News Film Technology

Home » Game News

Showing posts with label Game News. Show all posts

Travel and Videogames: Missing Play in Beijing

I often get cheap dinners in Beijing. I can get a plate of green peppers with chicken in a spicy sauce with rice for less than $2. Beijing is fun, but it’s not the easiest place to live in. There’s the long gray streets, the dust (from construction and sand blown in from Mongolia), and the air pollution, a silent danger to everyone.
On the subway to work, it’s crammed with people and the smell of sweat in the evenings. In China you’ll spot rural migrants with great bundles on their backs mixing with wealthy ladies in the most elegant of coats. On the subway, they’ll be crushed together in the same, tight space.
The smell of Beijing is often acrid with exhaust fumes, and loud honks from taxi cabs ring out, creating stress. The bars are no less full-on, filled as they are with cigarette smoke, cheap beer and the great potential for sex.
I grew up in Hastings, a small, run-down seaside town in England. Seagulls would try to steal your fish and chips, and the smell and sound of the sea is always near. It’s the kind of town where you either stay the rest of your life, or you escape to something bigger.
I often did escape, although perhaps that’s not the right word. After school, my attention focused on the gradual mastery of a videogame. My favorites were either extreme sports games with precise controls or adventure games in which you’re a secret operative, a gangster or a fantasy character carrying around a sword.
I loved my consoles, first an SNES, then a Playstation. I’m afraid Sony ensnared me pretty tightly (they always had great propaganda), and the PS3, although never really taking off like its previous kin, burned slow with incomparable experiences offered by the likes of Metal Gear Solid 4 and The Last of Us.
My PS3 is in England now, unused, my character languishing somewhere deep within Skyrim. I didn’t bring it with me to Beijing—I don’t have a TV anyway—and I miss it sorely. I miss it more than most things in fact. I think about it, and how much I miss playing games, more than I think about family, friends and other markers of home.
I think I can understand this. When I was young, my mum often said that I shouldn’t be playing so much on my console, that I should be studying or doing something more wholesome. I knew that I should be having adventures and experiences for real, too. For myself, rather than through a virtual character. That I should get to know “reality”.
When I was 18, I decided to go abroad. I lived in a small town thousands of miles away from home. I learnt a lot about relationships, what I want and how to get it, all that stuff. I felt temporary joys and the sadness of departures, the elation of love, crushing loneliness and hard-won knowledge.
I’ve felt some of those things while invested in the imaginary worlds of videogames too, but when you’re abroad and alone for the first time, the reality of experience is magnified so much that every moment becomes an opportunity to mature.
I started university when I was 20. I kept up the videogame habit. I played online properly for the first time, refining my reflexes shooting shit up. There were the late night duels and drunken multiplayer. They were fun, sure. And then in my final year, I brought my PS3 with me to my university town (other times I played on friends’ consoles), and I learnt about mood, texture and narrative playing Heavy Rain and Bioshock.
I played Portal the whole way through in one sitting on a German roommate’s Macbook. That perfect little game, which lasted less than three hours, lingers in the memory. Thanks, German guy. On the other hand my trip to Cyprus, much longer in duration, and occurring around the same period in my life, I hardly think about. But I wouldn’t say Portal was more important, as an experience. That would be perverse.
Tom Bissell, author and journalist, has argued that the act of playing videogames is a valid endeavor: “What have games given me?”, he asks in an essay on his attachment to Grand Theft Auto IV. “Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories”. It’s a sentiment that underlines what many people who grew up on games know and understand, that certain games and their moments unfolded as proper emotional touchstones in our youth.
In China, those experiences are vastly different. Here, the main way people play videogames is on a mobile phone or tablet, whiling away their time on puzzlers or Candy Crush, simple side-scrollers (“endless runner” games), and Chinese variations featuring dragons and lions and Chinese artwork. Otherwise it’s boys at internet cafes playing MMORPGs, with games drawing influences from well-known Chinese legends.
Consoles are banned in China, but in big cities at least they are actually not that hard to find. In Beijing, there is an area where there are a sizable number of small, independent shops selling PS4s, Xbox Ones, 3DS’ and games. They are often Japanese region-specific and there are significant mark ups in terms of price. PS Vitas are quite popular here, and the previous Sony handheld—the PSP—was even more so.
I tend to prefer games with well-made worlds, environments you can get drawn into. A console like the 3DS seems perfect for that right now. The innovative handheld, with charming, absorbing titles like The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is a transporting little device.
But I don’t have one. The ones sold here only play Japanese games and I can’t understand Japanese. It’s frustrating. The sense of achievement, exploration and play is something I hunger for. In Beijing I wake up in my tiny rented bedroom, commute to work and sometimes walk around spaced out that I live in a city so alien not just to “home”, but to what my sense of a world should be.
So why do I miss playing videogames so much? When I traveled to Thailand or Taiwan or around China, my game-playing desire waned a little. Traveling wasn’t just life but a game itself, an adventure where I was the only constant while the scenery, characters and the soundtrack changed all around me.
But living in Beijing, at age 25, not making huge amounts of money seems too real to be dramatic, too unusual to be mundane. I like living here, I made that choice and I like what I’ve done since I’ve moved here. Is it nostalgia then, a feeling of loss as I drift farther from childhood?
I am not sentimental. Rather I think it’s a need for joy, to be unsprung, to be lost in the flow, unworried about past and futures, which so many of us try to control. It’s a craving for comfort and play; to be enthralled by the notion that reality, wherever it may be, maybe replaced by a game—if only temporarily.
Lu-Hai Liang is a British-Chinese writer based in Beijing. He has written for IGN, The Guardian, New Statesman & The Atlantic among others.

