Brubaker’s Angel of Death

Posted on March 03, 2009 10:16 AM No Comments

Ed Brubaker is one of my favorite comic writers. He’s jumped over to film by doing an original series for Crackle, Sony’s internet video site. It’s a direct to web series called Angel of Death, a noir action mashup with plenty of bullets and blood.

The limited budget show’s in places, as does the rough transition comic book dialog and pacing can sometimes have when going to live action. That’s something we may see again later this week when Watchmen launches. But overall it’s a fun ride, and definitely worth the price, which is free.

There’s a new episode every day for the next week, so why not join the ride? I’d love to hear what people think of it.

The Edges of the Sandbox

Posted on December 14, 2008 5:02 PM No Comments

No matter how big or amazing the virtual Sandbox you’re planning on building for your games, it’s going to have something in common with the silica stuffed playground analog in the real world: walls. You can do your best to hide them, integrate them into the landscape, or write an elaborate story about how in the future the city is surrounded by deadly radiation, but integrated or not, you need something to pour the sand into.

So-called “Open World” games have improved a great deal since GTA3 first landed on the scene with a collective “Eureka!” from everyone who’ve played them. And they’ve been around long enough that we’re starting to generate sub-genres, from Bethesda RPG focused fantasy environments, to the criminal ridden dystopian super-cities of Crackdown. And the MMOs are beginning to borrow from that tradition, slowly offering more interactive treats than just things to see and monsters to kill.

But players like to do more than play. One of the first things they’ll do in any environment is throw themselves repeatedly against the walls of their entertaining prison like a fly smacking into a closed window. That isn’t actually mean it’s a bad thing. You’ve got to have rules, and rules mean edges. Sooner or later they’ll head the other way.

But once they do it’s important that there’s something fun to do besides breaking the world you’ve put them into. Gaming is about turning thoughts into action, and if you’re not keeping them busy with planned entertainments they’ll always find a way to overcome the limits of the system.

That may not be a problem in a single-player game, but it’s a red-alert crisis when your players break through the constraints of a multiplayer world. Any exploit, no matter how trivial can lead to a potential melt-down. Like a crack in the damn, the flow of water may seem trivial at first, but it’s the pressure behind it that can quickly lead to catastrophic failure.

One of my favorite examples of this was The Sims Online. Trading in the god-like powers they’d been given in the single-player version they instead were given a chance to become one of the burbling Sim creatures. It was a simple life of work and reward, as you ground your way up the ladder; day to day life, only not as good as the real thing. And pretty quickly the players figured out how to exploit the system.

The game provided power in numbers, the as people banded together into gangs, it revealed itself to be an ideal simulator for criminal activity. A mob moved in, calling itself the Shadow Government, and creating rackets and intimidating other players. A virtual sex industry soon sprang up as well. As shocking as these developments seemed to be, they’re actually pretty classic game activities. There’s a reason that GTA uses crime as its backstory, and it’s not just to piss off New England Senators.

In the end the problem isn’t what people were doing, it was that it was well outside the simple, wholesome intentions of the game. The players had jumped the walls because the fundamental gameplay wasn’t compelling enough to stop them from trying. So if you’re game is popular enough to attract a big crowd you need to be damn sure you give them something to keep them occupied. Otherwise they’ll make up their own games to play.

10 ways that Fallout 3 is like Burning man.

Posted on December 10, 2008 1:42 PM No Comments

Not SImilar AT ALL

While running around Fallout 3′s post-apocalyptic wasteland in my power armor I saw something oddly familiar rising up above the landscape in the pre-dawn gloom. It was a bright, flickering light coming from a hi-tech device purchased atop a metal tripod. It seemed to be blinking out a kind of rhythmic pattern, inviting me to come closer.

Then I realized where I’d seen this before: I’d seen something almost exactly like it in the Nevada desert at every Burning Man I’d ever attended. This was clearly a camp of some kind. But this particular four o’clock in the morning, instead of finding a group of tired nerds dancing to techno music and offering to trade me drinks for trinkets, I was greeted by four laser wielding Enclave soldiers and a cyborg Deathclaw.

