, and so forth.
I’ve been playing plenty of Hearts of Iron 2 over the years, and as my last post said, I’ve been spending time with Darkest Hour over the weekend. It’s a lot of fun! And yet I am constantly reminded of what I regard as a significant shortfall in the game – the absence of atrocities. From Paradox’s own forum: Short version is No Anything Nasty, No Talking about why there’s Nothing Nasty.
Now, if you are hesitant, I can understand where you are coming from. Videogames are not exactly renowned as an especially thoughtful medium, certainly not one which is ready to tackle weighty issues like the most horrific crimes in human history. As an aside, I would question how they ever can become that if we don’t start taking some faltering steps in that direction. Nonetheless if there is hesitation or concern I am, as I say, understanding of this sentiment. We are the medium of grisly chainsaw deaths, where a gunshot to the gonads is rewarded with an amusing animation and as often as not some sort of bonus, a medium where very few games even conceive of avoiding violence, let alone using non-violence as a primary arbiter of solving problems.
And you thought it'd be a screenshot of Madworld or Gears of War!
So yes, I can see where the concern would come from. I have concerns myself. I’m not confident that too many developers could do something as unpleasant as World War 2, the real unpleasantness of it I mean, in a way that is anything other than an appeal to prurient sadism or rubbernecking. And, let’s be honest here, in other games how many of us really have acted like genocidal maniacs in games where it’s possible? I’ve blown up stars because it’s easier to do that than to mount a regular invasion of a solar system. When abstracted -or when not based in recent historical events – players are given leeway to commit acts so overwhelmingly evil that the inhabitants of the 40K Universe would balk. Allowing the player to engage in such actions will mean players engage in such actions.
But here’s the thing: Hearts of Iron deals with a very specific period of history, involving very specific actors, whose choices had wide-ranging effects. Nazi Germany was not a fighting power who happened to devote some effort to exterminating millions because it sounded like a good idea at the time – it was a core ideological conceit of the state and it had a significant impact on their conduct of the war effort itself. However insane their policies, however divorced from reality, they nevertheless existed and were consequential. When things began to go badly on the Eastern Front for the Third Reich, they still devoted an enormous effort of industry and infrastructure to the extermination of ‘untermenschen’. They shipped tools and talent to the camps rather than to the front. Imagine a Germany where antisemitism never escalated beyond the norm of 1930s Europe. The Jewish scientists never fled to England and America, and suddenly the Nazi regime didn’t kill or exile all the people responsible for developing the atomic bomb.
My point is this: You cannot separate World War Two from its atrocities. Well, you can if you have a narrow-focus view. An FPS through Operation Overlord isn’t going to turn up too much of the truly nasty stuff, because the truly nasty stuff wasn’t happening in Northern France, and that is a completely fair choice for developers to make. But a grand strategy game which avoids doing it is capitulating, both in terms of not including something vital for understanding what the war was and factors which influenced how it played out, but because it ends up making the Nazis (and the Empire of Japan) seem like, well, a bunch of invading Germans (Or Japanese). They are militaristic, nothing more, and nothing within the game indicates that they are functionally different from anyone else. I believe that this approach actually whitewashes the Nazis to some extent because it divorces them from their gravest crimes, which were far worse than simply waging wars.
Will Wright presents: The Holocaust
In Paradox’s defense, there are European governments who would pitch a hysterical fit about a game where you could click a little button that said “Exterminate the Jews” or you got a big spreadsheet of undesirable elements and could choose whether to exterminate, sterilize, herd in ghettos, levy additional taxes, and so on. Additionally you can drop nukes on people, and that certainly does have an effect on manpower, indirectly suggesting massive deaths. As I’ve said myself I’m not sure such a thing could be done in entirely good taste and, even if it was, many players would most probably approach it with less than noble intentions themselves. Nonetheless I feel it is even more tasteless to act as though it never happened, and that it is detrimental to anything attempting to simulate WW2 on a grand scale.
Something I think should be spread around as far and wide as possible. Is it just me or does that one dude with the bandana standing in front of Max look like Diego from Vandal Hearts?
The long-running Streets of Rage Remake project has reached v5.0, the final release. It is basically a massive amalgamation of everything SoR, which for my money was one of the best game series back on the Mega Drive/Genesis.