Learning to Let Go: Time and Memory in Games

On Thursday at this year’s GDC, I attended game designer Yoko Taro’s talk “Making Weird Games for Weird People”. The Japanese director of Drakengard andNier first talked about his design process, but it was the latter half of the talk, where he began making a distinction between what games can and can’t do, that was the most interesting.

A light circle represented what games “can” do. The dark field around it, what cames “can’t”. A dotted-line circle within the light was, according to Taro, the perceived and accepted ideas of what games “can” do.

He labeled the area between the dotted line and the darkness “unknown”, and I love that division. That section where people who seriously ask but is it a game?” get uncomfortable and start to itch.

I’ve only played one of Taro’s games: Nier. Many games like Nier allow you to start them over once you’ve finished, keeping all your abilities from the previous playthrough. Nier messes with this formula. The second playthrough starts about halfway into the game and adds additional dialogue and cutscenes for the enemies. A few small additions make what was already a bleak experience even bleaker. Unlike games like Spec Ops: The Line, which tell you that what you’ve done is Bad, these scenes provide insight into what’s going on when you’re not around and explain the motivations behind what, in the first playthrough, seem like mindlessly violent monsters. It’s changed the context of your actions and hints at costs that maybe you hadn’t considered.

Taro used another example from the end of Nier in his explanation about creating emotions in the player. If, on a later playthrough, you meet certain conditions (collecting all weapons, etc), the player character is given a choice at the end of the game. If he sacrifices himself, he can save one of his companions. It’s not just a death, though: He is told that he will be erased from history.

Small potatoes for the player, though, right? The character doesn’t exist in the game anymore, but you can always load up the save and play again.

Except choosing the sacrifice triggers an in-game warning: To save your friend, you have to lose your save data. It will literally be like you, the player, never existed in that game world. The game itself will have no memory of you.

Which is terrifying, because in games, memory is everything.

Nier

Shadow of Destiny is an old PS2 game about time travel and paradoxes and a European city that changes a bit in the present depending on what you do in the past. Time Hollow is a later DS game written by the same person.

Well, they don’t change a lot, because neither one has a very good memory.

There are two kinds of time, when a story is involved: Myy time (as watcher, player, listener, reader) and the story’s time (you know, what the characters experience). Everything I see or read or play or hear happens in order for me. I’m no Billy Pilgrim.

But in a book, for example, a flashback in chapter four takes place before the events of chapters 1-3, but I read it afterward. But I understand it happened before chapters 1-3 because it doesn’t change what has happened in them. It might change my understanding of those chapters.

The present remembers the past, and not just in memory. I don’t have a memory of cutting my eyebrow on a coffee table when I was a toddler, but my skin sure does.

Do you know the difference between ROM and RAM? I’m going to force them into a metaphor here.

A book, or a film, is solely ROM. They don’t have any way to remember anything new after they have been fixed in place.

A game built on software, though, it can remember. It’s got RAM. Of course, it can only remember the things its code allows it to remember, which may or may not line up with what its code’s authors intended for it to remember.

Things that can be encoded in binary can be remembered. This is what progress in a game is: what the game remembers about what you’ve done. A book (well, one printed on paper) doesn’t dole out its later parts based on it remembering your reading of its earlier parts. You can jump to any page in a book at any time you want, read in any order you want (though it’s a little more difficult with certain ebook readers).

Frank talk: If you think a book is inherently a linear, narrative medium I’d say you think the message is the medium.

It’s funny, for all their championing as nonlinear media, there’s very little less linear than, say, Super Mario Brothers. You’re always trying to get it right, to make sure that Mario avoids or destroys the koopa troopa instead of running into it. A mistake is to be punished; the system’s built to forget everything that leads up to them.

The game forgetting what you do—resetting your score, making you start at the beginning—is a punishment. So if a narrative game doesn’t remember what you do and change its ending accordingly, is it kind of the same kind of failure?

Shadow of Destiny and Time Hollow aren’t built on systems with a wide array of possibilities. The rules don’t react to you and generate new scenarios, however brief. Mario has a relatively wide variety of ways to achieve his goal (getting to the right side of the screen); Eike and Ethan, protagonists of Destiny and Hollow, not so much. But where Mario’s failures are resets, the game willfully forgetting what you’ve done, Eike and Ethan have failures that move them closer to their goal.

This is a super-important distinction for what games can mean. There is so much trial-and-error inherent in goal-achieving games, ones that don’t know how (or don’t care) to remember your failures, in a way, say, the tries don’t matter. Only the one success does.

I used to think that games were unique in the way they could hold your time hostage. One mistake and suddenly all your progress is undone. The game forgets what you’ve achieved, and you go back to zero.

