StarCraft: The past, present and future
polygon.com
polygon.com
So I get a little twitchy when a gaming website does a story about a franchise like StarCraft and features the writing as the game changing aspect of it. StarCraft is not great because it's a sci-fi game. Warcraft is not great because it has ogres. Super Mario Brothers is not great because it has a chubby Italian plumber.
Interaction design often requires some metaphor - some analogy to inspire your first interaction with the system. The plumber, the ogre, the Zealot. But once you push that first button, and the system responds, the analogy is no longer the inspiration for delight, for frustration, for joy or pain. The interaction itself becomes the driving factor. And the most perfectly crafted interactions can inspire the full range of emotions without relying on a coherent plot, orchestrated sound, or ten minutes of FMV.
And StarCraft is one of the greatest examples of this. I don't care what a Zealot's motivation is, I only care about how much ground he can cover before the Hydra destroys him. My pulse is rising because the HP of my units is falling and my army is shrinking faster than my opponent's, not because I feel bad that the Zealots didn't procure the glory their race yearns after.
If gaming is ever going to take its proper place in the pantheon of higher artforms, it needs to stop acting like something it's not. Video games aren't movies, and they never will be. I hope the video games industry figures this out someday.
Thank for putting into words what has been in my heart for so long.
And when folks make broad appeals to interactivity, they are saying that somehow the interaction of the gamepad is fundamentally different from turning the page of a book.
But that isn't what we are thinking about as we get immersed in a game experience - we soon forget that the controls are there.
It is the simulation that people turn to next - a believable world that responds to your actions in complex ways.
But again, there is a problem - more than one problem. If the simulation is as chaotic as reality, people lose track of the hooks that kept them involved - they no longer have the ability to make extensive plans or strategies, neither are there any puzzles to solve cleanly and gracefully. And if the simulation adds detail without purpose, it dilutes any designed intent. The small differences in situations are vastly overwhelmed by a few key elements that control the real outcomes - leading to a noisy experience. Only a few kinds of games can survive the extensive sim treatment - the kinds of games that you play with the intent of telling a story about later. Put to this purpose the details rise back to the surface as important story elements.
If not those two things, what is it that is grabbing you about Starcraft? Here I would pause to consider what unifies chess, science, and literature. It is the conversation of being posed problems and arguing your case and proving your points, given a factual situation involving arbitrary rules. There are different interactions involved in each case, different skills and levels of execution needed. But it is this thing of being posed interesting problems with variety, one after another, that drives both the best liked games and stories. They don't have to be hard or deep problems - "who will the main character hook up with" drives countless stories and "which team will get the most points" drives most sports - but they give you something to chew on.
And so a writing focus is, in this light, an equal partner to a mechanics focus - either could be taking the lead role. The writing could pose a question that the player solves mechanically - that's a very typical model. Or the writing could usher you in one direction, only to reach a mechanical contradiction, leading the player to a critique of the system, a desire to escape the rules.
What we don't ask people to do in games is to design, from scratch, large parts of the experience. That takes us out of the realm of immersion, browsing, and strategizing, and into "hard" creativity where an intentional vision drives large bodies of work.
I can certainly agree with you that writing can have a meaningful impact on a game, but it's not the reason a game becomes art, as this Polygon piece would have us believe about StarCraft. StarCraft is absolutely an example of how interaction is the core of the experience, and writing only helps construct a narrative to draw you into the experience, providing a cohesive metaphor to describe the experience - both during and afterward.
Like Mario saving the Princess or Donkey Kong collecting his bananas or Terran defeating the Zerg, whatever goal the game designer creates to propel you into the narrative is orthogonal to what ultimately makes the experience meaningful. The first Goomba in Super Mario Brothers is far more important to the experience than the Princess at the end of the game. Hell, the first question mark block is even more meaningful than that.
But you're right, that without the eyes on the Goomba or the question mark on the block or Mario raising a flag at the end of the level, there's no narrative to be drawn into, there's no way to describe what you're experiencing.