But it dawned on me that except for my character’s tendency to use violence to solve 90% of all his problems, there were a lot of things in common between the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout 3, and the post-millenial temporary autonomous zone known as The Burning Man Festival.

10: Paper money is worthless.
Well, mostly worthless, anyway. Burning man is a gifting society where you can only spend “real” money to buy stimulants and ice. Fallout 3 is a world where “pre-war dollars” are only useful as trinkets for trade.
In both places a large handful of bottle caps will probably get your more loot than a wad of paper money will.

9. Everything is covered in dust.
In a world without trees the dust rules. The dry lakebed and the DC wasteland are both covered with a fine grit that can take the most colorful object and renders it into a spectrum of browns.

8. Taking drugs can help.
While you can argue that drug use is never a good thing, it certainly can be helpful if you have a specific goal in mind. Stimulants are especially useful, but ingesting psychedelics can lead to effects in the real world that more closely match the combat-screwing “withdrawal” effects of Fallout’s drug addiction. But, as I mentioned above, you tend to fight less stuff at Burning Man.

Image7. Cars don’t work.
By the time you’ve driven from the entry gate and into your camp your automobile has become a dust-covered albatross. For the next week your car will do little more than take up space and provide a semi-secure place for all your stuff. Fallout does lack art-cars and bicycles however, although I guess you could consider Liberty Prime an art-car of sorts. Or is he “The Man”?

6. Pre-packaged food.
While it may lack the fanciful and humorous names of the products in Fallout, there’s no doubt that it’s much easier to eat food out of a can or bag than try to whip up something fresh. There’s also far less radiation absorbed with every meal, although you’re certainly swallowing plenty of dust.

5. Galaxy News Radio
Although Black Rock City has internet these days, the best (and often fastest) way to get information in any wasteland is to listen to one of the radio stations. And just like D.C., one station provides music and news, while all the others are nothing but propaganda.

4. Attendees voluntarily assume the risk of death.
It says so right on your ticket. But if you want to stay in your vault and never venture out into the world, be my guest. Let’s see how much fun that’s going to be.

3. Most people are wearing a costume.
Can you really tell Raider Painspike armor apart from the average member of Death Guild? How about a naked four hundred pound man from a super-mutant, or the guy who’s spent four days sleeping in his glam-makeup from a ghoul?

And while you may not need body-armor, there’s a definite need to wear something warm and protective on those cold and dusty nights, along with whatever you may have managed to “borrow” from that guy who passed out in your camp this afternoon.

2. People wearing nice clothes are inevitably assholes
Tenpenny Tower may look like an enclave of civilization, but the people in it are anti-ghoul bigots who deserve whatever it is that’s coming to them. Clothes may make the man, but clean clothes may make the man a douche bag. In a twist of irony the ugly hordes of Burning Man are the well-dressed dudes and dudettes who stream in from Los Angeles the day before the burn, looking to see some naked chicks, or just experience the scene without actually being a part of it. Good karma, bad karma, you’re the guy with the glowstick.

1. You’re always looking for someone.
Whether it’s your father who’s set out on a journey to save the world, or your girlfriend sneaking out to try and hook up with that hot guy dressed like a satyr (don’t worry, he’s gay), it turns out that a lot of your time in the desert landscape is spent trying to find people you actually know. And while it may not be easy to figure out where they are in the middle of the night, you’ll definitely be able to have a conversation with them the next day.

So next time you step out into a stark, blasted, landscape, remember that you don’t have to just visit a virtual wasteland. You can go to the real thing at the end of August.

Social Gaming: The End of the Silent Era?

Posted on December 08, 2008 10:40 AM No Comments

It must have been a shock to the film industry when they first realized that era of the silent movies were over, and the future was going to be entirely about the “talkies”. After all, the language of cinema had really only matured over the last decades before, and modern movies had started to become masterpieces of motion and physical expression, using editing to create visual effects and dramatic storylines. But even though sound was inevitable, some creators didn’t go down without a figh: Charlie Chaplin made Modern Times, his last “silent movie”, nine years after Al Jolson first broke the sound barrier with the Jazz Singer. It proved that you could still make a great silent film, but it had also been seven years since the Marx Brothers had exploded onto the screen with their snappy patter and musical talent. Chaplin wanted to prove that things didn’t need to change, but they already had.

