Daria. Who would have thought that your cutting remarks would be so poignant a decade later.

…

I think I was going to talk about something but I just can’t recall what that …

Oh, right: Good news everyone! I’ve found a new source of thoughtful game criticism in video form called “Errant Signal”. The latest of which is the following:

He also has a blog called, you guessed it, Errant Signal where he expands upon his thoughts on game design, it’s context and the overall state of the videogame industry.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed by my praise, but I love what this guy is doing. Every piece of criticism he elaborates on is well thought out and spot on. Well …. most of the time. When analyzing Half-Life he made the point that changing gears every two hours was “bad” for some reason. I mean, how is that bad at all? It lets the player breathe after every exhausting action sequence and on top of that, it serves to change things up so the player doesn’t get bored.

You go from shooting, to puzzles, to driving sections to more shooting to big action set pieces to more puzzles and so on. You could make the argument that the game should be shorter and more compact but that’s an entirely different criticism, because these constant changes were not designed with the intent of making the game longer. They’re there for pacing purposes (That’s a link to an Extra Credits video. If you don’t know what Extra Credits is, shame on you! Go watch every single video they made. NOW!).

Anyway, besides that little tidbit, I really appreciate what this guy is doing.

Because at the end of the day, the games that I like to make and the games that I like to play are two different subjects. It’s not that they don’t have anything in common, of course, so I think that’s a good place to start since it’s always been clear to me what I like as a game player:

The thrill of the chase, the gracefulness of the movement of my character, the unexpected responses to my actions, the consequences to my seemingly unimportant actions, the feeling that the game world is alive, the atmosphere, that feeling of not having deciphered all of the rules yet (which can be used beautifully in horror games), stepping outside the explicit or implicit rules by my own volition (“cheating” you might say) and the excitement when a rule is broken exactly once by the game itself and for reasons that not only make sense but also carry a meaning behind them. There are other examples naturally, but the ones I mentioned are the most significant.

Oh, also: Numbers going up and random rewards, or in other words: I like RPGs. Yes, I know, but I can’t help it when those tactics are used well.

On the other hand I have a very clear idea of what I don’t like: Noninteractive sections that have no other purpose than to serve as masturbatory material for the art/story department (that includes exposition for more than 30 seconds, watching someone do really cool stuff that was impossible inside the rules of the game, and a load of other things), a system of rules that rewards luck over any other player aspect (skill, decision-making, hours spent, etc), chores with no other purpose than to waste my time, DIAS (Do It Again Stupid), rules that sabotage the game’s strongest points and excessive hand-holding at the cost of exploration (the latest nintendo games…) and this other thing and that one and and and…. and a motherload of other stuff that I shouldn’t even mention for the sake of brevity.

Well, all I need to do now is distill all of that into the barest essentials.

…

You know, erhm … it’s … it’s complicated.

I’ve written and rewritten this time and time again, going into minute detail then replacing it all with a few simple bullet points that ended up being entire paragraphs unto themselves. Going from obvious generalizations to my personal quirks, I just can’t analyze this stuff without going overboard. Nothing just clicks. I want to find what identifies me as a game designer, but I don’t know how.

Mmmhhh. I think I’m overanalyzing this. Let me try a simpler approach: I’ll start with only one sentence and then expand from that concept without bursting it all out at once.

…

How about this:

I like to build well constructed systems of rules that can/should be broken either by the game designer or by the player.

Heh, that’s a good start but I don’t like the focus on rule-breaking. Let’s try something else:

I’m interested in building systems of rules that permit players to experience unexpected, sometimes unscripted and yet always interesting moments.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Expanding it a bit more we get:

I like to build systems of rules that:

• Permit the player to experience unexpected, sometimes unscripted and yet always interesting moments.
• Are built to resonate with the context and viceversa. Neither being more important than the other.
• Respond to a consistent logic both inside and outside the context.

Yes! That’s about it in a nutshell. Though I suspect that most of you don’t have a complete idea of what exactly I’m talking about in those bullet-points. If that’s the case, then let me refer you to a post I did back in March titled “My favorite moment, deconstructed“*. That moment is very special for all the reasons I already explained in that post, but now that I’ve narrowed down what drives me as a designer I can say that I also like that moment precisely because it’s the type of moment I would love to design and build myself. It resonates with me both as a player and as a designer.

To be specific, that moment is both unexpected and interesting, built to resonate with the context (the shopkeeper warns the player not to steal and his face seems quite … let’s say evil.) and on top of that, it follows an internal logic hinted at the player by the delay in which the shopkeeper tracks the position of Link.

It’s … it’s perfect.

And precisely that kind of moments is what I want to have in my own games.

Also, this other game called LSD seems to be a good source of ideas (and nightmare fuel) that explore the “unexpected, unscripted yet interesting” moments:

—-

*That’s one of the best posts I’ve ever written, though I don’t want to think what that says about me as a writer …

[Warning: Rant incoming]

I don’t know how effective it’s going to be, but immediately it sounds better than the 12 years of schoolwork and half-assed lessons I’ve had to go through to “learn” english. If you’re so inclined, see for yourself how awkward were my posts here 3 years ago. Then think about the fact that each one of those required a minimum of three hours of editing (which were mostly attributed to weird sentence structures and misspellings).

Yeah.