And you put it so perfectly: But that isn't what we are thinking about as we get immersed in a game experience - we soon forget that the controls are there.
In a great novel, the words fade away and the book disappears and all that remains is the dream world the author has written for you.
A game does almost exactly the same thing, but through action and feedback. The feedback can be text, voice over, artwork, animation, or any of the thousands of possibilities digital multimedia has opened up for us, but it should never try to be meaningful unto itself. This is where game designers get bogged down in trying to be like other mediums. Feedback is about rewarding the gamer's action and pushing into the next action, looking for greater reward. A mushroom comes out the question block, the old man gives you a sword, your wave of zerglings wash over a gas refinery.
You might argue that writing is key to creating this experience, and I won't disagree, but the Polygon piece absolutely fails to illustrate this, and so another wave of English majors says to themselves, "Well, if I can't get my novel published, there's always video games"
Now on to games like StarCraft, DoDA, Quake 3, and Counter-Strike were all hailed as some of the greats, not because of the story like you pointed out, but because of the game mechanics that allowed them to be used as a medium for competitive gaming. And, as a former competitive gamer, I can attest to the addictive nature of gaming that causes your heart to race and one's palms to sweat while trying to clinch a victory.
For this, I believe you can't say stories don't matter. I believe there are games that are better suited for repetitive gameplay and those that rely on a great story and subpar game mechanics to reel in or captivate the player(s).
When Miyamoto invented the Goomba and made him the first enemy in Super Mario Bros, was he writing or designing?
Certainly he was writing because he was creating a protagonist and an obstacle for the protagonist. But certainly he was also designing, because he described a system for the gamer to control the protagonist and rules for how Mario could interact with the Goomba.
Metal Gear Solid and A Link to the Past are great for the sake of comparison. How many cut scenes could you tear out of MGS and still have the exact same gaming experience? How many from LTTP?
I don't know what the answer is, but I know that the answer for MGS is higher than 0. I'm less certain for LTTP.
Does that make Miyamoto more pure as an artist than Kojima? At least where these games are concerned, I lean toward yes, but there's quite obviously gray areas here.
The video game is both interactive and passively consumed.
Machinima exists because of how enjoyable experiencing a story through a video game environment can be. Spectating video games is a Billion Dollar Industry (TM), with Twitch and international professional gaming leagues getting ESPN coverage.
There's value in the mechanics and human interaction as story, on one level, and the fiction in the game itself as a story.
As well there's value in how the interactions make us a part of the game and a part of the story. Sure I know I'm not the lovable Italian plumber, but after a while my brain stops making that distinction, at least a little bit. I know I'm not a Guardian defending the remnants of earth from big brutish aliens, but after a while I stop consciously identifying that barrier, letting it become translucent.
The closer and closer we get to immersive 3D gaming, the blurrier that line becomes. So there too ^^, the story is incredibly important as a driving motivation to play and enjoy video games.
And really... the closer we get to putting the human inside the game, the more important that story is going to become. The interaction mechanics are important because when they're done right, when they're executed beautifully, we stop thinking about the game and form a more consciously transparent symbiosis with the technology. The COD games were fantastic because the FPS controls Just Worked.
What happens when we continue progress and get to neural interfaces, where the designer builds a realistic-enough-feeling environment that you can engage with the characters and elements in it? Story, I guess.
So... to summarize too many words for a simple counter-point: it's all a part of the whole, and inappropriate to say games are just a subset of interaction design.
But what you're describing is what I want. I want more immersion, I want the focus to be on the what the gamer experiences and giving them something meaningful to do.
But when you plug your brain into the NeuralCube4000 two decades from now, what are you going to get?
What I want: You're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest. Beyond the forest, you see the peak of a mountain escaping from the trees. You look to your left and see a farmhouse, and the farmer is starting his day at work. A fawn leaps across the field and birds take flight as the deer breaks the treeline.
