In our double-takes, we give our informal, conversational thoughts on a specific game or topic.
Daniel: Video games reward the player in a variety of ways. Some games reward the player's progress by showing them something awe-inspiring, be it a pre-rendered cut scene or a thrilling set piece. Others use new weapons, leveling up, and other systems of player empowerment. One classic reward system is the high score; a modern analogue is the achievement/trophy systems that have recently come into favor. No matter how a game doles them out, rewards are a key element of the pacing and design of most video games. How easily one reaps a game's rewards is also a large indicator of a game's difficulty.
So what are the most effective systems? The most satisfying rewards I have ever received from video games have been intellectual ones; to be more specific, I treasure the sense of victory that comes from solving a particularly interesting, intelligent puzzle. Braid was incredibly effective in this regard. I would get frustrated for a while, fiddle around with my various options for interaction, and eventually stumble on something that worked with a sense of sudden elation. Puzzle games are enthralling because they make the player feel intelligent when they successfully complete a challenge. This formula can also lead to discouragement and self-doubt, but to me, those hard-earned intellectual victories are worth the risk of feeling like an idiot from time to time.
So what video game rewards do you most crave, and why?
Of all the Nintendo franchises, Zelda has always been my favorite. The blend of action, puzzle-solving, and exploration has a special place in my heart. I’ve played a Zelda game on every console since the Super Nintendo, but I haven’t touched either of the exceedingly well-reviewed games for the Nintendo DS. It’s not that the games don’t look fun to me. I’m just trying to avoid public embarrassment.
You see, one of the mechanics that The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks have in common is that they require the player to blow into the DS microphone to accomplish certain goals. As an avid home console gamer, I use my DS almost exclusively on the bus and metro, surrounded by people I don’t know. While I may be willing to embarrass myself by flailing around in my living room with friends and loved ones present, my tolerance for doing weird things on a crowded bus is much, much lower. What would people think? Maybe if I just did it once, someone would assume I was blowing some stray dust off of the screen. More sustained blowing, however, makes the blower look steadily more insane.
There was an attack in The World Ends with You that required shouting into the DS microphone. I have no idea how useful it was, because I never used it. I’ve seen people who shout on the bus. Those people are avoided and occasionally asked to leave. In one puzzle in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, the solution required blowing into the DS microphone. I remember looking around, furtively, and then trying to quickly move my stylus across the microphone to mimic a blowing sound. It took a long time, but eventually worked. Of course the result was me furiously rubbing a tiny hole on my DS, which may be just as humiliating.
And Nintendo just can’t stop there. As if the microphone wasn’t enough, the DSi introduces a camera function. A few games have been announced which will allow the player to take pictures of their surroundings and use them in game. So now I’m meant to photograph strangers? This begs the question of whether I should do so openly, and hope that they take me as harmless, or be more secretive and risk looking more like a pervert. Either way, restraining orders seem likely.
A recent news post explains that Nintendo’s next generation of handhelds will use motion controls. It’s a little vague on the details: maybe you’ll flail the device itself around, threatening to strike innocent commuters, or perhaps the gesticulating will be done at the device, and it will register your movements with a camera, while others register your movements as dementia.
Slow down, Nintendo! Finding new ways to interact with video games is exciting, but the purpose of the device should be kept in mind. Handheld consoles are meant to be portable and playable in public. We already have wireless ear pieces to make us look crazy; there’s really no need to have us shouting, waving our arms around, taking photographs of people nearby, and then blowing desperately at our little screens. I’m all for pushing the boundaries of interactivity, but a modicum of common sense goes a long way. A handheld that’s too embarrassing to take out of your home loses a lot of its appeal.
When I was about five years old, my grandmother read me Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in its entirety. That very year, my older brother loaned me J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series when he was finished with them. I was hooked: as long as there was a chance of high adventure and sword play, I was willing to stick my nose into almost any book. My enthusiasm for swords and sword fighting was not limited to the literary world. Growing up on a farm, kids have to make their own fun and my brother and I did so in fine style. We spent entire summers hammering crude cross handles and makeshift shields out of scrap wood scavenged from the workshops and barns in the area. Our weapons made, we would battle for hours, smashing away at each other’s faux weapons until they broke or we were called in for dinner. We must have put my mother through no shortage of worry, but it was fun, some of the best fun I’ve ever had.
