GAMING

GAMING: TURNING BACK TIME

Tom Standage — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:15:40 +0000

We all wish we could press rewind sometimes. Tom Standage looks at a few video games that make this possible ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009

If I could turn back time... It’s a dodgy Cher song, with a video that features a battleship. It’s also a very natural wish. Who has not longed for the ability to press rewind, after blurting out something that should have remained unsaid, or reversing into another car outside the supermarket? Alas, real life does not have a rewind button. But a growing number of video games do.

The idea goes back at least as far as “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time”, released in 2003. The prince was armed with a special dagger that could rewind time by as much as ten seconds—very handy if you have just fallen off a crumbling ledge or been dealt a devastating blow during combat. Killing bad guys recharged the dagger’s time-travelling powers.

Time travel is central to “Braid”, a gem of a game originally written for the Xbox 360 that is now also available on Mac and Windows (and, as a download, on PlayStation 3). At first glance it looks like a Mario-style platform game, albeit with a distinctive graphical style and a rewind button that puts the on-screen action into reverse. If you miss a jump or fall off a cliff, you can rewind as far as you like and have another go. But things get really clever with the introduction of doors, switches and other things that are unaffected by the rewind button. All sorts of mind-bending time-travel puzzles become possible.

It is in driving games that the ability to turn back time really comes into its own. “Full Auto”, a racing-combat hybrid from 2006, pioneered the idea. Last year’s “Grid” had a flashback button that let you try again if you misjudged a corner or crashed into a wall. Codemasters, the company behind “Grid”, then included the same feature in “Dirt 2”, a rally-driving game that came out in September. Rewind also appears in “Forza Motorsport 3”, released in October; it is fast becoming a standard feature of racing games.

Rewind is a godsend because making a single slip-up no longer means you have to start the whole race all over again, with a tedious delay while you wait for the game to reload. Hitting a rewind button instead is much quicker, and makes it easier to learn the vagaries of a particular car or track. Purist fans of racing games feel that rewind is a form of cheating, but they don’t have to use it if they don’t want to. Instead of punishing you for making a mistake, rewinding lets you have another try right away. Games are, after all, meant to be fun.

(Tom Standage is The Economist's business affairs editor and author of "An Edible History of Humanity". He is the gaming columnist for Intelligent Life.)

Picture credit: bogenfreund (via Flickr)

ZOMBIES AND HEARTS OF DARKNESS

Brett McCallon — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:32:24 +0000

Cultural stereotypes, charged politics and a fraught colonial history make Africa a tricky setting for a video game. Brett McCallon describes his discomfort playing "Far Cry 2" and "Resident Evil 5" ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

As a rule, most games are set in one of three places: a generic modern military scenario; a generic fantasy world (think "Dungeons and Dragons"); or a generic science-fiction landscape replete with space marines. I was pleased, then, to learn that both "Far Cry 2" and "Resident Evil 5", two big releases from the last year, use the seldom-explored setting of Africa.

These games ventured into tricky territory, given Africa's long history of colonial exploitation. Their approaches seem uniquely informed by the cultures of the two developers—"Far Cry 2" (pictured below) is from Ubisoft in Montreal, while "Resident Evil 5" (pictured top) is by Capcom in Japan—and both make significant mistakes in attempting to balance the continent's exoticism with a sense of its fraught past. While playing each game, there were moments when I found myself profoundly uncomfortable. In one case, the experience was unsettling enough to cut my playtime short.

Games are not known for their subtlety, and the "Resident Evil" series is perhaps one of the least subtle of a crass lot. These games chronicle the battle between the sinister Umbrella Corporation, which periodically unleashes new varieties of zombie-creating viruses on an unsuspecting world, and various good-looking law enforcement types who oppose these efforts. Their plots are delivered with all of the tact and nuance that this rivalry merits. Clearly there were bound to be problems when this hamfisted, if well-regarded, series came to Africa.

The heroes' opposition to world takeover by the undead takes the form of shooting thousands of zombies, preferably in the head. Until now, the series' action consisted of white protagonists shooting mostly caucasian-ish zombies. When the first trailers of "RE5" debuted in 2008, many were shocked by scenes of white men pumping the skulls of rampaging black Africans with lead. "Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game," observed N'Gai Croal, a former Newsweek games columnist, at the time. He pointed out that the Japanese development team had managed to recreate the kind of racist imagery that was employed in the 1930s and 40s to depict blacks, and Africans specifically, as savages.

It bears noting that this "RE5" scenario is not unlike the previous game in the series, which opened in a spooky village in the Spanish countryside. The problem lay in Capcom's neglect of the complex and tragic history of the new African setting. "It would be like saying you were going to do some sort of zombie movie that appeared to be set in Europe in the 1940's with skinny, emaciated, Hasidic-looking people," said Croal. "If you put up that imagery people would be saying, 'Are you crazy?' Well, that's what this stuff looks like. This imagery has a history."

