Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts

Sunday, November 4, 2018

The first person shooter is a dad in mid-life crisis

OK I know Heavy Rain isn't an FPS but I like this screenshot so I don't care
Every semester for our introductory Games 101 historical survey class, a different NYU Game Center faculty member presents a survey of a game genre. Matt Parker lectures on sports, Clara Fernandez-Vara talks about adventure games, Mitu Khandaker talks about simulations, and so on.

My personal lecture happens to be on the first person shooter (FPS) genre. In my lecture, I trace five main currents through the FPS genre:

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Kick the cover box

A soldier hiding behind a gray box in a futuristic lab, from Deus Ex Human Revolution (2011)
The room pictured above from Deus Ex: Human Revolution is, I argue, bad level design.

The playable area consists of an open flat floor with lab counters, yet all the counters are the same height (they have to be, so the player can recognize them as "those boxes I can hide behind") and each box offers basically the same affordance to the player. (Hide behind it! Look over it! Shoot the NPC that's programmed to pop his head out every 7 seconds!)

Any given object becomes bad design when it is numerous, redundant, and lacks context to the rest of the game. If you automatically repeat any type of shape throughout your game world, as a catch-all solution to fill a space, then that object is basically functioning like the dreaded video game crate. Whether it's a pallet of barrels, or a stack of bricks, or a concrete road barrier, it all boils down to a "cover box"...

Level designers often place these objects in the same faux-haphazard way, like tasteful glossy interior design magazines forgotten on a coffee table. But they're mostly responding to the game design they've been given, especially in a AAA system where combat systems feel like immutable facts. Water is wet, crunch must happen, and shooters need cover boxes. It's going to happen, live with it.

So whose fault is it, really? Well, I blame Steven Spielberg.

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Radiator University, Summer 2018 course catalog


Hello prospective student. We here at Radiator University would like to apologize for the hiatus -- due to circumstances Beyond Our Control, all our course catalogs (printed materials, digital copies, and all backups) for Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 semesters were dumped off the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. We were puzzled as to why absolutely zero students enrolled in any classes throughout the whole academic year, but please rest assured that we have switched to a different vendor for all our printed materials in the future, and This Will Never Happen Again.

On behalf of RU, I'd like to invite all new and returning students to quadruple-enroll in various summer courses to make-up for the lost time. Here is a sample of our Summer 2018 course offerings:

ARTM 252: SPECULATIVE GUN LAB (4 credits)
Modern assault weapons are not just controversial, but also extremely ugly. In this class, we will conduct an art history analysis of firearms as aesthetic objects to understand how it all went wrong -- and link the decline of gun aesthetics with the decline of American moral authority since World War II, or maybe even before? Students will be expected to travel every weekend to apprentice under artistanal heritage gun smiths, and as a final project, design and manufacture a new type of firearm that reimagines the gun's relationship to nationalism -- the only constraint is that this new "speculative gun" cannot fire bullets or shells. What else can a gun do or be?

Offered only at West Virginia campus. Lab fee of US$11920.87, including accidental firearm discharge insurance, will be assessed by the university bursar. Prerequisites: at least 1 semester of both METL 200: INTRO TO METALURGY as well as HIST 92B: WESTERN THEORIES OF JUST WAR.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Mapping the sea floors of Subnautica


This post spoils the core gameplay and player progression in Subnautica, but not the specific story nor scripted plot events.

Subnautica is a long open world survival game set in a vast deep ocean. In it, you have to forage for food, manage your oxygen when diving into caves and deep sea trenches, and collect resources to build your own underwater base(s) and submarine(s) to find out What Really Happened Here.

Much like the other first person indie survival game The Long Dark, Subnautica features no combat, no world map, and essentially no NPCs or quests to complete for anyone. The few lethal weapons are either cumbersome and annoying to maintain (poison gas torpedoes must be crafted and loaded) or practical but anti-juicy (your knife)... but most importantly, unlike The Long Dark's focus on hunting, killing creatures in Subnautica *never* yields any reward or drops -- even when the game confusingly asks you to collect shark teeth but killing sharks never yields any shark teeth.

(Why? Well, there's a few story threads about how use of force cannot get you what you want, as well as a faint anti-capitalist / anti-colonialist message. But the smoking gun of authorial intent is in the credits: a dedication to the families of Newtown, Connecticut. The design lead has also talked about their no-gun philosophy.)

PC Gamer already did a nice roundtable about Subnautica's early climactic story moment, so instead I want to focus on Subnautica's most interesting systemic feature: its depth-based 3D level design, and implications on the rest of the game.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Ludonarrative dissonance doesn't exist because it isn't dissonant and no one cares anyway.

"I'm a living breathing person... but I'm just going to stand frozen in this spot forever. Also, I'm a tortoise."
I complained about Bioshock Infinite before. Here, I complain some more, because I really can't get over how bad this game is. Hopefully this'll be the last complaint post. I'm sorry.

Clint Hocking famously coined "ludonarrative dissonance" to describe moments when what's happening in a single player action game doesn't fit with what the game is telling you is happening -- maybe it's just plain wrong, maybe the tone doesn't match, or maybe the game thinks this thing is more interesting than it is -- either way, it doesn't quite work.

It's when you realize your sympathetic handsome male player character is a sociopathic mass murderer, or maybe when a character in an RPG "dies" despite having already died and revived dozens of times before, or maybe the brief instance when an elite soldier NPC glitches in the middle of a doorway despite all the boring game lore dumped on you. Sometimes it's intrinsic to making a game about killing people, sometimes you hope fridge logic kicks in, and sometimes it's a technical quirk you forgive.

But I feel like that theory doesn't explain what actually happens out in the field: if Bioshock Infinite was forged entirely, purposefully, from solid ingots of 100% pure ludonarrative dissonance, why didn't this annoy the shit out of everyone? Isn't ludonarrative dissonance supposed to be jarring and horrible? Why was the unusually unified critical response to Binfinite something like, "wow this game is colossally stupid," but the mainstream response was, "this is amazing"?

So I have a new theory -- most players do not find dissonance to be dissonant, and therefore ludonarrative dissonance doesn't really exist.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Unmanned, by Molleindustria

I'm a bit late to the party, but Unmanned is probably one of the best games I've played in a while.

It's a fantastic use of interactive fiction / first person sensibilities (some of which I'm going to steal) with innovative use of split-frame and achievements, contemporary relevance but also rather personal narratives... it's got everything.

If you're upset that it's not subtle enough, consider all the noise it's trying to combat, all by itself. You don't bring a toothpick to a knife fight, folks. Also, in case you missed it the first time, check out this game's distant cousin, "maybe make some change."

Funny how similar the premises of these two games' methodologies are: that text and only text can adequately communicate the psychological damage of modern warfare, and militaristic first person games thrive on the lack of text and introspection.

Pop music doesn't care whether you think it's authentic, though.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The Business End: Guns in the FPS (part 1)


First person shooters are about (1) moving, and (2) looking.

Currently, moving is very meaningful in almost every context: you dodge bullets, you dodge rockets, enemies react to your new position, games like Thief 3 and Mirror's Edge attempt a "body awareness" system to contextualize movement, etc.

But looking? Comparatively, not meaningful at all.

Stare at someone in real-life for a few seconds and they'll get uneasy. Stare at someone's cleavage in a game? They stare back or they don't care. People stare at each other in-game all the time. It's nothing special. Few NPCs will ask you why you're staring at their daughter like that.

So, how do you make the "act of looking" into something meaningful? Well, you can make whatever you look at -- you can make it explode.

And thus, the gun...