So, given my lack of precious time, please excuse me while I offload my condensed thoughts here:

• Motion control is in a transition phase and that’s the reason why so many people are disenchanted with it. It lacks the tactile feedback that is necessary for it to work in more broad terms. The only things that really work right now are the ones that don’t need this tactile feedback: Mainly throwing, dancing and shooting.
• Sword fights don’t quite work because when a sword clashes inside the game, it bounces, but the player doesn’t register this interaction in the same way. Sparks may fly, a clashing sound may play and the controller may rumble, but that isn’t enough, the swing of the player’s arm needs to stop as it does inside the game…. and that is impossible right now with the technology available.
• The same goes for the feeling of “fingers over glass” that touchscreens are recognized for.
• As it turns out, I’m still susceptible to be trapped by basic collectible mechanics if the game underneath is good enough. Even if the reward is as vapid and uninteresting as artwork and/or trophies.
• I think I’m the only member of society that actively wants a Zelda game that isn’t completely linear. For me, an open world gated with artificial obstacles only serves to undermine the sense of wonder and adventure. Once the gates have been removed then what’s left to explore?
• The Book Of Unwritten Tales seems quite lovely.
• So does To The Moon.
• Ray-casting is rapidly nearing interactive speeds which might mean that in a generation or two we’ll see very impressive graphics, especially in the lighting department.
• Box2D is not nearly as complete as I was hoping for, which kind of delayed a tech demo I’ve started to build.
• Flash continues to fail to support the disabling of the context menu, which continues to enrage me.

It’s the first time that I’m writting you, so forgive me if I seem blunt, but would you kindly get rid of the f*cking context menu for the flash player? It’s the single most annoying thing about your applet. Nobody else does anything remotely similar to that, not javascript, not java, not unity and especially not html5, your strongest competition in the coming years. I’m asking this for your own sake.

Since you are soon to be releasing a new version of Flash with a new focus on games, I’m inclined to believe that you’ll let developers use the f*cking right mouse button. I mean, you’re showing videos of Unreal Tournament 3 working inside flash! You’d have to be f*cking insane not to give developers the option to disable the context menu, right?

RIGHT?

I know that your flash technology used to be all about animation, and that’s why at first it seemed harmless to have a context menu. I mean, hey, there’s no interactivity with the applet itself so it seemed like a good idea. I know. That was 14 years ago. Things have changed and you might have noticed that developers now want to use the right mouse button for things other than displaying a f*cking context menu. We’ve even gone to the extremes of hacking around your applet, even if said hacks are never compatible with every browser out there (I’m looking at you Opera). We’re willing to loose some of our audience just to give our players a better experience and more intuitive control.

Get your shit tog*ther.

Sincerely,

Every fucking game developer

I was naive. Hell, I still am in many respects, but I’m here to address some of the gaping holes in this post.

My primary error while proposing a new grading system was that I didn’t know or was blissfully unaware of the fundamental difference between actually learning and just doing busywork. Because at the end of the day, the important thing is that the student has learned something. If the student spent 3/4 of the year studying or just a couple of weeks in total shouldn’t be of importance. We shouldn’t treat these students differently if both have retained the same amount of knowledge.

In the current education system, no matter where in the world you live in, trite busywork is what separates an excellent grade from an average one. And that’s because busywork is easily quantifiable. An “A” means the student did all of the busywork while a “B” means the student did only 85% of it.

Sometimes you can pass a class by just doing what the teacher says without ever absorbing any actual knowledge. Or in other words, you know that “2+2 = 4″ and “2+3 = 5″ but you don’t know what to do when confronted with a “2+3+2″ operation.

Doing busywork doesn’t always translate into knowledge or a lesson learned or any understanding of any kind. Taking a test on the other hand … does evaluate actual knowledge to some extent. (That is, if its done well, but I’m not getting into that topic for now). So, actual knowledge is only quantifiable through tests.

The problem most of the time is, as I’ve said in the past, that tests don’t reward knowledge, they just punish mistakes. On top of that, tests only evaluate knowledge during the couple of hours that they last. After that, the student is free to forget all about the subject he just spent the last 2 or more days studying. Unless there’s another similar test in the future, of course.

But all of this is just a problem of written tests.

If the test is just a conversation between the teacher and the student, then these problems vanish. No longer are mistakes directly punished and there’s a more direct correlation between what the teacher sees the student knows and what the student actually knows.

There are still three problems to this approach though:

1. The obvious one is that the teacher can’t evaluate 100 students in a day. Hell, I’d be surprised if he could do that in under a week. So: the efficiency of an oral test is deplorable, since it has been traded for effectiveness.
2. How do you assign a grade in an oral exam? The teacher has to *gasp* actually judge how much the student knows.
3. On the other hand, this approach means the teacher is depending on the ability of the student to communicate on the fly, to talk. Some people have an extreme difficulty to do this effectively, so they always prefer written tests because they can spend as much time as they want to try and build each sentence.

I used to be one of those people. In fact, I was like that through all of my schooling life. It wasn’t until I reached the university level of education that I started to improve. But that wouldn’t have been the case if at least someone had cared about my communication skills at an  earlier point in my life. And you know what? In retrospective, having regular oral exams would have helped me get over this problem.

Grading is also a problem for teachers that don’t want to engage students directly. These kinds of teachers could just grab a regular conversation and turn it into the equivalent of a written exam where a single mistake is enough to lower the grade. The solution: Get. Better. Teachers. Teachers that care about what they’re teaching and most of all, that care about the students themselves.

