Blog - Reflections on DJ Hero -- Music Games aren't Dying, They Just Forgot Who They Are

Friday, January 22, 2010

I have read about how sales are down on the music-game-with-plastic-instruments game genre as a whole. That they haven't been meeting sales expectations. I've heard cries that the genre is waning. Dying out. DJ Hero is one of those titles that just wasn't meeting sales expectations (despite Activision now boasting that it's generated more sales than any other new IP this year, ironically... although it seems that was in terms of revenue, not copies sold.)

Playing DJ Hero, though, I get the feeling that the problem isn't that the genre isn't dying-- the genre has just forgotten who it is. Or, more accurately, it forgot what made it hot in the first place.

I've mentioned many times here before that I'm a huge fan of Harmonix's first game, Frequency which is also a DJ game in a sense but in far more abstract terms. But Frequency and it's sequel were never the successes that their later game Guitar Hero was... Guitar Hero was the game that REALLY kick started the recent craze in music games, despite the fact that they've been around for quite a while now. And comparing the two games, it's not hard to see why. I think people at Harmonix would be the first to admit all the things that Frequency does that make it no where near the commercial and popular success that their later games have been. And I say this saying that I actually like Frequency BETTER than I like Guitar Hero -- that doesn't stop me from viewing it's flaws critically and admitting that it's not nearly as accessible of a game.

Playing DJ Hero, and the few times I've been able to play Activision's contributions to the Guitar Hero franchise as well, makes me wonder if the developers of the game really took the time to look back into the past and see the paradigm shifts that happened at Harmonix to take them from Frequency to their smash hit Guitar Hero (and it's continued legacy in Rock Band).

I say this because playing DJ Hero gives me the feeling that it's falling into all the same traps as Frequency. And as the Guitar Hero series progressed post-Harmonix, they just got harder and harder... and I stopped finding them less fun as a result.

Two things really made the initial Guitar Hero blast off in a rocket of success:

First, it was super-accessible. The music itself was, for one thing -- rock music is more generally popular and accessible than the stuff in Frequency, and they had enough flavors of it to more or less satisfy everyone. But also there's the interface -- the interface of Frequency/Amplitude is a big scary octagon of doom which intimidates the hell out of people who have never experienced the game before. A friend of mine watched me play Frequency for 20 minutes straight and said "I still have NO idea what's going on." But Guitar Hero? Pretty straightforward.

Second, it made you feel like a rock star. You could pick up the controller and after you get the hang of it after a couple songs, you're really rocking out. It's easy to get all stupid getting into character with friends and trying to look your most badass while shredding...
Frequency, although it got you into a real groove sometimes... and sometimes you'd pull off something impossibly hard in the game and feel a bit like a legend... was in the end too abstract to really make you feel like a rock star in any capacity.

So-- DJ Hero. When I played it, I initially jumped into playing it on medium. I guess I knew that it was going to be a different experience and would probably be lost jumping straight into expert mode... but cocky enough about my skills at other rhythm games to swallow my pride and try easy mode.

So, starting on medium difficulty-- I was immediately overwhelmed. On MEDIUM.
Oh sure, I got the hang of it eventually, and beat the whole game on medium... but initially it left me very flustered. I've now gotten used to where the controls on the mixer are located, but first starting, I'd be watching the screen and groping-- nay, flailing, trying to find them while keeping my focus on the screen.

Feel like a rock star DJ I certainly did NOT.

Even now, having beaten all of the hardest songs in the game on medium... I still don't think there's too many songs easy enough that I could properly show-boat and act like a cocky pro DJ if friends were over to play it as a party game. ...on medium.

I eventually decided though that it was unfair that I was judging the game in this way by medium difficulty mode, and went back to try the others. I take some of it back now. For example, beginner mode can't help but be too easy for anyone but the person who has never played a single rhythm game in their life before, and are hopelessly uncoordinated. So, accessibility as far as difficulty goes? I'll give it to them after all.