I was messing around with it some yesterday and it is very good. It remains faithful whilst making a ton of additions and refinements. As far as I’ve heard SEGA are cool with this, which is very admirable of them. Too many companies these days are too ready to step on fan projects.
It’s an admirable effort, and quite remarkable in scope. I’m a big fan of fan projects, be they things like this, mods, whatever. I think they’re great for the players, and they’re also a great way for the people involved to get experience of working in a team to put something out. So if you liked Streets of Rage back in the day, or if you’ve never played it at all, go and give it a looksee!
EDIT: Apparently, SEGA and Bombergames have had some kind of disagreement over this after all. The download has been pulled from the official site.
So as Pike alluded to in her post yesterday, I’m something of a fan of Dwarf Fortress. So I thought I would take the time to proselytize this game for those who haven’t heard of it. But first go and read Boatmurdered. It’s a community story done by Something Awful, showing just how demented and hilarious a game of Dwarf Fortress can be.
Done that? Excellent! Let’s continue.
I’ll get the bad out of the way first.
1) It looks like this:
Bonus if you even know what this is. Hint: It isn't ASCII.
2) The interface is, to put it mildly, a bit of a mess. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores but suffice it to say, the biggest part of Dwarf Fortress’ infamous learning curve is getting the hang of the interface.
3) Busier fortresses will slow right down on anything shy of a NASA supercomputer.
This does not sound like the best way to try and sell a game, right? Well, let’s move on to what it gets right, and why the bad is worth putting up with.
1) Imagination. This game has so much depth and complexity that it really blows anything else (okay, anything else that isn’t Aurora) out of the water. What does this mean? Once you get the hang of it, there are extremely few limits on what you want to do. Want to build a medieval-style above-ground castle? Go ahead. Want to recreate Rapture? Well once you learn how to drain oceans, you’ll be set. Maybe you just want to build a mile-high tower – built entirely out of soap made from kitten tallow! Minecraft, massive as it is, really pales in comparison to DF’s potential.
2) The Community. You probably think I mean “Oh hey these guys are really nice and welcoming and stuff.” No. They are, but nice people are a dime a dozen. This is a community where people have tried to figure out the logistics of making a perpetual motion machine powered entirely by pressurized blood. This is a community where people have sat down and worked out, over a period of time, with calculations, experiments, and discussion, the most efficient way to breed and murder merpeople. To harvest their bones. Civilization may turn us into sociopaths, in that we simply don’t care, but Dwarf Fortress turns us into sadists so deranged that Idi Amin would balk. It is glorious.
Should have stayed under the sea.
3) Detail. The man in charge, one Toady One, is infamous for the ridiculous amount of detail he wants to put into DF, and the great progress in this direction he has already made. I doubt any program, of any kind, outside of those used to train med students, has the amount of detail that DF’s health and injuries system does. You can knock out individual teeth. A wound dealt with an axe will be different from one dealt with a warhammer. The detailed and complex materials system means that different materials really are useful for different things, in terms of equipment and weapons. But this is reflected in the game in more detailed ways: Every time you create a world to play, a world is generated for you. The geography, the deities, the history, the inhabitants, everything. It makes each world unique.
4) It’s free. Completely free, not a penny to be paid at any time! If you want to support Toady in his endeavors (And I would strongly urge you to if you’re a DF fan) then you can donate, which is how he makes his daily bread, but it’s not compulsory.
I’m really only scratching the surface here. Dwarf Fortress is an insanely deep game, growing all the time (Toady is in the middle of introducing a bunch of new features like apiculture and new ways of NPC settlements forming), with a wonderful (If deranged) community. Oh, and don’t let the graphics scare you – there are quite a few excellent tilesets out there, and they really help if you find the not-ASCII intimidating or ugly! If anybody is interested, here are a few links to get you started:
The game itself. This is where the downloads are, and where you can access the other official stuff like the Dev Log and the forums.
OR just get the Lazy Newb Pack. It comes with a bunch of extra stuff, much easier than tracking it down yourself, and is being constantly updated as new versions of DF and various mods come out. The DF Wiki. Plenty of information on most topics in here. The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. Now outdated, but can still teach you around 95% of what you need to know to play the game. The forums. Standard fare, this is where you’ll find discussion, mods, help threads, stories, all that jazz.
Anyone out there who has played DF before? Tell us your fondest memories and grisliest experiences!
