The 2009 Select [Button]: Ambiance

by C.T. Hutt

Best Ambiance: The Path

Tale of Tales has been the little game developer that could this year. They have turned the collective heads of the gaming community with their original titles and unique approach to the gaming medium. I haven’t had a chance to play Fatale, but if their past performance is any indicator of quality I am sure it will be a knock out.

The Path, released last March, is not what many gamers have come to expect from an exploration game. There are no traditional puzzles to solve in this game and no enemies to fight, but The Path manages to establish genuine emotional resonance with the player utilizing graphics tricks many would consider outdated. Ambiance in The Path is created by changes in camera angle, well-placed music and sound effects, and alterations in lighting.

There were few action-oriented components to The Path, which made the title a non-starter for many gamers. It was a game that focused on one central mechanic, our feelings about a given scenario, and didn’t let up. In many titles, ambiance and setting are obstacles developers work to overcome so they can get back into the action. In The Path, Tale of Tales made ambiance the whole point, and it worked.

Honorable Mentions: Flower and the Hard Rain level in Left 4 Dead 2 both had stirring ambiance. Whether eliciting an imprecise, but radiant sense of hope or simply evoking animal terror these titles used environment, sound, and music effects to their utmost.

Worst Ambiance: Borderlands

Following a compass needle through a vast junkyard in the middle of a desert, this is the Borderlands experience. I don’t have much to say about this title that hasn’t already been said. The action mechanics were spot on, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but mild amusement from this game. They didn’t even get the feeling of desolation to ring through; in a game called Borderlands that seems like a necessity.

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.

Reflections with Tale of Tales

by C.T. Hutt

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been corresponding with Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, the directors and founders of Tale of Tales, about their runaway success with The Path and about video games and the arts. In a medium that is too often hampered by convention, it’s a real pleasure to see a few luminaries pushing the boundaries and challenging the status quo both in the art world and in the gaming community. It’s an even greater pleasure when they take the time to share some reflections with us.
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What do you feel is the principle characteristic video games bring to the art world?

That's a very big question. And also a rather ambiguous one. The "art world" could mean either the entire universe of artistic practices and the spectrum of experiences that people can have with art. Or it could mean the established community that surrounds contemporary fine art today: the galleries, museums, artists and collectors.

The distinction matters to us because we feel that the two have rarely been more opposed. Contemporary fine art seems to be all about negating the very thing that art has meant for centuries. The modernist avant-garde has turned into the new salon.

We have always been inclined towards a more traditional form of art making. We enjoy figuration, narrative, beauty, even spectacle. As a result we could never get comfortable in the gallery space. The internet, and later games, have offered us an opportunity to address our audience directly, without the need of filters like museums, galleries or critics. And we're not the only ones. If it were up to the establishment, art would have all but disappeared from this planet due to its extreme elitism. But thanks to the computer and its ubiquity, new channels have opened for the creation and enjoyment of new forms of art.

On top of that, videogames, or the interactive medium in general, offers a new way of art making that is more suitable to our post-modern sensibilities. The older media are perfect for one-directional straightforward mass communication. But this doesn't seem to fit with the world anymore. People are not that easily defined anymore. And we don't accept simple truths so easily anymore. Newer computer-based media are capable of dealing with this richness, the ambiguity and the highly personal and intimate atmosphere that contemporary communication requires.

We also believe that videogames technology offers the potential to realize the dream of many artists of involving the viewer in the artwork as an essential part of it. So far, this has always been a theoretical premise that happened mostly in the imagination of the viewer. But now we can make this a lot more real. Now we really can put the viewer inside of our painting and we really can make art that is about him or her. Artworks become collaborative environments where the experience consists of a continuous flow between artwork and viewer.

What is the greatest challenge independent video game publishers currently face?

Probably remaining independent. Mostly remaining independent of commerce. In fact, not many independent developers succeed in that at all. And many, if not most, seem to consider their practice to be a commercial one. As a result, the independent scene is not doing much in terms of pushing the medium forward. We should be out there, exploring deeply in the potential of the medium. But most of us are happy to stick to tried-and-true ideas and we merrily re-use retro-genres.

Obviously it's not easy. And I'm sure many are trying to find a compromise. But we can do better. We think there should be more non-commercial support for research of the videogame medium as a creative technology.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in independent video games such as The Path and Braid. Do you think this will last? Has it affected your work in anyway?

It seems that everybody who is involved with videogames feels that the medium is capable of much more than we are currently seeing. As a result, it would only be logical that games like Braid and The Path get a lot of attention. They may not go very far or may be very flawed, but they show us a slight fragment of what we all dream of as the future of games. This interest will last as long as the dream exists.

The interest as such hasn't affected our work much. Maybe it sounds arrogant, but we know what we're doing. We have a job to do and we're doing it. We're very interested in seeing how other people respond to what we make. But we're not quite ready to change direction yet. There's a lot of work left to be done.

That being said, it's been quite encouraging to see how positive most of the games press has been in their response to The Path. We had never seriously considered a future for ourselves within the games industry. We had always assumed that the industry was perfectly content making hardcore games for hardcore gamers. But things may be changing. We used to be firmly on Chris Crawford's side when he claimed that the future of the interactive medium lies outside of videogames. But we're not so sure anymore. Maybe there is room for expansion. We'll see.

Do you agree that more mainstream publishers are, in a way, hindered by their own success?

Obviously their success does not hinder them in their goals of making money. Though it may hinder them, in the long run, in establishing a stable business.

Because, in the long run, the current practice of extreme competition in a cramped space cannot continue. It is already the case that the majority of all games published never returns on investment. The survival of the industry depends on the small amount of games that become hits. When achieving that hit status is the only way to make a profit, you have an industry that contains many more losers than winners. And that's not healthy. It only makes the big companies get bigger and the small ones disappear. And that's the straight road to oblivion.

