A question of motive

Between the Mirror's Edge conversation* and some recent shots across the bow of the Serious Games Journalist Network of Pretension, I've seen a couple of people mention that reviewers and gamers need to be considering more seriously the intentions of a game's developers. My gut reaction is to say "No we don't" and move on, but I'm incapable of letting this sort of thing go. Plus, upon further inspection, I don't think it's all that simple. Only mostly that simple.

Whether we're talking about books, movies, or games, in general I don't put much stock in authorial intent. I think my distaste stems from way too many encounters with sloppy writers who wanted to blame their own shortcomings on their readers. It is true that sometimes a writer might be perfectly clear in his meaning, and run up against a stubborn, uneducated reader who doesn't know or care what words mean, and disdains those who do. But that's a rare case -- sort of like all those fat people who claim that they have a glandular problem just because somebody, somewhere, actually does.**

The truth of the matter is that if a reader doesn't understand what you wrote, it's almost certainly because you did a bad job writing it. You chose vague words. Your grammar was careless. Your syntax was confused. If someone responds to something you wrote, having derived a wholly different meaning than what you intended, then it's a sign that you didn't do the best job you could have -- not that the reader was an idiot. And yes, this is extremely hard to remember when somebody slams your writing. That's all the more reason to keep it in mind when we talk about a developer's intent.

So, as I said, I'm not terribly interested in what a developer was trying to do. I care about what they did. Even trying to read interviews in order to uncover their intentions doesn't seem all that valuable, because I'm willing to bet that they intended to make a good game. Should they get points for that? Trying to consider any factors other than the direct gameplay experience seems to lead in a direction I don't want to go. We should be talking about what works and what doesn't, and, more importantly, what playing this game is like. I can't read the developers' minds, but I can play their game.

Still, this is a bit of a straw man. The side of the argument that makes sense to me is that a developer sets out to make a specific type of game, and it's nonsensical to review their product as though it were something else. For example, talking about Left 4 Dead as though the single-player mode were its top priority is probably not a great idea (but I certainly wouldn't see anything wrong with bringing up the strengths and weaknesses of the AI teammates).

Here's the thing: If the developers did their job right, then you don't need to know what they intended, because it will all be right there in the game. You don't need to know, going in, that Valve was trying to make a multiplayer shooter. Every design choice they made underlines that fact. Hell, maybe they were trying to make the best single-player shooter ever, botched it, and ended up with this sweet team-based shooter instead.

That's why, when I answered Shawn Elliott's questions last week, I said that I try to answer these questions in my reviews: "How do the game's apparent goals seem to mesh or conflict with its execution? What is this game trying to say?" I specified "game" and not "developers," because a game can speak for itself. Once it's finished and shipped, it doesn't belong to the developers anymore. It belongs to the players.

*No, this doesn't count as a mention of Mirror's Edge!
**Oh my god, I didn't just.

Friday afternoon tidbits

No drinking beer and falling asleep on the couch for me this weekend! I'm going snowboarding. Let me just apologize in advance if I break my wrist and can't type come Monday.

A few items of note before the weekend begins:

-The comments have been great around here recently, so thanks to everybody who takes the time to respond. Blogging should be a dialogue and not a monologue. I always appreciate any considered comments, whether they're assenting or dissenting. Group hug.

-Every time I think I'm done talking about Fairway Solitaire around here, they pull me back in. Bill Harris linked to an interview with the game's designer, John Cutter. It's probably more interesting if you've played the game, such as when you come across passages like this:

"One of my theories about game design is that there is a direct correlation between the quality of an action's feedback and the perceived enjoyment of that experience. So with that goal in mind I was pretty diligent about giving players great feedback each time they "play" a card to the foundation," he said. "I really wanted this action to feel like a golf shot, with a nice solid "WHACK" sound and the card spinning and arcing down to the bottom of the screen."

It's totally true. I can't stress it enough: Fairway Solitaire is an absolute gem. At least try the demo.