So now we’re only left with one major issue as to how to improve testing procedures: Efficiency.

…

Yeah, there’s no getting around that. There’s a trade-off that can’t be broken, at least not until we invent a chatbot intelligent enough to do the testing.

…

Well, since we are talking only in theory, we could say that the teacher’s job should be to test and teach at the same time. That the classrooms should have at most 20 students and perhaps more than one teacher. That the teaching process be 30% exposition and 70% conversation.

And maybe while we are at it, we should stop world hunger, give an interesting and fulfilling job to everyone and cure cancer. I’m very aware that what I’m proposing is far from possible in most parts of the world. However, I would settle for something like this:

The ladies and gentlemen that are responsible for how our education systems work, would you please give a f*ck?

To get into specifics, I’m gonna be talking about games such as Angry Birds, Peggle, Plants vs Zombies, Bejeweled,  Zuma, Canabalt, Pong* and many others I can’t recall at the moment. I respect these games because I can clearly see why they are/were successful, what was their respective designer’s intent and above all else, what kind of person would play games like this. Namely: Everyone. That is, everyone but people like me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve liked most of these games at one point or another, but with repeated playthroughs I grew increasingly dissatisfied. They’re all great for what they are, but I can’t shake the feeling that they don’t satiate my hunger for play. They seem to avoid all of the core reasons why I play games in the first place.

I always thought I knew why I don’t like these games. They throw out rewards like candy for accomplishments such as “choosing the right angle to throw something”. It’s cheap. It’s meaningless. It’s crass. They have absolutely no soul to speak of. They don’t have anything to say other than “You’re awesome!”.

But you know what? That’s not what bothers me. Hell, Mario fits that criteria almost perfectly and that has never bothered me in the slightest.

It’s only recently that it dawned on me the real reason: All of these games at the very least have limited input and at the very worst don’t require a player in the first place. They play themselves.

And that’s incredibly frustrating to me.

I can’t help but feel that I should be more in control of what’s happening in the screen. I want to be able to do more, I want to be able to do what I can in other very similar games. I want to be able to guide my birds mid-flight, I want to tell the game to throw the ball with a specific amount of force, I want to tell my plants when to start firing, I want to move my jewels around even if they don’t create a match, I want to move around the board, I want to decelerate at will and finally I want to move around horizontally as well.

I feel that the limited input is restraining my freedom of expression.

In retrospect I realize that this is obvious, but it bears to be stated: These games were not made for people like me. But then, what is the audience of these games exactly? My guess is that they don’t want to control too many things at once. These people are content to have minimal input, even if that means that the game practically plays itself.

In other words, these people have not played many games and/or have no interest in them as anything other than a time-killing diversion.

Simple games with simple control-schemes, simple to explore mechanics with simple options and simple strategies. Basically, shallow gameplay.

It feels great to finally realize why I don’t like these games.

…

But there’s one particularly popular game that is still stuck in my mind: Bejeweled.

It’s restrictions are so astounding that I can’t help but feel like the designers had a very specific audience in mind. An audience that doesn’t like choice, because they get flustered and start feeling as if they’re playing the game wrong. These people are happy to be given the least amount of options possible, even if there’s absolutely no challenge to the decisions they’re left with. Everything they might choose is a correct answer. Everything is a positive feedback loop. The game literally plays itself, it just waits for some player input to continue.

I suppose it’s harmless, but I can’t help to feel a very creepy vibe from that game.

———————-

*Pong is going to be an exception to most generalizations I make in this post, but I feel like that’s a product of its age more than of its design.

These are two of his TED talks, the first one is from 2007:

And the second is from 2010:

After watching both videos I realize I’m quite lucky. I liked mathematics since I was very little and so the heavy focus on mathematical thinking didn’t hurt me in any way. I didn’t feel suffocated. What I did find boring, unsatisfying and a complete waste of time was the history classes. Mostly because the teaching methods and the subjects involved were so boring, uninvolving and downright depressing that I just couldn’t bear the thought of studying this garbage at home. Or paying attention in class for that matter. Decorating the chair with a faulty liquid paper was a more involving and interesting experience.

In retrospect, my main problem was that I really suck at memorizing things literally. I have to decompose them, I have to understand what they mean and link everything within the  web of knowledge that’s inside my brain. I have no use for dates if I don’t have a context for them. I can remember them for an exam but they won’t stay with me after a few days.

1945, the end WWII? Yeah, I didn’t memorize that number until I learned all the context surrounding it. And you know what’s the worst part? I actually learned more about WWII from Wikipedia, National Geographic and the History Channel than from school.

Let me repeat that: I learned more in a few hours of television than years of history classes.

Oh, and that whole thing about making children afraid of being wrong? And that every question has only one answer? That’s absolutely true. I was terrified every single time the English teacher assigned us students with creating a short story. A STORY? About what? How should I start? What if it’s wrong? I can’t come up with anything… Why do I have only have an hour to pour my creative juices onto the page? but what if I’m not finished by then? Should I just end it and be done with it?

They spent years and years kicking the creativity out of our skulls and NOW they want us to engage in something creative?

Frankly, I didn’t find my creative side until I left school.

I didn’t even know I had a creative side before then.

