That Thing With the Links That I Haven't Done In Months

Someday - someday! - I'll get back to original content. For now, here are some articles and videos that are very worth your while.

Laura June - The Verge
For Amusement Only: the life and death of the American arcade
This is a tremendous article. I'll admit, if you've read any books on video game history, you won't find much new information here, but you will find clear, concise writing from someone who clearly has a commanding grasp of the subject, and its her perspective, emphasis, and conclusions about a well-documented slice of Americana that held my interest from start to finish. And if you're new to arcade history, wow, you're really in for a treat.

Bonus: This might be the best Web layout I've ever seen. I really need to start reading The Verge.

Ryan Davis and Partick Klepik - Giant Bomb
Quick Look: Tokyo Crash Mobs
In 1998, development Studio created a a new type of match-three puzzle game with Puzz Loop. They later followed it up with the incredibly similar Magnetica, while imitators like Zuma and Luxor did little to differentiate themselves. Now, Mitchel is back to breath a little life in the tired formula, and the result just might be one of the most delightfully bizarre games I've ever seen.

Tony Ponce - Destructoid
Boob Wars, the  last game you will ever need
Boob Wars: Big Breasts vs Flat Chests might be one of the most bizarre games I've ever prayed to never see, and not in a delightful way. If that title isn't enough to convince you that the human race is wretched blight on this poor planet, one that deserves nothing less than immediate extinction, the game's official description (found in the link above) should be more than enough to change your mind.

Leigh Alexander, Jenn Frank, and Mattie Brice - GDC Vault
Writing the Unsung Experiences: Gender In Game Storytelling
Recordings of several panels from previous Game Developers Conferences have recently been made available online for free. That means you can watch three cool, smart people talk intelligently about a subject that deserves intelligent discussion.

Will Wright - GDC Vault
Classic Game Postmortem: RAID ON BUNGELING BAY
I will gladly listen to Will Wright (SimCity, The Sims) talk about anything. The man's a genius. I've always heard that Raid on Bungeling Bay was fairly mediocre, and Wright starts off this talk by echoing the sentiment. After listening to a few minutes of what went into making Wright's first game, I'm not convinced that it's the most exciting thing to play, but I do know that I want to play it for myself.

Mark Cerny - GDC Vault
Classic Game Postmortem: Marble Madness
One more GDC postmortem, and this time it's for a great game I have played. It's a good talk!

EDGE
Time Extend: P.N.03
P.N.03 was one of those games that grabbed my interest from the moment it was released, but I never played it outside of a few minutes at a demo station in a Wal-Mart or something. Reviews were none too positive, and I always suspected I would either find a misunderstood work and fall madly in love it or completely hate it. This article comes from someone in the former category. Maye it's finally time for me to give P.N.03 a shot.

Untold Ludo-Narrative Dissonance

Hey! I have written anything here in ages! But sometimes I write stuff on other parts of the Internet, like today when I left a long comment on the Untold Entertainment blog, and I'm not above recycling blog comments as original content for my own site. This was a response to another reader's comment. You can get the full context over there, but all you really need to know is that the subject was the validity of linear storytelling in interactive works.

What you’re talking about is “ludo-narrative dissonance.” The story you’re being told doesn’t match the experience you’re creating, like when you gleefully blow up thirty cars with a tank and then immediately follow it by watching a cutscene where Niko Bellic kvetches about not wanting to hurt anyone. And then you fire a bazooka at a helicopter flying above a busy downtown intersection.

This is bad, inconsistent storytelling, but it’s silly to say that games should never have canned story elements just because so many games suffer from sloppy execution.

You mention that player actions should be accompanied by animations and sound effects, but are these not canned, as well? If I accelerate a car in a game, I expect to hear engine sounds and see spinning wheels. This is reasonable feedback. It would be confusing to hear footsteps and see footprints left in the mud behind the car. Unless Fred Flintstone is driving, in which case it would be perfectly appropriate.

I think the reason you see so many people eagerly deride linear storytelling in games is not because games and pre-written narratives don’t work together, but because they are frequently mismatched. In fact, and I hope I’m overstating this, ludo-narrative dissonance is the norm in story-driven games.

Pairing interactivity with defined narrative can work, but it often falls apart when the story is about the player character’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, and actions, because, guess what, the player’s own decisions might not match what some writer had in mind. But rather than looking at the elaborate, movie-like scenes of today that I suspect you find unsatisfying, let’s peek back at some of the earliest cutscenes in games. After all, it was the early examples that must have convinced later game developers to keep moving in this direction.

In Pac-Man, a circle with a mouth eats dots and avoids ghosts, except sometimes he eats the ghosts. After every few levels, control is mercilessly wrestled from the poor player’s hands, and an unskippable, non-interactive cutscene rears its ugly head. In the first, Blinky chases Pac-Man off the screen, only to chased himself by an enlarged Pac-Man. It’s cute, it’s quick, and while this event couldn’t play out exactly this way in-game (Pac-Man never gets bigger) it’s true to the nature of the characters and mechanics. An individual player may not actively try to eat the ghosts, but the scenario doesn’t deny the player’s experience – Pac-man isn’t crying because he just wants to stop eating dots. Moreover, this scene reinforces that the relationship between Pac-Man and the ghosts reverses when the ghosts turn dark blue. Now, please, please try to tell me that Pac-Man is wrong for including linear storytelling.

