Toward better collections, part 1: Assassin’s Creed

During my family leave, I’ve gotten some time during 2.0’s sporadic sleep schedule to play a ton of games. The majority of those games features a common, popular gameplay element – set collection.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  It’s that optional gameplay element in which you’re invited (usually unsuccessfully) to “collect them all” or “find them all”.  A few examples:  Okami’s stray beads, Gears of War’s COG tags, Fallout 3’s bobbleheads, Ratchet & Clank’s golden bolts, Super Smash Bros.’s trophies, Pokemon’s… pokemon.  There are also other, more subtle forms of set collection that you may not have thought about: multiplayer titles, skill sets, armor sets, crafting recipes, beastiaries, codexes (I’m looking at you, Bioware) – even Xbox/PS3 achievements/trophies can fall into this category.  Since I’m a bit OCD and somewhat of a collection nut, I spot these collection opportunities rather quickly.  I also tend to determine rather quickly that the vast majority of such opportunites are not worth my time investment.  And I’m sure many of you have done the same thing – shelved a game without even giving a second thought to those things you left uncollected in that bygone world.  There’s a reason for that – it’s because most games implement set collection badly.  In this series of articles, I’d like to use personal experience from playing various games to examine how other games could improve the quality of these collection mechanics and give players more incentive to participate in these peripheral activities.

Schlaghund v2.0

It’s been way too long.  The last 3+ weeks have been quite an adventure.  Per my usual modus operandi, I’ve neglected to update this page with any info.  But to be brief, I am now a father to a very handsome son – sure, he’s fickle and rambunctious, but he’s so cute.

Hopping onto the Twitter bandwagon

I joined Twitter recently – mainly because my wife joined it and she mentioned how the username she wanted wasn’t available.  Since I’ve clearly had problems reserving my name of choice in most other services (and since I figured that Twitter was an inevitable eventuality), I preemptively claimed sole right to my namesake before the other notorious “schlaghund” could take it.  Besides… WordPress already has a widget that shows my recent tweets, so why the heck not?

Oh, and forgive me if my tweets aren’t using the latest lingo.  I’m getting too old to figure out all this “RT @blah” stuff.  And God only knows what else the hip kids have conjured up to compress their tweets beyond legibility.  Does no one write plain English anymore?

And bit.ly?  I guess tinyurl wasn’t tiny enough.  Man, I feel like a tech fogey.

Yes, I’m still alive

For anyone still waiting for something to come out of this blog, I’m sorry about my neglect.  Yes, I’m still alive, and yes, I still have an interest in blogging.  And I honestly have no valid excuse for the lack of posts aside from laziness and a greater interest in actually gaming rather than writing about it.  That, and my company finally upgraded my nigh-three-year-old work computer, so the time I might’ve spent jotting thoughts down while waiting for stuff to compile or load is now spent actually being productive.

Anyway, what am I up to these days?  Two things, mostly: BlazBlue and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite.  One of my cousins also recently got an Xbox (finally) and Live, so when I’m not playing the two aforementioned games, I’m probably playing Street Fighter IV or Halo 3 with him.

I watched the Evo 2k9 live stream almost a month ago.   (It was every bit as epic as I had imagined it would be!)  I was tempted to write about it (and I still probably will when I can gather my thoughts on the state of fighting games), but I realized that I’m starting to blog (or at least think) a lot about fighting games and I’d rather try to vary the subject for those that aren’t as interested in the genre.

Oh, and thanks to modern technology, I got a neat peek at my little nublet, who’s less than three months away from entering the world of loud noises and bright lights.  He looks something like this:

He’s a feisty sucker.  But he respects Daddy.  He hasn’t kicked me in the face.  Yet.   Although I’m quite convinced that my persistent vocal intrusion into Mommy’s cavernous belly will soon persuade him to try.