With Video Games it’s not as clear what our “talkies” moment is going to be. Certainly there are lots of issues with narrative, and as we solve them games are become less and less about pure goal getting, and more about uncovering story. But it seems to be social gaming, from World of Warcraft, to Rock Band, to games on MySpace and Facebook, that are moving games in a new direction. We’re leaving behind the lone player in his heavily simulated reality, and heading toward a world where we games are part of an ongoing, evolving social interaction with hundreds of even thousands of others. It’s a world where gamers aren’t just buying an experience, they’re getting into a relationship.

Two years ago Raph Koster predicted that single player games were coming to and end. At the time it seemed implausible, almost hard to understand. And the idea set off a minor firestorm of conversation across the internet. It was easy to dismiss his ideas at the time, but things have only accelerated since then, with multiplayer becoming the core experience on the PC, and co-op play being a part of almost every successful console release this years.

There’s a variety of reasons why that trend will continue to accelerate, but one clear effect of adding in a social relationship to your game, whether it’s with other players or the publisher, is that it turns all the “peer to peer” tools of piracy from negatives into positives. When it’s the relationship that the player is paying for, the more easily they can access the content the more money the publisher can make. And that seems like a win for everybody.

Metaphor in Media

Posted on December 01, 2008 10:06 AM No Comments

There’s a joke that I made up a while back that goes like this:

What’s a Metaphor?
It’s for when the regular one isn’t big enough.

And that’s more than just a bad pun, because a metaphors can be powerful stuff. Using one pushes an idea beyond the original context and allows the creator to reach out and “borrow” from another, more common, chunk of human experience so that new experience can seem more familiar than it actually is.

Whether it’s a piece of fiction or an interface, there can be a tendency in entertainment of all kinds to let your metaphor try and do too much work. After all, when done well it’s an easy way to create that all-important “aha” moment in the mind of someone experiencing your work. It allows them to “get” what you’ve been going for, and avoid the dangers of having to actually explain it to them.

The danger is, if you take it too far, that your audience can become too aware of what you’re attempting to do. And once they make the connection they may decide you’ve become a poor shadow of the thing that you’re trying to borrow from.

In the interactive world your problems get big really fast if you decide to be too literal, because you’re trading in efficiency for “truth”. Gamers may be happier with an interface where you can click on different pictures of rooms in a house, rather than having to steer an avatar from room to room in order to select the next level, no matter how “realistic” that is. Not every game is Super Mario…

Sony Home discovers that virtual realities often mean going nowhere

Posted on November 26, 2008 10:26 AM No Comments

 

The idea of a fully computer-generated virtual reality (VR) hit the mainstream two decades ago when William Gibson introduced to the world to the cyber-cowboys of data-decks of Neuromancer. But even as crude prototypes were developed, and the concepts were discussed late into the night, we were without the computing power to actually make it happen. We could talk a lot about how cool it would be, we just couldn’t actually go there.

Since then there have been a number of attempts to create virtual worlds, but our intellectual understanding of what that might mean has remained far ahead of our ability to actual create it. Second Life, a more recent example, was able to generate far more press than it was activity, because in the end the ability to “do anything” still means that someone has to do all the work that it takes to make something happen.

The disconnect comes from the fact that the endgame of VR isn’t really about breaking the laws of physics, it’s about fulfilling desires. What we’re really looking for is a magical genie where the products of our imaginations can be realized instantly, without the painstaking work that it usually takes to go from fantasy to reality, and without the inherent language process errors that come from Monkey Paws or genies in old Twilight Zone episodes. But even as our digital tools get better and better the interfaces for turning thought into action still remain crude, filtered through complicated devices that still only allow for the simplest approximations of interaction. Or, as a friend pointed out to me the other day, when someone knocks all the crap over in your house in Fallout 3, you suddenly realize that you don’t actually have the hands you need in order to pick it up.

