Friday, April 30, 2010

An unconvincing clone

I was recently playing Final Fantasy XIII. Well, I should say that I recently stopped playing Final Fantasy XIII. It lost me about 35 hours in. Everything that was holding on to my strings of interest for the game were let go far too early. There was tension between characters, mystery in the world and ambiguous morality driving everything into confusion, and that was a good thing. So why did they let it all go so early and turn it into a hallway dungeon crawler? But that's not the topic I want to talk about today.

A lot of people have complained about how FFXIII robs the player of more control over the game than almost any other RPG to date. The dungeons rarely have alternate paths or hidden rooms, there are no towns to explore and side quests are only introduced much later in the game and are rather linear when they are. Even the battle system, which I'm actually a fan of, can get extremely tedious and boring. If what they were trying to achieve was epic cinematic battles, then making the player fight the same combination of enemies 8-10 times per area is just a bad an idea as asking someone to watch the same episode of some HBO show before asking them what they thought. The beginning of the game introduced new battle mechanics often enough to keep it interesting, but that quickly disappeared. Final Fantasy XIII is a very very long animated movie with a lot of repetition. The particularly surprising thing about this is that the previous entries in the series were more open than any before them. FFXII featured vast areas to explore and find secrets in, large intricate towns and the battle system balanced player control and customizable AI brilliantly. FFXI is an MMO, so its open-ended gameplay goes without saying.

What made Square-Enix decide to go in such a drastically different direction? It's my opinion that it's the current generation sin of gaming: trying to be a movie. More and more games are trying to imitate movies. Is it because movies are a recognized form of art and game designers are trying to validate their own medium? Or is it because the FPS and western developers have become so popular, attracting a large crowd of lovers of action movies. I think that this is a more likely culprit.

Uncharted and Uncharted 2 are the culmination of the type of game that tries to imitate a movie. The plot of the second one in particular is so dangerously close to the Tomb Raider movie that I was embarrassed for the similarities at times. Not to mention the cast of action movie characters complete with snappy female supports and sarcastic, yet charming male leads. Many gamers raved about the story of Uncharted 2 and the character interactions, but the only thing I kept thinking while playing the game was "how would this do as a movie...?". The answer is not very good. But, it was one of the highest ranking games of 2009 with an aggregated score of 96 on metacritic. If you look at the reviews, it's not only the game play that is raved about, although it is indeed good gameplay, people actually boost the score significantly for the story.

The problem here is the phrase "it's good for a video game". Since video game stories are generally something thrown together to allow the gameplay to take place, it's rarely taken seriously. So, when a game that has a story that actually tries, people notice, and are apparently easily pleased.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Kellee Santiago Responds

Kellee Santiago responds to Roger Ebert's criticism of her claim of Games as Art.

http://kotaku.com/5520437/my-response-to-roger-ebert-video-game-skeptic

and so does Brian Ashcraft!

http://kotaku.com/5520087/an-open-letter-to-roger-ebert

Sorry Roger, doesn't look like the gaming world is swallowing your criticism very easily.

You're still very good at criticizing movies though, so thanks for that.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Roger Ebert: Video games cannot be art

Roger Ebert recently posted an article here http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html about how video games "can never be art".

To defend his point, he uses Kellee Santiago's TED talk where she argues that video games are art and argues against her. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y6MYDSAww&feature=player_embedded

You don't have to read or watch those links if you're pressed for time, I take up their arguments in what I'm going to say. Although I recommend you do take the time to read Ebert's article and watch Santiago's presentation.

Unfortunately, I don't find Santiago's argument particularly compelling either, so it's no surprise that Ebert manages to trump her so soundly. She cites wikipedia for a definition on art where it says "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." Ebert then argues against that definition since he says that as a Chess player, he believes his game fits that definition and seems to imply that his game is not art. But isn't it? A carefully designed game with intricate rules that forces the player to look past the obvious. Build the desire to win while inspiring emotions of nervousness, trepidation, excitement, loss and glory. If something that can do all of that isn't art, then what is?