Fighting games and the role of execution

My Dawn of War II excursion was severely sidetracked when my repaired Xbox finally returned home and I was able to play the copy of Street Fighter IV I had lying around.  As of the past few months, I’ve been attempting to immerse myself in the culture of 2D fighters.  3D fighters have always been my forte – Soul Calibur and, more recently, Virtua Fighter in particular.  I never “got” 2D fighting games.  The play was always a blurry mishmash of over-the-top animations from which I could never extract any meaningful strategic decisions.  Hit priorities were a mysterious black box.  And inputs were just… weird.  Maybe Virtua Fighter’s input buffering spoiled me – none of this “just-link” business or one-frame input windows.  I never understood why I couldn’t just start buffering my combos during guard stun like “normal” 3D fighters.

However, with the massive popularity of Street Fighter IV, I resolved to get past this mental 2D barrier and see just what all the fuss is about.  I messed around with Guilty Gear X2 #Reload on XBLA.  I geared up for the Street Fighter IV release with Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix.  And finally, after learning the ropes of Street Fighter IV (and unlearning all of my 3D fighting game habits), I started coming to an understanding of what makes the 2D fighting genre special.  After a lot of thought and analysis, I’ve distilled the essence of 2D fighters to one special characteristic: the execution barrier.

Strategy and exection

Fighting games, like many other competitive, real-time games, have two major components – strategy and execution.  Strategy is comprised of the decisions and the mind-games, frame advantage and disadvanatge, the nitakus and okizemes.  Strategy is the “game” part of the fighting game, in which the smarter player wins.  Execution, on the other hand, is where the mind meets the machine.  It is comprised of the physical dexterity and reflexes that are required to carry out the intended strategy.  A player must excel at both of these components in order to be successful.  In Halo, a pure strategist can find the perfect sniping position, but it avails nothing if he can’t get the crosshairs over the opponent’s head.  An adept executioner, conversely, accomplishes nothing if he keeps getting assassinated by someone who’s always thinking one step ahead.

Various games put different amounts of focus on the two elements of play.  Turn-based games are the extreme example of strategic focus, while something like a time-trial mode of a racing game is probably the extreme example of execution focus.  Fighting games are comprised of a healthy mixture of the two, but within the genre, there are distinct differences in focus.  My personal experience has led me to the conclusion that the 2D fighting game has a much greater focus on execution, while the 3D fighting game has a slightly greater focus on strategy.  I’m not really sure why this is the case.  One of my theories is that early incarnations of the popular 3D fighting game franchises didn’t have the system resources to render complex combo animations, forcing them to opt for subtler, more strategic gameplay.  Another theory is that movement in the third dimension might have conflicted to some degree with the genre conventions of quarter-circle and half-circle inputs.  Whatever the case may be, the two types of games diverged into two distinct styles of play.

Comparing dimensions

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the play styles of 2D and 3D fighters.  3D fighters generally have fewer buttons.  Soul Calibur has four: vertical attack, horizontal attack, kick, and guard.  Tekken has four: left and right punches and kicks.  Virtua Fighter has three: punch, kick, and guard.  Compare this with some popular 2D fighters.  Guilty Gear has 5 buttons: punch, kick, slash, hard slash, and dust; 6 if you count respect.  Street Fighter has 6 buttons: light, medium, and hard punches and kicks.  Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has 6 buttons: weak and hard punches and kicks followed by two assist buttons.

In addition to the extra buttons typically found in 2D fighters, they also tend to have more complex and hard-to-grasp motions.  3D fighter special moves generally consist of single or double directional inputs plus a combination of buttons.  For instance, in Virtua Fighter, the majority of the moves you’ll see look like 6P+K, K+G, 33K, and the like.  On the other hand, 2D fighter special moves are most often executed with complex quarter-circle, half-circle, full-circle, dragon-punch, and charge inputs.  In Street Fighter, a shotokan player stands little chance without having 236P or 623P burned into their muscle memory.  The complexity of inputs is made most apparent when subjected to the “wife test”.  My wife was able to learn and consistently reproduce a good number of Pai’s moves in Virtua Fighter.  But when it came to playing Chun-Li in Street Fighter IV, her consistent move execution was limited to either the lightning legs (repeat K) or her auto-crossup (3HK).  While she was able to do quarter circles and dragon punch inputs after multiple attempts in trial mode, there was no way she could do them on command in the middle of a fight.  And you can forget the half-circles.