One more example: Maniac Mansion. There’s a good explanation of why Maniac Mansion had cutscenes in an era before they’d hit the big-time in 1UP’s Maniac Mansion retrospective from earlier this year (http://www.1up.com/features/maniac-mansion-retrospective), so I’ll stick to what other games could still stand to learn from this game. The player gets to choose a set of three characters at the start, and while each has a broad personality, they’re all fairly blank. Rather than trying to tie together a story about whichever characters the player uses, and trying to keep that story in line with the player’s actions, most of Maniac Mansion’s cutscenes, in fact, CUT to other characters in other locations. These characters are seldom even aware that the player’s crew has entered the mansion. Their thoughts, motivations, and actions have nothing to do with the players, and they shouldn’t. The cutscenes aren’t about you, but they more than justify their existence by being entertaining and informative. And, yes, it helps that there are different outcomes depending on how you affect the mansion, but that’s not essential to the concept of cutting away from the player and focusing on outside characters.

(I’ll stop now. If you want more, I wrote an essay on this subject once, specifically as it relates to Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully. It could have used a little editing, but here you go: https://sites.google.com/site/hotlavy/all-articles/bully-a-course-in-narrative-disconnect)

Finally! The Seventh Fantasy (VII)

I played a little Final Fantasy VII this morning, even though I haven't enjoyed any part of the game so far. Aside from some of the music, nothing has grabbed me yet. Overall, I think it's not only overrated, it is an actively bad game.

But after seven long hours, I've finally moved beyond the first city, and the game is opening up a little. I'm still being funneled very much in one direction, but the characters are holding back their inane dialogue, at least a little, and I'm finally getting enough equipment and magic spells that I'm able to tailor my team to my liking. In other words, I can focus on the game part of this video game. After successfully working out a strategy to catch a giant cartoon bird, and then riding it through the world's expansive valleys while that classic Chocobo theme played, I found that I was almost beginning to enjoy myself.

Then the game crashed and I lost an hour's progress.

Read previous installments of Finally! The Seventh Fantasy

Finally! The Seventh Fantasy (VI)

[CLOUD runs across a narrow metal pipe in a narrow industrial metalscape. Steam billows out from a pipe. A blue glow emanates from the metallic, industrial abyss below. CLOUD twitches back and forth as he attempts to grab a slowly swinging chain. He jumps on the chain, then accidentally jumps back on the platform, then twitches until he jumps back on the chain. He climbs down the chain and jumps onto the broken pipe below. He deftly jumps across the gap where the pipe is broken onto the other end of the broken pipe. Steam continues to billow in a cycle of two repeating frames. CLOUD runs across the narrow metal pipe above the blue light until he reaches a platform near a piece of industrial metal machinery covered in wheels, switches, levers, blue diodes, and pipes that emit two-frame loops of billowing steam. You know, technological science stuff. BARRET and TIFA ignore the laws of conservation of mass and walk out of CLOUD.]

BARRET: Shinra! %$@!

CLOUD: SOLDIER.

TIFA: Mako materia SOLDIER Shinra.

BARRET: %#$%#! Damn!

TIFA: Midgar Sephiroth Shinra. Mako Planet life-force.

[TIFA waves her arms expressively.]

CLOUD: Ex-SOLDIER.

[CLOUD waves his arms in a way that expresses nothing.]

BARRET: #%@&! AVALANCHE Jenova! Promised Land. Midgar &$#@!!!!!!!!

[CLOUD slowly walks in an arbitrary direction, pauses, then walks back to his original place. He raises his arms, then lowers them, and places his head in his palm. He shakes his head, as if to say, "..."]

CLOUD: ...

BARRET: Damn! @%#*&!

[A SOLDIER from Shinra appears. He is defeated by CLOUD, TIFA, and BARRET. CLOUD is a good soldier because he is ex-SOLDIER. He is very good at selecting ATTACK from the menu until the SOLDIER (not from SOLDIER) turns red and fades away. Everyone receives EXP. The party receives a potion.]

CLOUD: ...

CLOUD: Mako Shinra. Midgar Sephiroth.

[BARRET and TIFA walk into CLOUD. The platform shakes. CLOUD falls. Fade to black.]

CLOUD: Materia Jenova... Sephiroth.

[Fade to a slum made. Buildings are made from sheets of discarded metal. The ground is dust with no traces of plant life. Neon lights are everywhere. A MAN walks east, then west, then east again, repeating this cycle for the duration of his existence, pausing only to wave his arms and say, "Shinra Mako inn potion!" when interrupted by strangers.]

AERIS: I have a bodyguard. Planet.