But that’s a narrow view, putting things in terms of the destination rather than the journey. Just because a game can remember some things doesn’t mean that what it can’t remember is worthless.

The past is what is remembered by everything in the present. Memory and scars and trace evidence, gained skills and lost flexibility. It’s not just the ending, not just the choices that marketing can sell you.

Peter Molyneaux’s promise that in Fable you could plant trees as a child and they would grow alongside your character, or the Bioware promise of choices mattering before apparently undermining them with a series-ending palette swap: These are consumer technofetishist at heart, a promise of technology that places meaningfulness on the “choice”, as if which brand we choose or which crew member we save is an insight into our essential being.

But when we can only choose the options we’re given, there are whole worlds of possibilities not offered. And if we try to say that what matters is only what can be stored in binary memories, well, what are we missing then?

Taro presented Nier’s save-game erasing as a failure to push the medium. It’s not. It’s brilliant.

To succeed, you have to let go. You have to accept that material proof of your progress is irrelevant. Players not being able to accept that was not a failure of the game, but a critique by it.

Maddy Myers and Samantha Allen on Manveer Heir's GDC Talk

In her Game Developers Conference recap earlier today, Paste’s assistant games editor Maddy Myers discussed Manveer Heir’s GDC talk about diversity. Here are some notes Maddy passed with fellow Paste contributor Samantha Allen during Heir’s lecture.

MADDY: I’m not wild about this talk so far. I feel like he’s really focused on studies and jargon.

SAMANTHA: Yeah. This line about stereotypes being about the efficiency of grouping people together just totally absolves bigots of their imbrication with concrete tangible systems of power. The media effects discourse is a fragile peg to hang your hat on, too. We should represent people because it’s about justice, not because the media supposedly shapes identity.

MADDY: He’s also trying so hard to back up his points with evidence, as though this all isn’t already apparent. It’s almost a citation every other slide. I guess it’s because this stuff is already obvious to me. It’s like how all of GDC is about proving that inclusivity matters for some tangible reason (financial, etc.) These studies are basically just proof that media affects people. How many times do we have to show a variant on that same study? We get it. Why is that the whole argument here?

SAMANTHA: He’s also just generously optimistic about the audience in the way that only a man can afford to be. Like the privilege of people who buy and play games, and the sort of toxic social attitudes that accompany that privilege are real — they’re not just “good people” who happen to have a homophobia problem.

MADDY: Yeah. I also wish he would talk about how we reach audiences that aren’t playing these games and also aren’t seeing themselves represented in games. He’s blanketing all of that as “marketing,” but actually, marketing games like Tomb Raider and Gone Home to men was difficult and possibly not even useful. It’s that old problem of men not being able to identify with women because they’ve never had to, whereas women grow up being used to identifying with male heroes because they’ve always had to.

SAMANTHA: (Heir has just brought up the prospect of playing as a gay character in a game and being in a position where you have to stay closeted.) I kind of don’t want to experience that in a game …

(Meanwhile, Todd Harper tweets that same thing at the same time without seeing our notes. The next day, the two of them would appear on a panel about this very topic.)

MADDY: Me, either. Also, I’m irritated that all of his “strong female character” examples are women doing classically masculine roles, even cross-dressing (his examples are Brienne and Arya from Game of Thrones, and Aveline from Assassin’s Creed).

SAMANTHA: It’s almost like oppression sims are still for straight white men.

MADDY: Like that Gender Swap Oculus Rift game.

SAMANTHA: Because god knows we don’t want to play a game where we simulate being female, queer, etc., in the same fucked-up world we already live in.

MADDY: Fuck that. We already live there.

Hyper Mode is an occasional column by Paste’s assistant games editor Maddy Myers. Her work has also appeared in the Boston Phoenix, Kill Screen and at the Border House. She also blogs at her personal website Metroidpolitan and tweets@samusclone.

Samantha Allen writes about gender, sexuality and videogames. She writes regularly for the feminist gaming blog Border House. Her work has also appeared on Jacobin, Salon, Paste, Kotaku, Kinsey Confidential and in Adult Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @CousinDangereux.

Catching Up With Wil Wheaton: International TableTop Day

Wil Wheaton—actor, writer, host and geek icon—stands in front of a brick wall, stand-up style, wearing a shirt that says “CRUSH ALL HUMANS” and launches into an opening monologue:

“When most people think of a small world, they think about being on a boat surrounded by creepy dolls who won’t stop singing. But when gamers think of a small world, they imagine a fantasy-filled land full of crazy races with outrageous powers where the world is covered in blood as we battle to see who can take it over and win the game.”

So begins Episode 1 of Wheaton’s online show TableTop, where he and three of his friends play a board, card or dice game. The 30-minute video has nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube. But if the idea of watching other people play a game doesn’t immediately grab you, that’s okay with Wheaton. His real goal is to get you to play.