The commercial success of the videogame format also hinders the creative development of the medium in our opinion. Contemporary videogames are the descendants of pinball and arcade games. Those were forms of entertainment designed to please the player and keep him spending money as long as possible. And still to this very day, many consider the defining characteristic of videogames to be "fun". So when everybody is enjoying themselves and paying money to enjoy themselves, it's difficult to decide to do something else, to go and explore what else this medium can do.

The kind of fun that current videogames offer only appeals to a small subset of the population. Everybody else is left out in the cold. This is a commercial disgrace for sure, but it is also simply unfair. Videogames technology has a great potential for a wide variety of entertainment and art. We shouldn't just make games with it.

What would you like to see more of from the gaming community?

We would like to see more tolerance and openness to new ideas. And we would like to see more respect for people with different opinions, especially if those opinions entail that they don't like videogames. The gaming community can be a very hostile place and seems extremely conservative, even defensive about its hobby. Games are immensely successful and yet gamers act as if anybody who expresses even the slightest bit of criticism is the Evil Demon From Hell Who Will Destroy Them All. Gamers seem literally afraid of anything that is even remotely different from what they are used to. They often behave, in fact, like xenophobes.

It is only through facing criticism that the medium will mature. But sometimes we wonder if that's what the gaming community fears. Sometimes it seems that they are delighted by the license to be childish given to them by games. And they don't want to give that up.

So more maturity is something we'd also like to see more of in the gaming community.

Would like to share with our readers what Tale of Tales is working on next?

We're currently working on a prototype for a sort of casual multiplayer game with the Brussels organization of Foam (http://fo.am/). It's a game in which every player plays a plant. And players can be humans or plants.

And soon we'll start on a new small project in the vein of The Graveyard but with a totally different atmosphere and interface. This time it's about a young woman. And she dances. For her stepfather.

E3 this year seemed more focused on high-tech controls than on upcoming titles; did anything catch your eye? Are you looking forward to any releases in the next year?

Well yes, we're very much looking forward to The Last Guardian, Fumito Ueda's new game. Maybe this time he'll let us be friends with the colossi.

It was also mildly amusing to see how Microsoft takes an idea from Sony (Eyetoy) and promotes it like an idea from Nintendo (Wii). It's like they're finally doing this together. Such a show of friendship is truly heartwarming.

The Path Less Traveled

by C.T. Hutt

There can be little questioning that the artistic medium of video gaming is still in its infancy. Despite this, there is no denying the existence of established genres. We have the first person shooter, the side-scrolling platformer, the fighting game, the RPG, and so on. Even games which push the boundaries of these classifications such as Mass Effect or Portal often end up awkwardly piled in with others. I feel it is one of the great failings in human thinking that we are given a sense of comfort when we attempt to dissect creative work and file it neatly away. I understand why it’s done of course; it makes the sublime more accessible, the infinite and indefinable more commonplace, and it cools the blazing power of imagination down to the lukewarm temperature of logic. Just occasionally, however, something in the art world comes along that refuses to be classified or contained in the established ways. It is these bold endeavors that truly lead us to new and wonderful frontiers in the arts. I have seen the beginnings of such genius reflected in The Path by Tale of Tales.

If Edgar Allen Poe had programed a video game for his estranged daughter it would probably look a good deal like this. The Path is a dark, confusing, and truly absorbing adaptation of the classic children’s story Little Red Riding Hood. Players take control of one of six sisters who are charged with the simple task of delivering a basket of goodies to grandmother’s house and are warned not to stray from the path that leads there. Any diversion from this task leads your character into a dark forest filled with all manner of strange and interesting sights, sounds, and feelings. Exploring this enchanting place is not all light and games. The more one plays, the more they get the feeling that there is something sinister in the forest, always just out of sight.

Things only get stranger when a player makes it to Grandmother’s house. No tea and cookies await your arrival; instead the player is treated to a surreal digital funhouse, made more extensive and interesting by the amount of exploring accomplished before arriving there. Rules of physics and time twist into a fantastic display of just how far the gaming medium can challenge our perceptions. All through the experience is the chilling suspicion that there is something right behind you.

Perhaps the most unique effect of The Path is the emotional cord it pulls in the gamer. It is not the visual effects of the game itself so much as our own imaginations which provide the real thrills. There are very few actual boogiemen in The Path; whatever monsters may lurk in the shadowy forest never truly unmask themselves to us. Instead of showing us the face of fear, this game evokes a long-buried ability in all of us to make every shadow into a ghost and every gust of wind into a monster’s wail. No matter how many times I checked, I was quite certain that there was a wolf hiding somewhere in my apartment Wednesday night just waiting for me to nod off.

I have been, and probably always will be, a meat-and-potatoes narrative man. I know it is a weakness to have such a limited palate, but frankly, I like my story arcs to look like mathematically perfect parabola. The Path is much more like guiding an avatar through an abstract poem than a traditional story, as such it doesn’t quite satisfy my finicky appetite for a clear beginning, middle and end. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Tale of Tales is showing the gaming world exactly what it needs to see: that there is more to this new medium then what we are familiar with, that video games can be emotionally evocative in their own right, and most importantly that we, as gamers, should expect more from developers then overused conventions.

I heartily encourage all gamers to turn out the lights and give this one a try. It can be downloaded through Steam and The Path website.

One of my favorite things about the indie gaming scene is that developers are more accessible and receptive to inquiry then their larger counterparts. Rather than post on some oft-ignored forum and wait four months for a one-line reply, I’ve had the pleasure of sharing some correspondence with Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, the directors and founders of Tale of Tales. They shared with me some reflections on gaming and the arts which I will post next week.