And having played through some songs on all difficulty levels now I'll admit that there actually is a really decent curve of difficulty between all the different difficulty modes. I can't think of a better way than they did it. But... it still doesn't feel quite right to me. But as I can't admittedly think of a way it could be better -- sure, you win this round, DJ Hero.

I've since, btw, jumped into playing Expert mode now, and at first I thought it was actually pretty cool -- terrifyingly difficult, but it's interesting that it's far more accurate to real turntablism than the rest of the game, and the challenge of actually having to scratch in the right directions is kind of fun.
(...But those damn peak spikes! WTF ARE THOSE?! They are just annoying as hell, impossible to juggle on top of everything else and are entirely unlike anything a DJ does ever!! Again, W-T-F?! ...there, got it out of my system... sorry)

However, all that said, there's still a problem -- the interface. At first it seems simple -- 3 note track. Not bad! But as the game goes on, it adds more and more things that happen to that track-- the crossfader that splits the track, the different kinds of scratch portions, the sample-playing sections, the dial-tuning bits and the peaks...

If you hadn't played or seen the tutorials, you'd have NO IDEA what's going on!
Guitar Hero you could easily play without a tutorial, but I can't imagine anyone playing most of the songs in DJ Hero without having seen the tutorials, especially the higher the difficulty modes. Really hurts the game as far as being pick-up-and-play at a party -- which is what made Guitar Hero explode in popularity.

And, furthermore, the problem with all those things that clutter up the track is that all that all of those things are entirely different actions you have to perform!

Here, let's go back and look at something...

Frequency had quite a few actions possible:
-hit beats
-switch tracks
-deploy powerups
-scratch/play samples (when available)
-play with the axe (when available)

Guitar Hero?
-hit notes, sometimes chords
-strum (basically always done at the same time as the hitting of notes, so it's almost only really one action, and not two)
-deploy star power.

5 vs 3.
And... which one of those two was the more accessible, hugely selling game again?

DJ Hero's list...
-hit beats, sometimes 'chords' of them at the same time
-crossfading to the left or the right with the crossfader
-scratching, sometimes freestyle, sometimes in more specific discrete directions
-tuning the audio with the effects dial knob
-deploying 'euphoria' (read: star power) with a button on the mixer for that
-spinning back the platter to rewind the track (when available)
-hitting peak spikes with the crossfader

7. Woah.
(Isn't the limit to how many things a person can even juggle in their head... 7 things? HMM...)

Note also that the game often has you doing some completely ridiculous juggling of things that are on completely different controls!
Sometimes I swear it seems like there's more things available for you to do at a time than is physically possible with only two hands.

Again, feeling like a rock star, I did not. I just felt incompetent.

Admittedly, the difficulty level you're on does determine how many of those features you'll see or have to use (thank god). So, put Grandma on beginner mode and all she'll have to do is hit one button and freestyle scratch -- not bad. Easy mode, best as I could tell (didn't play too many songs on it) adds all three buttons. So in some ways it still does beat Frequency's list, if you're playing on a low enough difficulty mode.

But I can't see myself ever 5-starring more than the first 4 tracks on expert mode. Thanks for making me feel like a loser, game.

And since even on medium, I find most songs too difficult to show-boat so I can feel like a rock star... the game just doesn't make as good of a party game as even Guitar Hero, let alone the new "band" games out these days...

At least DJ Hero provides a 2 player mode -- a nice attempt. But I don't think it's enough to make it work as a party game, and so it'll never be the success that Guitar Hero was.


But after all that criticism of DJ Hero -- the game certainly isn't awful. If I had worked on it, I'd be pretty damn proud. The game design may not be as polished as it should be -- but the game as a whole certainly is! Some of the mashups are really awesome, and there's not too many song/levels I straight up dislike -- the overall quality of the tunes available are pretty good. I totally love the spinback-rewind powerup -- time rewinding in a Guitar Hero style game is really interesting and actually leads to at least some strategy (something the rhythm game genre generally sorely lacks). The game has certainly kept me playing it, and nothing BUT it (due to the fact I AM in crunch right now so not really much free time for gaming...) for a week now. So kudos, Activision.