But the idea of VR is compelling enough that it seems to constantly trick people into giving it another go. To that end Sony has clearly decided it’s worthwhile to pour millions of dollars into trying to create a virtual front-end for the Playstation 3. Unfortunately they seem to be running headlong into not only into the classic roadblocks of VR creation, but also the modern problems that come when what people want is to screw around with ideas and characters that other people “own”. As the creators of Spore recently discovered when their users decided that making thousands of living penises was a great idea, giving people the tools to be able to easily do whatever they want comes with the added responsibility of having to police what they actually do.

There are solutions to those problems, but they can be expensive, and once they’re applied you may find that what you have isn’t really a virtual reality anymore. Instead you’ve got a game where the only rules are defined by your limitations, both real and artificial, which isn’t really much fun at all.

The Dentistry Interface: The Tooth Hurts.

Posted on November 25, 2008 9:39 AM No Comments

It’s not surprising that people don’t like to visit the dentist. From the doctor’s point of view the user interface is your head. He sticks in a series of pointy tools such as drills and suction tubes as his controllers, and the goal of the game is not only to “save the teeth”, but also to cause the least amount of pain possible. Being a dental patient is about as much fun as being a level in Starcraft.

But, over the last few decades, there’s been a revolution of sorts. Visiting the dentist has always been a about removing chronic pain in the long term by allowing for extreme discomfort in the short term. But until modern times the crude methods of “repair” meant that each operation left you a little uglier and more broken than when you entered. Every surgery gave you a fresh gap in your teeth from an extraction, or a metal filling where once there was shiny white enamel.

In modern dentistry the result is usually an improvement over the initial state. Starting with crowns and braces, and adding purely cosmetic elements like “professional whitening” dentistry has not only been about replacing short-term discomfort with long term improvement, it actually gives you an improved interface for eating, talking, and smiling.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a kid anymore, but I hear a lot less nervousness and complaining from people about going to the dentist these days. Sure, it’s still an unpleasant experience, but it seems to have become a game where the player can actually walk out feeling like a winner.

Eidos attempts MetaCensorship

Posted on November 24, 2008 2:32 PM No Comments

Because gamers are technical by nature, and identify themselves so strongly with the experience of playing games, and often see themselves as “amateur professionals” they also tend to be tuned into information that your average book reader or movie-goer would never see.

That’s why this attempt by Eidos to game the system seems so ridiculously ham-handed:

Gamespot UK journalist Guy Cocker revealed the tactic in a Twitter post on Wednesday that said: “call from Eidos–if you’re planning on reviewing Tomb Raider Underworld at less than an 8.0, we need you to hold your review till Monday.”

Said a Barrington Harvey rep on the phone this afternoon: “That’s right. We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos.”

When asked why, the spokesperson said: “Just that we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”

On one level it acknowledges that gamers are probably going to respond to Metacritic’s review numbers, but it also completely fails to realize that if the information got out (and why wouldn’t it?) the fans will consider Eidos’ lack of confidence in their own product into their perception of the game as well.

It’s hard enough to re-invigorate a product that’s been through as many ups and downs as Tomb-Raider has over the years, especially when it seems like every iteration of the game is trying to be a “major re-launch”, but this kind of behavior only serves to confirm people’s worst fears. Oh, and turn them into a target for Penny Arcade.

Om Nom Nom Nom on MySpace: Dark Horse Presents

Posted on November 06, 2008 1:27 PM 1 Comment

My first professional comic work is now up on Myspace.

It’s the first story for the new Creepy comic that will be coming out shortly from Dark Horse Comics.

 

I’m very excited about it.
Take a look and let me know what you think!

Lego Batman and The Lawnmower

Posted on October 12, 2008 9:56 AM No Comments

image When my replacement XBox arrived back from Microsoft this week the only un-played game in my house was Lego Batman. I’ve played all the double branded Lego games, but now that the license is moving beyond the pure nostalgic high point of the classic Star Wars and Indiana Jones films I think that the line may be starting to show some of the limitations of the format.

