Levels to Look Out For, May 2012.

These are some unreleased levels / environment WIPs I've seen posted around the internet, along with some brief commentary.

Island of the Dead, by Mac "macattackk" Hart.

Hart bases this CryEngine3 environment off the Arnold Bocklin's notorious Isle of the Dead paintings. What I really admire here is the masterful control over materials; the normal map on the rocks is really important to ground the unorthodox shape of the rock. It's a really surreal treatment of realism that, I think, is really subtle and difficult to pull off -- a desaturated, muted palette that somehow isn't boring. What I like most about this piece, though, is that Hart is actually fleshing it out into a level. He could've stopped with this one view and one camera angle to produce a diorama / portfolio piece, but now it's actually turning into a legitimate space as he extrapolates the painting's original style.

Why game architecture matters, and the reality / unreality of de_dust.

(This architecture criticism post was cross-posted to my department's research blog, Game @ Parsons. In general, I post my architecture criticism stuff there.)

Last July, the German new media artist Aram Bartholl secured funding from Rhizome to begin building de_dust, a popular video game level, as a 1:1 scale model cast out of solid concrete. It would be a crime to paraphrase his concisely argued rationale, so I’ve pasted a large chunk of it here:

“Computer games differ from other mediums such as books, movies or TV, in that spatial cognition is a crucial aspect in computer games. To win a game the player needs to know the 3D game space very very well. Spatial recognition and remembrance is an important part of our human capability and has formed over millions of years by evolution. A place, house or space inscribes itself in our spatial memory. We can talk about the qualities of the same movies we watched or books we have read.

How the worst part of the game industry uses PAX East to teabag your entire face with its cancerous scrotum.

(I attended PAX East on a scholarship from the IGDA, for which I'm grateful. They also facilitated a lovely lunch with Tom Lin of Demiurge Studios, some neat studio visits, and other things. Thank you IGDA.)

(Also, a warning: this gets pretty dramatic, but I hope it comes off as honest.)

First, understand that PAX East is actually made of two conventions. Literally, a gigantic wall divides the analog (card and board games) from digital (the video game industry).

In game design, it's popular to say that analog and digital games are the same at their cores, because they both depict systems -- and PAX East is the place where all that rhetoric utterly falls apart. One side of the convention floor is a quiet and personal pastime, the other is a deafening business. If you're a games academic or optimistic indie, this dissonance will test your faith, because here the game industry teabags your entire face with its cancerous scrotum.

For sure, there are good parts of the game industry. But here, it is clear that the bad parts still completely control the entire body, erecting giant temples to its glory. Me and many indies felt alienated, and relatively alone in our alienation. This is the weekend when you're painfully reminded that Anna Anthropy's idealism remains mostly just idealism. (... for now.)

"Real Life Goldeneye 64"

The most compelling part of Real Life Goldeneye 64, to me, isn't how they mimicked the pathfinding / enemy animations. To me, it's the way they used Let's Play culture ("I'm using save states") to justify the editing choices, and more impressively, how they kind of mimic the "feel" of moving and aiming in Goldeneye 64.

The game had a strange kind of floatiness to it, mainly caused by the control scheme -- the N64 controller only had one analog stick (unlike the dual-stick standard now mandatory for all consoles) which meant one control had to handle both moving AND looking. To freely look around, you'd have to hold "R" (one of the shoulder bumper buttons) to aim, which also meant you had to stand in-place while your arm wildly flails around the screen. And as this video reveals, people are actually kind of nostalgic for it.

Come see CondomCorps and others @ Spring Fair

If you're going to be in the New York City area on Sunday, April 15th, come check out my department's first ever "Spring Fair" -- basically, we're all just going to show the random stuff and side projects we've been working on for the past semester. I'm planning on debuting the newest version of CondomCorps (now with romantic subplots!) and I know my classmates have plenty up their own sleeves; there'll be plenty of games, robots, interactive installations, and just plain cool shit.

Come pop in for an hour or stay and hang out / mingle with Manhattan's technorati!

We'll be at 6 East 16th Street, 12th floor, right off the Union Square stop. Sunday, 1-6 PM. (map)

Book Club, level design edition

Here are some books I've been reading, most of them about halfway through. I haven't bought any of these; they're all from my university library. (Pro-Tip: If you're a student, take full advantage of your library.) I'll probably give them more detailed write-ups later...