-The anonymous scribe behind Magical Wasteland rarely posts, but each new update is always required reading. "In Defense of the Meaningless Video Game" touches upon some of the issues we talked about in yesterday's post on racing games. A key quote: "World of Warcraft means something (to millions of people) because it provides the framework for meaningful occurrences, not because it, itself, contains and delivers meaning." That's true. But the meaningful occurrences people create for themselves are naturally shaped by the decisions of the folks at Blizzard, whether or not either the developers or the players mean for that to be the case.

Without arguing any of the author's core precepts -- that some games are fun for fun's sake, and that most don't need to be overtly relevant to the world we live in -- I still can't shake the notion that every game has some kind of meaning. The reason it has meaning is because conscious decisions had to be made about even its smallest aspects. Yes, you can take this to ludicrous and self-parodying extremes. But think about it: For each design decision made, an infinite number of options was rejected. If you ask yourself why a particular choice was made, then that's where you'll find the meaning -- no matter what the game.

-Today, Game|Life, Kotaku, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun all posted gushing previews of the dystopian Parkour game Mirror's Edge. I agree that it sounds neat. But honestly, people: Have we learned nothing?

Going in circles

There's a thought-provoking feature in Edge about the decline of the racing game as a genre (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun), as discussed by a roundtable of developers behind games like Dirt, Sega Rally, MotorStorm, and Project Gotham. The essence of the problem with racing games was flagged by RPS in their headline, and it's spoken by Bizarre's Gerard Talbot:

"Why am I doing this?"

This was the question I was unable to answer while playing Dirt. It's the question I can't answer while I'm playing The Club (which, though not a racing game, shares many characteristics in common with Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham series). It's the question that has prevented me from investing the time and effort necessary to succeed in Gran Turismo and Forza. For some people, simply being challenged to do well is reason enough to play, whether that means achieving high scores or low times. But these skill players are only one segment of the gaming community, and those of us who look for some more personal reason to play won't find one in these games.

What racing games don't generally do is tap into the player's emotions. I don't mean that they should have stories or characters, necessarily, just that there needs to be some animating reason for the player's actions beyond a basic desire to win. Look at Dirt: the rally style means that you race alone, and afterward compare your time either with that of hypothetical computer opponents, or of real-life opponents you never actually see. There's no drama there. The best games for tourist-style players are those that connect with something elemental, like fear, empathy, or a desire for justice. Obviously this wouldn't work for hardcore sims -- the niche products -- but I think it's going to be necessary for mainstream racing games to connect with mass audiences in the future.

One way to do it would be to ditch the straightforward lap mechanism, and instead create courses in which the player is racing either toward something or away from something. "Why am I doing this?" Because if I don't get to the finish line in time, something terrible will happen. Because if I don't outrun this horrible thing behind me, I'm going to die. What about a game based on The Wages of Fear? The physics engine possibilities alone are exciting, and the ticking-time-bomb scenario adds that missing impetus for those of us who need one.

Whether that's a good idea or not, the point is that as long as racing games are just about running laps, then they'll all be going in circles. There will always be a market for Gran Turismo and games based on NASCAR. But if developers really want to push ahead conceptually, then what's needed is a willingness to move beyond the prevailing mindset that racing is about winning a trophy. There's a chance to do so much more.

The auteur theory of games

I've been having an interesting discussion with Michael Abbott in the comments to this post. The question: Can inspiration survive the collaborative process intact? Or does the team-based approach to design necessarily dilute a singular creative vision?

At first blush, my feeling is that the list of video game "auteurs" is pretty small. I could name you Shigeru Miyamoto, whose games tend to emphasize the allure of new worlds hidden just out of sight; Hideo Kojima, who delights in breaking through the fourth wall to draw explicit parallels between his fictional stories and the real world; and now Suda 51, whose embrace of game symbols and history is almost post-modern.