Wheaton has had several vocations since starring in Stand By Me and spending time as the youngest member of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. When the series ended, he did one more film—the 1991 boarding-school action flickToy Soldiers—then left the spotlight of Los Angeles for Topeka, Kansas, where he worked for NewTek, helping develop a video production tool called Video Toaster 4000. He returned to film in the late ‘90s, opting for independent projects. He also started voice acting again—he’d gotten his start playing young Martin Brisby in The Secret of NIMH at the age of 10. He’s now appeared everywhere from Family Guyto Batman: The Brave and the Bold. In 2001, he launched the blog Wil Wheaton dot Net and was named Best Celebrity Blogger by Forbes two years later. He’s hosted several TV shows and guest-starred on The Big Bang Theory. He’s written several books, including his first memoir Dancing Barefoot and amassed 2.5 million Twitter followers. But it wasn’t until recently that his passion for table top games intersected with his career.

Boardgames, dice games, deck-building games—Wheaton has kept a habit of finding new games to play with a group of friends who he’s known since high school. And a couple of years ago, he decided he wanted to help others discover the hobby he loved. At the encouragement of his friend Felicia Day—creator and star of The Guild, where Wheaton played her nemesis/love interest—Wheaton developed an idea for a show where he’d invite friends to play a different game each episode. TableTop has been a hit for Day’s Geek & Sundry YouTube channel, often generating more than a million views per episode thanks in part to guests like Seth Green, MythBusters’ Grant Imahara and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Jeri Ryan.

Wheaton expanded his gaming evangelism beyond the screen to the real world last year, helping found International TableTop Day, a series of events across the globe where anyone can join in the table-top game renaissance. Last year, more than 3,000 events were held on all seven continents (thanks to researchers in Antarctica). The second annual TableTop Day is April 5, and Wheaton hopes to have 11 million people participating. The stated goal: for us to “put down our worries and play more games.”

We spoke to Wheaton about his love for games and the success of TableTop.

Q: Did you grow up playing boardgames as a kid?
Wil Wheaton: When I was a kid, I played lots of the old-school tabletop games with my parents and my sisters—Life and Sorry and Risk and things like that. But when I was about 14 or 15, I was introduced to real tabletop games by my friends in high school. We were all awkward nerds, and we were all into RPGs and Dungeons & Dragons. But I didn’t know what tabletop games really were. As a result of that, tabletop games are the mortar which holds together the longest friendships of my life.

Q: Do you still get together with that same group of friends?
Wheaton: We get together on average about twice a month—probably five of us that are in the core and another three or four who come in and out. We all have families now; a lot of these guys have kids. We get together as couples, and we all game together. If we say we want to have dinner or a barbecue, nobody will show up. But if we say let’s have dinner and play a game, we have to pull the card table in from the garage and crowd around it.

Q: What was the first game you remember falling in love with?
Wheaton: One of the first games that I completely fell in love with was an old Steve Jackson game called Car Wars. It’s effectively a table-top mini-game, but instead of using mini figures, there were cars were printed out on little pieces of cardboard. The game takes place in post-apocalyptic America where all the vehicles are kind of outfitted like the Road Warrior. The whole game is designing vehicles with weapons and driving around the countryside or an arena and trying to destroy all your friends. What I really liked about it was that I’d never played anything that had the same kind of tactical visual component to it—I’d played Risk but that was a different thing. I really liked the reality of that game. I loved imagining that I was this character in this post-apocalyptic future and letting that—in my mind at least—be real and letting my imagination create that place. I loved it so much—I was playing a game, but I was also being this weird character. I’ve become friends with Steve, and I found out years later that Steve Jackson says, “All games are role-playing games.” The way that D&D or role-playing games where you assume the identity of another person or creature in a world that you collaborate to build. Every game you play is just going to be a role-playing game and you just let whatever role you’re playing in that game inhabit you. What’s funny is I don’t play it anymore. It doesn’t scratch the same itch that I have as a player anymore. These days, I’d rather play a Euro-style game that has a different approach to gaming. But that will always hold a place in my heart and my memory that taught me that boardgames didn’t have to be Monopoly or Payday.

Q: How did International TableTop Day get started?
Wheaton: In the first season of TableTop, just a few episodes into the season, we became aware that not only was it successful, but it was a hit. It’s success exceeded anything any of us expected or prepared for. And I can’t even remember who came up with the idea, but someone said, “We should have a TableTop Day where people are encouraged to get together and play games together.” Because that’s whyTableTop exists. I created the show because I wanted to give people an excuse to get together and play games. And I wanted to show people how awesome gaming is. And TableTop Day takes the things that people see on our show TableTop and makes it real and puts it into their homes or their game shops or their libraries or whatever. The first TableTop Day wasn’t even finished and people were asking, “When are we going to do this again? This is so great. This is so fun!”

Q: I’ve been getting more into table-top games lately. We just brought on our first boardgames writer, Keith Law, who by day is an analyst on ESPN.
Wheaton: Oh, cool.
Q: It seems like table-top games are having a boom right now. Why do you think that is?
Wheaton: Well, I think that TableTop has certainly helped because people who are curious about games can look at it and see what the gaming hobby is all about. People who are already gamers who have non-gamers in their lives can show themTableTop so they can see what the hobby is about. But also table-top games are everywhere. I recently went into a bookstore and the table-top games section of the bookstore was nearly as big as the table-top game section of the dedicated table-top store that I went to in high school. And with big box retailers and stores like Target carrying table-top-style games, people who maybe would have needed to go into a game shop to find a game like Takenoko or Settlers of Catan would see it in their normal places where they’re shopping for entirely non-gaming-related reasons. The availability of it as well as the existence of a show that lets people see what it’s all about has contributed to the gaming renaissance. We’ve also noticed that there’s all these people who identify as gamers. They may have worked in the same office for years and never really knew because it never really came up. We’ve worked hard to demystify the hobby so that it’s just a natural thing people talk about. This is a great time to be a gamer.