Part of the problem is that the slapstick dumb-show used for the story elements only really works well if you’re already deeply familiar with what’s being parodied. That worked out great for Star Wars, and it was fine for Indiana Jones, but it doesn’t really make much sense in Batman. It’s a fun way to satirize the familiar villains (Riddler, Joker, etc.), but there’s no well known story there, so we get a lot of physical comedy, but none of the ironic, assumption-shattering meta-humor that made the earlier games seem so cheeky and fun when they were razzing Darth Vader, or mocking the Cantina scene. Instead it comes off feeling oddly similar to the old Batman TV show from the sixties. The characters are mostly defined by their strong visual traits and not much else, and their function tries to follow their form. Except, in this case, the form seems to have been defined to serve the gameplay and it weakens the story.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Both Batman and Robin are given a number of alternative “suits” that can be activated when they’re found inside a level. They’re sold as giving the player amazing new abilities, but the powers they confer are incredibly specific, and rather than opening up the player’s experience of the world they seem to limit it. Robin, for example, can get a magnetic outfit that allows him to walk on metal surfaces. But the places it actually lets him explore are clearly marked, and few and far between. So you end up in this goofy outfit, waiting for the next obvious place to use it.  It doesn’t make sense in terms of the source material, and it doesn’t feel all that fun after the first few times you do it.

Ultimately the core dynamic in the Lego world is collection, and there are plenty of things to try and grab, with money being the most important. The way you get stuff is busting up objects in the world so you can gather up all the juicy Lego coins that spring out. In order to do this effectively, you move through the world like a lawnmower, cutting down everything you can, until the environment has been cleared of anything destructible. Breaking things also reveals lego pieces that you can use to build new object. Unfortunately they’re pretty random. Breaking apart a bank vault door allows you to build a giant laser wielding robot, for example. This worked great in Star Wars, where you were creating cool stuff from the movies, but here it just seems kind of abstract and forced.

One of the most frustrating parts of the game is that there a lot of the objects that only become accessible once you’ve unlocked more of the content. You can see all this cool stuff hanging around the level, but you don’t have the ability in the game to actually get them, because the things you’d need to reach them are locked away until after you’ve finished a level in the story mode. This makes it available for “open play”. And in that mode you to access any of the suits and characters you’ve unlocked at any time.  So the first time through in the Story Mode you end up feeling like a sightseer, passing by collectible objects that can’t be collected, and machines that can’t be used. Or at least it seems that way… There’s often no way to tell if something is a mandatory now puzzle or an optional later puzzle. And it’s entirely possible to replay a level and still not have unlocked what you need to collect the bonus content. It just doesn’t have the elegance of something like Metroid, where the frustration of the unreachable is always a tease that the world will become more open as you power up.

You could argue that this dynamic makes the whole game a meta-puzzle; get the characters you need to go back and get the stuff to get more characters and abilities to get more stuff that you need. That’s a good idea, but it really doesn’t work so well in this case. There’s an initial rush, but after a while it seems like everything is constantly being kept just out of your reach. It ends up being a negative feedback loop, so at this point I have oodles of money, but nothing to spend it on because I haven’t unlocked enough stuff to go into the levels and find the stuff that will unlock the stuff that I’m allowed to spend my money on. So now, instead of being focused on the moment to moment gameplay, I’m constantly having my lack of resources rubbed in my face as I trudge through that limited story mode.

Having said all that, this isn’t a bad game. It’s polished, rich, and smart. It’s also got a great “fun for kids of all ages” feel that we don’t get enough of these days. For the most part it is also easy to play, with the only punishment for failure being the loss of a little cash.

Still, Lego Batman feels a bit like the end of an era for the Lego line. Traveller’s Tales have managed to create a number of great titles, hitting a high water mark with the Original Trilogy version of Lego Star Wars. But like any successful series, it’s possible to become so focused on improving and innovating in the fundamentals that you fail to occasionally add in the kind of wild innovation that made your original products so great.