Ebert offers Plato's definition that "art should be defined as the imitation of nature," and later offers his own notion that "it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision." But what Ebert doesn't take into consideration is the danger of taking anything Plato says at face value and taking a single point of view from one text. Yes, Plato says that "art should be defined as the imitation of nature," in one text, but then in The Ion, Socrates warns the Rhapsode Ion of taking such a simplistic view on art. Ion has only one point of view of the poet Homer and knows of no other poets. Socrates argues that Ion could not have a mastery of that knowledge without knowing several other perspectives and understanding the other poets as well. Ebert, and even Santiago, are both making the same mistake where they try to define art from a narrow perspective.

I propose that art is anything that allows us to see a new angle on a subject (or object) that we never saw before. It inspires us through our emotions and then forces us to contemplate why we were so moved by it to learn new perspectives.

Maybe I'm making the same mistake as Ion, Ebert and Santiago, but I feel that my definition offers a little more leeway in terms of the medium to allow almost anything to become art.

One limitation that video games have as art is their tendency to appeal to their rather short history. Games like "Passage" or other pieces by Jason Rohrer have charming 8-bit graphics that resound nostalgically with gamers from the 80s, but for most gamers, those who started playing with either the last 2 generations, the Playstation and Playstation 2 generations, or even the newest gamers of the Wii, 360 and PS3 generations, this style has no appeal. As one of my professors once said "which is the better form of art: The ultra-artistic super introspective indie film in theater 1 with an audience of 3, or the kind of shallow movie with an obvious message and an audience of 500 in theater 2." How great is a piece of art if it has a limited audience? It's certainly one hurdle that games have to overcome.

To avoid this post becoming any longer, I'll stop for now, although I still have lots to say against Mr. Ebert. I promise that games as art is something that will come up again.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Pokéwalker

So I recently picked up Pokémon SoulSilver for the DS. The original Gold and Silver have always been my favorite of all of the iterations of the pokémon games, but I still wasn't instantly convinced to buy the remakes. I had just finished playing Diamond not long ago and as we all know, Pokémon games tend to be rather similar.

What did spark my interest though, was the pokéwalker. Of course, I was reminded of the Pokémon Pikachu from years ago that was included with the Yellow version of the first generation games. Memories of sitting in my bedroom shaking that little yellow rat to death to collect watts flooded back with oddly fond memories. Now that I was older though, I thought to myself, maybe I could actually go out and do my daily chores with a monster in my pocket instead of just shaking it silly.

After I got one of the creatures into the device (my level 6 Totodile), I went for a walk around the block. When I got home, I transferred him back to the game cartridge was pleasantly informed that my Totodile had grown by one level. I was later disappointed to discover that my pokémon could only grow one level at a time using the device, but I quickly got over it and have now grown several levels for my party pokémon by walking, biking and doing various chores.

Then I was reminded of the "Design Outside of the Box" presentation at DICE 2010 by Jesse Schell. In the presentation, he builds up to where he thinks games are going, which is a real life reward system for doing various chores, eating properly, etc.

The pokéwalker is doing doing exactly that. Instead of shifting your thumb left and right walking through tall grass to power-level your creatures, it encouraged you to go for a real walk or get something done to get the grinding done. I was instantly excited that I wouldn't have to grind in the later part of the game to prepare my party for the elite four. Instead I could go see some friends, go for a bike ride, or do some groceries, all the while leveling up in my pocket. A device like this was the solution to an RPG gamer's nightmare: level grinding. With home consoles becoming more and more complex in their capability to connect to various devices, it's entirely possible that we'll someday see some sort of universal pedometer device that game developers can choose to implement into their game to encourage gamers to go outside to walk instead of stay in their game, walking back and forth waiting for the next random encounter.

I admit that I'm mostly anti-wii at the moment, but this kind of thing is right up Nintendo's alley. They already created the pokéwalker, so I'm hoping to see something like this encourage us to do real life activities to benefit in our games rather than reward us for killing the same enemy 37 times to get that 1 rare drop.