At this point, you're going to want to do something. Chase the deer, climb the mountain, beat up the farmer and take his gold, whatever it is you want to do, the game should encourage and reward your action with feedback.
What the games industry is likely to give me:
You're dropped into a dark room. A disembodied voice speaks: "You are Reginald Brisbane, a young farmer from Bastogne in the 14th century. Your father perished at the hands of brigands when you were seven and you were sent to live on your uncle's farm, but you've never stopped nursing the need to avenge your father's death, and you're now ready to seek it." Then, you're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest...
Now, clearly both of these scenarios were written by me, but one was written to encourage interaction, and the other was written to tell a story.
Which one do you want games to be? I think I've made my desires clear.
In the same vein, a game should be told with the protagonist as the camera. You go to the farm house, no one is home. You go the forest, you see broken twigs and no animals: Somethings not right.
The upcoming game The Witness seems to embrace this sort of thinking. So did many rpgs (even vanilla WoW, to a certain degree. Much of the feedback from the game came through interaction with your surroundings[2] and you could always choose a different quest line).
[0] http://www.amazon.com/On-Directing-Film-David-Mamet/dp/01401... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory [2] The first time you see a glowing plant you realise there's something called herbalism etc.
Fret not! Of your two NC4000 possible futures there, we're already getting some fantastic examples of the first case.
I'll be contentious though in that you've stood up two straw men there. A "here's different world simulator, go explore" game will take you only so far without story and motivation toward some end. And the second option would get the same reviews a game like that would today -- formulaic, boring, pedantic.
One aspect at the expense of the other gives you a not motivating game, it's as direct as that. You need an interface that becomes transparent over time, and you need compelling storytelling to engage you in the lives of the characters and their plight.
Let's not oversell. That's a minor contribution. A much, much bigger reason machinima exists is that it's easier to harness an existing video game to display things than to animate the same things yourself.
the second problem is that there are only a few good writers of the correct style out there and they're all in television. (total hyperbole but the point should be evident)
the third problem is that video game makers refuse to accept their actual demographics and they keep aiming the story at 14 year old boys, who have awful taste, frankly.
edit: accidental word
In Halo: Reach, you win, and then you die. Halo 4 didn't have what I'd consider a happy ending either.
Kentucky Route Zero — Player choice affects the flavor of narrative but not the direction of the story, so that the story is linear but the experience is wildly different for everyone who plays it. Absolutely brilliant. Player choices that both do not matter and, at the same time, matter more than anything else.
Black Ops 2: I know, I know, and yeah the first one is probably in the top 5 worst games I've ever played, and this one's got a ton of issues, but what it gets right are a huge number of opportunities to fail forward—losses, big and small, that affect the story rather than showing a game over screen. More dumb action games should do this, it would make them suck less. It's also got the best local multiplayer I've seen in an FPS since Perfect Dark (though still not as good) but that's another topic.
Yeah, seriously. For hardcore StarCraft fans, the narratives they REALLY care about involve characters such as Greg Fields, Lim Yo Hwan, Lee Young Ho, and Lee Jae Dong; not Jim Raynor and Kerrigan.
This just makes me think you have no idea how traditional sports are managed at levels above "let's get some kids together to play in the field". If anything, large corporations have much more power in traditional sports.
The most egregious error might be the company not having a genuine designer in charge of the game, which to me seems like a very corporate-y lack of respect for game design. SC2 as a whole was way too conservative. And this is just on the design side, there was greed and short-sightedness all over the place.
The difference: Context
Starcraft multiplayer is a Game of Sport, where character and story are nonexistent and mechanics/"interaction" are all that matters in a game of chess completely removed from any context other than the tournament you are playing in.
Switch over to campaign mode and the context becomes the story line and plot. Sure, the game still relies on mechanics but you advance through different scenarios where you meet new characters, form alliances, explore new worlds, and even switch sides and play as a different race based on the plot of the story. Solo play is a Game of Immersion.