It is no surprise that video games were quick to tap into young peoples’ interest in medieval armaments and fantasy. The Legend of Zelda was a huge success, and with good cause. In its time, it had awesome graphics and brilliant game play. These qualities where all but lost to me at the time as I was much more concerned with the sheer awesomeness of not only getting to see a dragon on my TV screen, but getting to slay it with my own hands. Other titles like Ninja Gaiden and the first couple of Final Fantasy games also grabbed my attention early on. They were, after all, adventure stories involving swords, and that was enough for me. The 1987 release of Sid Meier’s Pirates! Included not only a sword fight mini-game but scurvy buccaneers as well; you better believe I played that game through a couple hundred times on my parents’ old Mac.
Flash forward to the late nineties, my cup runneth over. Innumerable RPGs littered the medium; the Samurai Showdown and Last Blade series made a splash in the fighting game scene, and strategy games like Warcraft put entire armies of blade-wielding minions at my disposal. Weapons were upgradable; some of them glowed with magical power, and some of the best RPG’s like Bioware’s Baldur's Gate even allowed you to build a character from the ground up to specialize in almost any conceivable armament. It was a golden age of the controller and the sword, yet still, I was not satisfied. I wanted more from the experience.
It’s not that any of these titles fell short of video game greatness; they just never quite hit swordplay greatness. The player hits a button or clicks a mouse and the avatar swings a sword, damage is then assigned with a numerical representation displayed in a health bar. It just wasn’t enough: guns are a point and click mechanism, hence the enormous successes of ever so many first person shooters, but swords are much more complex. A gun shoots in one direction at a time; the swing of a sword is a much more elegant piece of physics. Its lethality is not only based on where it hits its target, but how fast it is moving, and how much weight you’ve put behind it. I can certainly appreciate the difficulty of putting such considerations into programming language, but without them I feel that the medium hasn’t quite captured the experience yet.
There have been several notable exceptions. Square Soft’s 1998 release of Bushido Blade 2 made a big impression on me. It was not so different from most of the other early 3-D fighting games with two major exceptions: one, your characters were armed. Two, if you managed to score a good hit on the other player with your weapon, they died. Even between two skilled opponents, matches typically lasted less than fifteen seconds. Many people didn’t like this kind of pacing, but I thought it was brilliant. After all, in the real world, if someone slashes you with a katana, it tends to kill you. Also in 1998, the developers at Tantrum Entertainment released Die by the Sword, a platform adventure game where you controlled the actual movement of your avatar’s sword arm, allowing you to thrust, parry, and slice to your heart’s content. This was a brilliant addition to the game, but a difficult dynamic to master. Translating complex swordplay to the keyboard never quite panned out. Both of these titles fell by the wayside of video game deployment, but I felt they had important things to offer the medium.
In 2006, I watched demonstrations of the Nintendo Wii and felt a new glimmer of hope. Here was perhaps the greatest development in gaming since the turn of the millennium. With motion-sensitive controls our avatars now not only responded to the manipulations of buttons and joysticks but the movements of our bodies. A crucial gap between gamers and the worlds they explore had been bridged. Playing the original Wii Sports I couldn’t help but think: if this system lets me toss around a bowling ball, what’s to say it won’t let me swing a sword? The release of Zelda: Twilight Princess got me all aflutter, but the end result was something of a disappointment. Sure, you swing your arm and Link swings his sword, but only in a few different ways. So far, swordplay on the Wii hasn’t really come into its own. Developers haven’t yet put all of the pieces together.
Hope springs eternal. Red Steel 2 for the Nintendo Wii is due for release in the first quarter of 2010 and it promises to utilize the full potential of the Wii MotionPlus, which should help sword play feel more like sword play and less like hitting buttons. Until then I will just have to goad my brother into a stick fight when we get together for Thanksgiving.
Hey! Listen! Does that annoy you? Hey! Listen! Do you find it distracting? Hey! Listen! Do you find yourself losing interest in the article and instead fantasizing about how you could track me down and bludgeon me to death with my keyboard? Then it’s probably time to stop.
The Legend of Zelda was more than just another series to me, it was a staple of my early gaming experience. I have loved stories about swordplay and magic since I was old enough to read, and the original Zelda put me right in the driver’s seat. I faithfully played each new incarnation of my boyhood favorite, even that confused side scroller with the golden cartridge Zelda 2. Zelda for the SNES remains one of my all-time favorites and when Ocarina of Time came out for the Nintendo 64 I was positively giddy. Sadly, along with another dimension the Zelda series acquired a terrible disease: Navi.