But yes-- that said, I can't lie to you either-- the game's got some real issues too.
But hey, nobody's perfect. I can tell you a million things wrong with my games...

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:30 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Fun With Time Pressure

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

An old trick for making game play more emotionally intense is to add time pressure.

As a fun example, my sister and I for a brief time enjoyed a variant of chess we invented, and it used this technique. The core rules remained the same, although we did experiment with new starting locations of the pieces. For the most part, however, it was the normal game of chess but with one new rule:
For every 1 second you had not yet moved one of your pieces on your turn, your opponent was entitled to slap you in the face.


It turns chess into a rather different game.
Analysis Paralysis is long gone, replaced with panicked, rash decision making.
The anger and fear of being slapped tumbles together with your amusement at the hilariously stupid moves you're making to avoid the slaps. We also blasted high bpm trance music to keep the energy levels high and the heart racing. It's a strange roller-coaster of emotions all at once.

I don't know if too many more people are insane enough to try it, but at least it amused me. And yes, we actually did play this more than once. :)

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:42 AM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - More on Frequency

Monday, December 29, 2008

Inspired by yesterday's entry, today I'll write a little bit more on Frequency.

I had played it back when it was first out, but never properly owned a copy of it myself until recently. This summer I found a copy in a bargain bin at a Walmart, and eagerly snatched it up.

By the end of this last quarter I was playing it pretty heavily and nearly beat everything in the game (can't manage to beat the final bonus song...)

Playing the game post-Guitar Hero and Rock Band is a very strange thing. You can see the ways in which Harmonix saw the strengths and failures of their earlier titles when developing their later ones.
Frequency is a great game, but I can see why it never took off as hugely as Guitar Hero did.
First of all, I'm sure more people are into rock music than electronic music, and more than that, almost everyone has a "I want to be a rock star!" fantasy while far fewer have a fantasy of "I want to be a DJ!"
And to that effect, Guitar Hero actually makes you feel like a rock star much more so than Frequency and Amplitude, which are so abstracted that they don't really feel anything like being a DJ.

Most tellingly, though, was the fact that I was playing the game for one long session one day as my roommate had a bunch of friends over. Everyone who passed by the television would usually stop and watch me play for a period of time, and, as they'd leave would say something akin to: "I have no idea what is going on in that game," and leave, regardless of how long they had been watching me.
Even if I tried to explain how the game worked, and even if they were fans of Guitar Hero, they still didn't fully "get" Frequency.
Admittedly it does have a much more intimidating interface than Guitar Hero does and the seizure-inducing background art didn't help things I'm sure.

I find this a bit of a shame though because I really love the game.
First of all, perhaps its a bit of a bias on my part as I'm more into electronic music genres than rock. More than that, though, through playing it again post-Guitar Hero I find that it's a more interesting game to play than Guitar Hero is in some ways.

If you take the 'classic' Meier game definition of "A series of interesting decisions," then Guitar Hero you'll note does not really have any real decisions at all.
Chris Bateman wrote an interesting rant about it that I would encourage reading. In any case, he points out that Guitar Hero doesn't have any real decisions to be made but is still and absolutely fantastic and successful game, so games need not have any decisions at all.