The Dark Souls franchise has a good balance of the two. You advance across the world (semi) linearly in a movie-like fashion, learning about the various NPCs and lore of the world. You are also regularly invaded by other players, and then the game becomes completely mechanics/interaction-based until one of you wins the duel.
You're basically arguing that video games are/should be more like a football game than a movie. They can span both forms of entertainment, and people will choose to engage with one or the other based on personal preferences.
In real life: do you derive pleasure from understanding and mastering the physical laws of the world, or from spending your time creating a mental narrative for yourself and building emotional relationships with those around you? Perhaps a combination of the two?
Likewise, Starcraft had a story, as did Command & Conquer. But one of those games is played to this day, both in its original incarnation and its sequel, on a massive scale that makes people question their definitions of the word "sport." I don't think this author would have cared to write filler about the story of Command & Conquer today.
Super Metroid anyone?
Thank you for this comment and the distinction between Sport and Immersion. I love the story mode and do not enjoy multiplayer matches.
It is like chess in that it is a game of strategy and board control, army movement, identifying what your opponent is planning and actively countering it, identifying weaknesses and exploiting them.
It is like poker in that is a game of imperfect information. Unlike chess I cannot ever see the entire board in starcraft, only the pieces I have scouted and as soon as my scout leaves that information is now outdated and assumptions have to be made about the actions of the opponent since I last had accurate information. Poker is similar in that you can never have 100% certainty of what your opponent may be holding, there is always that knowledge gap and great players can exploit it.
It is like first person shooters in that is it reaction based, the person who is able to more efficiently process the information they are receiving and make correct decisions about their course of action can execute faster and have an exponential return in terms of tipping the scales in their favor. This applies to many things such as base building, army building and micro mechanics during army engagement.
I've been a fan for so long precicely because these fine strategy details and forced decision making make an excellent filter between the good and the great, the great and the elite. Watching the elite play is comparable in my mind to watching chess grandmasters battle only in real time and not turn based where their perceived life is on the line and one slip up can cause instant death. It's that great adrenaline high, not the background story, that has kept me so engaged for so long.
I think the most damaging idea to ever enter gaming is the myth that it's primarily a 'narrative' medium. That is horribly reductionist and limiting. Games are about narrative generation, not narrative delivery. That's the beauty of it. Each starcraft match is a narrative in the same way a professional chess match is a narrative. I think this is why let's plays are so popular. You aren't watching to get the game's story, you are watching to get the specific narrative that is created by a certain person playing the game.
As a more personal counter example: There have been many games where I have hated the mechanics and continued playing for the story or art, and I know many people who are the same way.
I guess legacy of the void concludes a chapter of the company history. They are a e-sports company now. Their three latest games are gameplay driven with barely any story at all. Overwatch, HoTS and HS.
Diablo III got a pass on its writing only because of the RMAH that was taking all the ire. I am not sure why the writing declined so much beginning with warcraft III - probably the gameplay requirements prevented the (extremely talented) team of giving their best.
There is still great writing in Blizzard's games - but their last character I cared about was Thorim in Storm Peaks (pre model change - while he was a huge varkul). The writing in the ICC and Cataclysm main storyline was quite meh. It just felt like the writers have written some amazing storyline then got their leashes pulled and told to simplify and make absolutely understandable for a lot younger audience.
Blizzard's primary success since their early games (pre-WoW) is understanding and abusing the psychology of addiction and creating videogames around that concept. They make ultra-streamlined (sometimes to the point of being nearly featureless) and ultra-polished games which are usually super easy to approach but tough to master. The writing is generally cartoony/poor, but the moneymaking potential of each game is very large. They still produce some winners, if you can get over the above.
Except the music. The twangs of diablo 1, the perky tunes of Warcraft 2, the terran theme of sc1...!
As a dutiful orc in the army I only needed for the warchief to tell me where to hit hard.