To their credit, Capcom seemed to have taken this criticism to heart. When the game was officially released earlier this year, its opening segment featured a veritable ethnic rainbow of zombie variety. This change deflected much of the pre-release grumbling, yet the fact remains that far more insensitive imagery awaits gamers later on in "RE5". Several levels in, players find themselves facing enemies deep in a swamp. And while the game is set in modern times, these enemies are wearing versions of traditional African costumes, including grass skirts, wooden masks, shields and spears. Spears. Clearly, the design team wanted to create an interesting variation on the standard, modern dress that enemies wear in preceding levels. But to any western gamer who has seen films like "Zulu" or the original "King Kong", the imagery is almost unbelievably racist.

I don't pretend to understand the attitude that the average Japanese game developer or gamer has to the legacy of western anti-African racism. But I do know that however unfortunate the imagery in the game was, it didn't make me stop playing. The game felt thoroughly Japanese, and I could rationalise it as the product of a culture that had a different history and different norms than my own.

"Far Cry 2", on the other hand, features a much more realistic and much more serious approach to its African setting. The player takes on the role of a mercenary who is tasked with assassinating "The Jackal", an arms merchant who has been supplying both sides of a civil war. In many ways it's an excellent game, and initially I found myself deeply interested in this setting and its denizens. But as I continued conducting missions for one or the other of the game's armed, warlord-led clans, I found myself increasingly upset about my place in this world.

Clearly, this was deliberate—the references to "Heart of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now" are impossible to ignore. I feel certain that the design team set out to make players question their own humanity amid assassination assignments. Still, the experience was profoundly unnerving. My personal breaking point came when one of my fellow mercenaries, a man who was my character's best friend, asked me to (as I recall) help him hijack a shipment of medicine and sell it to the highest bidder. I hit "eject" and haven't gone back to the game since.

It's hard to explain why being asked to participate in a fictional theft (that was doomed to be hijacked by another fictional militia anyway) was the trigger that made me abandon "Far Cry 2". On the surface, it seems far less fraught than the shooting of natives in "Resident Evil 5". Perhaps the issue here is that "Far Cry 2" based its moral quagmire on regional problems that I feel culturally responsible for. I felt disconnected from the Japanese team's offensive choices, the product of attitudes that are very different from my own. But the western-developed game was asking me to recreate a form of exploitation that white westerners like me have been committing for centuries. For this I respect the game in many ways, but I'm not sure I'll ever care to play it again.

Picture credit: Capcom, Ubisoft

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. He writes regularly about gaming for More Intelligent Life.)

PLINK, PLONK, BOOM

Tom Standage — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:47:14 +0000

Playing "Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Edition" on the child-friendly Nintendo DS is a bit like "putting vodka in a baby’s bottle," writes Tom Standage in his latest gaming column ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2009

Wherever two or three children are gathered together with nothing much to do, whether in a dentist’s waiting room or an airport lounge, you will hear the plinky-plonk tones of the Nintendo DS, with its merry games featuring Pokemon, ponies or puppies. And now this safe and cosy world has been invaded by a stolen car, driven by a drug-dealer, with a gun in his hand. “Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars”, the latest instalment of the most notorious of video games, is available on the DS. It’s like putting vodka in a baby’s bottle.

Borrowing my eight-year-old daughter’s DS, I slotted in the cartridge and was soon running over pedestrians, fleeing from the police, shooting at rival gang members, running drugs and hotwiring cars (using gestures with a stylus on the DS’s touch screen). The action, set in the murky underworld of Liberty City, a stylised version of New York, is rendered in a cartoonish graphic style which cleverly remains true to previous versions of the game without overtaxing the processing power of the DS. And it’s great fun. Better still, you can play it on the train—there’s an extra illicit thrill in doing all this on the 8.39 to Charing Cross.

The player takes the role of Huang Lee, the son of a murdered Triad boss, who heads to Liberty City to deliver a family heirloom to his uncle and finds himself drawn into the conflict between rival gangs. The script, as usual with “GTA”, is cynical, witty and well written. The game world manages to be large and immersive even when squeezed into the tiny DS. As unlikely as it sounds, given the sorts of game usually found on the DS, this is the genuine, controversial, ultra-violent article, with no corners cut.

And that is a good thing, not just because it’s an excellent game, but because the “GTA”-DS collision is a useful reminder to parents of the importance of paying attention to age ratings. As this is the first DS title to receive an 18 rating in Britain, its very existence declares that you cannot assume that all games for a particular console are suitable for children, any more than you can assume (as some do) that all games are violent and unsuitable. Indeed, generalisations about gaming as a genre are as worthless as generalisations about whether films or books are suitable for children. Some are, and some are not. Always read the label.

Illustration: Max Ellis

(Tom Standage is the gaming columnist for Intelligent Life and business editor for The Economist. His last column was on good films and bad games.)

FINALLY, A FIRST-PERSON GAME WITHOUT A GUN

Brett McCallon — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:38:05 +0000

First-person games can be thrilling, but they always seem to involve shooting (to the dismay of concerned parents and bored gamers). That's what makes "Mirror's Edge" so unique, writes Brett McCallon ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In modern video games first-person perspective, in which a game's camera is fixed approximately at a player's eyes, offers the illusion of near-total immersion within a game's world. Bullets appear to fly directly at you, not just at your onscreen avatar, which quickens the pulse and pours on the adrenaline. This helps to explain why the first-person shooter (FPS) genre has become such a gaming powerhouse. Series that feature this perspective, such as the "Halo" and "Call of Duty" games, have been among the most successful titles of the past few years.