That said, Frequency intrigues me as a musical, rhythm-based game that actually did have a degree of strategic choices involved. The only real choice you have in Guitar Hero is "When should I deploy my star power, where it will be most effective?", which indeed originates in Frequency, where the choice of when to most effectively use your power-ups sometimes even becomes a question of whether it's a good idea to use them at all (in some ocassions, using a powerup in the wrong situation would actually cause you to earn less points than you otherwise would have.)
More than that, though, is that unlike in Guitar Hero where you are only playing one instrument throughout the song, and thus have to merely anticipate and play the notes played by that instrument, the play of Frequency is actually more about switching instruments many times mid-song. In order to maximize your score (which becomes increasingly life-or-death as the game grows more difficult) you have to think on your feet incredibly quickly as to which instrument you should switch to next.
This makes the game a far more intense game than Guitar Hero, which may explain another reason it never achieved the successes of it's offspring games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band as it was limited to a much more hardcore audience.

For example, one decision that comes up in the game at times is trying to deduce if you have enough time after completing one track to jump over to, say, the next track to the right, deploy the track-completing power-up you have on that track and jump again to the next track to the right after before the start of the next measure so you can play it. It's a tricky decision to make as that gap in time might be less than a second long, and given the fast paced tempo of the songs in the game, one didn't have long to decide. It's also a high risk but high reward move: to misjudge the time and come in late on the next measure you risked losing an entire measure, which on later difficulty levels is something that is difficult to afford... but pull it off and the payout of points would be very substantial.

Needless to say, that's... pretty hardcore. So in effect, the element of strategy in Frequency and Amplitude most likely limited it's appeal to a broader audience, and you'll notice such features were removed to make Guitar Hero, which was a massive success in comparison.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:24 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Musical Play

Saturday, December 27, 2008

My mom rented Wii Music and it has me thinking about games with musical play.

While discussing the topic with Dan, a friend and fellow game design student, I came up with a few parameters by which I was ranking musical gameplay features:

1.) Complexity
2.) Musical Quality
3.) Creative Control
4.) Dynamic Quality

Complexity:
Guitar Hero is a fantastic game because its goal was to make you feel like a rock god even if you have no musical talent. That's what this parameter is all about.
Complexity is the degree to which you can create something as complex as music very very easily, and potentially with very little in the way of controls. Also, how much musical talent does it require of the player?

Musical Quality:
How good does the resulting 'music' sound?

Creative Control:
How much input does the player have over the music? How easily could they recreate any song they wanted, or play whatever music they imagine?

Dynamic Quality:
To what degree does the act of the music creation happen smoothly and on-the-fly, as though playing an instrument live?


Now, Guitar Hero for example... did a great job as I said of simplifying the process of playing a guitar into something your average person could do. It's still moderately complex though with multiple buttons, the strumming at the same time and at least on the right notes... if that's not technically musical talent then the game at least requires something akin to it. However, the game also provided such a range of complexity with the difficulty modes and song selection that I think it nails the complexity score pretty solidly. And because it's prerecorded music, the musical quality is great, but that's the problem... it's all prerecorded music, so the musical control is almost nonexistent. You can miss a note, or hold certain notes differently, or mess with notes with the whammy bar, but largely you're playing someone else's music, rather than your own. Finally, dynamically, it at least feels like your jamming live, so Guitar Hero does fine in that category.

Wii Music on the other hand...
In one sense the game is very simple. You don't even need to press buttons, merely strumming to the beat. Interestingly, that beat is whatever you feel like or want it to be. So, on the one hand, that's more creative control than Guitar Hero gives you. But it loses creative control when it comes to melody. Wii Music makes the melody for you. If there is a way to influence what pitch your strum will make, then I wasn't able to figure it out. This made my own music unpredictable and often sounding like a mess, so I'd rank it fairly low in musical quality. At least once again, you're doing the playing live (besides the pre-constructed melodies).

If you'd consider tools in games that let you 'compose' music, like the track editing tools of the latest Guitar Hero game, or Frequency's Remix mode, then they obviously score poorly in the dynamic quality category, and usually rely on a very complex interface adding complexity as well.

I clarify all of the above to express my love for a small feature included in Frequency: the "Axe".
At certain points in the game if you were doing well you might get access to special bonus 'instruments', one of which was like a simulated turntable scratching effect, and the other being the Axe.