There’s no roundabout way of saying it, so let’s take the bull by the horns: A gigantic part of Destructoid is Jim Sterling. A man capable of the stupidest jokes you’ll ever see on the internet, at least at face value. His comedy is very hit or miss but there’s always a reasoning behind it. An infamously bad example of his shocking humor would be the time he … well, just go here and take a look at the comments if you don’t dare to play the video. Low-brow? Of course it is, just as low-brow as the source material. You can’t say that the game wasn’t intended for what Mr Sterling did.

But that’s not why I love most of his stuff, especially in recent years. What fascinates me is that even though he’s the reviews editor for the site, his commitment to express his own opinion as unfiltered as possible is unparalleled. If he loves something, he’ll let you know in a heart-beat. If he hates something, he’ll rip it apart. No matter what game it is, no matter what company is behind that game and no matter it’s metacritic score.

Excuse my language, but what he does takes some balls.

He also makes very good points from time to time.

Now, having said all of that, my love for the site wouldn’t be as strong if it weren’t for their Community Blogs and how they promote the very best of them to the front page. For example, I recently read this essay on why motion controls shouldn’t be used for 1:1 movement. It exposes a fundamental flaw with these types of controls, using simple terms and even illustrations to help an average reader understand. On top of that the author even makes a few suggestions on how to improve the current systems used for hand to hand combat.

There’s an air of honesty and intelligent discourse around the site that I just find quite appealing.

Also, they are not afraid of just goofing around.

Then again, the lack of creativity and innovation we see in dialog mechanics is as inviting to a game designer as is a blank canvas to a painter. I can’t help but dream of more non-conventional ways to portray dialog every time I encounter a new annoyance with the established systems … which is why I’m kind of surprised I haven’t touched the subject for so long. I guess my overall lack of actual gaming could explain such an ocurrence.

Anyway, that’s enough faffing about,  let’s get down to business:

Imagine if a dialog system wasn’t based on what is actually said, but instead based on the intention. To achieve something like that, my mind inmediately found a compromise: Use descriptions of what is being said instead of the lines themselves.

Such a system could use a traditional tree-based structure, but that’s boring, so let’s shoot for something more ambitious: Let’s use a directed graph structure. It’s a higher level of complexity, but we can afford it since the change to a descriptive dialog form has freed our need to keep track of the bulk of the data exchanged in conversation. For example, I don’t need to keep track of names unless it’s relevant to the conversation.

To complement this approach we could add a shout/declaration mechanic that would work somewhat like the gestures in Fable 2: The player does an action that more than one NPC can receive, interpret and then give feedback on. In other words, the player would have the ability to map certain topics of dialog to the shout/declare key. Upon pressing such a key, whoever is near and is able to listen can react to the player’s declaration.

Let me give you an example to make things clearer: The player character just robbed a knight to give the stolen treasures to the poor. The player maps this topic to the shout key and starts using it in the middle of a town. A crowd might gather, people might cheer and the guards may try to split the player character’s head open. Fun!

Since we would be using a directed graph structure, that means we could have options that are always available, like insults, compliments and even specific phrases such as  “I’m the king of the leprechauns, bow before my greatness or die by my magic pickaxe”. Yeah, that phrase wasn’t exactly a description, because after all, not everything needs to be in a description format. Rules are meant to be broken, especially in videogames.

Now, going back to the conversations themselves, I’m very aware that the success of such a system depends profoundly on how it’s executed. And even then, it may even be impossible to construct in the first place. Well, that may be the case if we are talking about a huge RPG with thousands of unique NPCs. Of course, attempting such a thing would be suicidal, so something a little smaller needs to be built first.

There are many things that can be done in order to make this system viable, but the key to it all is in the descriptive nature of it. For example, you could use minigames to represent parts of a conversation. You would choose the option to talk about a certain subject and then a minigame would play out where the player is basically a detective trying to find if there’s any information that the NPC is not sharing.

The joy of dialog mechanically speaking is one of exploration, so why wouldn’t a classic exploration-based game work for something like this? A mini-metroidvania would be perfect if you ask me. Knowledge would be represented as the space in the map and the platforming elements would represent the arguments and logic. Lies would be illusions, outright refusal to talk about something would be an invisble wall. Furthermore, the ability to question and to detect lies could be represented as the different abilities of the platforming protagonist.

The directed graph structure doesn’t even need to be all that complicated, it depends on the execution and the intention of the designer.

I don’t know. I’m obviously biased, but I think a dialog system like this could work really well. Especially if there’s a certain variety between conversations. After all, the system has a decent amount of flexibility on paper.

* Holy f*ck, that was back in 2008?

Basically, I’ve focused on what could be accomplished if the industry at large decided to experiment with this very subject, but I never sat down to think about the problems that games with “mechanics as meaning” have.

The short version:

Mechanics alone can’t work in and off themselves.

The long version:

For example, Rod Humble’s “The Marriage” is too abstract for its own good. Or in other words, I enjoy the explanation of it more than the game itself. It’s use of mechanics as metaphors was something unique at the time (2007), and so it got a lot of press and has been used as an example of what could be done with mechanics ever since. The problem is, as I’ve said, it’s too abstract. The only context provided is the title of the game itself. Without that, all the player sees is a bunch of squares and circles with strange spatial behaviours.