However, first-person perspective in games has a number of disadvantages. For example, it can be difficult to intuit the precise position of a character's "body" in the game space. While aiming, shooting and moving along a flat plane are relatively simple, it's hard to figure out exactly where the character's "feet" are, so precise jumping is a challenge.

In practical terms, this has meant that almost all first-person perspective games are shooters (though some role-playing and driving games offer a first-person option). This has raised the hackles of both concerned parents and some bored gamers. Is shooting really the best way to harness the excitement of first-person perspective?

"Mirror's Edge", released last autumn by Electronic Arts, answers this question with an emphatic "no".

In essence, the game is designed to simulate parkour, as originated in France and popularised by various spectacular YouTube clips (and the opening sequence of the James Bond film "Casino Royale"). In parkour, practitioners climb, vault, jump, balance and in every way manoeuvre around, over, under and through various urban architecture. It's hard to describe, but watching it in action is guaranteed to amaze. Masters of parkour appear to defy the laws of physics, as well as the limitations of the human body, several times per second.

Other games have included elements of parkour, notably the "Prince of Persia" and "Assassin's Creed" games. Yet both depicted the action from a third-person perspective, so that players could easily comprehend the position of their characters and the distance to their next temporary handhold or landing point.

What makes "Mirror's Edge" so challenging, so exhilarating and often so frustrating is that it is played entirely from a first-person perspective. Players navigate the character, Faith, through various arresting, sparse, beautifully rendered urban obstacle courses, all the while maintaining the same view that the character herself would have. Just as in first-person shooters, this leads to some incredible gameplay moments. For example, during one notable sequence, Faith hurtles through the interior of a building, ducking around various armed enemies, only to find herself stranded on a terrace with no obvious next move. Soon enough it becomes clear that the only way forward is to hurtle bodily over the railing, slide down a hundred feet of angled, mirrored skyscraper and finally execute a split-second jump to grasp a railing on another building high above the virtual street. Watching the edge of a skyscraper race toward you, knowing that only a perfect leap will save you from a dizzying fall is a heart-palpitating experience, and one for which the game's design team (Swedish studio DICE) deserves tremendous credit.

Moments like these are some of the most exhilarating sequences offered by any recent game. Still, "Mirror's Edge" suffers from some of the typical limitations of first-person perspective. Players often need to execute a complex series of movements with split-second timing, yet spatial relationships still remain vague. (Thankfully the game returns players to their last safe position almost immediately after a fall, making trial-and-error gameplay less annoying than usual.)

Armed enemies appear at various points throughout each of the game's nine levels. While "Mirror's Edge" lets players kick, punch and disarm foes in slow motion, the game is designed to discourage shooting. Picking up a weapon removes all of Faith's complex movement abilities and drastically slows her otherwise breathtaking speed. Moreover, shooting just seems like the wrong approach in Mirror's Edge; some of the game's best moments come when players are able to intuit a path that takes them over, above and through ranks of machinegun-toting heavies, staying just ahead of the bullets all the while.

Still, opting to avoid the easy path by depending on well-placed kicks and evasion tends to mean suffering numerous deaths at each enemy encounter before finally figuring out how to escape.

"Mirror's Edge" is often frustrating, with a throwaway plot and no memorable characters, but it is also a strikingly original gameplay experience. Hopefully future iterations will build on the game's thrilling, movement-centred intensity and reduce the frustration. We could use a game that grants a first-person intensity without forcing players to perforate their foes.

Picture credit: "Mirror's Edge", Electronic Arts

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. His last gaming column was about the post-nuclear-war landscape of "Fallout 3".)

THE TROUBLE WITH WAR GAMES

Benjamin Pauker — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:48:20 +0000

The first video game about the Iraq war provoked a firestorm of its own. A realistic game about the second invasion of Fallujah might be a bit too ambitious, writes Benjamin Pauker ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

War is a messy business, but it also makes for good entertainment—eventually.

In the six years since the Iraq war began, there have been several dozen films and a handful of television shows about the conflict. Some, like “In the Valley of Elah” and “Generation Kill”, have been good, but most have been poor—either blatantly anti-war (Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs”), deceptively shallow (Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies”) or simply melodramatic (Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss”).

On the whole, fictionalised dramas about the war have earned little controversy and performed extraordinarily poorly. The execrable “Home of the Brave” (2006), for example, which starred Samuel L. Jackson, 50 Cent and Jessica Biel as soldiers grappling with physical and psychological injuries sustained in the war, cost an estimated $12m to make and grossed a mere $51,708 in America.

None of this helps to explain the furore over the first video game about the American experience in Iraq.

Konami, a game publisher, and Atomic Games, a game developer, announced in April that they planned to release “Six Days in Fallujah”, a third-person shooter based on the bloody second invasion of Fallujah in 2004. Meant to feel harrowingly realistic, the game puts players into the boots of American Marine Corps soldiers as they fight insurgents in the dusty streets of Iraq. Atomic Games reportedly consulted with both insurgents and Marine veterans to recreate the six-day assault, described by many as the heaviest urban combat in recent memory.

