June « 2008 « Spectre Collie

Friday June 27 2008 Personal

Thirty-Seven

According to Patton Oswalt, 37 is not one of the 20 birthdays you’re allowed to celebrate. But I want a cake, dammit! (And no offense to my peer group, but I’d like to eat it in a crowd where no one is tempted to point out that the cake is a lie.)

I can tell that I’m getting older and lazier, because I’m kinda thinking my birthday present for myself will be hiring somebody to come clean my apartment.

Highlights from my gift registry are listed below, feel free to browse it as I shamble on towards thirty-eight years taking up space on the Earth.

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Wednesday June 25 2008 Television

All up in her griddle

A couple weeks ago, my satellite went out, and I seriously considered just canceling the service altogether. Even if I were home long enough to watch TV, all the shows I’m most interested in are available on the internet. And if I ever do get free time, wouldn’t I be better off going outdoors, or at least reading?

Luckily, the DVR helped dispel all that nonsense by recording the Fuji TV programming block that runs in the bay area on weekends. One of the shows I caught was “Teppan Shoujo Akane!!”, which is about a teenage girl who uses a magic griddle named Ittetsu to battle rival teppanyaki chefs while searching for her missing father.

I know, right? But it’s even better than that: even though it was made in 2006, it looks and feels like it’s coming straight out of 1988. Her arch-enemy is a scenery-chewing rich girl of the Animal House/Meatballs school of villainy, and there are scenes where Akane takes long walks on the beach with her griddle as romantic music plays.

This is something that I never would’ve heard about had it not been for the sweet, sweet rays of entertainment broadcast to my TV. How could I ever have doubted it?

At one point in the episode I watched, Akane grows despondent over a betrayal, and she actually throws Ittetsu into the trash! After some soul-searching, she realizes her mistake and begins a chase through the streets of Tokyo, pursuing the garbage truck taking away her magic griddle. She jumps onto the back of the truck and bows to Ittetsu in abject apology. And I understood exactly how she felt when she caressed the griddle and said:

I’m not all alone! I have Ittetsu! I still have iron-griddle dishes!

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Sunday June 22 2008 Storytelling, Videogames

I'm thinking of a number between 1 and You're Dumb

Since this is about adventure games, I feel like I should make my usual disclaimer explicit: this is a personal blog, I don’t speak for my company, and vice-versa. Any opinions I spew out here are not necessarily my coworkers’; in fact, when somebody at work tells me, “I read your blog,” it’s most often followed by, “I didn’t agree, but….”

Apparently, “Yahtzee” Croshaw has a column in the back of PC Gamer now, and the one in the July 2008 issue is about how he’s bored with adventure games. They always devolve into the same old thing; and sure the SCUMM games were excellent, but that was in spite of their gameplay, not because of it; and ever since Half-Life came out and proved that action games don’t need to be mindless and shallow, do we even need adventure games anymore?

Fair enough. A few years ago, I would’ve probably agreed completely. When I first got into videogames, I was only into SCUMM games, because shooters were dumb. And even then, it was rarely because of the puzzles; the puzzles were almost always something you had to slog through to get to the next cool story moment. When Dark Forces proved that DOOM could have a cool story and characters, and then Jedi Knight and Half-Life proved that cinematic storytelling could actually be fun to play, I said, “Well, that about does it for adventure games.” Until I started working for Telltale, I can’t remember playing an adventure game since Zork Grand Inquisitor. (Which is still a fantastic game, by the way, one of the best I’ve ever played).

But that was eight years ago. I tend to like Croshaw’s video reviews, because buried amongst the Britishisms and dildos, there’s frequently some genuine, bullshit-free insight in there. Even when I don’t agree, I like hearing someone cut through conventional wisdom and hype and just get at the heart of whether a game is fun or not, and why.

And that’s why I was disappointed in that PC Gamer column, because it doesn’t say anything new. Basically, he says the exact same thing anyone says whenever the topic of adventure games comes up:

Myth 7: Adventure games suck because they’re artificially complicated and there’s only one correct solution to every puzzle and it’s never what you would do in the real world so you have to READ THE DESIGNER’S MIND!!!!

Whenever this observation gets trotted out on the internet, it’s invariably followed by a link to the Death of Adventure Games article from Old Man Murray. That’s the one from 2000 where a particularly ridiculous puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 gets ripped apart, and adventure game fans and creators both get exposed for the smug, self-important bastards that they are. And as soon as you link to the OMM article, the crowd scatters like cockroaches, adventure game apologists hanging their heads in shame. The issue was definitively settled, eight years ago: Adventure Games Just Aren’t Cool Anymore.