“Just like Tetris” you might say. Fair enough, there are similarities between the two, but the main difference here is that the purpose of Tetris is to provide challenge and nothing else. It isn’t trying to convey any meaning whatsoever, it’s a pure abstract game.

The Marriage certainly could be played as a challenging diversion but the focus of the game is nowhere near that. This game wants you to take the blue square and pink square and think of them as a married couple and that all the mechanics that surround them represent the nature of the relationship. The hardships they must endure, the sacrifices and so on.

It’s a very nice concept, the theory behind it is stellar, but the execution lacks any appeal as a game.

Other than for pure curiosity, there’s no other reason to play this game. In fact, given that it’s all explained by Humble himself, I find it more interesting to read about the mechanics than to play with them myself.

I’m hesitant to call the game a failure since, hey, I’m talking about it 5 years later, aren’t I?

Mmmhhh, let me put it this way then: It’s a failure as a game, but a success as an experiment.

But I’m left wondering … if The Marriage had mechanics that could stand on their own, could it be marketed as a “proper” game and be a success at it? My guess is that, yeah, why not? The problem I see with the game in its current state is that most players will become bored with it pretty fast. There’s no tutorial whatsoever, the mechanics are quite complicated and the context is almost non-existent. But if that weren’t the case, then it might serve it’s purpose better. Asking players to play and experiment just for the sake of play when there’s no apparent goal, there’s no context and no expressed challenge… well, not many people will be able to decipher what the game is trying to communicate.

There’s no reason why The Marriage can’t have more context to it. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a tutorial-like phase at the beginning as to make the player acclimated to the game before the metaphors and complicated interactions surface.

Mechanics alone can’t work in and off themselves. You need context. You need a tutorial. Basically, you have to acknowledge that the player exists and he/she has a minimum set of requirements that need to be fulfilled before they can actually enjoy the game they’re playing. Only then can an interesting conversation begin between the player and game designer.

As an addendum: Yes, I do know that this game was intended to be an experiment and nothing more. That doesn’t change my point though, and even then it helped me clear my mind about certain things I’ve talked about here.

If I get a little more inspiration on this topic I’m more than sure I’ll be talking about Passage next time around.

What made me stop the video and then proceed to write this post was how he described some teachers using the Khan Academy lectures. Basically, the students watched the lectures at home and what used to be homework was done in class. That way, the teacher is freed from having to give the same lectures over and over again, the students are free to pause, rewind and fast-forward the lectures as they see fit, and in class the students get to talk to the teacher and other students about the subject.

This reminded me of the Dragon Speech given by Chris Crawford in 1992. In that speech (in the third part, if you’re curious) he described how normal lectures are designed to be efficient but at the cost of low effectiveness, that the human mind is an active agent, not a passive receptacle. What he proposed for giving more effectiveness to lectures was to make them interactive by translating them into games.

It’s an approach that doesn’t seem practical since it requires a huge amount of legwork to get it started and then there’s no guarantee that it’ll catch on.

See where I’m getting at?

Yes, the Khan Academy videos seem to be the solution to the problem Crawford exposed. Granted, there’s not a huge amount of interactivity on the videos themselves, but that’s not a problem here. By watching the videos at home, the students are free to interact, to talk about the subject freely between themselves and with the teacher. It takes an expository environment such as the classroom and makes it a hell of a lot more interactive.

And it’s efficient too because the video lectures can be watched by anybody at anytime anywhere as long as they have an internet connection and a browser.

Frankly, the only problem that I see with using the Khan Academy lectures is that they’re all in the same language: English. The chances of these lectures catching on in countries other than the english speaking ones are … well, minimal. Non-existent, in fact.

When I was little, to get information I and many other students resorted to the spanish version of Encarta. It was nice and all, but it doesn’t even compare to Wikipedia nowadays, which not only has supplanted Encarta, it has helped spread a new paradigm in and off itself.

Would the Khan Academy do the same thing for the classroom environment? At least I’m sure of one thing, it’s going to need a huge translation effort in order to get closer to that goal.

——————-

Side-notes of stuff further in the video:

• Students with swiss cheese holes in their knowledge. That’s unbelievably and painfully true.
• The data structures and how they are graphed is very intelligent and intuitive. Seems as it would be a huge help for the teachers.
• Everyone gets stuck on a topic eventually and due to that some kids are labeled as “slower” than their peers. I’m not sure that happens everywhere in the world, but at least it rings somewhat true to me.
• Haha, he talks about a global classroom. Yeah, as long as it’s only in English that ain’t going to happen.

Hocking wondered how changing a narrative’s dynamics might also change its meaning. Referencing Brenda Brathwaite’s Holocaust-themed board game Train, Hocking suggested that it’s possible to alter an abstract game like Tetris by applying a narrative layer on top of it. Attaching Train‘s narrative to Tetris (cooperate with the Nazis and pack together as many blocks full of people as possible; or defy them by creating as many gaps as possible) changes what Tetris means and suggests something important about how games impart meaning.

I had a concept in the same vein that I’ve been turning over in the back of my mind for quite a while now. That paragraph right there solidified that concept in the form of the following sentence:

The context brings meaning to mechanics and mechanics bring meaning to the context.

Let’s take the example of Tetris as a purely abstract game. The mechanics themselves don’t mean anything because they don’t have a context attached. If you were to, say, make the Tetris blocks into people, then you’d suddenly have a game about maiming human beings.