Same with Diablo - the rudimentary story was simple and got the job just fine.
Also warcraft 2 had ships. Their lack from III was a crime.
With WCIII they tried to make an epic story - and it was just meh at best. Pitching so hard Orc Jes .. I mean Thrall created such damage that the whole Horde feeling is suffering to this day. I enlisted Horde to play Kharn and instead got Roboute Guilliman
Not just Blizzard, compare the Doom and Quake series, that lost this appeal
In contrast, Starcraft 2 has you play as established characters. From the promotional material[0]:
> You are Jim Raynor, a marshal-turned-rebel on a vigilante crusade to bring down the Dominion and its nefarious leader, Arcturus Mengsk. Haunted by betrayal and remorse, some believe you may have given up the fight.
This writing task is much harder --- they need you to have a matching experience with the character they are portraying and yet still force you into what their predetermined plot points are.
Consider the case of Raynor rescuing Kerrigan at the end of Starcraft 2, after swearing eternal vengeance against her in Brood War. If the player were another participant in the world it might be reasonable to watch Raynor evolve to that position. However, because I as the player explicitly am Raynor and his choices are mine, Blizzard needed to convince me that saving Kerrigan made sense --- which they did not even come close to doing.
A similar thing happened in the shift from Warcraft II to Warcraft III --- you went from being a character/commander on your own to explicitly controlling another hero.
Impressed that Blizzard still runs the IRC servers necessary for that part of Battle.net though, far more modern games have lost all of their multiplayer within a couple of years let alone two decades on. There's third party remakes of the server daemons but you need a hacked up client to use them, or at least you did last I looked a decade ago.
The game has been kinda dead for a while now, because it's so unaccessible to the general population. Games like Dota and League of Legends have taken the place of Starcraft 2 because it's pretty accessible to newbies yet offers a very high skill ceiling for those who want to play competitively. Starcraft 2 is simply too difficult of a game - you have to micromanage not only whole armies but also create new buildings and new units, looking for ways to boost your economy, and micromanaging research, all at the same time. It's simply too much to ask for a new player looking to break into the game.
Dota existed because players just wanted to play a single hero inside an RTS game, and not have to control an army. The army is automated, there is no research, and there is no building/economy to worry about. You simply control one unit. Then League came and made it even more accessible to new players. Starcraft just simply cannot compete with both of these games, it just takes too much effort to even be remotely good at the game.
Obviously you still need strong twitch/multitask skills to be really great at Dota, but you can go a surprising distance without them. I found that when picking up Dota I started to have fun and feel vaguely competent quicker - despite the fact that I didn't play for very long or get very good. I was aware that to progress far I'd need to pick up an enormous amount of information, but I could still feel good playing against other newbies.
With Starcraft (where I generally hovered between high gold and low platinum on EU), I always felt like I was doing really badly. I think this was probably due to the stress of the multitasking, at which I'm no natural :-).
Unfortunately, Blizzard's latest game, Overwatch, will not be coming to OS X. That question happened to be the first one asked by a member of the audience in the first Overwatch panel on Friday, November 6 at the BlizzCon 2015.
Maybe the overhead required for developing a new FPS engine (which, AFAIK, Blizzard's never done in-house before, even SC:Ghost was another developer) was too much for them to have OS X support in the initial timetable.
I'd say their devs familiar in that space are getting poached/spread to other teams and its not feasible to support OS X on team 4 at the moment.
The content of each game is so radically different that the comparison might not be appropriate.
It'd be interesting to know if it was economical for Valve to do these OS X ports. I guess they wanted to spread Steam usage to other OSes. I'm curious if it worked and if it was worth it.
Source runs rather well on OpenGL as well. The same can't be said about most other engines.
This sounds like its catering to the deathmatch/Counter-Strike crowd, rather than the people who actually want to play an RTS game. StarCraft 2 is incredibly streamlined compared to some of the pioneering RTSs that people my age and older cut their teeth on. Sweet Jesus, some of those early games didn't even have multiple unit selection...