Finally, to seal the coffin on the casual player’s foray into 2D fighting, 2D fighters generally have an additional factor of input timing complexity.  Again, the reasons for this are completely arbitrary, but as far as I’m aware, input windows are far stricter, and combos are much more difficult to execute consistently because of these strict timing requirements.  2D fighter combos are traditionally based on two concepts that rely on strict timing – cancelling and linking.  Cancelling is the concept of cancelling one move animation into another.  Combos derived from this mechanic involve inputting two moves in very rapid succession.  This cancelling window is generally small, so the player has to be very quick in order for the combo to succeed.  Linking is the concept of inputting a second move between the end of the first move’s animation and the end of the opponent’s hit stun.  In many cases, the input window for linking moves is extremely small – on the order of one or two frames.  These are typically what make Street Fighter IV’s hard trials… well… hard.  3D fighters, on the other hand, seem to have very lenient timing in comparison, where a player can buffer a second move anytime during the first move’s entire animation, and it’ll follow immediately after the first move ends.

It’s become quite clear that, for whatever reason, the 2D fighting game has a stronger focus on complex execution than its 3D counterpart.  This gives us the opportunity to examine the role of execution in fighting games by taking a closer look at 2D fighters and the characteristics that set them apart from their more strategic peers.  This is not to say that 2D fighters are inherently unique.  The evolution of the genre just happened to put them in that unique position of possessing complex and more difficult execution schemes.

Many people decry difficulty in execution as the biggest “problem” with fighting games.  David Sirlin, famed Street Fighter tournament player and game designer, wrote a widely circulated rant about Street Fighter IV’s “impenetrable wall of execution”.  I’ve also made mention in the past about my disdain for unnecessarily difficult inputs.  But I’m starting to question whether this “execution barrier” is really a problem at all.

Execution and risk

Fighting games with simple inputs rapidly descend into strategic territory, where one player is trying to out-guess the other player and counter the next anticipated move.  If you really wanted to, you could probably create a huge and complex game-theory-style payout table (a la Prisoner’s Dilemma) for various situations in the game. At its lowest level, fighting game strategy ultimately comes down to picking a choice on this table to maximize your damage payout based on the choices available to your opponent.  I highly recommend looking into Sirlin’s Flash card game Kongai on Kongregate.  The game is an interpretation of fighting game strategy and the mind games that can ensue when the various payouts are quantified and unobscured by layers of input strings and timing.

Now, looking at the execution barrier strictly from a theoretical point of view, one can consider the difficulty of executing a move or a series of moves as a risk – a risk with percentage chances of success and failure that depend on the particular player’s skill level.  At low- and mid-level play, the difficulty of execution introduces a significant percentage chance of failure – especially with things like linked combo strings.  In fact, I’ve even seen recent Street Fighter IV tournament videos of high-level players missing those links on occasion.  When that kind of combo string fails (i.e. is blocked), momentum turns to the other player and will typically give them frame advantage and higher potential payouts.  The execution risk just boils down to a probabilistic entry in the payout table (or tree, if you want to account for successive choices).  It’s true that, by taking some of the determinism away, the randomness violates the supposed “purity” of the theoretical game.  However, coverting the random outcomes into expected values allows a player to analyze the payouts in much the same way as he would with deterministic outcomes.

That might have sounded like gibberish.  Here’s the translation: just as randomness does not break a game, risk can also be analyzed and optimized.  But there’s an interesting and key difference between risk in fighting games and strictly random events: while random events have fixed probabilities, the probabilities associated with risk change as the player becomes more skilled in execution.  In fact, at the highest levels of play, the difficulty of execution starts melting away and the probability of successful execution begins to approach 100%, reducing the game yet again to one purely composed of strategy and mind games.

So as long as this probability of successful execution is factored in, fighting games, regardless of the difficulty of their moves, still boil down to the same concepts.  A barrier to execution, however, ensures that the strategy and options evolve as the player does.

Execution and discovery

Enough with the theory.  2D fighters are, after all, more than a subgenre of games – they’re the subject of an entire culture.  This culture has thrived on a number of things, and among them is the aspect of discovery and experimentation.