The mechanics add a new layer of meaning: Not only is it about maiming people, but it’s also about stacking them well enough so that the pit doesn’t overflow. But then again, you are playing as the executioner and the context shows us that he is right next to the pit, so if it overflows, then he’s effectively screwed and the game is over. See what I was talking about? The context brought meaning to the mechanics, but the other way was also true: the mechanics brought meaning to the context.

It doesn’t seem like a very complex concept, and that’s because it isn’t. I was just having trouble finding my viewpoint on the relationship between context and mechanics.

That is all.

I always wondered why that is. I mean, the site doesn’t look like it’s that bad. Sometimes (well, alright, regularly) they post ridiculously irrelevant articles about some recent event or scandal. Sometimes they pretend that it has to do with videogames… but lately they don’t even try. Add to that a sprinkle of anime news and you’ve got yourself a cocktail of pure internet garbage. At least according to some people.

The problem with these irrelevant posts and the reason behind the hate is that they’re there to bring as much traffic to the site as possible, without any regards to quality of content.

But to me, that isn’t reason enough. I never actually liked the site, but for me it fulfilled it’s purpose as a source of news and interesting things to read about. I never saw much of a reason to hate Kotaku, apart from the website’s layout (don’t even get me started).

Well, as you might expect from the title of this post: Now I get it.

I’m talking about this post.

Go ahead, read it, I’ll be here when you come back.

Done? Good. Now, tell me something:

Doesn’t that post sound like it was written by a stupid little teenage kid? We all have our brain farts from time to time, but there are editors at Kotaku. They’re supposed to be able to spot childish banter and complaints. There’s no excuse.

As a PS9 said in the comments:

I don’t get what he’s really complaining about. He says the games a turd, but doesn’t tell us the turd-ier aspects of the gameplay. He doesn’t like manga, doesn’t like androgyny and doesn’t like references to Catholicism. (didn’t know only catholic churches have bells and reference halos and horns but whatever).

Two of those three complaints could have been discovered through screenshots and movies. I mean, look at Catherine’s face. If it took a demo download and a play through to tell you this was going to be a strange anime game by now, I feel sorry for your obviously damaged powers of perception.

(Emphasis mine)

Now, I’m not saying that I won’t be reading Kotaku anymore … what I am saying is that my respect for the site and specifically Mike Fahey has suffered a plummeting fall.

On the other side of the spectrum, my respect and love for Destructoid grows more and more each week.

Yeah, I’ll stop now.

Sorry about that.

So… what I was trying to say was that I have an ongoing project that I’d like to share with you my dear readers. It’s nowhere near finished, heavens no, but I think I’m at a point where there are a sufficient amount of mechanics to get a sense of how the game works.

But let me warn you first: There’s no tutorial, no objective, no consequences and of course all the graphics are crude “programming art”. So, basically it’s just a small sandbox to play around with.

Having said that, here’s the sandbox itself:

Explosions! Wires! A protagonist! NPCs! Buttons! Blocks! Traps! A squiggly grey thingy!

Download link:

• Download here! Sadly, it’s made with Game Maker 8.1, so it only works on windows platforms.

Controls:

• Enter key restarts the sandbox.
• Mouse over to select.
• Left click + drag to operate wires (create and/or move) and to move the blue circle.
• Right click to cancel wire operations and to delete wires themselves.

Game elements:

• Circles represent characters. The blue circle is the one you can control and move around, while the green ones will be enemies at some point in the future (right now they don’t do much).
• The grey blocks and the squiggly thingy are impassable walls.
• The cylinders are buttons that can be pressed by characters.
• The holes are actually spike traps. They don’t do much apart from being able to be activated/deactivated.
• And finally, the wires.

Oh, the wires. Let me tell you this, if you enjoy discovering how a mechanic works, then stop reading right now and go play the damn thing.

Alright?

Good.

The wires, as you might expect, are the most important element in the sandbox. By connecting a button to a trap you can activate said trap by making the blue circle go through the button. That’s fairly simple, but then things can get more interesting. For instance, you might connect two traps in a row! Exciting, I know. But seriously, things get a little more complicated once you figure out that there’s no limitation to the wires (apart from distance … and even that has a loophole) and on top of that, characters can be connected to wires, even the blue little guy can. What happens when a character is sent a signal from a button? Well, that screenshot might give you a clue.

And that’s about it for now. I know that it doesn’t seem like much, but this simple sandbox took me quite a while to develop, certainly more than I expected (something like 6 days of work if I recall correctly).

Cheers.

When having a conversation, why is constant eye contact mandatory?

Let me give ya an example (skip to the 5 minute mark to see what I’m talking about)

I’m not a conversational expert, but this behavior seems to be completely creepy to me. I mean, the guy is sharpening an axe as he speaks and not once does he look away from you. True, this is mostly a problem with Bethesda-developed games (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and now Skyrim), but I sincerely can’t remember any relatively new game where conversations happen more … naturally. People either completely ignore you while they talk or they never break eye contact. There’s nothing in-between. I want something in-between.

Am I asking for something impossible?

…

Well, no, as a matter of fact, it’s a perfectly reasonable request.

As a side-note: Regardless, I have to say that Skyrim looks like an interesting game. For now at least. Though the environments shown in the video seem a bit too linear for my tastes. Oh well, we’ll see when it comes out.