In its “First Look” review of the “ultrarealistic” game, GameSpot had much to praise:

With a focus on urban combat, and all of the complications that fighting in close quarters and among civilians brings with it, the developers at Atomic Games have created a new game engine to power the action in Six Days. The hallmark of the new engine is destruction; everything from individual bricks to entire buildings will be candidates for destruction in the game, a fact that opens up entirely new avenues of strategy when taking to the streets in the hunt for insurgents.

"Cool", said the boy in me. While I wouldn’t describe myself as an ardent video gamer, playing them remains an occasional guilty pleasure. I’m still amazed by how real games look and feel these days. When I was nine, my father returned from a business trip to Hong Kong with an Intellivision console, billed as the most advanced gaming system of the time. I recall blissful hours playing “Major League Baseball”, a game made up of right angles and primary colours, with sound effects that hovered somewhere between "The Three Stooges" and flatulence.

Check out a current baseball video game, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re watching a television broadcast of an actual contest. Perhaps that’s why killing aliens or zombies—popular fare in many of today’s shooter games—seems so tedious to me. Granted, I’m far too old for any of this, but if the technology exists, why not explore more adventurous and controversial territory? Atomic’s “Six Days” is certainly bold, possibly foolhardy and probably insensitive, but if they can pull off the claimed realism, I’m interested.

Popular response to the announcement, however, was decidedly mixed. Avid gamers were mostly excited by the planned release, but public opinion tended towards shock, if not outrage. A group representing the families of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq condemned the game for trivialising the conflict. In a damning interview in the Daily Mail, the father of a British soldier killed in the battle called it “crass and insensitive.” Too soon, said the chorus, too soon.

Konami, the game's distributor, balked and summarily pulled out of the project only two weeks after the big announcement. "After seeing the reaction to the video game in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it," a Konami rep told the Asahi Shimbun.

I spoke with Peter Tamte, the president of Atomic, and asked him if he expected this firestorm. “Well, we knew there would be some controversy,” he chuckled, then exhaled. “But no, not like this.” Konami’s decision to pull the release reportedly caught Atomic by surprise.

What is it, then, that so inflamed public opinion? Perhaps it’s the fact that the video game is based on an ongoing war. The 2004 invasion wasn't so long ago, and for some the wounds are still fresh.

Of the hundreds of studio films and television shows that have dramatised war, few have ever attempted to tackle the complexities of one that was still in progress. Fewer still have done it well. The problem, of course, is perspective. The films that burst forth from Hollywood during the early days of the second world war were consistently of the rah-rah variety. It is for good reason that no one remembers "Stand By for Action", a film made in 1943 about naval battles in the Pacific. But the more reflective "From Here to Eternity" (1953) and "The Great Escape" (1963) have stood the test of time.

John Wayne’s controversial pro-war vehicle “The Green Berets” was one of only a handful of popular films produced during the Vietnam war. When it was released in 1968 Roger Ebert, a film critic, gave it zero stars, and eviscerated it for being “offensive” and “dishonest.” More nuanced efforts, such as “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now,” came ten years later.

Like Vietnam, Iraq is a complicated and unpopular conflict, and few seem to be ready to see it dramatised on screen. Back in early 2005, Stephen Boccho, a vaunted television producer ("NYPD Blue", "LA Law"), released “Over There”, billing it as the first serial television drama about an ongoing conflict. It earned some fanfare but little critical acclaim. No one watched it: the show was cancelled after only 13 episodes.

Supposedly there are only two types of stories: a stranger comes to town, and a man goes on a journey. The Iraq war is both, but everyone hates the stranger, and the journey was a dumb idea to begin with. Do you want to see that film? American audiences don’t--at least not yet--and for good reason.

But why not a video game? You can’t really blame the developers at Atomic Games for trying. There are dozens of extremely popular and profitable console video games about modern warfare. Even Konami, the erstwhile distributor of "Six Days in Fallujah", sells the remarkable “Metal Gear Solid 4”, which begins with its protagonist caught in a Middle Eastern firefight. Grab your gun and you’re off, sniping and slicing the throats of sinister private military corporation employees.

It’s easy to understand the small leap to pixellating the Fallujah invasion. “Six Days” is meant to capture the visceral feel of urban warfare, with morally complex scenarios and documentary footage to heighten the realism. “Every aspect of the game is based on a true story,” says Tamte. "We want—and it’s very hard to do this and it hasn’t really been done too well before—is to make people feel what it was like to be there. And video games are among the best ways to explain what it’s like to be a Marine in intense, urban warfare.”

Tamte notes that just like in real warfare, characters in the game will have to make “split-second moral choices,” though he wouldn’t elaborate on what exactly that means. (I’ll hazard a guess: collateral damage.) Herein lies a key problem: video games are not yet sophisticated enough to dramatise the sometimes awful consequences of certain choices (though this is starting to change), and they are just not built to evoke the terrible costs of war.

Say, for example, a player accidentally--or wilfully--kills a few civilian families by calling in an air raid: what is the punishment? Remorse? A cut-scene of a court martial? And what about injuries, or death? How could such things be represented meaningfully if they fail to capture the bigger picture?