Complex input systems have driven players to search out shortcuts and tricks to simplify execution or to allow players to do things that are otherwise considered impossible.  In essence, the execution barrier acts as an often ambiguous gray area of input processing – one that many players dedicate copious amounts of time deconstructing.  The result of these efforts are the various tricks and shortcuts that litter the lexicon of the fighting game culture.  Instant-air dashing, instant-air attacks, jump-installing, and kara throws are just a few of the terms you might hear.  It’s not hard to find entire forum threads and tutorial videos specifically dedicated to unconventional inputs.

In addition, with the extravagance of special moves that characterizes the majority of 2D fighters, discussions on various move properties are abundant.  Many players enjoy exploring and dissecting the myriad combinations of moves and potential counters.  And there are always those moments of memorable incredulity when something that shouldn’t have happened, for some quirky reason, did.  Many players end up devoting time to determining exactly why the strange thing happened, and whether that particular phenomenon can be exploited to their advantage.

And then there are the combo fiends.  When you combine the complex mechanics of a 2D fighter with the subgenre’s liberal use of frame-advantage-on-hit mechanics and aerial moves, you end up with the potential for insanely long (and insanely difficult) combos.  There is a significant subset of players dedicated to executing and sharing these meticulously constructed and carefully executed combos with the world at large.  Every 2D fighter fan has probably watched a combo video at one point or another.  Street Fighter IV’s infinite combos were even reported by several major gaming sites.  Squeezing in that extra hit has always been an integral part of the 2D fighting game culture.

None of these things would exist, of course, if the 2D fighting game was robbed of its twitchy, wrist-wrecking input schemes and distilled down to its strategy alone.  There’s an undeniable appeal in exploring the unknown, in probing and penetrating that black box of computation, in mastering that which was once mystery, and doing what most might consider impossible.  And that leads us to my final point.

Execution and distinction

Although the difficulty of execution in a fighting game serves the aforementioned roles very well, I’ve found that its best function – one that truly elevates the culture of 2D fighters above their 3D counterparts – is in establishing the renown of its genre’s experts.  The 2D fighting scene has legends of such magnitude that I can think of no 3D fighter equivalent.  Alex Valle.  Daigo Umehara.  John Choi.  Justin Wong.  I’m already intimately familiar with the weight behind these names and I’ve only been getting into 2D fighters for a few months.  I’ve played far more Soul Calibur and Virtua Fighter over the past few years, and I can’t think of a single player with the same kind of recognition as those aforementioned 2D fighting gods.

Why are these people so distinguished among their peers?  It is exactly because 2D fighters have higher execution barriers.  Mind games are an acquired taste.  They require deep understanding of a system to really be appreciated.  It doesn’t, on the other hand, take much understanding at all to stare awe-struck as an opponent gets 75% of his life depleted without any chance for retaliation.  It doesn’t take careful, calculated analysis to admire a combo that just doesn’t seem to end.  You don’t have to play Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike to know that this is epic.  These kinds of easily acknowledged accomplishments cannot be achieved unless the player possesses inhuman amounts of dexterity and reflexes.  It’s this perception of a player’s robotically precise control of a game that really sets the 2D fighter legend apart from someone playing a glorified game of paper-scissors-rock.

This is not unlike the general population’s recognition of highly skilled martial artists.  I think it’s easier to see and appreciate their talent than it is to appreciate that of the world’s chess grandmasters.  Most people know the name of Jet Li, Bruce Lee, Tony Jaa, and the like not because of their ability to get into the mind of their opponent – they’re famous because of their demonstrations of extremely quick, precise, and difficult martial arts techniques and maneuvers.  They do things we only dream of doing.  That same kind of distant admiration most certainly applies to the electronic counterpart.  I mean, isn’t it only appropriate that art (or, in this case, game) imitates life?

Conclusion

Execution is obviously an integral part of the fighting game genre, and as I’ve explored here, making the execution more difficult is not necessarily a detriment to the game.  Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that more difficulty = better game.  There’s definitely a balance to strike between fulfilling the roles I’ve mentioned and making the game accessible.  And I completely understand the mindset of people like Sirlin, who prefer to linger as much as possible on the strategic elements of the fighting game.  I’ve been there.  But I have to admit that I’ve reconsidered my adamant and unwavering preference for strategy, and in doing so, I’ve come to a newfound appreciation for the fighting game genre as a whole.