Navi the fairy was your little guide to the world of Hyrule, constantly dispensing advice about how to overcome obstacles, no matter how banal. She was like Jiminy Cricket, only instead of guiding you through situations of moral turpitude she gave you detailed instructions on how to accomplish every task in the game. She fit right in your pocket so she was always right there, always watching, always advising. No matter how many times she repeated her advice, it was never quite enough for her. Apparently she just didn’t trust Link to get the job done, as per the example below:
Hey, listen. The spider web is in your way! You need to find a way to get past.
Hey, listen. You need to set the spider web on fire.
Hey, listen. Use a stick like a torch and set the spider web on fire.
Hey , listen. You set the stick on fire, now it is like a torch you can use to set fires.
Hey, Listen. Fire is very hot because it is flame and you can use it now to burn down things like spider webs because they are flammable.
Hey, listen. Good job, you burned down the spider web and can now progress forward past it because it is no longer in your way, because you burned it down.
Hey, listen. There’s a door. You can’t get through the door because it is locked. You need a key to unlock the door otherwise it will remain shut stopping you from passing through it.
HEY, LISTEN….
As you can see this kind of advice goes well beyond good intentions and strays into the realm of mental abuse. I can only surmise that Navi in Zelda 64 was employed by Ganon to drive our hero insane. But Nintendo wasn’t finished defiling the series, oh no, not by a hook shot. After a lengthy hiatus I returned to my beloved series to see how it had changed during the years I was in an asylum, so a few months ago I popped in Zelda Twilight Princess for a test run. I was in sheer joy for a while; there was not a fairy in sight. My happiness was to be short lived. Enter a new side kick: Midna, who not only feels the need to vomit up unsolicited advice like her fey forbearer, but gets right into the action as well, making her abominable presence inseparable from the game play. With a sigh I set my controller down and turned away.
The Zelda series is not the only one where side characters seem to have a compulsive need to wax verbose about the obvious or the irrelevant. The Metal Gear Solid series is so thick with distractions and lengthy blather on the part of secondary and even tertiary characters that I often forget that I am playing an action game. The player cannot simply turn off their radio to ignore these chatterboxes; they make a special point of noting that the communication system in the game is wired directly to the avatar’s jaw bone. Like Zelda, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Metal Gear series, and I genuinely appreciate any game that makes an effort at adding some dialogue and plot into the mix, but when game play stops entirely to deliver dozens of communicator chats it becomes a burden rather than an enhancement.
In Okami, Capcom’s 2006 release where your avatar is a god-wolf named Amaterasu, you are accompanied by Issun, a tiny artist/sprite/insect. Issun is so tiny that he can hide on your person at all times, like a flea in Amaterasu’s divine fur, but not so tiny that he can be ignored. The otherwise beautiful game is punctuated by commentary from this miniscule vermin whose contributions to the title are limited to ham-fisted comic relief and constant re-iteration of what other characters have already said once before.
All of these side “helper” characters follow a standard formula. They are difficult to ignore and are a constant auditory distraction. They are either extremely small or incorporeal so that they cannot be thrown away, turned off, or destroyed. Without treatment I fear that these characters will find their way into other decent games like an infestation of talking pubic crabs.
I think I know why they may have originally been put into games. Developers grew so weary of people not being able to figure out and complete their games that they felt the need to over-compensate. They dropped these pint-sized nannies into the mix to spoon feed the gaming experience to us, not because we need it, not because it improves the games, but because they underestimate our ability to reason our way through their worlds. It’s a lazy, stop gap solution, and it has got to end.
Developers take note. Being interrupted every few seconds by an obnoxious talking flea, fairy, ghost, demon, air traffic controller, or whatever is not a fun time for us. It breaks the pacing of a game and reduces otherwise playable titles into exercises in madness. Part of the fun of being immersed in an interactive world is finding out what we are supposed to do by trial and error rather than having it constantly dripped on us like water torture. At least provide us the option of turning these annoying little helpers off.
Video games are many things to many people: escapism, entertainment, art, etc. We're putting down the controller and repurposing our keyboards to bring a few thoughts to the table about what we've experienced in various electronic worlds.