Generally, when I play a game, I don't get that feeling that I've tapped into the psyche of some cracked genius. Many good -- even great -- games still feel more like a machine that's been precisely engineered, rather than a sloppy work of genius. Along those lines, I was struck by a comment Gus Mastrapa made on a post Chris Dahlen wrote about Burnout Paradise:

I’ve always taken issue with the Burnout series’ reticence to commit to a style, position or even attitude. The worlds are always kinda bland, generic even. The radio hosts are usually suicide inducing. The crashes and racing are awesome, but the setting is so non-committal that it irks me for some reason. Who gets the opportunity to make a world and fashions something so utterly devoid of character?

I read that and thought immediately of No More Heroes. By any measure, Burnout is the more polished and "professional" of the two games. Its open world is seamless. It is a technological marvel, and at its best it provides a gut-level thrill that I'm not sure is matched elsewhere. But the game lacks any kind of a voice or point of view. Paradise City doesn't possess an ounce of the character that Santa Destroy has. Whatever attitude Burnout Paradise contains comes from a place that rings false, especially as expressed through the riffage of DJ Atomica. My instinct is to attribute that difference to the lack of Suda 51-like personality at Criterion Games.

Of course, that conclusion could just be ignorance on my part, simply because Criterion doesn't have a celebrity figurehead. It may be presumptuous to think that Suda 51 is the only one who had any input on No More Heroes. And, as I think about it, I could name you dozens of designers with distinctive styles. Peter Molyneux. Sid Meier. Tetsuya Miziguchi. I might be saying there aren't many game auteurs only because I haven't thought about it long enough.

On the flipside, you have development houses that continue to produce singular work. Abbott compares the game industry as we know it today to the studio system of Hollywood's early days:

...it's very easy to discern an Atlus game, a Sega game, a Capcom game, and a Grasshopper game. They each have very distinctive features and stylistic signatures. Yes, they can't necessarily be traced to a specific designer, but I think their distinctiveness is no less pronounced...

MGM films looked very different from Warner Bros. films, which looked very different from Paramount or RKO... the collaborative, factory-like system of filmmaking in the 30s managed to generate such singular, artistically distinctive films.

The parallels are easy to draw. One place you see this in action is in the sharing of tech across development houses owned by the same publisher. Naughty Dog and Insomniac seemed to lend each other a hand between the Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank games, for example. And once one EA game implements a new feature, it tends to propagate pretty rapidly throughout the company (such as how every EA Sports game started to implement the right analog stick in the same model year).

And certainly there are teams with unmistakable styles. Games by Team ICO, say, are as unique as anything in the industry. but Fumito Ueda doesn't tend to enjoy the rarefied status of other rockstar designers. Yet Wikipedia credits his work on ICO as "Director/Lead Designer/Lead Animator/Cover Design/Art Direction." How could he possibly have had more of an impact on that game? It could just be that those of us with no knowledge of what it takes to make a game don't know quite where to give credit, or place blame, especially these days, when it takes a team of dozens to ship a game.

No doubt there are convincing arguments on both sides, and I'm fairly certain that this is the sort of thing that doesn't have a true answer. What do you think? Are great games the product of a determined visionary, or a group of talented people working in perfect harmony?

Balancing Puzzle Fighter

This is a bit old, but it's just fascinating. I always think people happen upon excellence by accident -- that innate talent tends to take care of the little details that can mean the difference between success and failure. Maybe that's true sometimes, but more often it seems that dedication and persistence are the most potent fertiziler for the fecund mind. So it was interesting to read about the design decisions that went into the Super Puzzle Fighter II remake for Xbox Live Arcade, not least because I wouldn't have thought the original needed any improvement.

Most of the Puzzle Fighter re-balancing involved each character's drop patterns. The funny thing is that we all played as Donovan back in the day without having an inkling of the advanced strategy this piece describes. Specifically: "Because you know the pattern of colors that the opponent is capable of dropping on your side, it’s possible to build your side so that enemy attacks sometimes help you. If all characters sent random patterns of blocks, it would be very difficult to build up large Power Gems on your side without having them covered up all the time."

Who knew? Not me. Nor was I aware of the "Diamond Trick." Maybe it's a good thing I haven't downloaded the XBLA version, because people would probably be wiping the floor with me.