And then the writer of that article went on to get a job at Valve, working on Portal, which is more like an adventure game than most adventure games I’ve played.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Wednesday June 18 2008 Videogames

It LIVES!

The Spore Creature Creator demo went live on EA’s site today, with the $10 version available tomorrow. I’ve been playing around with it a little bit, and if the complete game has even a fraction of the detail and attention given to the creature creator, Maxis has knocked this one way out of the park. They deserve every one of the millions of copies they’re going to sell (I hope).

Here’s where I try to sound like an insider: when the expansion pack for SimCity 4 wrapped (around the end of 2004), a friend at Maxis showed me a very early prototype of the creature editor. It was just a blobby spine that you could bend around, and add legs or rip them off. That was kind of neat.

Then he hit the “walk” button. The thing started flailing around, and after a few seconds, it learned how to walk on four legs. He tore a leg off, and it flopped down, then quickly adjusted to walking on three legs. He tore another leg off, and it became a biped. Then he stretched one end of the spine way out so that the thing’s center of gravity changed. It immediately flopped over, and then after a few seconds adjusted its gait to account for the added weight.

It was amazing, and actually a little creepy. Computers aren’t supposed to be able to do that kind of thing. In fact, you’re supposed to make fun of people who believe that computers can do that kind of thing. It smacked of a giant “Make Videogame” button.

As far as I can tell from the little I’ve seen of the creature creator, most if not all of that functionality is still in there. You can’t make changes to your creature in realtime, but it does adjust itself based on any number of legs, size and length of the spine, types of appendages, and so on. The problem is that it does it so seamlessly, that you can’t really appreciate how much work is going into making that happen.

But even if the gee-whiz tech demo aspect isn’t as immediately apparent, what they replaced it with is pure, undiluted fun. There’s already tens of thousands of creatures floating around the internets, only about 40% of them wang-themed. When you start up the tool and see how easy it is not just to make something, but to make something good, you can’t help but keep doing it. It’s got a perfect feedback loop of letting you jump right in, making your simple creations satisfying, and rewarding you for digging deeper and making more complex things.

I have to admit that I was extremely skeptical about the potential of user-generated content. All the previews and lectures about the game talked about a wonderful galaxy full of planets populated by creatures generated by other players and shared over the internet. I thought this was a little over-optimistic: even if you assume that they’ll have content filters, so your planets don’t keep getting overrun with dong monsters, there’s still the basic law that 99% of anything sucks.

What I didn’t take into account was that they’ve put so much thought into the creation of the creatures, that it’s kind of hard to make one that’s not appealing on some level. And that they’ve incorporated the community so that you’re encouraged to make your creatures cooler, just so that you can show them off and they won’t get lost in the crowd. And that they’ve made it so easy to make and share them, that you can create an upload a menagerie of dozens in under an hour — meaning hundreds of thousands if not millions of creatures available. And if 1% of those is really good, that’s a hell of a lot of content you can play around with.

Best of all is that they’ve really, finally captured that feeling of messing around with Play-Doh, building whatever you can imagine. Plenty of games have tried this to varying degrees of success; this is the first time I’ve really seen it pay off.

And they still managed to cram the gee-whiz tech-demo in as well. The “DNA” for your creatures are saved as metadata in small image thumbnails. There’s no additional file to keep track of. So you should be able to take a picture that somebody uploads to the internet — like my first three creatures below — save it or just drag it out of the browser and onto your game (or into your “My Spore Creations/Creatures” folder), and it’ll be able to use it in the game.

There are already nefarious forces at work trying to reverse engineer the files and figure out how it’s storing the creature data, but I don’t want to know how it works. I prefer to believe that it really is magic.

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Sunday June 15 2008 Battlestar Galactica, Television

Iz not so great, aktually

This “half-season” of “Battlestar Galactica” ended last Friday with an episode called “Revelations.” I don’t really have much to say worth a spoiler warning, but if you want to know nothing about the episode, you might want to skip this post.

Maybe the series has always been like this, and I just couldn’t tell because I was watching the episodes out of order, but it seems like the show has been wildly uneven in quality. Two episodes ago was a muddled, directionless mess of an hour, immediately followed by one of the best episodes of the entire series (“Hub”). The finale was more of the same: there were story moments and individual scenes that were just fantastic, but I just wasn’t that impressed with the episode as a whole.