Our feelings about this war may be just too complicated for what is meant to be an entertaining simulation. “The word ‘game’ is a problem for us,” Tamte acknowledges. If it ever sees light of day, “Six Days” will be judged not for its high-minded ideals, but for their execution. On this, it will inevitably fail. The essential problem is that part of the fun of video games, and third- or first-person shooters in particular, is the superhero aspect: the ability to wage war almost single-handedly, racking up a staggering body count. This forces game programmers to choose the simpler "realism" of intense urban combat over the more difficult task: conveying the folly and futility of war. Want realism? Read Dexter Filkin's book "The Forever War". Cowering for hours on a rooftop and then watching a friend get shot in the face just isn't fun.

Still, Atomic Games may be on to something. Recently I asked Ned Parker, a long-time Baghdad correspondent, what he thought of "Six Days". “It sounds kind of crazy,” he allowed, “but the last time I embedded with troops in Iraq, as soon as they got back to base, all they did was get on their laptops and play war games.”

Picture credit: "Six Days in Fallujah", Atomic Games

(Benjamin Pauker is managing editor of World Policy Journal.)

GOOD FILM, BAD GAME

Tom Standage — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:48:36 +0000

Why do good films make such bad games, and vice-versa? Tom Standage, business editor of The Economist, considers this strange paradox ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

“The Chronicles of Riddick”, a dodgy sci-fi flick from 2004 starring Vin Diesel, was not a high point in film history. But it is held in high esteem by video-gamers. Its spin-off game, one of the best on the old Xbox, made pioneering use of whizzy graphical tricks, such as simulated depth of field. It had a strong plot and voice acting, and a cinematic quality far ahead of its time. It was re-released in March, updated for the latest consoles, as a bonus with a fervently awaited new “Riddick” game, “Assault on Dark Athena”.

Most spin-off games, alas, are dire, but they sell anyway, often to parents of young children, who assume that if Little Johnny liked the film, he’ll like the game, too. This is a trap set for the non-gaming adult. Pay no attention to the recognisable characters and reassuring packaging: the chances are that a dud game lurks inside.

Why? Spin-off games are often rushed, to be ready in time for the film release. They are often produced by a separate company that is simply given a script and a load of artwork and told to make a game, pronto—hardly a recipe for quality.

The best games draw you in with a blend of satisfying gameplay, carefully calibrated difficulty, an attractive game world and a compelling plot. Movie tie-ins are absolved from these requirements. They are often made by taking an existing game and re-skinning it with details from a film, forcing them into a particular genre and stifling innovation. So you find yourself fighting off endless streams of baddies, and collecting glowing rings or orbs, whether or not these things figured in the film. Judging by its tie-in game, Narnia is overrun by an infinite supply of wolves that must be beaten to death with sticks.

The film’s plot provides the game’s structure, and you are expected to plod your way through it, no matter how dull or confusing its presentation. In “Harry Potter”, Hogwarts is a school filled with wonders; play the latest video game and it becomes a prison, filled with menial tasks.

Spin-off games get away with being so bad by exploiting the buzz around a film. The “Riddick” game, by contrast, had to overcome anti-buzz. It did so with new twists in both gameplay and graphics, transcending its film rather than being hemmed in by it. The same is true of the “Lego Star Wars” games and other titles in which franchises (“Indiana Jones”, “Batman”) are re-enacted in plastic bricks. The Lego games add playful humour and gentle but satisfying puzzle-solving to a film’s existing world. Tellingly, they are not direct spin-offs and are not tied to particular films, but are based on franchises with enduring popularity. And just as films usually make bad games, games invariably make bad films. What works in one medium rarely works in the other.

Illustration: Richard Rockwood

(Tom Standage is the gaming columnist for Intelligent Life and business editor for The Economist. His last column was on addictive games.)

AT PLAY: COMPELLING, DYSTOPIC "FALLOUT 3"

Brett McCallon — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 13:54:55 +0000

Set in a post-nuclear-war landscape, "Fallout 3" is an almost unbearably grim video game. Brett McCallon explains why he can't stop playing it ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I'm clambering through the ruins of what was once an elementary school, now a hideout for a post-apocalyptic gang of criminals. Out of the corner of my eye I notice a mohawked psychotic in leather bustier levelling a shotgun at me. The world slows, I take careful aim and blow her head off. Her comrades then descend on me in force. I duck out of range of a grenade, take my gun and mow down the rest of the gang. I take a moment to savour my victory.

I now have unquestioned dominion over what is in fact a hollow shell of a building, lifeless amid the remains of a civilisation that committed suicide.

These weird juxtapositions of triumph and desolation have defined my experience of "Fallout 3", a startlingly detailed role-playing game (RPG) set in a post-nuclear-war landscape. Released last autumn by Bethesda Softworks, this is the company's second hit RPG in four years, following on the wildly successful "Oblivion". The games have similarities: both let players create their own story within a huge game world. Both feature a central plot, yet players can pursue dozens of missions, visit numerous locations and meet a huge cast of characters, many of whom have no role in the main story at all.

But their respective worlds couldn't be more different. "Oblivion" is a traditional, swords-and-sorcery fantasy epic. It places characters in the mythical kingdom of Tamriel, where environments range from lush forests to snow-capped mountains. Fundamentally, the world seems worth saving. "Fallout 3", on the other hand, is set in the suburbs of Washington, DC, some 270 years after a nuclear war. Save this blasted, hostile world? For what?

