Make your own! Some good ones available via twitter search.
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Make your own! Some good ones available via twitter search.
Monthly Archives: February 2009
All Will Be Revealed… At Once
Apparently the revolutionaries of the last few episodes were armed with low-caliber exposition rounds, Teflon-Flashback coated to penetrate the armor of the Rules of Dramatic Writing, including “Show, Don’t Tell.” But I kid “Battlestar Galactica” only because it annoys me [...]
Apparently the revolutionaries of the last few episodes were armed with low-caliber exposition rounds, Teflon-Flashback coated to penetrate the armor of the Rules of Dramatic Writing, including “Show, Don’t Tell.”
But I kid “Battlestar Galactica” only because it annoys me so much. This week’s episode (“No Exit”), was paced and written as well as it could be, and it had some fine performances from everybody — especially Kate Vernon as Ellen — making the best they could of the material. But it was pretty much an exact manifestation of what I was afraid of once it became clear that the series had too many loose ends to deliver a satisfying pay-off.
The first miniseries was a great bit of television, but what really got me hooked on the series was the storyline that built up to discovering Kobol: the idea that the series hadn’t just created a sci-fi drama series, but had actually developed a fairly complex history and mythology. Especially since that mythology wasn’t the typical believer-vs-heretic scenario you see in science fiction, but was nuanced and mature, just as religion and faith are in real life. There were True Believers and non-believers, but most people just existed in a middle realm of atheism or lapsed faith or simply belief that had fallen by the wayside because it simply wasn’t relevant anymore. It gave all these 45-minute-long bursts of drama some real weight and depth, and fit in perfectly with the overall theme of the show, that pure good and evil are rare and are overwhelmed by the billions of shades of gray.
So I’d been hoping for a process of divulging bits and pieces of backstory over time, instead of a night of some pretty good actors reading from the Wikipedia entry on The History of Battlestar Galactica (Reimagined Series). The show’s always been impressive for what it can accomplish on a limited budget, but this was the first episode I can remember where the budget limitations were painfully visible. Could they not have had more memories on Earth? A flashback to the science lab, or even to the creation of the first human-like Cylons forty years ago? Focus an entire episode on these key events, instead of flashing back to someone telling someone else about these key events? Or just have Anders babbling Hybrid-like semi-nonsense, instead of giving regular 5-minute recaps?
My problem with the way it was handled isn’t just that it offends my Dramatic Sensibilities. It’s that I couldn’t follow it all. There was too little to reinforce it or tie it all together. If you want to know the facts, it’s all summed up in this community effort on the Chicago Tribune’s website. But if I wanted to read fake sci-fi history, I wouldn’t be watching television.
So as not to end on a complete downer: everything that was done is thematically strong, I think. Again, those themes of humanity, of people encompassing both good and evil instead of being purely one or the other, and the idea that we have more similarities with our enemies than differences. And I don’t doubt the big Cylon civil war they’re building up to is going to be pretty epic, and it’ll have some heft to it instead of just being effects sequences. And one of the commentors on some blog brought up a point I hadn’t considered: using Cylon biotech to repair the Galactica has implications not only towards Cylon/human hybrids, but on possibly repopulating Earth.
Or, I suppose, the next episode could jump forward a year, and we could spend the remaining episodes watching characters explain to each other how it all went down.
But our pistil is in another castle!
The game “Flower” for the PlayStation 3 is short, simple, and masterfully done.
The game Flower was released on the PlayStation Network yesterday, and if you’ve got a PS3, you should buy it. If you don’t have a PS3, you should find someone who does and play it on theirs for a few hours. It’s really a wonderful game.
I’ve been anxious to play it for months, not so much because the concept was that compelling but because I was curious to find out exactly what it was. The previews would mention that it was beautiful (it is) or that music and sound are an important part of the experience (they are, but it’s not a music game), and that it uses the motion controls of the PS3 controller (it does, and it works surprisingly well). The object of the game is to use the wind to pollenate a field full of flowers. But they would use phrases like “interactive art” or “casual experience” that made it unclear if this were an actual game, or just a glorified tech demo.
As it turns out, it is very much a game, with more direction and purpose than a “software toy.” And the entire thing is put together so well — it’s almost always clear what your goal is (using no words at all), there’s an instant reward for what you do and something pulling you towards the next thing. I was extremely impressed with how the presentation encouraged experimentation and discovery, but I was even more impressed with how well the pacing was done.
You’ll frequently hear the words “tranquil” and “zen” used to describe the game (and they fit), but you shouldn’t take that to mean it’s dull. There are moments of calm and moments of tension; silence and cacophony; sunshine and rain; day and night; peace, fear, and then celebration. Although again, it’s not a music game, it invites comparisons to a symphony because it’s a narrative structure expressed completely non-verbally.