Q: I watched the last episode of TableTop this morning and I was surprised how entertaining it could be to watch other people play boardgames. What made you decide to create the show and what made you think that this could be something fun for other people to watch?
Wheaton: Through the early part of this century, I really loved watching people play poker on TV. That showed me that it was possible to watch other people playing a game, and even if I’m not playing it, still be entertained. So when Felicia [Day] asked me to if I wanted to start a show for Geek & Sundry and we were talking about what kind of show it was going to be, I said, what if we did a boardgame show that was like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner for Five, with table-top games instead of poker. We’ll get interesting people to come and play games with us ,and we’ll draw in lots of different people. If someone’s a fan of Grant Imahara or someone’s a fan of Grace Helbig, they might come and watch the show to see this person they love doing something and hopefully they will leave being interested about playing table-top games. Or someone is already a table-top gamer, but they’ve got a person in their life who isn’t. And they want to be able to say, “Hey, look, this is why I get together with my friends twice a week to play games,” and they show them the show. We’ve been really pleased to see that the predictions we made of how entertaining this was going to be to be correct. And this is really important: We have phenomenal editors. I bring to the editing process the eye and the brain of a gamer. Felicia brings the eye and the brain of a filmmaker. And the two of us are able to work with our editorial team to bring out the strongest entertainment and gaming elements and make sure those get into the show. And then the editors work really hard to put together something that is easy to follow, entertaining and visually interesting. Because we all have to acknowledge that this is a visual medium. But TableTop is a show that comes together in editing and it’s always very important to me that Steve [Grubel] gets the credit he deserves.

Q: The show gets anywhere from a quarter million to over a million views each episode. Were you surprised at all by that response?
Wheaton: [Long pause] No. I was really excited about it. I always expected that it would do well. When we see episodes get up over the one-million mark, I always have to sit down for a minute because that’s actually pretty amazing. And one of the things that I think is really cool about that is that I know from talking to gamers, that gamers will get together—four or five people will sit down to watch TableTopand then play that game or other games. So those numbers don’t necessarily mean one million people. It could mean two million or even three million people.

Paste: So what are your favorite table-top games these days. What do you most enjoy?
Wheaton: At the moment I’m playing a ton of Lords of Waterdeep, Takenoko, a bluffing game called Skull, and a brand-new game called T’Zolkin. I want to say it just came out last year. Those are the ones that we’re playing the most. I’m also spending a lot of time reading sourcebooks for Fate Core and Savage Worldsbecause I’m about to start an RPG campaign with some friends.

Q: I know you’ve gotten to know some of these game creators. Have you considered creating your own game or collaborating with those guys?
Wheaton: Yeah, sure. It’s something that I’ve talked about with some friends. Every now and then I’ll talk to one of my friends who’s a designer and we’ll say, “Gosh, you know, it’d be fun if this happened in a game.” And my friend said, “Well, so why don’t we just make that?” “Oh right, of course, we can do that. I didn’t even think of that.” So yeah, it’s something that I thought of and it’s something that I’d really love to do. But if I’m going to do that, it’s got to be a passion project and it needs to be something that’s really awesome. Because there are so many great games right now and no time to play them all. It’s the same way I feel about writing a book. If I’m going to ask someone to trust me with their time, I better make it worth their while.

Q: In getting ready for this interview and watching TableTop and reading about International TableTop Day, I’ve thought, “Oh we’ve got to host something here—game nights at the office.” So you’ve inspired me to dive into that. I think it’s a wonderful way to get friends together. We’ve enjoyed that when we’ve been doing it at our house, but I think it’d be fun to do here.
Wheaton: I love that and I’m so happy to know that because that’s one of the main motivations I had when I created the show. I wanted what you are describing to happen. And it’s a really great thing to do at work. I worked in offices years ago where we played Counter Strike after work. And it really brought the team that I was on really close together. And the same thing happens with table-top games now. People get together and form new bonds that really wouldn’t necessarily be forged in a work environment.

Q: Well, you’ve been a huge presence on social media and people say there’s danger in that taking away from actual real friendships and real face-time, and I love that this is the way you’ve taken that social-media cache and tried to plug it back into real-world connections.
Wheaton: Yeah, one of the things we really hoped to accomplish with International TableTop Day is giving people a good reason to get into the same place and sit down together and enjoy sharing a game together and hopefully create some relationships that persist beyond International TableTop Day. Last year tons of people met people at a game shop that became their gaming group. And that’s really great, and I’m really hopeful that that happens this year and every year that we do this.

