“DIGITAL SADNESS” MULTIMEDIA

Below is what scrolls by when  you start up “Disc 0” of the 4-disc Sega Saturn game “Enemy Zero” by insane man Kenji Eno. Of course, then it turns out that Disc 0 is just a trailer for the game, a promotional video for Eno’s studio WARP, Inc (in which Eno comes off like John Romero, which is hilarious), and a Metal Gear Solid VR Missions-style training stage that implies that you’ll actually have a gun for more than, say, a tenth of the real game and that it won’t have limited amounts of ammo.

But I digress. The menu screen for the game-free portion of Enemy Zero:

ENEMY ZERO
WILL
BECOME
A MORE
MOVIE-ORIENTED
TITLE,
WITH
LAURA
AS AN ACTRESS.
THE MAIN
STAGE
OF
THE WORK
WILL
BE
THE SPACE
ITSELF.
BUT
ENEMY ZERO
WILL
HAVE
AN ASPECT
OF
AMUSEMENT
AS
A GAME
AS
WELL,
A LESS
WEIGHT.
ONE
OF
THE CONCEPTUAL
SUBJECTS
OF
THE WORK
WILL
BE
“DIGITAL SADNESS”
MULTIMEDIA,
AS
DIGITAL
MEDIA,
HAS
EPHEMERAL
FACTORS
AND
RISKS.
THROUGH
SHOWING
ENEMY ZERO,
I
WOULD
LIKE
TO
MAKE
IT
CLEAR
THAT
THERE
ARE
SUCH
CONTINGENCY
RISKS
IN
THE DIGITAL
WORLD
OF
THE MODERN
TIMES

Me too, Kenji. Me too.

—Casey

Cognition, randomness, and deception

Frank Lantz, responding in the comment thread of a blog post he made today:

I would like to encourage game designers to stop thinking of players as subjects of psychological experiments and think of them as collaborators, fellow researchers in the experiments games allow us to do on ourselves.

The original post concerns talks by Sid Meier and Rob Pardo at the most recent GDC concerning randomness and player psychology. (Here’s a good summary of both talks.) Lantz concludes that there’s a danger in adjusting models of randomness in games to be more in line with human intuition, and asks: “Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths? Shouldn’t games make us smarter about how randomness works instead of reinforcing our fallacious beliefs?”

Long time Warp Skip colleague Ben Zeigler wrote today on a similar topic, detailing all of the instances at GDC where game designers were urged to deceive and prevaricate. Ben’s more sanguine about deception in game design than Lantz, comparing the whole deal to professional wrestling:

The vast majority of [professional wrestling] fans are completely aware that it’s all fake and planned, but they don’t care. They are completely willing to suspend their disbelief, and in return become part of the show. The experiences are real even though they’re based on a foundation of deception, and that’s at the core of gaming as well.

Both articles are good reads. Go read them. Lots to think about.

—Adam

Everyone Loves a Period Piece 2

Stealth games are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and with good reason: they can inject buckets of tension into their gameplay. Part of the tension is intended, but unfortunately a lot of the times part of it comes from the fact that, perhaps unintentionally, getting caught can just be no fun at all.  I finished Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2 (AC2) the other day, and came away really impressed with how it addresses this, among other things.  Now in case you were wondering about the relevance of reviewing a game that came out three months ago, you’re actually a bit off: I never played through AC1, so this is largely a review of a game that came out more than two years ago.

Above: you can actually do crap like this.

In the interest of keeping this post focused on AC2’s gameplay, I’ll simply mention that the plot requires you to run around Renaissance Italy, assassinating various members of a conspiracy, usually by inserting a knife into their back.  You spend most of the game sneaking from mission to mission in three or four towns.  This isn’t too straightforward, as you’ll have to move amongst a fairly active patrol of guards.  However, this turns out to be a lot of fun, as (1) you’re secretly the love-child of a grade 5.10 rock climber and a Cirque de soleil acrobat and (2) the towns are designed to take advantage of (1).  Town design was clearly a labor of love for Ubisoft: although you only get about four fully fleshed out towns over the course of the game, they all demonstrate an incredible level of scale and detail, and the game always gives you plenty of ways to get from point A to point B.  You really come to appreciate this in the missions where you’re asked to tail someone.  The complexity of the streets gives you tons of ways to stay with your mark, whether its sneaking through crowds, swinging on outcroppings, or going across the rooftops, which make these sections some of the best parts of the game.

