Collect Everything

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Collectible items have become standard fare in video games. If you haven’t collected all the flags in Assassin’s Creed or shot all the stars in Resident Evil 5, there’s still some meaningless task left to be accomplished. As irritating as those two examples are, however, it is possible to make collectible items a valuable part of the game experience.

Let’s talk about how:

Double-Take: Rewards

by Daniel Bullard-Bates and C.T. Hutt

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? 

Skip This Track

by Daniel Bullard-Bates 

“Supposedly Cousteau and his cronies invented the idea of putting walkie-talkies into the helmet. But we made ours with a special rabbit ear on the top so we could pipe in some music.”

-Steve Zissou

Modern video games give us a number of ways to customize our experiences; we can change the outfits the characters wear, the weapons and vehicles they use, and in some cases even change the appearances, skills, and powers of the characters themselves. This is one of the great advantages of the interactivity and malleability of video games: they allow us to have unique, individual experiences that fit our tastes. So why are we stuck with the soundtracks the designers have chosen?

If This Is an Open World, Why Are All the Doors Closed?

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

I was hunting down another surveillance device on the side of a building in inFamous, struggling with the awkward platforming controls. This was the third building covered in these blinking red devices, and I had to track down each one and get right next to it to deactivate it. I was stuck, once again, jumping up to grab one ledge and accidentally clinging to another, when it occurred to me just how little open world games bring to the table. The formula for creating an open world game seems to be this: Take a normal, linear story, separate it into missions, and require the player to do a lot of travelling to get to each mission. Then throw in lots of dull, repetitive side missions, hidden objects, collectibles, etc. And don’t worry too much about sloppy, over-complicated control schemes or glitches; those have come to be expected in open worlds.

At their very best, open world games offer one of two things not present in most linear video games: the ability to do almost anything and push the boundaries of the world, and a sense of discovery and wonder. Grand Theft Auto, as a series, became famous largely for the former. There is a linear story in each Grand Theft Auto game, but the appeal for many is the ability to do as one pleases. You want to spend all your time hitting on women and eating hot dogs? Fine. Want to be involved in high speed chases with the cops? Sure. Want to see how far you can jump on a motorcycle? Go for it. Will you obey traffic laws, or drive recklessly? Do you want to travel by bicycle or jet pack? This is a valid and useful approach to the open world game, because the openness is about options over environment. Grand Theft Auto presents a playground.

The other approach to the open world relies more fully on the aspect of exploration. This school of thought is based on the appeal of discovering new and interesting places, and relies more thoroughly on visual and narrative design. An excellent example of this school of open world design is Fallout 3, which had several completely optional locations with compelling, insulated stories that outstripped the cliché overarching plot of the game. Some of the vaults that dotted the landscape, for example, oozed with tension, intrigue, and atmosphere. And if the player didn’t go out exploring, they would never be seen. Brütal Legend managed to make exploration exciting simply by virtue of its creative environmental design. Every heavy metal landscape had some bizarre new piece of architecture or natural growth worthy of an album cover. Fallout 3 and Brütal Legend show their seams elsewhere, but they each get a few things right; it’s clear, at least, why the creators wanted to set their games in open worlds.

If an open world game doesn’t provide one of these two benefits, why bother making it an open world game at all? Playing inFamous, I continue to wish that the same plot had been told in a completely linear fashion. Taking breaks in the action to replay the same mission types reduced the enjoyment I was getting from the game. Just because a mission is optional is no excuse to make it boring. Assassin’s Creed was criticized for the same problem; there just weren’t enough different things to do to keep the experience consistently entertaining. If inFamous were a more linear, plot-driven game, there wouldn’t be so much junk on the periphery, spoiling an otherwise fun and exciting premise.

Also, for some reason open world games have become synonymous with poor controls and technical difficulties. It is difficult to get Cole, the lead in inFamous, to jump and land just where you want him to or cling to the right part of the building. The cover mechanic in Grand Theft Auto IV was obtuse and the car controls were needlessly difficult to master. The first Assassin’s Creed gave the player a huge world to explore and the graceful, simple controls to explore it, and then killed the player if they accidentally took a dip in any body of water. And almost every open world game ever made has had problems with texture loading, slowdown, screen tearing, and crashing. What rule determined that having a more complicated world gave the game designers license to make a less functional one that’s harder to interact with?

I can accept technical issues; I prefer a well-polished game, but I’ll take a fun one with a few hiccups. A strange control system is less forgivable, but I’ll learn it if the game makes up for it in other ways. The real tragedy of open world games is that they are still designed just like linear experiences. There is still a main storyline that the player is meant to traverse, at the end of which something climactic happens and the credits roll. Maybe the game lets the player continue after the end credits, but the narrative is finished.