Myst and Riven, by Mark J. Wolf. (2011). I only picked this up because I saw it on the shelf next to Ian Bogost's "How To Do Things With Videogames." I'm not going to say it's bad -- if you've never played Myst or Riven, this'll give you a decent idea of what that's like, and the various idiosyncrasies involved -- but from my perspective, Wolf seems like a huge fanboy who overestimates the series' significance and place in history. I argue against his account in an upcoming feature on FPS games in May's PC Gamer UK; Myst sold a lot and seemed poised to start a revolution, then it didn't. Instead, Myst (along with Second Life) is "significant" more in the minds of humanities professors. Where are the scholarly monographs on Doom and Quake? (Actually, I think Dan Pinchbeck's in the middle of writing it?)

Against Puzzles?

(I was going to do a "Radiator 1-3 is done" post for April Fools, but it hurt too much...)

We had a public playtest of me and my teammates' VVVVVV-FPS thesis project, "Souvenir," with a bunch of New York City junior high / high school students -- and I don't know if you've ever been to a New York City public school, but these kids generally speak their mind (to put it mildly) and they're ideal playtesters. I also had a few interesting conversations with them. One of them asked what the goal of the game was, so I started trolling / engaging them:

Well, when you go out for a walk, do you have a goal? No, you just walk because you like walking.

"Yeah," she said, "but if all you do is walk around, it gets boring after a while. I'll stop playing." Well, that's fine, then stop playing.

"Plus," her friend says, "I'd just play it once. And then it would gather dust on my hard drive." That's fine. Play it once and delete the game then.

"But like, if I wanted to walk around, I'd just go outside." That's fine. Then go outside!

They're so young, and already they're perpetuating the same messaging from massive industry interests: that the "realism of games" competes with the realism of reality, addictive games are better games, clear goal structures are best -- and retention, retention, retention. That's just one way of thinking about games, and they've already locked themselves in that mindset. They've been indoctrinated.

Mass Effect 3, minutiae

Spoiler free. Here's stuff I thought while playing the latest and hottest "guns and conversation" game:

THE GUNS

• I had 300,000 credits and didn't know what to do with it. Upgrading guns seemed pointless (the bars barely budge in the stats readouts) and clicking on stuff in a menu with little visual change or feedback was unsatisfying. Seems like the gun upgrades were a last minute feature that could've used another GUI design pass.
• Functionally, all squadmates seem pretty much the same (1 crowd-control ability, 1 buff, 1 debuff) except Liara who has significantly less health. It doesn't really matter who you bring, which I somewhat liked, because that meant squad choice was based on narrative and characterization instead.
• My Shepard had a "biotic charge" ability that lets her fly across rooms through cover, tackle enemies, and completely recharge her shields; combined with other bonuses, the cooldown period becomes negligible even early on. I didn't feel particularly smart when I figured out how overpowered this ability was -- I felt like the balance was broken. 
• Well, I don't think anyone plays Mass Effect for the gunplay anyway. It serves an aesthetic purpose: to make you feel like you're fighting in battles. What baffles me is spending time developing a multiplayer game that capitalizes on the weakest, least interesting part of the series?

THE CONVERSATION

• Again, I chose a LadyShep who decided to romance her secretary. From watching the YouTubes though, the GayMaleShep stuff seems pretty well done and even a little cute. (see above) I wish I had had the faith to stick it out with a MaleShep through the entire trilogy, but the male voice actor is just so much worse.
• Given the heavy proceduralizing of conversations, BioWare does a really smart thing during cutscenes: it cuts to different cameras frequently so that your brain better processes the discontinuities. The dialog doesn't sound as disjointed if there's a visual cut in time. (see above)
• Some weird player to player-character dissonance when my Shepard always confesses how much she misses Ashley, when I'm wondering, "Ashley who?"
• They kept all the core design from Mass Effect 2 and instead pooled all their resources into art, which I think was a smart move: there's a lot of variety to the levels, and the abundance of scripted animations turned stale conversations in a hallway into "getting dinner" or "going out to the bar" -- functionally, nothing is really different, but the new narrative context does wonders.
• When the characters aren't blathering on about the price of war to the point of parody, there's some genuinely good writing and characterization going on -- well, Garrus and Liara mostly. The "military stud squadmate" NPCs (Kaidan, Jacob, and the new unexplained mildly hispanic guy) are still awfully boring characters with amazing normal maps on their pecs. I guess Alistair really was the anomaly in a milquetoast lineage of Carths.
• I like how RPGs always have the "endgame" moment; a character literally tells you that the endgame is beginning, all side quests will be disabled, and you must confirm whether you're ready. It kind of breaks the fourth wall (assuming you really care about that) but at the same time you appreciate the game signaling itself to you. It's such a uniquely game-y thing to be able to read and understand what the game is actually saying beneath the thin narrative skin.