If guards are directly monitoring something of interest to you, the game usually presents three potential solutions, which are, in decreasing degree of hassle:

1. Wage a full-on street fight.  This won’t be much fun for you, as one thing that AC2 unfortunately inherits from its Ubisoft Prince of Persia is PoP’s awkward combat system.
2. Hire a roving band of thieves/prostitutes/mercenaries to annoy/seduce/brutally fight the guards in your way.
3. Use a clever feature of the local geography, and maybe one or two well-placed stealth kills, to get through things painlessly and cost-free.

It’s interesting to compare the guards in AC2 with the ones from the other stealth series that I know best, Metal Gear Solid.  You can view MGS as setting up a very clear but unforgiving contract with the player: the game gives you a method for precisely determining what guards can sense at any time, and the levels are designed so that it’s entirely feasible to get through them without being seen at all.  The consequence is that you pretty much have to stay completely out of sight the whole time.  Sure, if someone sees you, you may be able to fight your way out, but you’ll probably take a lot of damage.  You might be able to run away and hide again, but even in the best case, you have to sit in your hidey-hole and do nothing for minutes on end, which isn’t a lot of fun.  The game is really designed for you to rehash each section until you get through undetected, and sure enough, whenever I play and get caught, I’ll just pop the suicide pill and start over.

Above: a typical escape scene breaks out.

In comparison, AC2 is faster and looser.  The game doesn’t give you precise information about the guards’ spheres of perception, and the levels are designed so that you’ll certainly be noticed from time to time.  The trick is that getting noticed can actually be a lot of fun. First, even though you’re almost perpetually piquing the interest of some guard, this only starts a timer for how long you have to make them lose interest, whether by blending in with the crowd or ducking behind some scenery.  Second, there will be times when you put the town on full alert, either because you flubbed up, or because the game forces you into this situation after you take out a high-profile target.  These scenarios can turn out to be some of the most fun moments in the game, as they put a fresh twist on all of your tricks listed above for sneaking around guards in the first place.  For example, after finishing one assassination, I swung and climbed around town for about a solid minute looking for a way to shake the crowd of guards after me.  I eventually spotted out of the corner of my eye some mercenaries, which I hired on the fly to fight off the guards as I made my escape.  This all feels pretty emergent, which makes it that much more gratifying.

This is the world that you work through to get to your mission sites. When you actually get to the sites, you typically find some way slip past the guard, which places you on the rooftop, in position to scout your target’s moving patterns, eavesdrop on his conversation a bit, and find the best way to swoop in for the kill.  Getting to stalk the guy from the roof is a great moment, but frankly it often turns out to be a bit anti-climactic, as usually all you have to do to finish him is find a spot to drop from that doesn’t cause too much fall damage, then run up and stab the dude.  I think it’s an area that could benefit from a bit more complexity.  What I’d love to see in AC3 is a game mechanic that gives you the power to organize and schedule events, using multiple characters or traps, and then force you to get these to play out exactly in concert in order to pull off the job.  But this is mostly just brainstorming by someone who really got into the game.  In general, AC2 does a great job of coming off as emergent but fluid at the same time, and the result is a very satisfying game.

—Bill

Another Castle podcast

Hear me talk about Mass Effect, Animal Crossing, interactive fiction and Wittgenstein in the latest episode of Another Castle. It’s always a blast to sit down and have a conversation about games with Charles J. Pratt (illustrious game designer and host of Another Castle), and I hope it’s fun to listen to as well.

I have an unshakably high opinion of myself, so it’s a big deal for me to say that I am by far the least interesting person ever to appear on Another Castle. Charles has been reeling in all the heavyweights of the New York City game design scene; the interviews with Frank Lantz and Jesper Juul in particular are can’t-miss. In my view, it’s the best podcast on game design out there. Download all the episodes here, and make sure to subscribe.

—Adam