The Axe has always been my favorite implementation of player controlled music in a video game, and with my above parameters I can back up my claim:

The controls for the Axe are very simple. All you did was hold down a button and use your joystick to move a slider back and forth. Depending on your position of the slider, it would play different synthesized melodies, which all were very well written to always seem to fit the rest of the music. The genius, however, lay in the fact that unlike Wii Music where it is difficult to determine what your input is doing and accordingly to influence the music being played, It was apparent within seconds of using the instrument that your joystick position caused the melody being played to switch to ones of higher or lower pitch ranges. Given that you could also shift your position around as fast as you could move the joystick, this meant you actually were given quite a lot of control over the melodies the instrument produced. This is because on any given note of the song, you could slide your joystick left or right to make the pitch of the next note be lower or higher. And because it was a whole slider-bar sort of display for the instrument, you could easily gauge from where you were on the slider approximately how deep or high that next note would be when it hit.
Whereas Wii Music takes control of the melody and gives you free reign over the rhythm, the Axe of Frequency takes the opposite approach.
You have great control of the melody, but the notes are always timed to the rhythm of the song you were playing.
This is a far better system in my opinion.
With Wii Music's approach the resulting 'music' players produce often doesn't sound very musical at all as a cacophonous, unsteady jumble of seemingly random notes.
Because the Axe's synthesized blips were always set to fit the tempo of the music but you had a simple but surprisingly graceful control over which notes were playing (and those notes possible all seemed to always fit nicely with the rest of the music) meant that the Axe did well in all categories.
It was simple, required no musical talent at all, and despite having the tempo done for you and the notes you could select from were from pre-written loops, you still had a surprising degree of control over the music that came out it. Best yet, the music that came out of it always sounded amazing and fit the rest of the song like a glove. Finally, you played with it live like a real (if bizarre and abstract) instrument.
Of course, there's no way to score something like it (but then again, there's no way to score the jam sessions of Wii Music either) so, figuring out a way to incorporate a similar feature in a game may prove tricky.

But still it seems like a useful feature to look at if you're making a game that requires some kind of musical gameplay.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:47 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Unusual Constraint - Design a Game with a Specific Time Limit

Friday, November 14, 2008

For the final project for my programming class, we are to make a game.
The twist, as always, is found in the constraints.

Constraints are interesting things. They force you to think on your feet, very creatively, as you have to work to not only think up a game that meets the constraints but preferably one that is enhanced by them. In other words, to design a game that doesn't just fit the constraints, but fits them like a glove. Constraints can lead to some extremely creative ideas and original games.

The following constraints are placed on me for my programming final:
-The game must be played only with the mouse.
-As we've not covered any code for networked play, our game is limited to being a 1 player game.
-It's a student project, so, not surprisingly there's no budget.
-The deadline, of course. There's always a deadline. We have 1 week.

Finally, there's the really interesting one:

-The game play has to last exactly 15 seconds.



I'm interested by this surprising challenge. I tend to think of play time only much more generally, as in "this phase of the game is taking the players too long to complete", etc. This constraint is another matter entirely. What mechanics and dynamics benefit from such a brief and specific time limit? Which ones support it?
What narratives would make sense to explain why there's a time limit in the first place? Does the short time limit lend itself more to a casual game or something more hardcore?
It's been fun to think about while I had to come up with my game concept pitches.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:50 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Learning with Games

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

I've made an interesting observation lately:

When I'm trying to learn a new skill, I often end up making a game about it.
This is not done on purpose. However, it does make a lot of sense.
Games are active, they're something you do, and the game design has to communicate how the player must proceed. Or to put it another way: they teach.
I guess that as I'm learning something, I compile all that knowledge and attempt to spit it back out again (as a game) much like a test requires you to repeat back all you've been taught.