BARRET: #%@!

[The party runs out of the desolate neon slum in search of the next steamy, industrial tower lit by blue lights.]

THIS IS THE

GREATEST

STORY EVER

TOLD!!!

Read previous installments of Finally! The Seventh Fantasy

Here Are Some Links Related to Video Games

Well, well, well! At last, my overtime has come to and end, only to replaced by...temporary unemployment. That's life in the video game business. I don't know yet if that means I'll get back to regularly updating Hot Lavy or if I'll find other ways to busy myself. All I know is that I have a bunch of links.

Andrew Groen - Game|Life
‘Routine’ Game Industry Layoffs Kill Creativity
Hey! Yeah!

Adam Conover - CollegeHumor
Hardly Working: Most Retro Video Game System Ever
The hilarious Adam Conover introduces us to the Skaris One-Bit.

L. Rhodes - Culture Ramp
The Critic
A wonderful interview with my wonderful friend, Jenn Frank, about video game journalism, games as time travel, our generation's "Odyssey Years," and so much more. Brilliant and heartbreaking. Part three in Rhodes' series, "The Ludorenaissance."

Bill Harris - Dubious Quality
"Value"
EA re-released FIFA 12 for Wii this year, but now they're calling it FIFA 13, pretending it's a new game, and charging $50 for it, which is just one example of the wonders of modern video game market. Says Bill Harris, "This is why I've stopped caring whether any of these companies survive. Their incompetence and greed has destroyed the traditional retail ecosystem. Not piracy. Not used games. This is not dinosaurs getting destroyed by an exogenous event. It's strip farming, followed by starvation when the soil is depleted."

Ryan Rigney - Game|Life
Apple’s Favorite Strategy Game Is a Financial Disaster
$300,000 to make; $40,000 in return. This is a fantastic and terrifying look at the luck and economics of iOS and free-to-play games.

Patrick Klepek - Giant Bomb
The Authorship of a Video Game
Patrrick Klepek talks to 5th Cell's Jeremy Slaczka about the collaborative nature of studio game development and the intent behind putting one author's name on a video game.

Jest
50 Attempts At Speech In Early Videogames
You know what I like more than hearing super-compressed speech being force out of video game systems that had no business reproducing human voices? Neither do I. My only problem with this list is that it's too short. No Awesome Possum? No Bubsy? No World Class Leader Board? What a drag.

Jason Tanz - Game|Life
How a Videogame God Inspired a Twitter Doppelgänger — and Resurrected His Career
That would be Peter Molyneux and @PeterMolydeux. The story is actually kind of weirdly heartwarming.

Leigh Alexander - Gamasutra
'As a woman': Misconceptions in the diversity discussion
As a dude, I think diversity is pretty neat.

Jim Sterling - Destructoid
Deadly Premonition: the cult of split-personality
A special edition of Deadly Premonition, the best game on Xbox 360, is coming to PS3. This is good news not only because more people will have an opportunity to play the bizarro not-Twin Peaks adventure, complete with all new bicycle-riding, but because it means this should be the first of many interviews with director SWERY I'll be reading in the coming weeks. One question: When did everyone start calling him Swery65? I thought his name was SWERY, and Swery65 was just the name of the bar in Deadly Premonition. Right? I know some gamemakers have unusual nicknames, but let's not get SWERY mixed up with Suda51.

Alex Navarro - Giant Bomb
Major Round of Layoffs Reportedly Hits Zynga
Yep, life in the video game business.

Ryan Creighton - Untold Entertainment
Men Helping Women Use Computers
Because evidently women can't figure it out on their own.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw - Extra Punctuation
It's About Characters, Stupid
I got into a conversation with some people at this summer's Penny Arcade Expo about Resident Evil. At one point, I stopped the arguing and asked each person, one by one, if they care about the series' increasingly prominent and convoluted story. A few hemmed and hawed, trying to defend it, but, in the end, not a single person could feign interest. In this article, Yahtzee breaks down why we find it so dull, and reaches a convincing conclusion about entertainment and storytelling in general.

Game Center CX
Game Center CX: Special Feature - Iwata Asks the Chief
Arino talks to Balloon Fight creator and Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on a recent episode of the delightful Japanese TV show Game Center CX. Both guys are just so likeable that it's impossible not to smile through the whole clip.

Please, just call me York. That's what everyone calls me.

Takin' Care of Business and...

Updates will continue to be light for a while longer. I'll be working overtime every day until the higher-ups tell me otherwise, and I have some additional demands on my free-time that will limit my ability to write about video games to the extent that I'd like.

Escape From the Lavy

There was not a proper update yesterday because I spent my afternoon walking across town to pick up free a guitar. And what better way to test out a new axe than with melancholy covers of Sonic the Hedgehog songs?

I was hoping to have two updates ready today, but scheduling gets a little hard to predict when you start recording music and video. I've planned for a week of Dreamcast music, though, and all the songs I picked will make it onto Hot Lavy in as timely a manner as reality allows.