There’s more than one way to tap that

There are two Magic: The Gathering mini starter decks sitting just a foot away from me. My wife requested them for free as part of some Wizards of the Coast mass promotion. I don’t think she quite fully realizes just how big a can of worms she threatens to open by doing such a heinous act. CCG’s were a high-school and college obsession. I still have a large number of voluminous boxes full of various cards sitting in the office closet.

That sinister craving began creeping over me. I resigned to digging through my endless cache once again, if only to remind myself of what could happen if I did not control my hunger. This did not, of course, go without triggering waves of happy, card-collecting nostalgia.

I remembered Brian, one of my best friends from middle school, trying to explain how to play this new craze that was sweeping the campus lunch tables. He babbled on in some accursed tongue about “mana” and “tapping”. That term “tapping” was especially troublesome. It took several iterations of his explanation for me to realize that he wasn’t talking about repeatedly touching the surface of a card.

It’s been a long time since Magic’s 3rd edition. I believe the game is in its 10th edition now – making fifteen years since I rid myself of that addiction.  CCG’s/TCG’s have, in that time, become increasingly ubiquitous – especially among the younger generation. And it comes as no surprise that many of those card games were heavily influenced by Magic. Throughout the course of my personal excursion into the genre, I often stumbled upon a very commonly used convention – the turning of a card 90 degrees sideways. Magic called it “tapping” to denote that a card was “used up” and could not be used again until the next turn, when all of the player’s cards were “untapped”.

The mechanic is a very sensible one, and I can’t fault other games for borrowing it. But while a small subset of games have since used different indicators to denote the “usage” of a card – for instance, turning it face-down, setting it aside, putting counters on it, or just remembering that it had been used that turn – a great number of games continue to use that tried and true card-turning convention.

Out of sheer boredom, I’ve compiled a list of terms used by other CCG’s to fulfill the same purpose as the term “tapping” does in Magic. I’ve left out the games that use the turning of a card to signify wounding (such as in .hack and Doomtrooper, among others) and the games that involve turning the card 180 degrees instead of 90 degrees (such as Shadowfist and Guardians).

• Boot – Doomtown
• Bow – Legend of the Burning Sands, Legend of the Five Rings
• Commit – Universal Fighting System, WarCry
• Deplete – The Spoils (implied)
• Drain – Tempest
• Engage – Dune
• Exhaust – Call of Cthulhu, World of Warcraft, VS System
• Kneel – A Game of Thrones
• Lock – Warhammer 40k
• Roll – Gundam WAR
• Rotate – Babylon 5, Mythos
• Set – Ophidian
• Spend – Warlord
• Tack – 7th Sea
• Tap – Battletech, Magic: The Gathering, Middle Earth, Star Wars: Trading Card Game
• Turn – Shadowrun
• Use – Cyberpunk

Feel free to let me know of any other neat alternative “tap” terms I might have missed.  I have, after all, been mostly out of the CCG loop as of late.

As a bonus, here’s a quote out of the Dune rulebook for the best CCG rule ever:

To indicate the completion of your House Interval, you may turn the palms of both hands toward the ceiling, say “I honor you with my water,” and make a spitting gesture toward the table (no vulgarity or actual spitting, please!). If you do so, each of your rivals must respond “Your gift is a blessing of the river.” Failure to respond incurs a loss of 1 favor.

I never could get that spitting gesture right…

Design rant: Lock’s Quest

There are occasional instances when I get into a state of unfettered rage about some annoyance in a game’s design.  At that point, I typically start cursing its maker and swearing off all of their future products.  Since my wife probably doesn’t want to hear me go on and on about how stupid some specific thing is, I’ve decided to vent my frustrations here.  Oh, and I’ll try to write it up as soon after the experience as possible so I can accurately capture the thoughts going through my mind as I’m in that state of raw hatred.  So, onto our first victim: Lock’s Quest.