Need for Speed: The Run seems to be what an executive might come up with when confronted with the “need” to “innovate“. Sure, it’s just another racing game, but guess what, this one is scripted up the wazoo and filled with Quick Time Events…. hooray?

It’s the ultimate example of cinematic flair at the expense of everything else. You race for a few seconds, then get interrupted by a scripted scene you have no control over, then proceed to press X to not die a few times and then repeat this same process all over again but in a different car.

No, don’t worry, I don’t want to control my character while he’s running. Or hiding. No, I want you, dear designer, to play the game for me. Sure, make it so I have to press a few buttons here and there to make me believe I’m part of what’s happenning on the screen. Yeah, that’s exactly what I want.

Giant arrow signs blocking other possible escape routes? Fantastic, that sounds awesome and completely plausible. Sign me up.

…

Yeah. I haven’t played this game and I already hate it in principle.

Education is backwards.

… well, that’s true, but let me reduce the scope of this post: The “final exam” system is backwards.

Instead of measuring the knowledge of the student, it’s counting the mistakes he/she makes.

Instead of going upwards, it’s a system that begins at perfection and anything less counts negatively.

It incentivizes short-term memory over any kind of long-lasting effects.

It stigmatizes any kind of mistakes. According to the education system, mistakes are perfectly avoidable and if you ever commit one (that is, if you’re human) you should and shall be punished accordingly.

You cannot and should not learn from said mistakes, because once you’ve done something wrong, it can’t be erased, it’s permanent.

….

I’m not exaggerating here. That’s what it feels like every time I have to study for a final exam, and if you are a student or remember what it was like, then I imagine you’d agree with me when I question:

Who the fuck designed this system?

But I guess the more important question is: Why the flying fuck haven’t we changed such a monstrosity? It’s a horrible, horrible system that needs to be killed with fire.

Right now.

FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

I get the feeling that this system worked in a time when things like these were acceptable. Have we gone soft? That’s a horrible way to put it. I’d say we’ve grown more sophisticated as a society. We’ve gained access to greater and greater forms of entertainment, of immediacy and rewards. We’ve learned how to milk the human psyche both for good and for bad. We’ve done so much in the past 50 years that it’s no wonder the education system feels antiquated, moldy and badly designed.

I don’t know if we should attribute it to a change between generations, all I know is that when I was at school, with each year I grew more and more dissatisfied and I didn’t know why. The kids that are at school today are even more disinterested. Some just don’t give a fuck and just sleep through every single class. Others just play with their cellphones, smartphones and/or netbooks because they are both more interesting and more informative than the classes themselves.

Well then, if the kids of today find these tech thingies so interesting, let’s spice our classes up with some education software!

…

That’s not how it works. That’s like trying to fix the leaky pipe of the kitchen sink with the molten metal of the currently on fire oven. Sure, it sounds like a nice solution but you might wanna go take a look at that other slightly bigger problem.

Look, the reason why all of these kids are getting more and more bored with classes isn’t because they aren’t flashy enough. It’s because teachers don’t give them compelling tasks. “But Diego” you say, “isn’t that a lot more work for teachers?”, well my friend, that could be true if we approached the problem with brute force. Something like bringing kids to the Grand Canyon to study its geography. That’s nice, but instead I propose something way more simple and general than that: JUST CHANGE THE FUCKING HORRIBLE GRADING SYSTEM.

This is what I designed in 5 minutes:

• Have everyone at the start of each year with 0 points for every subject.
• With each homework, with each successful test, grant the student points.
• With 500 points, the student passes.
• The maximum a student can get for each subject is 1000 points.

It’s not perfect by any means but it immediately feels “right”. This way, more points mean more work done. Any “grade” that is greater than 500 means that the student either liked the subject or was willing to work harder for a greater grade. On top of that, it’s a grading system that goes upwards instead of downwards: It doesn’t punish students for making mistakes, it only rewards successes.

So, yeah, I had to get this out of my chest.

Also, for more interesting thoughts take a look at this Extra Credits video. It’s one of the more insightful and spot-on videos I’ve seen in years.

Now I’m gonna go to sleep, then get up 2 hours later, go to class, be astoundingly bored for 2 and a half hours and then go home so I can do something way more productive: get some proper sleep.

Update from the university: Yeah, astoundingly bored already. The professor is currently explaining that a six sided die doesn’t have a face with 7 dots. He’s been explaining this for the last 5 minutes…. this is pathetic.

Why am I paying for this? Why am I here? … Oh right, I “need” to know this stuff in order to get the diploma next year.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one that notices these things, especially when I see the same glaring design flaw over and over and over AND OVER again.

What am I talking about? Simple: When the camera is in first person, I should be able to see my feet when I look down.

There. That’s the whole post.

…

*sigh* Alright, alright:

I know it’s a cosmetic issue, I know it’s almost never done for budget reasons, I know it’s a pain to make it look right. I know all of that, and yet, it keeps bothering me that apparently I’m not playing as a human being, just a floating camera with a pair of arms attached to it.

To put it in tweet size: Look down. No feet. I can see the zipper on the monster’s back. The illusion is shattered.

No amount of shaders, voxel octrees, shadow volumes, blooming, bump mapping, mipmapping or whathaveyou is going to immerse me back into the game once I can see the seams. In fact, the better quality the graphics are, the worse my anger becomes because I can’t think of a single reason why would a company spend so much money on graphics and not even consider giving the player a body.