A destroyed landscape has been the setting for games before, including the recent "Gears of War 2" and the first two games in the "Fallout" series. But "Gears" transpires on another planet, a thinly imagined backdrop for heart-pumping firefights, and the earlier "Fallout" games were rendered with technology that is now at least a decade old. What "Fallout 3" introduces is a terrible realism and familiarity. Players can explore the remains of the Washington monument from a fairly realistic perspective. The view from the top is plainly depressing.

And that's hardly the only dark scene. Murder, cannibalism, slavery, child abuse--the developers at Bethesda deserve credit for creating appropriately nightmarish content. It's easy to see why most game designers tread a little softer around dystopic scenarios. Yet I still play. What makes "Fallout 3" so compelling is the way its bleak setting, hopeless atmosphere and interactivity create personally meaningful moments.

The game is known for giving players unprecedentedly consequential choices. Most famously, players can either save or destroy the first town they encounter, potentially wiping out dozens of characters and hours of gameplay, while opening up a criminal world that is otherwise inaccessible. But in my own journey through this wasteland, I found that the most emotionally wrenching experiences were more subtle.

To take one example of many: a young boy asks me to destroy the monsters who had killed everyone else in his town. I ultimately do away with the monsters (giant, mutated, fire-spitting ants--apparently a fairly common pest in the post-Armageddon future), but not before they murder the boy's father. Even with the last ant dead, the kid was stranded in a ghost town. When I left, the boy had hidden himself inside a personal protection station the size of a phone booth. I promised to look up his aunt in Rivet City, whenever I made my way down there.

For a while afterward I wandered around looking for trouble and new quests, but something was bothering me. I know it's stupid; I know the kid is just lines of code and some well-executed voice acting. But I couldn't just leave him in that booth, all alone. My natural instincts to protect my real-world daughter forced me to turn around and travel as quickly as possible to locate the kid's aunt and return to tell him the good news. His pre-scripted, animated smile didn't offer the payoff I might have hoped for. But the fact that Bethesda has created a world so dismal, so mindful of our worst fears about the future, that I found myself rushing to help a pretend child in a fictional wasteland just to prove that I am a civilised human being--now that's a significant achievement.

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. His last gaming column was about how gaming can and should infiltrate our everyday lives.)

AT PLAY: HOW GAMING WILL (AND SHOULD) INFILTRATE OUR EVERYDAY LIVES

Brett McCallon — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:00:47 +0000

New video games are encouraging players to cook dinner, get in shape, learn French and enjoy the genius of Beethoven. Brett McCallon is cheered by the way gaming has infiltrated the everyday. Now if only he could convince his wife to play "Halo" ...
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I love video games, clearly. Unfortunately, my wife doesn't feel the same way. At all. And while the two of us have reached a detente on the most important aspects of this issue (my children will be raised as devout, if moderate, gamers), my efforts to convert her over the past seven years have been totally fruitless.

Recently, though, I noticed that her regular Facebook habit now includes a near-daily round of "Lexulous", the online, unlicensed replica of the popular word-based board game "Scrabble". "You realise, of course, that you're now a video-gamer, right?" I asked smugly. Her dismissive raised eyebrow indicated that she was unconvinced. And to be honest, my dreams of co-op "Halo" sessions with my beloved were no closer to fruition than they were before she nailed her first online triple-word score.

But "Lexulous", and the game's incredible popularity on Facebook, does say something about the way that gaming is infiltrating the experience of seemingly non-gaming-related activities. As gaming becomes more mainstream, and as designers learn to use gaming mechanics to enhance our work, education and relaxation, we can envision a time in which nearly every experience offers the possibility, if not the requirement, for play.

Nintendo has been remarkably prescient in this area, both with the motion-controlled Wii console and with its portable DS system. Much of the company's recent success has come from convincing non-gamers to pick up a system in order to play a non-traditional game. The company's early triumphs on the DS included "Nintendogs", which isn't so much a game as it is a simulation of caring for and playing with a virtual pet; and "Brain Age", which promises to sharpen players' mental acuity through a daily regimen of timed tests (including mathematics, matching puzzles, etc).

More recently, Nintendo has seen incredible success in combining gaming and exercise with "Wii Fit". The game retails for $90, nearly twice the price of a regular game for the Wii console, as it requires both the software and a "balance board". But Nintendo's savvy marketing to non-traditional gamers (read: my parents), together with the promise of a slimmer physique, sold over 4.5m copies last year in America alone.

"Wii Fit" is not the first video game that has promoted fitness, but it does present a streamlined, user-friendly experience, using the balance board's weight-sensing capability to model the shifting centre of balance of the player. Through this core mechanic, "Wii Fit" can simulate both sports mini-games (including an event in which the player leans left and right to deflect virtual soccer balls with his head) and more traditional fitness activities, including yoga exercises.

Exercise is only one of the non-gaming areas into which gaming has intruded in recent years. Games that teach foreign languages, cooking and other skills are also becoming increasingly popular. But in addition to instructive gaming, there are a number of titles that offer new ways to experience routine tasks.