I go into the supposed “final battle” more than well prepared, with 40k+ source to build me a monstrosity of a defensive perimeter.  And after three days, my impenetrable fortress (on which I spent at least 60k total) is magically destroyed, leaving me with a piddling 25k to rebuild and take on the arguably hardest boss in the game…  What the hell?!  If the clockworks can instakill entire forts in the blink of an eye, why didn’t they just do that 97 friggin’ days ago and put Antonia out of its misery?  Heck, at least it would have saved Lock a lot of trouble.  Oh, and just to make it more fun, the game decided to autosave shortly after wiping my meticulously planned defenses.  So the source I gained by playing their mind-numbing siege minigame three times in a row was all for nothing.  Thanks.  While we’re at it, let’s make an RPG where, right before the final boss fight, all of your characters’ levels are halved and your entire inventory disappears.  Seriously, did 5th Cell do any focus testing at all?  Did they not note the cries of indignance that erupted at this point in the game?  No wonder the boss is named “Agony.”

Why adventures still matter

I spent a good amount of time this past weekend playing through Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.  I enjoyed it very much.  The game kept me sufficiently glued to my currently neglected handheld.

When the Phoenix Wright series saw its debut release (or, technically, re-release) on the DS, it got a lot of positive critical reception.  But each new title seemed to garner successively less interest in the gaming media.  It feels like the gaming audience at large is beginning to consider the franchise as just another cog in Capcom’s sequel-laden money-machine (a la Mega Man).

That’s a real shame, because I’m still in love with the series.  I got around to thinking about what made it strike such a chord with me.  After all, the core gameplay across the entire series has, for the most part, remained unchanged.  As a staunch advocate of innovation, I, myself, am baffled as to why I’ve tolerated this supposed “stagnation” across four (!) different titles.

And the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to the nature of adventure gaming as a genre.  The “adventure” term is typically applied as a fallback classification to describe any number of primarily explorative or non-combative games.  But for me, the words “adventure game” are always automatically and implicitly prefixed with the word “point-and-click”.  Yeah – point-and-click adventure games – those decrepit games of yesteryear with the pixelated sprites rendered atop gorgeous, hand-drawn backgrounds.  Adventure games were a huge chunk of my childhood gaming experiences.  My earliest memories of them were of playing King’s Quest V and Lucasarts point-and-click demos that came packaged with various shareware/freeware CD’s that my dad picked up at a local computer hardware swap meet.  (We weren’t exactly rich at the time – games were truly a luxury.)  After perusing the contents of those discs, my attention always came back to those intriguing adventure games.  Eventually, I got a hold of the full version of King’s Quest V and instantly fell in love with the genre.  My loyalties continued through the next two King’s Quest titles, and I continued to maintain interest in similar titles.  My interest was piqued again with the advent of the Myst series.  I played the first title alongside my best friend in junior high, and I more recently played through Riven and Exile with my then-fiancee after I purchased a Myst collection for cheap.  Syberia, The Longest Journey, Indigo Prophecy – all great adventure titles of recent years.  It wasn’t much longer until I stumbled upon what brought me to this topic in the first place – Phoenix Wright.

To me, the Phoenix Wright series has been a real triumph in the genre.  Sure, it’s got great characters, hilarious dialog (thanks to the superb localization efforts), and an engaging story.  But there’s something about the series that really sets it apart, and, if you’ve read enough of my posts, you’ll know that it all comes down to the gameplay.

With the “games as art” movement picking up in recent years, there have been countless discussions regarding “narrative” and its role in games.  And with all of the philosophizing and applied intellectualism, narratives have increasingly become assigned to the role of “context” – the idea that gives life and meaning to the otherwise mechanical functions of the underlying gameplay.  In other words, narratives are becoming a strict output that is simply layered on top of the gameplay.  There are the game’s core mechanics under the hood, with which the player interacts, and the narrative “skin” that typically has little influence on the play itself.

If you think about it, it’s quite easy to imagine many modern games being stripped of their narratives without really breaking the gameplay.  After all… Andrew Ryan, GLaDOS, President Eden?  They’re all ultimately just voices that can be muted.  Many shooters thrive on reskinning the FPS experience.  RPG’s can still retain the thrill of battles and character development without the thousands upon thousands of lines of character dialog.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that a game’s experience as a whole would remain unaffected by removing or altering that narrative layer.  I’m making the point that many games, even in the absence of their story, would remain largely playable.  This clean separation of narrative and gameplay is easily spied in that not-insignificant subset of players that just want to “skip the cutscenes”.