Or to put it less pretentiously: it’s a beautiful game on every level, and everyone should buy it.
And also, since it didn’t get a laugh on Twitter: the game was developed by thatgamecompany (and its founder, Jenova Chen), which first got widespread attention because of the game “flow.” I’m hoping that the next game is called “Flowest.”
This place is AWESOME
Okay, “Lost,” I can see how watching a bunch of French-speaking scientists slowly going mad and shooting each other might not be the gripping, edge-of-your-seat drama that I’d been imagining all this time. Thanks for letting me discover that for [...]
Okay, “Lost,” I can see how watching a bunch of French-speaking scientists slowly going mad and shooting each other might not be the gripping, edge-of-your-seat drama that I’d been imagining all this time. Thanks for letting me discover that for myself, though, and showing us only the cool parts.
For at least the first 20 minutes or so of this week’s episode (“This Place is Death”), I was back to loving “Lost” at near-they-just-opened-the-hatch levels. Not only was there pay-off on the long-awaited “So whatever happened with Rousseau, anyhow?” question, but it involved dismemberment! Considering how I’ve stuck with “Heroes” solely because of the promise of scenes like the one where the cheerleader wakes up in mid-autopsy, you might think that all it takes is some TV-level gore to keep me interested in a series.
And you’d be right. But this episode, if not this whole season, has been like finally cresting the lift hill of a roller coaster that I’ve been on for three years now. Spoilers start now!
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Feedback Loop
Previously on Spectre Collie, I snapped my tether and responded to a critique of games I worked on. The claim was that adventure games are bad at giving feedback to the player, partly because it’s impossible for the game to [...]
Previously on Spectre Collie, I snapped my tether and responded to a critique of games I worked on. The claim was that adventure games are bad at giving feedback to the player, partly because it’s impossible for the game to know what the player’s thinking. I agreed that adventure games are usually lousy at giving feedback, but disagree that it’s a problem unique to adventure games. It’s a problem for any game that requires the player to make deductions more sophisticated than “put the red key in the red door.”
And, I claim, it’s not because videogame puzzles are inherently cerebral, but because we all like to believe that they are. We emphasize the “a-ha!” moments, where the player suddenly figures out the solution to a problem and all the remaining pieces fall into place, at the expense of all the “but what if…?” moments that build up to that. That leaves developers trying to second-guess what’s going to make sense to the player, and leaves the players trying to second-guess what the developers were thinking when they set up this puzzle. And to me, that’s not a fundamental game design problem, but a communication breakdown.
After I posted that, a friend in the comments interpreted the post as saying “games should have in-game hints.” And for some reason, another blog interpreted it as talking about the Strong Bad games instead of Sam & Max. Those are unintended but convenient examples of what can happen when there’s a communication breakdown. It’s also a convenient excuse to give more concrete examples of what I’m talking about, explain why Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is the most frustrating game in recent memory, curse Minority Report for repeatedly insulting my intelligence, and say that difficulty levels in videogames are bad.
Myth 10: Player-selected difficulty levels are the best way to ensure a videogame is accessible to the widest possible audience.
First, a reminder: so far, every one of these “videogame myths” is an actual thing I’ve read somewhere on the internet. In this case, it was an argument on a message board I used to read, where one side claimed that including difficulty levels was developer laziness, and the other side claiming that not including them is developer arrogance. Yet another reminder that I need to get a hobby outside of work.
The author of that Design Lessons post made a complaint that was fairly common about the Sam & Max games: the first season was too easy, and the second season got too hard. When the games were first released, they got the most attention from fans of the LucasArts game, people who’d been playing adventure games for years. And now that the first season has been released on the Wii (and the second season is coming soon!) you can see a pretty clear shift in the response: more people complaining about “frustration” and “needing patience.”
What’s interesting to me about all of those is how adamant the reviewers are. You’d rarely if ever hear that the game was too easy or too hard “for me,” but that it was clearly, insultingly easy, and what were the developers thinking? (And, it should be mentioned, every single episode of Sam & Max has had people on the forums asking for hints). Or on the other end, it’s not “I got stuck,” but “the genre is broken and deserved to die.” The OMG INTERNET BIAS!!! implications of this are legion, but that’s a topic better left to irate forum-goers. What’s interesting to anybody working on ostensibly “thinking” games is the realization that there simply is no such thing as a universal standard of difficulty.
And if you cater too much to one group, you’re inevitably going to alienate another. The worst thing you could do would be to shoot for some idea of the “lowest common denominator,” which games are starting to do to an increasingly alarming degree, and which movies have been doing for years.
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