Q: So where will you be spending International TableTop Day, and what will you be playing?
Wheaton: We actually have an event planned here in Los Angeles. I’ll be playing with Felicia and a bunch of our team at Geek & Sundry. We’re going to live-stream it on the Internet just like we did last year. I’m not sure what we’re going to play; we haven’t decided yet. But last year we played a game that I really love called Seven Wonders which is a game that wouldn’t necessarily work on TableTop. It doesn’t fit our format, but it’s still a great game. So I’m thinking maybe we’ll do that again—play a game that we all really love, but that’s a little bit different than the ones we really play.

Day Z: A video game exploration of the best and worst of human nature

There’s a question inherent in the design of DayZ. Every player wakes up on the shore of a deserted, partially ruined and overtly hostile Eastern European island, with nothing but a flashlight in their pocket and the shirt on their back. On this island are weapons, food, plenty of water and a few dozen other players, all with the same opportunities and needs as you. The question, then, is simple: What’s going to kill you first?

It could just be simple hunger, each step you take incrementally ticking down a hidden number towards starvation, at which point your vision blurs and you’re incapacitated by sharp pangs in your stomach. Thirst, too, is an ever present reminder as your character lets you know that it’s been a while since you last saw water, and things aren’t looking too good. The zombies, of course, are a threat, although it’s less about attrition there and more about having the bad luck to have one of them cut you, making you bleed and making your already weak state significantly worse.

Sitting at the top of the pile of threats that DayZ presents to you, however, are the other people. The ones who know what they’re doing, sweeping across the Chernarus countryside with efficiency and a keen eye, quickly amassing and stockpiling supplies, clothes and weaponry. Some will kill you just to be on the safe side, a crackle from half a mile away and a dull thwack into the grass around you the only marker that someone is taking pot shots at you, until one of them hits home and the screen goes black. Then it’s nothing but a deadpan ‘You are dead.’ sitting in the middle of the screen.

Worse are those players who use you as sport, entertainment to break up the monotony of the apocalypse. They’ll handcuff you, rifle through your belongings taking the choice items, before either setting you free or deciding to have a little fun. Then it’s force-fed disinfectant, or blindfolds before sending you out into zombie-infested territory. Or they might just shoot you, just the once, and let you run around, faint and bleeding.

DayZ should be unpleasant. It should be held up as a monument to the darker side of the human psyche, a grand social experiment that went wrong, and instead of reflecting how we would band together in our shared need for survival, it instead just mirrored back a monster, a series of predators and prey, each struggling to become the former while inevitably, at some point, pushed into the latter.

“It’s not about giving the players the ability to do cool stuff like force feed someone disinfectant or tie someone up,” Dean Hall, the creator of the original Day Z mod, and now the Project Lead on the standalone game, is emphatic in the face of this psychopathy. “We give players these options because every now and then you’ll run across someone who won’t do these things, and that gives you a really positive experience. The crux of it is to give players free will to choose what they will do in a given situation. And when you’re dealing with other human beings, that really makes the player think about the impact of the choices they make.”

What is compelling about DayZ is the contrasts it creates. If you’ve heard about the game at all, you’ve probably heard what amount to horror stories, retellings of terrifying kidnappings, or just being held up on the side of the road and being utterly powerless in the face of superior weaponry, and a superior will. But these moments are blips among a relatively tranquil experience. Most of the time, you’re wandering alone or with friends, through wilderness or abandoned towns.

As a result, silence and a quietness of experience become emblematic of DayZ. It’s not boring because of those blips; if you let your guard down you will end up in a bad way. So you are riddled with tension, each element, from the hunger to the thirst, the players to the zombies, all working together to force you to stay aware.

“It’s about adding one of many little tensions onto the player when they’re making decisions.” Hall continues. “So they’re hungry, thirsty, and they need to get food and water, but to do that they need to go into a built up area where there are zombies.” And players, because that’s where the good stuff is; the tinned food, the weapons, the nice equipment.

I’ve been at both ends of a rifle, and both ends of a stick-up. I don’t think it’s trite to say that most players, when they start DayZ, imagine themselves as a sort of Clint Eastwood of the wasteland, aspirations of being the Pale Rider running into town, saving lives and shooting bad guys. What’s interesting to me is how quickly that hope falls by the side of the road, cast away among a pile of empty cans of tuna, and ruined jeans. Necessity makes an honest man a knave, and quickly, too.

So you ask yourself that question, what’s going to kill you, when you start DayZ. It’s filled with curiosity, and a sense of adventure; without the normal consequences, death can suddenly take on a certain morbid entertainment value when you know you’ll just wash up on the shore of Chernarus once again, looking to cheat the reaper for a little while longer. It’s what takes the wind out of the sails of the argument that DayZ is abhorrent, nothing but a murder simulator for sadists and the perverted. Yes, the things you can do, in the context of reality, are terrible, but when interpreted through the lens of a virtual space, you’re provided with an opportunity to experience the things you’d never want to in reality. It’s a form of escapism, to be trapped and robbed.

“I’ve heard the game being called a ‘murder simulator’ in the past,” Hall admits. “And I think there’s an element of truth to that. I feel like videogames have often taken the easy road, and they’re all about fun. There’s a phrase used for a lot of rogue-like games that ‘it’s fun to lose’, and I think that’s kind of what DayZ’s about.” It’s at this point I’d interject. In DayZ it isn’t so much fun in the losing, but the /how/ of it. What happened before, how you got there, how far you made it. Putting a cap on a series of experiences, to provide a clean end to the narrative.