But this is where adventure games fundamentally differ.  At their core, point-and-click adventures really are as mind-numbingly bland as the genre’s name implies.  You point at different things.  You click on them.  Something on the screen changes.  Repeat.  These games (generally) do not require twitch reflexes, rhythm, strategy, or tactics like many of their modern-day peers do.  However, adventure games do something that the majority of their counterparts do not – they truly integrate the narrative into the gameplay.  In an ideal adventure game, the player interacts with the underlying game mechanic (i.e. pointing and clicking on objects) in a way that is strongly influenced by the player’s understanding of the narrative.  To look at it a different way, without the narrative, an adventure game is little more than random clicking.  One cannot easily swap out the narrative of an adventure game without having to alter all of the interactions in the game.  To reskin an adventure game is essentially equivalent to creating an altogether new one.

Of course, adventure games have integrated their narratives with their gameplay to varying degrees of success.  In reality, a lot of adventure games still have some remnant of this ludo-narrative separation.  On the extreme end of the spectrum, you have the “interactive novel” Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which, although I enjoyed it, really just ended up telling you the story while you walked around and played completely unrelated minigames.  Also similar in separation is the Myst series.  The majority of puzzles throughout the various ages are mostly self-contained and do not typically have any fundamental connection to the story itself.  In these two examples, the narrative could be completely altered without having to change much of the actual play that the player engages in.

A lot of other adventure games will also typically present self-contained challenges that require the player to find objects on the screen and combine them to overcome some obstacle.  Again, a lot of these are mostly narrative-independent.  For instance, one can easily adapt a wide range of narratives to require the player to find an object that opens up some previously inaccessible location.  However, as various parts of the game become inter-dependant (i.e. as your character is required to use multiple objects from different times and/or places throughout the game to proceed) it becomes harder and harder to separate the game’s narrative from the player interactions.  This is because an altogether different narrative would still have to justify all of the interactions.  I would say the majority of adventure games fall into this middle ground of ludo-narrative interdependance.

Finally, we come to the Phoenix Wright series.  What makes it such a great adventure game?  It is such an engaging experience because its narrative is so deeply intertwined with the gameplay itself.  The series’ core mechanic tasks the player with presenting evidence to reveal contradictions in a character’s testimony during a trial.  Doing so inevitably requires the player to truly comprehend the narrative – the crime and its circumstances, and the characters and their motivations.  Furthermore, the gameplay goes beyond a simple “reading comprehension” test.  Knowing what has transpired is often not enough to succeed – the player is also expected to draw implicit conclusions and stay one step ahead of what has been revealed.  In other words, the game is indelibly linked to the player’s discovery and exploration of the narrative.  The narrative is the game.

And it comes as no surprise.  After all, mysteries and crime novels have been around for centuries.  But perhaps what readers enjoyed about those novels the most was the fact that underneath the plot and prose laid what was, fundamentally, a game of sorts – one intimately married to its narrative.

Progeny

My wife and I just got back from the hospital and we’ve confirmed that Schlaghund’s gonna be a daddy!  My wife’s almost 7 weeks pregnant, according to the sonogram.  We got to see it’s tiny little heart beating – even though that basically amounted to a rhythmic blur on a really low-res screen.

Here he/she/it is:

Looks like I’m finally getting a nooblet of my own!

The Xbox homecoming

My Xbox 360 has finally returned from Microsoft’s repair center in Texas.  It arrived yesterday afternoon – exactly two weeks from the day I shipped it.  The turnaround time wasn’t bad, all things considered.  My experiences with the repair are very positive overall.

I initially hesitated to ship it because Microsoft supposedly offered to send a box for shipment.  Since I didn’t want some inadequacy in my packing process to be responsible for physical damage to the console during shipment, I requested a box instead of opting to print an eLabel and supply a box of my own.  Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t sending boxes out anymore.  The same issue was reported on Kotaku about a week ago – and I can confirm its validity.  Let me repeat: contrary to what Microsoft has claimed, they are not sending shipping boxes – at least they didn’t for my particular request.  I’m not sure if it’s a location-specific issue (I live in California) or if it’s a global policy.  I even called customer support to make sure I wasn’t going to receive a box at some later point in time.  I was told that no box was shipped.  By the way, getting a hold of an actual human on Microsoft’s customer service line is a real pain.  I had to look online to find out how to speak to someone fleshy.  I believe the method is to not do or say anything when prompted.  Eventually, you’re redirected to a human rep.  So that box-waiting ended up being a waste of four days, as all I ended up receiving in the mail was a UPS shipping label – the very same thing I could have printed at home much earlier.