In an entry I made a while back I mused about game mechanics based on blues dancing principals right after attending a lesson, and continued with talking about the sword-fighting system I developed based on stage combat training I once had.

After my brief stint as a professional DJ, I've always been interested in using the psychological principals a DJ uses to keep people dancing as the basis of a DJing video game. After attempting for the past few years to learn how to freestyle battle-rap (which hasn't worked, by the way) I have even experimented a few times with a game based on the thought processes I was going through while trying it.

They say sleep and dreams are where you sort and compartmentalize all that you learned in the day, helping store such data as long-term memories.
Perhaps game design fulfills a similar purpose for me.
It allows me to sort-out, analyze and reinterpret the incoming data of my life.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 7:39 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Borrowing Structure, Even in Games

Monday, August 11, 2008

My best friend was in town for a little while and just before he left we decided to collaborate on another writing project.
I won't spill too much information on this one at the moment, although I will say I'm super excited by the project at the moment.

I'm at the stage of creation where I'm so excited by my own ideas that every time I sit down to write I'm so hyper that I have to get up and walk around or something until I calm down. I'll consider that a good place to be.

In any case, I'm going to talk today about structure.
The current piece I'm writing is a short story (currently taking the form of a one-act play) entirely taking place during a police interrogation of a suspect.
While trying to research a few things on how interrogations are done so I could get my details straight, I ended up finding a list of the steps actual investigators use for conducting interrogations. It's actually a meticulously structured ordeal designed to psychologically weaken the suspect at just the right times.

I'm attempting to use that sequence of stages as the plot structure for my scene.
For one thing, that seems the most natural thing to do. My scene is an interrogation, and so when I discover that interrogations themselves have an internal structure, why not use it?
More than that, I just love playing with structure, using all kinds of unconventional systems as the structure for plot. I guess that's the game designer in me, loving to play with systems. ;)

The first one-act play I wrote (coincidentally, the only serious piece I've written that has actually been produced and shown to an audience) used the stages of death as the base of it's plot structure, for example. For a time my best friend and I were considering writing film of short vignettes using the structure rules for various forms of poetry (villanelles, etc.) but using filmic language (shots, transitions) in place of literary ones. In other words, where you'd normally have a word repeat, we'd have a shot repeat, etc. But like the poetry forms, it'd have to be stitched together in a way that not only followed all the rules, but actually made sense and in fact had it's meaning deepened by the adherence of said rules.

I'm thinking though now that such play with story structure would be much harder to pull off with a video game. Story structure is a tricky matter in games, because the player is this rogue element that you can't control. The player is often the trickster god of chaos working to bring down the neat and tidy order that the story wants to lay down as its structure.

I considered this problem relative to the current use of borrowed structure: my example of the interrogation process as a plot structure.
I've been thinking of ways to make that work in a game.

And it seems to quite well. After all, games are pretty good at representing processes.
Just make interrogation itself as a game. It very nearly is already.
There's two sides with opposing goals. Either get the confession out of the suspect if you're the investigators, or if you're the suspect then your goal is to make it out of the situation the best you can. The psychological weakening techniques used by investigators leads to an intensely strategic game. It's a battle of wits, although an admittedly fairly one-sided battle. You'd have to admit that it is a pretty emotionally intense experience though, to a degree most games would kill to achieve.

Given as there's already a process laid down for what investigators say and at even at what time they say them depending on how psychologically weakened the suspect appears, an interrogation would make for a pretty amazing dialogue-tree puzzle. Especially if the game informs the player in advance of what the process is and how the system works.

For example, playing as police investigators, during some training portion the player is taught the techniques, then later in the game has to use them to say just the right lines at the right time to break down the convict and make him confess.

Or, playing a caught criminal, the player could have been warned by someone of what to expect, and the player has to try and use that information to avoid being psychologically weakened and being lead down the wrong path - the one that leads to you being caught in the trap of confessing.