“DayZ was always about providing choice to the player, so that the player’s decisions actually mattered; you weren’t going on rails. So the way I’d redeem it to people is that really this is about exploring the good and the bad of people, and that you can’t have the good without the bad, and that is really what DayZ is; it’s about exploring that. It’s really an experiment in terms of emotion in a videogame. Giving someone something of value, and then seeing how they react when that’s taken away.”

The Seattle Sound of Infamous: Second Son

Seattle’s a rock town, and has been forever. When you think about Seattle rock, though, one specific time probably jumps out. The town’s got Heart, sure, which matters, and you might remember Hendrix is from Seattle, but that guy skipped town early. The Sonics are from Tacoma, which is close, but unless you’re granddad old or a decades-long collector you probably didn’t pick up on them until well after the fact. No, when you think of Seattle rock you probably land on grunge and Sub Pop and Nirvana, Soundgarden and the Singles soundtrack and Marc Jacobs’ 1993 line for Perry Ellis (Uh…) When you think of the Seattle sound the dream of the ‘90s is alive, or some such.

The ads for the superpowered Infamous: Second Son remember the ‘90s. From Dead Sara’s cover of Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” to the omnipresent TV spot with Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick”, the newest Infamous game proudly reps the rock of its home town. (Well, kind of: Like Eddie Vedder, Dead Sara is actually from California.) It makes sense: Like the New Orleans-(ish)-based Infamous 2, Sucker Punch wanted to ground its game in the culture in which it is set, and for Seattle that will inevitably include grunge.

Except that isn’t really what happened.

“Infamous: Second Son was unique compared to Infamous 2,” Brad Meyer, the Audio Director at Sucker Punch Productions, tells me. “For Infamous 2, the locale (fictitious New Orleans) defined and shaped the music. For Second Son, rather than having Seattle define the music, we let Delsin [Rowe]’s character drive the direction of the score.”

Meyer admits that “Touch Me I’m Sick” and the “Heart Shaped Box” cover were picked by the game’s marketing team. The marketers “really wanted to use Nirvana, Soundgarden or one of the other old grunge bands since that still resonates with lots of people when they think of Seattle,” he says. Second Son isn’t a period piece, though — it takes place in 2016. Sucker Punch wanted music that didn’t tie the game so closely to the past, but respected the game’s setting, so, as Meyer describes, they “compromised and got Dead Sara, an up-and-coming band, to record a cover of the Nirvana song.” Sucker Punch liked the cover so much they wound up putting it in the game.

Mudhoney doesn’t make an appearance in Second Son (although Mark Arm would’ve made a great mentor for Delsin), but the tough sounds and sarcastic smirk of “Touch Me I’m Sick” fit the game’s character perfectly. ”’Touch Me I’m Sick’ just did a great job of representing the feel of Delsin enjoying his powers,” Meyer says. “The fact that it was a Seattle band was a secondary consideration, but a very happy accident.”

Still, Second Son doesn’t run from its Seattle influences. They’re just one part of what inspired the game’s score, which was composed by Marc Canham, Nathan Johnson and former Primus and Guns ‘n’ Roses drummer Bryan “Brain” Mantia. “Seattle has an amazing musical history,” Meyer boasts, “and you can hear elements of all of that within the score. We started with a style guide for our composers … featuring a wide gamut of music from Neil Young’s soundtrack from Dead Man to crazy noise rock from Austin, TX to Sacramento hip-hop band Death Grips to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ work on The Social Network and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Those references didn’t box Brain and company in. As Meyer describes, “although we started with this style guide, our composers crafted a sound completely unique from any of our initial style guide tracks. They did a phenomenal job creating something unique that totally encapsulates Delsin’s personality and his journey.”

Second Son might not feature the full tracklist of Sub Pop 200, but this is a videogame. It’s not a Wes Anderson movie. You can’t just drop licensed songs throughout a game and expect it to reflect or match the choices and experiences of a player. A movie director chooses how long a scene runs—a game designer usually only has that ability with cutscenes. The length of almost everything else in a game is dictated by the player. So expecting an open-world sandbox like Second Son to sound exactly like a college radio station circa 1989 would be a little foolish.

Matching a game’s score and soundtrack to the player’s actions is, as SCEA’s Senior Music Manager Jonathan Mayer describes, “one of the biggest challenges working in games.” He’s confident Sucker Punch pulled it off.

“We designed our adaptive music system to be as seamless and unnoticeable as possible,” Mayer says. “Sucker Punch and our music team at Sony headquarters in San Mateo, CA worked very closely together throughout the project from pre-production through the final mix. There were instances where our music team worked directly with mission designers and animators to create musical moments within missions. They also worked directly with programmers on the team to fine tune our adaptive music system so that they had granular control of the music tension based on enemies’ awareness states in regards to the player. To pull this off we really had to play the game as much as possible and really understand what our users are going to experience. The end result was that having such an integrated music team made the music much more impactful throughout the game.”