To prepare for shipment, I removed the Xbox’s hard drive.  I took an old cardboard box I had lying around, put a generous lining of junk mail, and rested the Xbox on it.  I then used whatever remaining newspaper-type material I had and surrounded the Xbox with it.  Since I didn’t quite have enough paper, I took a spare phonebook, tore pages out, and used it to ensure the console was snug in the box.  I taped it up, affixed the label, and handed the box to UPS the next morning.  Even though I was misled about being sent a box, the packing and shipping process was relatively painless.

Then I waited.  It took most of one week to arrive at the repair center.  The repair itself only seemed to take two or three business days.  The return shipment took another chunk of a week.  I had hoped to get the console in time for the weekend, but I ended up having to wait until Monday.  I was also lucky that my wife was taking that day off, as the return shipment requires a signature upon receipt.  The Xbox site was very informative regarding the status of the repair – it indicated when they had received the console, when they had finished fixing it, and the site even supplied a tracking number for the return shipment.

So, after two Xbox-less weeks, voila!  The console arrived safe and sound.  It even came with a 1-month Xbox Live Gold subscription card attached for my trouble.  Honestly, though, 1-month doesn’t really cover it for me – I lost the first two (three, counting the fruitless wait for a shipping box) feverish weeks immediately following Street Fighter IV’s release.  It seems that a lot of the hype is beginning to die down, and I’m sure that the competition on Live is much steeper now.   I can’t get those few weeks of potential practice back.  I’m now behind the rest of the curve.

I have to admit I was a bit hesitant to believe that the repair service had done anything.  The problem is that the red ring doesn’t appear immediately after turning on the Xbox.  Generally, after a cold boot, the Xbox will run fine for a few minutes before hanging.  It usually takes several attempts of running and hanging before the red ring appears on the next boot.  If the repair service didn’t bother to make those multiple attempts, they might have ended up concluding that nothing was wrong and sent me my original, broken console back.  Fortunately, they did, in fact, fix the problem – probably by replacing the components.  From what I’ve read about the issue, it would take nothing less than a swap-out to remedy the issue entirely.  I do know that my original faceplate was preserved (I know because I lost the spring on the USB cover panel); it’s probably safe to assume I got it in my original case, too; as for the internals, it’s really anyone’s guess.

But I’m not content to guess.  I needed to make sure things were right.  So after watching my Monday-night television programming, I hooked up the old girl and took her for a spin.  I was startled by the fact that my original display settings were reset and it almost looked like the console had to reinstall NXE again.  I’m guessing it was because the internals were brand new, and the firmware was still out-of-date.  After watching that ridiculously long NXE intro again, everything was back to the way it was (except for the system time).  I popped in Rock Band 2 – a game I sorely missed – and played a set with my wife to make sure the console didn’t freeze after a few minutes of play.  After inserting the disc, the first thing I thought to myself was that the disc drive seemed much quieter than I remembered.  Maybe it was just the fact that I had gone three weeks without it, but I could’ve sworn that the drive used to be a lot louder.  It’s possible that the repairs also resulted in a swap-out of the old drive.  Which is totally fine with me.  That thing was noisy.

Anyway, after Rock Band 2, I finally popped in Street Fighter IV and continued to play it for the next few hours.  Everything seemed to be in order.  I now have a three-month repair warranty on the console, so if anything went wrong with their repair, I can send the console in again.  I’m not entirely sure whether the extended red-ring warranty of three years applies to a repair warranty.  I can’t see any evidence of it on the Xbox site, so I’m inclined to believe that I won’t be covered by the repair warranty if another red-ring occurs after more than three months.

Let’s just hope that Microsoft speaks the truth when they say that the worst of the red-ring problems are behind them.