I liked pretty much everything they did, plot-wise, but I wish they had stretched it all out over the last 8 or 9 episodes instead of trying to cram everything significant that will happen to the human race into 45 minutes. Everything was rushed and muddled. Lately my biggest gripe about TV shows is that the characters’ motivations get lost; it doesn’t seem like they do stuff because the characters want to, but just because the writers need them to get from here to there. In this episode, it seemed like characters did stuff just because they were afraid they wouldn’t have time to before the scene ended and we cut to somewhere else.

But a few of the moments were great. It got so tense that I actually had to pause it and get up to pace around the apartment, which I’m guessing is the kind of reaction they were hoping for. But I was anxious only partly because of the tension the episode had built up, and mostly because I kept saying, “Don’t screw up the whole series, don’t screw up the whole series…”

I don’t know, maybe that’s an intentional dramatic device — they’ll show you an episode so bad, or a plot development so ridiculous, that you have to be a little scared of them. They’ve got a gun to the series’ head and are holding it hostage, “Keep watching, or we’ll blow it to hell! We’re crazy enough to do it!”

The ending was fine, but it was more “oh, so that’s the option they picked” than “holy cow, I didn’t see that coming!” I guess the last 10 or so episodes are going to be all about the Final Fifth and what happens next. I’m not so upset anymore that it’s going to be 2009 before any new episodes air. I’m curious to see how it all ends, but I think BSG and I could use some time apart.

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Sunday June 15 2008 Television

Spoilers

Last month, news came over the wireless that Steven Moffat is taking over “Doctor Who” when its fifth season starts in 2010. I didn’t think much about the announcement, since I haven’t been paying much attention to the series. It’s turned into kind of a shrill, nonsensical mess with increasingly overwrought finales. Even though it has the occasional brilliant, best-thing-on-television episode, that hasn’t been enough to keep me interested.

Of course, what the brillaint, best-thing-on-television episodes have in common (with a couple of exceptions) is that they were written by Steven Moffat. I just finished watching his two-parter for season four, “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, and it looks like this hasn’t been just a coincidence. The guy is just crazy good. And he seems to understand the series on a gut level, and he knows how to turn it from goofy kids’ sci-fi programming into astoundingly good television.

What impresses me the most is how he manages to nail the formula of the series, without its feeling formulaic. The two-parter is a straight-up “Doctor Who” formula story: time travel, aliens, a little bit of horror, with new characters getting picked off one by one and a thrilling conclusion where the Doctor suddenly figures out a deus ex machina to fix everything. Not only that, but this episode is something of a mash-up of Moffat’s other episodes, with time paradoxes, a love story, a little bit of self-referential storytelling, and scary monsters from unlikely sources (in “Blink” it was statues, here it’s shadows) shambling around repeatedly saying creepy catch-phrases (in “The Empty Child” it was, “Are you my mummy?” here it’s “Hey, who turned out the lights?”)

So it’s amazing that it all mixes together to make something that works so well. I think the last time I’ve been genuinely creeped out by a TV show was when I saw “Blink,” and the last time I’ve been so genuinely happy at a happy ending was when I saw “The Doctor Dances.” Lesser writers are afraid to save a character because they think it’ll look like a cop-out, but Moffat really earns his happy endings. And earns his scares, as well — the monster in these episodes is basically the haunted spaceman from “Scooby Doo.”

If we can expect a whole season of episodes as good as these two, then the next full season of “Doctor Who” could be amazing. Of course, it’s over a year away, but it’ll be worth the wait.

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Tuesday June 10 2008 Personal, Television

MST3K at Comic Con

Via Andrew P Mayer’s blog, there’s an announcement that almost everybody who ever appeared on Mystery Science Theater are going to be speaking at a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con:

We now have full confirmation of the upcoming panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, Friday, July 25, 7:15 p.m.

On the panel will be: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Frank Conniff, Bill Corbett, Joel Hodgson, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Bridget Nelson, Mike Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis Weinstein. Wow.

Holy monkey! Could that get any cooler at all?

The moderator will be Patton Oswalt.

In unrelated news, I’m going back to the San Diego Comic-Con this year.

After last time, I swore I never would, but right as I was wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this year, I got asked if I wanted to go for work. (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’ve got a cool job.) Now I’ve got another reason to look forward to it.

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Tuesday June 10 2008 Movies

Espinazo

It’s an old cliche that Hollywood takes the hard work of creative people and squeezes all of the originality and innovation and intelligence out of it, to dumb it down for the mass market. I never really believed it, though: instead of this big, faceless, creativity-sucking entity, isn’t it easier just to assume that some people just aren’t as talented as others? If a movie like National Treasure is all Hollywood’s fault, then how do movies like The Life Aquatic and Adaptation and Miller’s Crossing get made?