Sure, Deus Ex suffers from an acute lack of feet (and legs for that matter), but one would expect such a shortcut from an eleven-year-old game.

No, the problem is that games that look as good as Bioshock still suffer from having a floating “camera with arms” as the player’s avatar.

And it’s just silly now.

This issue appears to be omitted in every opinion piece out there, and that unsettles me. Nobody complains about the lack of physicality of the player’s avatar, even professional game reviewers that are supposed to nitpick the sh*t out of these games.

What gives? Am I alone in this?

Right, so, the following video shows my favorite moment in all of gaming, which surprisingly enough, comes from the GameBoy. Unsurprisingly, it’s from a Zelda game: Link’s Awakening.

Now, why was this moment so special for me? After all, you can steal pretty much anything in RPGs like Fallout, even from shopkeepers. What’s the difference?

Simple, my dear non-existent readers, it’s because in most games that give the ability to steal (or any other ability, really) they do so explicitly. It’s always a mechanic specifically showcased to the player or at least made obvious without much investigation. The thing is, the hint doesn’t come from a tutorial or anything of the sort. Here, the ability to steal is subtly hinted at by a few other mechanics.

…

Let me say that again: The ability to steal is subtly hinted at by a few other mechanics.

I don’t know if I should play games (of the video or the board variety) more often, but I can’t sincerely remember any other game where I identified a mechanic through other mechanics. Not by chance, not by accident, but by pure deduction and exploration of the set of rules.

I feel like I should generalize this a little further, so here’s the same idea in other words: an unspoken rule being discovered by the combination of a set of rules.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid and discovered this, I couldn’t believe what I just saw. It’s only now that I ponder why that moment was so wonderful that I realize quite how masterful the design of this game is. But that’s not the whole story of course, there’s more to this moment. So, to explore it further, let’s take a look at the specific rules that hint at the ability to steal:

1. Items can be picked up.
2. Link can move while holding an item.
3. The shopkeeper always turns to face Link, but he has a delay of a second or two.
4. If Link tries to go out while holding an item, then the ‘keep will give him a warning.

One would expect quite a few mechanics or interconnections between them to achieve something that almost no game does. And here it is, with only four basic rules that are very easy to understand and to master. That is at face value of course, but as we’ve seen, there’s something beneath the surface.

Behind that innocent smile, Link is hiding something from you. Something obscure and morally corrupt. Are you prepared to explore the dark corners of the (Hy)rules? Remember, there's severe consequences for such actions ... Thief.

Any person can discover the first, second and fourth rules with a little exploration since they are more than apparent. But in order to discover the hidden ability to steal, one needs to observe the shopkeeper first and deduce the mechanics that dictate where he’s facing. Only then can the idea of stealing come to mind. A theory forms in your head:

If I try to exit the shop while the shopkeeper isn’t looking, maybe he won’t warn me again. Something interesting might happen!

Almost every game I’ve played has given me similar experiences of rule exploration like this one, but no other game actually delivered the goods when I tested to see if any of my theories came true. Here, the game recognizes your actions and acts accordingly. Where most games would just slap your wrist for trying to break the rules, here’s a game that encourages this kind of play. Come, explore the boundaries and be surprised when unexpected rules pop up. It’s a very rare sight indeed, even more so in the games of today.

Not since the days of combining every item with every object in the scenery of “Super Adventure Game X: The click-ening” have I been so euphoric to prove a theory of mine right. There’s a certain fun to be had when a theory forms in your head and turns out that it actually works. After all, it’s what made adventure games fun, isn’t it? … and that’s exactly why they were so freaking frustrating.

Why? In order to discover these new rules, the player has to think like the designer, or the designer has to think like the player (whichever view suits your tastes … and yes, there’s a difference*). This, coupled with the wrong design decisions can make any game the most frustrating piece of software on the planet. Or, with the right decisions, my favorite moment in all of gaming.

Here’s what Link’s Awakening did:

1. The discovery of the ability to steal is not mandatory. It’s an option.
   

…

Yep, that’s it. There are other touches like the scene that plays out when you go back to the shop, but being optional is the main reason why I liked this moment so much: It wasn’t forced on me at any point, so I had the time to explore the environments and the rules that govern them at my own pace, without being constantly nagged by the game designer telling me “There’s something hidden here! Find out what it is or we won’t let you play anymore!”.

I can’t stress it enough: As a designer, when you make leaps of logic a mandatory obstacle to progression, you’re setting up your players for the world’s most frustrating game ever made. Especially if you go by the Gabriel Knight 3′s school of thought. But the death of adventure games (or rather, their suicide, in Old Man Murray’s words) is another topic entirely.

The way this Zelda game did it is one of the correct ways, in my opinion. Sure, not everybody is going to discover the ability to steal but that’s miles better than either making it mandatory, hinting at it explicitly or cutting it out of the game entirely. It rewards players that explore the ruleset and for me, that was enough to make it my favorite moment.

*Which I’m not going to elaborate on out of fear of bloating this post with lots of off-topic babbling.**

**Hey, look! Restraint! That’s something you don’t see from me everyday, so don’t get used to it!

PS: After you steal something, every character in the game will refer to Link as “Thief”. Isn’t that just awesome?