Take, for instance, listening to music. Certainly, the iPod and the digitization of our music libraries have helped many of us dive deeper into the forgotten corners of our album collections. But a clever game called "Audiosurf" (pictured) offers the opportunity to experience music in a very different, very interactive sense. On its surface, the game is a hybrid of the puzzle (think "Tetris") and racing genres: players direct a vehicle as it picks up variously coloured blocks that must be matched in patterns in order to earn points and avoid penalties.

That aspect of the game isn't the interesting part, though. "Audiosurf" is so fascinating, and so infinitely playable, because the game automatically generates a custom racing-track based on the rhythm, melody and other characteristics of any audio file the player chooses. Different colours of blocks appear as the intensity of the song ebbs and flows, necessitating different gameplay approaches to different musical genres, or even slower and faster parts of the same track.

In other words, rather than simply racing through a futuristic world collecting patterned blocks, the game provides an experience that is uniquely attuned to the chosen music. It creates a new mode for listening to music while also engaging with it--by "playing" some of my favourite songs in "Audiosurf", I have noticed rhythmic and melodic nuances that had eluded me during hundreds of previous, passive listening sessions. Try navigating the rhythmic minefield of "Tomorrow Never Knows", for example, and you'll never disparage Ringo's drumming technique again.

Even such mundane activities as household chores can be made less onerous through the addition of gaming mechanics. A free, web-based game called "Chore Wars" lets players apply traditional role-play game rules to their laundry, dishwashing and vacuuming duties. For each completed task, players are granted "experience", "gold", etc, which helps their characters advance through imagined quests. It's a fairly basic system, but as a means of motivating lazy spouses and housemates to pull their weight, it could be quite helpful.

The idea that many aspects of our lives may eventually be influenced by video games may not appeal to some of you. Surely some activities will rightfully remain resistant to the allure of customised game-rules, reward mechanics and similar innovations. But if games can help to convince you or the ones you love to cook dinner, get in shape, learn French, rediscover the greatness of Beethoven, or keep their wits sharp, that can't be all bad, can it?

Picture credit: Audiosurf

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. His last gaming column was about Hideo Kojima's deeply flawed masterpiece.)

GAMING: "SPORE" GETS THE WILLIES

Tom Standage — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:12:50 +0000

User-generated content is working wonders in the gaming industry. "Spore" is a fine example, except for all of those penis-shaped monsters, writes Tom Standage ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine

Unleashing a plague of penis-shaped monsters onto the internet was probably not what Will Wright had in mind when he started work on "Spore" eight years ago. Wright is a gaming legend, and one of its few bankable stars, but "Spore" has become the video-game equivalent of the long-overdue Guns N’ Roses album, “Chinese Democracy”. Yet somehow, with its arrival last autumn, "Spore" manages to be right on top of one of gaming’s latest trends: user-generated content. Which is where all those phallic creatures come in.

"Spore" is a game of galactic ambition, in every sense. Wright, best known as the creator of "SimCity" and "The Sims", originally called the new game Sim Everything, since it takes his love of simulation to its logical extreme. "Spore" kicks off at the cellular level, as you guide primordial microbes around the screen, looking for food and avoiding predators. Then you reach the creature level, where your creature fights to establish itself in a harsh environment, competing with other beasties and evolving under your guidance. Next comes the tribal phase: you control a village of your creatures as they gather food, fight other tribes and discover new tools. Then comes civilisation, in which you design new buildings and vehicles as your creatures expand their influence. Once they develop the technology, the game moves into space, where your creatures colonise new planets, fend off rival civilisations and generally try to rule the galaxy.

If playing God were not ambitious enough, there is a further twist: much of what players see in "Spore" will have been created by other players, just like on Wikipedia or YouTube. Your creatures can be uploaded into a shared online “Sporepedia”, which populates your world as you play. Isn’t this just outsourcing an expensive bit of making a new game—the character design—to its players? Well, yes. But examples of user-generated stuff online show that it can work well, if there are ways to make sure that the best content rises and the bad stuff sinks.

The problem is that some people will always make stuff that other people find offensive. In June a taster for "Spore", called Creature Creator, was released as a free download. It lets you design your own creature, reshaping its body by pulling it here and there, adding arms, legs and grasping limbs, placing eyes, tusks and so on. Then you can make it jump, dance, roar and sing. The Creature Creator is a joy to use: Wright creates software toys that are simply great fun. So much fun, in fact, that people started creating penis monsters, giant walking breasts, and so on—and then putting video of their creations online. "Spore"’s publisher, Electronic Arts, sniffily threatened to suspend offenders from playing. But the whole thing provided lots of free publicity. And the game allows users to tag Sporepedia items they regard as offensive, to filter them out. There are also mechanisms to reward the creators of successful creatures.

"Spore" is not alone. "Little Big Planet", a new game for the PlayStation 3 in which you guide a character called Sackboy through a series of obstacle courses, lets players design their own levels, share them online, and vote for the ones they like best. Enthusiasts have been designing add-ons and new levels for PC games for years, but the process was too fiddly for most players. "Spore" and "Little Big Planet" make it easier for players to create and share content, and to become more of a community. "Spore" suggests the idea has great potential—as long as the penis monsters can be kept at bay.

Picture credit: y2bk (via Flickr), Electronic Arts

(Tom Standage is the gaming columnist for Intelligent Life and business editor for The Economist. His most recent gaming column was about his addiction to "Jewel Quest II".)