But I’m starting to think that cliche might have something to it, the more movies I see from Guillermo del Toro. This weekend I watched The Devil’s Backbone. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, it was made in Spain. And unlike Mimic, Blade II, and Hellboy, it was very good. Original, innovative, intelligent, and above all, uncompromising. So either del Toro’s talent has been wasted by Hollywood, or he only knows how to make movies set around the Spanish Civil War.

The movie’s weird, not even so much for what it shows but for how it kept turning into something other than what I’d expected. Before it started, I’d thought it was going to be like The Orphanage, another Spanish movie set in a haunted orphanage. But it’s much more interesting than The Orphanage, and it’s a period piece, and it’s not really a ghost story. Except it kind of is, except for when it veers off into melodrama, or character study, or coming-of-age tale. Plus, there’s an explosion.

You can tell that del Toro’s a fan of Mike Mignola, or at least why he’s a fan if he weren’t already before making this movie, because there’s that same feeling of simple stories interwoven with the gothic and gruesome and just plain strange. If I were to describe just the plot, it wouldn’t sound all that compelling, but then you watch the movie and there’s something interesting going on in just about every scene.

The new kid at the orphanage meets the principal — who’s got a half-wooden, half-metal prosthetic leg. He finds a father figure in the kindly old science teacher — who keeps fetuses in glass jars and drinks the liquid when no one’s looking. And he runs into the orphanage’s spooky ghost — who’s called “the one who sighs” by the other kids, and who has a constantly-bleeding wound from the crack in his skull, and is always surrounded by particulate matter as if he were still underwater.

The Devil’s Backbone turned me into a bona fide fan of Guillermo del Toro, and I wish I’d seen it sooner, and now I’m really, really looking forward to Hellboy II this summer. The best I can say about the first Hellboy movie is that it was clear del Toro was a big fan, and while the movie didn’t add much to the character or even really capture the spirit of the comics, it had some good ideas and didn’t do anything awful. But the trailers for the sequel seem to have a better feel for what it is that makes Hellboy cool.

Plus, del Toro’s riding on the success of Pan’s Labyrinth, so I’m thinking he’s got enough clout that he can stand up to the nefarious Hollywood talent-suppression field, and make an American Big Summer Blockbuster that’s as cool as the ones he’s made in Spanish.

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Monday June 9 2008 Videogames

The revolution will be playable on your television

There’s something inherently sad and a little pathetic about being addicted to a videogame. Worse by several orders of magnitude — measured in units that I will from now on call dorkstroms — is being addicted to a videogame that’s not even out yet.

The demo for Civilization Revolution came out last week, and I’ve already played through it 5 times now. The map never changes, and you can only pick from two leaders, and the demo cuts off at 1250 AD, right before you can reasonably win. And still, it’s somehow taken hold and convinced me I want to keep playing.

There’s no doubt it’s going to be criticized, repeatedly, for being Civilization IV “dumbed down” for consoles. But I really do think they’ve achieved their goal: making a version of Civilization IV that’s streamlined for consoles. It’s got just about everything that I like from the game, and it leaves out almost everything that makes the game a tedious drag. You can really tell that they went over the entire game and examined each feature — tech tree, unit selection, city buildings, wonders, terrain improvements, leader bonuses, roads, resources, espionage, etc. And instead of just deciding to leave it or cut it, they looked at what each feature gives the player, and thought of a way to give you the same level of control without the same level of micro-management.

One thing that I never see mentioned about the Civ games is that they’re clever, and they sometimes have a dry sense of humor. (But Civ IV takes itself a little bit too seriously). I really like the tone of this one; it stays pleasantly goofy without falling completely into ridiculousness. The Spy has a little song that plays when she runs, the advisors get annoyed when they get interrupted, and the advisor text has clever bits of real character. It was nice to see, because one of my favorite lines in any videogame is from one of the advisors in Civ III: “Maybe we could ride the horses!” Also, it’s neat how they name the unit upgrades, so you can end up with a “Ninja Tank Army” or “Stealth Archer”, with correspondingly different art.

It’s not perfect. My biggest gripe is that the map size is too small, making everything feel cramped and losing that feeling of global scale. It’s not Advance Wars, but it doesn’t feel quite like a planet, either. I still haven’t gotten the hang of combat; it seems to favor pre-assigned attack & defense numbers above anything else. And I wish you could set boats to auto-explore, although with the maps as tiny as they are, that’s probably not an issue.