A truly open world would let the player set their own goal. Maybe they want to end crime in the city, once and for all, by working their way through the crime families and striking fear into street criminals. Maybe they want to be adventurers and thrill seekers, and run a business to finance their every whim. Maybe they just want to find the right person to love, and make sure that they are both safe from the forces allied against them. Adding every option imaginable is an impossible task, but more available storylines will result in a more open world. The credits should never roll on a real open world game. The game world should just present itself to the player and ask them how they want to change it.

The Digital Ground Beneath Your Feet

By C.T. Hutt

Look up. Now down. Look at the walls surrounding you or the landscape in the distance. Disregard the people and things and consider the space. If you were a stranger to the area you are in now, what would you think of it? Does it seem comfortable? Familiar? What was this space designed to do? Was it designed at all, or does it exist naturally?

The programmers who create environments are unsung heroes of the game development world. While we often overlook something as banal as the ceiling tiles in the head-crab-infested hospital in Half-Life 2, or the water stains on the walls of ruins in Fallout 3, these minute aspects of the gaming world add immeasurably to the experience of a given title. The environment of a game is a character unto itself and unlike many facets of the medium, I believe that environmental design has been one of the greatest successes in game development history.

Shadow of the Colossus stands alone as simply one of the finest games I’ve ever played. The opening credits set the story as one of love lost, and the desperate struggle of a young man to get it back, no matter what the cost to the world, or to his own spirit. After being handed the task of killing the mighty colossi that roam the lands, your character steps out onto a vast plane, devoid of any signs of human life save for some dusty ruins. Truly massive though the colossi are, it takes considerable time to locate them in the expansive world. During the search the player has ample time to take in the scene around them. Empty would be the best way to describe the land the developers created, as empty as a broken heart. With no other characters to interact with or enemies to fight, the profound solitude of the environment is overwhelming. It sets the scene perfectly for a game as sobering as it is beautiful. And the colossi are environments to themselves, walking, living landscapes.

The strange combination of futuristic technology and old-timey decor that surrounds a player in Bioshock is overshadowed with every step by the feeling of being underwater. Not comfortably underwater mind you, but suffocating. The environment of BioShock makes the player feel as though they are dragging out the last gasp of air in drowning lungs for hours. Everything, and I do mean everything, in the environment is affected by the water. The bolts in the walls look rusty and ready to snap, the woodwork is swollen or rotted through, and everywhere you look there are puddles of brackish seawater. All these things and more are none-too-subtle reminders that the ocean does not welcome intruders and that a watery death is only ever moments away. Even if you weren’t being stalked by mutated horrors and soulless abominations, the environment in BioShock is absolutely terrifying.

It doesn’t take a huge studio or a multi-million dollar budget to create an immersive and engaging environment. The expansive woodland in The Path by Tale of Tales is a stylized version of a few acres of pine you might find behind your house. Aside from the interactive aspects of the game what makes the environment in The Path truly interesting is its subtle enhancements to reality. The light streaming through the trees, the peculiar twists of branches, it all seems very common, very real, but at the same time enhanced, altered into something more than the everyday. It took me some time to identify the feeling, but after a while it came to me. The environment in The Path is like that of a memory, sharp as a razor here and there, but soft around the edges. For a game covering themes such as the pleasures and pitfalls of innocence lost I think this was an excellent aesthetic choice on the part of Tale of Tales.

While certain aspects of gaming have been slow to evolve (story, character development, etc.) the medium as a whole has produced some incredibly immersive environments. It makes sense: aside from interactivity the greatest difference between a video games and other art forms is the worlds they take us to. Many great directors over the years have been praised for using the settings of their films as characters. Think of Ang Lee’s long shots of rolling landscapes in Brokeback Mountain or Stanley Kubrick's careful, slow pans over bright, empty outer space in 2001. But a film can survive on good characters, a fine script, and an environment that doesn’t ruin the moment.

Perhaps what sets video games apart in this regard is that the player controls the shot, not the director. The environment needs to be so much more detailed, so much more fully realized, than that of a film, because the player will push the boundaries. They will try to get behind each façade, jump off every cliff, and explore every corner. Through necessity, then, setting and environment in video games has become one of the greatest strengths of the artform: whether it is the colorful spheres of Super Mario Galaxy or the burned-out, corpse-riddled wasteland of Fallout 3, video games have done a fantastic job of building compelling worlds and environments.