You can argue that Second Son would have more impact with at least a tiny taste of Tad, or some of his other grungy brethren. It’s hard to disagree that Canham, Johnson, Mantia, Sucker Punch and Sony succeeded at creating memorable music that effectively fits the game’s scenarios, though, while also paying some tribute to Seattle’s rock history. It might not embrace ‘90s nostalgia as much as that “Touch Me I’m Sick” ad indicates, but then that song’s from 1988, anyway. Nostalgia is a dead end, and anyone old enough to remember the ‘90s will probably agree that it isn’t a dream you’d want to live in, even with Second Son’s superpowers.

Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre Review (3DS)

<em>Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre</em> Review (3DS)

The last month of 2013 was a loud, dreary affair. Amidst all the sturm und drang of year-end Best Ever lists, not to mention the rumble of next-generation consoles still bustling out of their respective gates, it was easy to miss a quiet release on the year’s most successful console. Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre is a piece of downloadable software that replicates for home-use the same interactive guide available for rent at the famed Parisian museum. While its competitors barked about cloud computing and 1080p resolution, Nintendo released the equivalent of a portable high-school field trip. The surprise here is how successful a dedicated gaming device is at showcasing some of the world’s most treasured pieces of art.

The guide was first available exclusively to visitors starting in spring 2012. This purchasable version has been tweaked, with several options more befitting the At-Home experience. You can still use the interactive map as if you were there, but the interface is a little disorienting. Wandering the giant palace can be a confusing task, as the map was likely designed only as a supplement to being there, in person; sensors installed throughout the museum talk to your rented 3DS system and show you where you are, GPS-style. But in my apartment outside of Boston, no hazy blue dot lights my way. Still, the ability to poke around an overhead view of each floor gave a touch of verisimilitude to my long-distance appreciation.

Once you choose a piece of art, you can play the audio track(s) paired with it while viewing the work from multiple perspectives. Simple information annotates the piece, such as time period or artist. I do wish a more extensive text was available for each item, as important details are left to be gleaned from the commentary.

The museum itself is one of the art pieces to be admired, as evidenced by dozens of 3D photographs and audio tracks about the history of and architecture of the building. The arrangement and curation of pieces is as much a part of roaming a museum as each individual work. Knowing this, specific “tours” have been built to help one progress through the space without getting lost, while still providing a semblance of moving through this grand space, and not simply cherry-picking known masterpieces.

Oh, you can do that, too—just take the “Masterpieces Tour,” which focuses on the most renowned pieces at the Louvre. Though featuring only three works, the sequence takes fifty minutes, telling of the robust amount of content on offer here.

If you’d prefer to browse art as if perusing your iTunes library, just click “Look at Artworks.” All 489 selected pieces are at your disposal, filtered by medium or title. Some paintings provide high-definition up-close versions, suitable for zooming in and seeing if, yes, Ms. Lisa had a faint trace of a smile on her lips. Chosen sculptures are visible as full three-dimensional models, a perfect match for the 3DS’s native feature. Unfortunately only five such 3D sculptures are available. Cross your fingers for DLC.

One of the more interesting, unexpected virtues of Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre is its treatment of the mundane and everyday. While exploring the museum’s overhead map, clicking recognizable icons will bring up information and 3D photos of useful, if pedestrian, aspects of any tourist destination. The Information Desk is a handsome, round circle cut from pale stone: Without its needed computer monitors and pamphlet holders, one might mistake it for 14th century Islamic ceramics. (Real artifacts of that time and place are just one room over, in the basement section of the Denon wing.)

Each section includes a half-dozen 3D photos of the space itself, providing each series of displays with a context impossible to gather from a simple line-up of favorites as would be found in a book. A ceremonial ivory dagger, its hilt a horse’s head with jewels for eyes, is certainly worth investigation; so, too, is the nearest WC (restroom). Click on the telltale Man/Woman icon and sure enough, prepare to be graced with a 3D image of a heavy brown door, its silver handle casting a shadow on the burnished entrance, the dusty tile floor no less instrumental in explaining its era’s virtues than Artemis from Philomelium, a sculpture of the Greek goddess of war, describes the interests of 2nd century Asia Minor.

In the Land of Videogames, 2013 will be remembered for two shiny new boxes with numerical names. Nintendo, to the chagrin of those who expect pomp and bluster from their game-makers, continued to nonchalantly produce things for people living outside of those boxes. Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre is but the latest example, packing in a trove of culture and history that makes you, and its host device, immeasurably smarter. Sounds like a new year’s resolution to me.

Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre was designed and published by Nintendo. It is available for the 3DS.

Jon Irwin is a writer and teacher living in Boston whose work has appeared in Alimentum, Billboard, GamePro, Kill Screen and Paracinema, among other fine publications. Follow him on Twitter, but don’t follow him home.

News Film Technology

MENU

LATES

Travel and Videogames: Missing Play in Beijing

Learning to Let Go: Time and Memory in Games

Maddy Myers and Samantha Allen on Manveer Heir's GDC Talk

Catching Up With Wil Wheaton: International TableTop Day

Day Z: A video game exploration of the best and worst of human nature

The Seattle Sound of Infamous: Second Son

Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre Review (3DS)

Search This Blog

RECOMMENDED

Last Visited

Visitor