AT PLAY: HIDEO KOJIMA'S DEEPLY FLAWED MASTERPIECE

Brett McCallon — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:49:01 +0000

"Hideo Kojima's 'Metal Gear Solid 4: Sons of the Patriots' was, without question, one of the most important game releases of 2008," writes Brett McCallon in his gaming column. Be patient: its greatness overcomes its considerable flaws ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Hideo Kojima's "Metal Gear Solid 4: Sons of the Patriots" was, without question, one of the most important game releases of 2008. It represented a monumental achievement in terms of graphical fidelity, gameplay innovation, and cinema-grade production values.

Yet I hesitated to play it. While Kojima's talent is unquestionable, he is also unquestionably self-indulgent, and his work can seem impenetrable to those who don't follow it closely. Kojima is sort of like the David Lynch of the gaming world. Like Lynch, Kojima's brilliant images and stunning innovations are often coupled with questionable narrative and aesthetic decisions. But having invested the 20 or so hours it takes to complete "MGS 4", I'm happy to say that the game is far more "Mulholland Drive" than "Dune". Kojima's team has created an undeniably powerful gameplay experience, despite its considerable flaws.

The "Metal Gear" games, which first appeared in 2D form in the 1980s, base their gameplay on stealth. Perhaps Kojima's most important innovation was turning the standard gaming convention on its head. Instead of a powerful hero who shoots his way through wave after wave of innumerable, but comparatively weak enemies, these games tend to feature an unarmed hero who sneaks around a complex environment. He can fight his enemies, but the game rewards those who use the terrain, gadgets and their wits to avoid detection altogether.

The series' other hallmark is that much of the experience consists of narrative cut-scenes--that is, cinematic, non-interactive segments (discussed in a previous column). These moments in "MGS 4" are the best in the business. Not only does Kojima have a real gift for cinematography, but his team's mastery of graphics and animation means that it is surprisingly easy to become completely engrossed in the action, and to forget that you are watching a video game. Some of the combat sequences are on a par with any similar scene in "The Matrix" or "Kill Bill".

The problem is Kojima needs an editor. Desperately. Cut-scenes in "MGS 4" regularly exceed 20 minutes, and the game's final scene is nearly an hour. These might make nice short films, but 20 minutes of watching a game (in lieu of playing) can feel excruciating. In the case of the immaculately choreographed action scenes, I was torn between admiration and frustration: I loved watching them, but it seemed odd that most of the best action in the first two acts of the game is out of the player's control.

More problematically, the majority of these scenes are devoted to endless, ponderous, histrionic explication of an utterly absurd plotline, along with some seriously over-the-top melodrama. While the history of gaming is littered with formulaic, deeply silly narrative ideas, "MGS" takes the prize for both implausibility and self-seriousness. It's pointless to even try to synopsise the absurdities of the "MGS" story here--the game's publisher, Konami, recently released an interactive encyclopaedia to help make sense of it all. Here's one emblematic plot point: Liquid Snake, the twin of Solid Snake, the game's hero (both of whom are clones of Big Boss, a legendary war hero), dies in the first instalment of the MGS series, only to have his arm grafted onto former Russian operative and superhuman marksman Revolver Ocelot. The arm then apparently takes control of Ocelot's brain, naturally.

It took nearly eight hours of playtime before "MGS 4"'s greatness overcame these flaws. I was fully hooked by the third act, in which the player controls Solid Snake as he stealthily pursues a member of a resistance movement through a heavily patrolled, gorgeously rendered Eastern European city in the dead of night. It was like controlling Joseph Cotten as he pursues Orson Welles through the streets of Vienna in "the Third Man". The tension was relentless: just when I believed that I was in an undetectable position, my quarry suddenly stopped, looked around, and doubled back toward my hiding place behind a screen of bushes. Scrambling out of sight, I saw that he had returned in order to relieve himself in the shadows. I waited for him to finish, took a deep breath, and then resumed the hunt at a safe distance. For vicarious, cold-war-era spy thrills, this beat the hell out of John leCarre.

The game is littered with brilliant moments like the above, but its true genius lies in the empathy that the game develops between the player and Solid Snake. For reasons that are too ridiculous to explore here, Solid Snake has aged prematurely by the beginning of the game. As the gameplay progresses, his physical deterioration is viscerally conveyed (Snake is frequently overcome with coughing fits, pain in his back, etc) to a point where I actually felt bad about pushing Snake through ever more difficult challenges. In one of game's final interactive segments, Snake must make his way through a series of hallways that are filled with microwave radiation. In order to progress, the player must hammer on one of the controller buttons with ever-increasing rapidity, even as Snake falls to his knees and finally crawls the final few feet to his destination. This was a truly weird experience: my frustration at the endless, high-speed button-pressing mixed with the obvious pain of the character on screen to produce something very much like regret, at least in my case.

I felt bad for putting Snake through this--which is precisely what Kojima's team was hoping for. It's strange--having finished the game, I'm still entirely indifferent to the plot and most of the characters, but I feel like I have a stronger identification with Snake than I have with any other game character I've ever controlled.

And that is a singular, and remarkable, achievement.

Picture credit: Konami

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. His last gaming column was a last-minute shopping list.)