By structuring the gameplay, you ARE structuring the story. Gameplay is perhaps our medium's most powerful means of conveying story anyway, and as the only medium that can use that means at all I'd say it's one we should continue to explore.

Consider another process easily turned into plot structure: a 12-step program.
The primary character ("player", in the case of a game) certainly has a clear goal: get through all the steps, and end up clean. The twelve steps are the roadblocks on the path, the trials she must prove she can pass. Twelve levels maybe?
This was just an example off the top of my head so I haven't exactly thought through how to make the twelve steps a fun game to play, but I won't say it couldn't be done.

Borrowing structure like I do can inspire and enrich writing, and I wish to both inspire and enrich writing in games.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:06 AM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - On Survival

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Something I read somewhere was talking about getting more women into games and gaming (a topic I'm interested in, given my full support of WIGI) and it was mentioned how back in its day Frogger was very popular with, well, everyone. Women weren't just interested, it argued, because you were playing a cute little frog rather than some kind of weird male power-fantasy or sex object (thought that probably helped.) They argued its popularity was also based on the game's non-aggressive nature.

(I don't mean to come across as having the prejudice that women don't like violent games, by the way. I've certainly known women who didn't fit that mold. In fact, at the lecture just given last week at the Boston Postmortem there were findings reported that the GTA series were listed as one of the top games among teenage girls.)

Now, you can't quite say there's no violence in Frogger. You can be crushed under a truck, or eaten by alligators. Neither is all that violent, no. I've seen worse in Disney movies. But I'll still count it.
The difference is that the player character, our protagonist, isn't the violent one.
The player is not forced to commit (virtual) acts of violence.

I like that.
I once played through (and beat) Fallout without engaging in a single round of combat, because I argued that most people avoid fights at all cost. I tried to play the game making decisions I would actually make in real life if I were placed in the same situations. If faced with evil forces I would run away, hide, sneak around if I had to. Playing that cunning and adaptable coward character was one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've ever had.

I also was completely blown away by some of the "chase scenes" in Half-Life 2, where the character is being pursued by some terrifying and at the time unstoppable force. Such situations in games, where fleeing is the only option, are risky as the player must KNOW that making a stand and fighting isn't possible. I think HL2 did a good job at providing such feedback. In the Ant-Lion chase sequence, the fact that for every Ant-Lion you kill, more appear makes it quickly apparent that staying and fighting is a bad, bad plan. When chased by the Helicopter-thing through the waterways on your boat, you don't have a gun that seems powerful enough to put a dent in that thing's armor. After unloading a clip into the machine and the bullets seemed to ping uselessly off it's hide, I got the picture. So, in both cases, I ran. Knowing that these deadly forces that I couldn't possibly stop were just behind me in full pursuit made for an intense emotional experience. It was powerful.

So, I've often had an extreme attraction to game experiences where I'm NOT the hero, where I'm fragile and scared. Why?
Well first of all, relative to video games, because it's DIFFERENT. Not many games give you that feeling. Most games are male power-fantasies after all.
But in real life, I'm no hero, and have no plans to be. So as cool as it would be to be one, I still feel that it doesn't resonate as well with me.

Most people don't have experience with actually firing a gun and killing someone. It's kind of abstract to most people. Survival, however, is something we do every day. Many people HAVE experienced a moment of terror where they thought they might die.
Shouldn't that resonate with more people?

Being a hero is a good fantasy, and my entry from yesterday should demonstrate that I don't mean to knock that fantasy as a great one to base a game around. Hell, it's certainly been a successful formula in the past. That's why when it's reversed on me it totally takes me by surprise and blows me away. It may not be as strong of a fantasy to be fragile, or a coward, but as long as I'm risk-free doing exciting things under heavy fire, there is still a thrill there.

I love post-apocalyptic works because something I take for granted every day, like finding something to eat, becomes a new, compelling emotional experience. I'd like to see more games that let me experience that.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:27 AM  1 Comments Links to this post