I hated the advisors and world leaders at first, but they quickly grew on me. It was unexpected, because most games of this type just don’t devote that much screen space to characters. But in the end, it pays off, because it gives more personality to the proceedings than you get from little portraits tastefully sequestered into a small section of the UI. Best of all, you can turn off the volume for leaders and advisors independently, which makes them tolerable — at least in the demo, they all speak Simlish (some of the sound clips I’d swear are taken directly from The Sims), and it’s a whole new kind of annoying.

But overall, it’s exactly what I’d hope for in a game like this. I must have started hundreds of games in Civ IV and Civ III in my lifetime, but have only ever finished about a dozen. I’ve always loved the idea of Civilization more than the reality of it; at some point around the industrial revolution in every game of Civ IV, the fun gets sucked out of the game like oxygen out of an airlock. With Revolution, I feel like I’m getting exactly the level of challenge I want, but with games that I’ll actually finish.

Now I just have to see how many more times I can play the demo until the game comes out in July.

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Sunday June 8 2008 Storytelling, Videogames

Who's in control here?

That’s Alexander Haig. Look him up.

Also: This post has spoilers for BioShock and Grand Theft Auto IV, in case you’re paranoid about that kind of thing.

Previously on Spectre Collie, I made the claim that videogame developers can learn more from “non-interactive” media than just how to make more cinematic cut-scenes and more literary dialogue. If interactivity is the key aspect of videogame storytelling, then how come everything we borrow from traditional media is non-interactive? Why not look for the ways in which movies, books, TV, and comics interact with the audience, and then try to build on that?

The example I used last time was the “don’t go into that room” scene in horror & suspense movies. Those scenes build tension not by showing the audience what happens next, but by asking the audience what they think is going to happen next. In effect, they’re turning the storytelling duties over to the audience.

This only works because there are always at least two versions of the narrative being told simultaneously: the filmmaker’s version, and the audience’s version. It’s as true for movies, books, and TV as it is for storytelling games. In games, obviously, you put more emphasis on the player’s narrative. Which leads to the assumption:

Myth 6: Player narrative is always more important than developer narrative.

On the one side, you’ve got the arrogant, control-freak game designer, forcing his lame story onto players who don’t want to hear it. One of the designers at Telltale, Heather Logas, described this phenomenon better than I’ve heard anywhere else: “A lot of game designers act like they don’t want players coming in and messing up their story.” So we’ve developed all kinds of ways to ensure our stories don’t get messed up: cut-scenes; choke points; and linear sections that trick the player into believing he has control, when in reality he’s only allowed to do the one thing we want him to do.

On the other side, you’ve got the players, a bunch of whiny malcontents with an inflated sense of entitlement. They insist that their $50-$60 has bought a team of professionals who should dance at their command. The interactivity of a game is supposed to let the player tell his own story. That’s the only story that players care about. Besides, everybody knows that games will never have storytelling and writing that’s as good as movies or even television. If a game developer just wants to tell a story, he should get out of games and just make movies. So players have developed all kinds of ways to ensure their stories don’t get messed up: basically, insisting repeatedly on blogs and message boards that developer’s stories be kept quiet and unobtrusive, and that cut-scenes should be kept skippable if not cut altogether.

So which narrative is the more important one? If the real potential of interactive storytelling is giving the audience the freedom to tell whatever story they want, then the answer’s obvious: the player’s narrative is everything.

But the real potential of interactive storytelling isn’t giving the audience the freedom to tell whatever story they want. That’s the real potential of the pencil. And if you give someone a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, or a blank page in Microsoft Word, or a blank workspace in Flash, you don’t automatically end up with great storytelling. If you end up with anything at all, more often than not it’s insipid, derivative, filled with cliches. That’s as true of the best screenwriters alive as it is of the guy who writes “FIRST!” on blog comments. Great stories are rare, because great stories are hard. So the player’s narrative isn’t the most important.

But the developer’s narrative isn’t the most important, either. After all, if a game developer just wants to tell a story, he should get out of games and just make movies.

Tear down this wall!

The real potential of interactive storytelling is delivering a story that’s a collaboration between the storyteller and the audience. It’s not the player’s narrative, and it’s not the developer’s narrative; it’s this third thing that’s better than either. As you play the game, the pieces of the story start to come together, and you feel not like you’ve played a part in someone else’s story, but you helped write the story.

So how does a game design make that happen?

Read the rest of this entry »

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