I'll admit, I'm an oddity, because I have almost never played any games multiplayer - for me, it is all about the single-player experience, which boils down to story, and how fun the actual gameplay is. I don't really care about the meta-game, or how friendly the game is to e-sports, and really, the optimizations that make a game more attractive on those fronts make it less attractive to me.
also, having only one hero to control only gives you the illusion that Dota/LoL is easier. it takes just as much effort to be "remotely good" at Dota as SC2. this is why most people who play casually are trash. MOBAs have so many players who don't even understand enough about the game to recognize they are bad. at least in SC it's obvious.
I watched Life in the World Championships on the weekend do like 300APM constantly.
I'd honestly be going GG at about 1 minute in I think.
there are so many responses suggesting Starcraft cannot be played casually. it's no different than saying chess cannot be played casually- which is ridiculous.
Never mind trying to also throw in micro and optimum game strategies into the mix.
SC2 specifically has a few options for this. one really fun option is playing 2v2 vs CPU. or 1 v CPU on easy mode (it is essentially a passive CPU). the expansion is also introducing "archon mode" which is 2v2 but each team of 2 controls one base/army. "comp stomps" were prominent in SC1 because even though they were, by definition extremely easy, it's a fun social way to play. there are also "fastest" modes that completely eliminate the need for resource management by giving all players unlimited minerals.
my point is that while SC2 is daunting, there are a dozen options for players of all skill levels, even those who don't intend to play competitively.
maybe a better analogy than chess would be learning an instrument. it's difficult to become a good guitar player, but it takes an advanced lack of interest to not have fun learning.
It is an unbelievably stressful game and you have to not only master all 3 races abilities but understand numerous and ever changing strategies around them, have excellent macro skills and understand timings, etc. If you don't keep up aggressively with practice and all these other things you'll simply get slaughtered over and over. And although their rating system tries to pair you up it has become harder and harder to find casual players.
I think it's one of the best games ever made and I love watching the top players to this day even though I do not play any longer. But I wish they could come out with a scaled down version with fewer units, easier macro and certain rules in place to limit cheese play, etc. Have smart units or something where different strategies can be used throughout a game and various units will intelligently play a certain role of scouting, attacking, defending, etc.
The truth is the game is amazing because of its difficulty and also unplayable for most people for the same reason. I am not "gosu". I have a life and can't play for hours every day - or every day for that matter.
This is why I don't play. So much stress.
Performance-wise it shouldn't be an issue on today's hardware.
IIRC the mouse acceleration was sometimes problematic in OS X, you might need one of the many third-party utilities for OS X that let you disable or tweak it, e.g. USB Overdrive, or maybe Smoothmouse would work.
Even though other genres are a lot more popular than RTS is now, the packed venue makes me optimistic about the future of the Starcraft franchise.
Like here with WarCraft/StarCraft and Warhammer/Warhammer 40,000.
But I hear people always complaining about how Y is like X was back in the days and nothing new.
Is there any pattern behind this?
People even say "Goethe hasn't invented Faust"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk
Hardly 'scientific'... but how do you quantify copying.
The question, I ask myself, is: What is worth copying and what not?
I could imagine, that most of this success is simply luck. Everyone copies a different part of an already existing entity and those who hit the right one win.
I mean, even successful companies like Google and Apple throw stuff on the wall an see what keeps sticking and they got some of the most intelligent people around.
But one of the things that I've thought of is that copying with understanding greatly increases your 'success rate'. I think you can find that in the heart of the standard quote "Good artists copy; great artists steal". Great artists can copy with understanding and in doing so make it their own - thus steal. They now have a possession of sorts over whatever they took.
Blindly copying in the extreme case results in the literal cargo-cults. Copying with too much effort and you lose your advantage (the whole point of copying to is save effort).
Still doesn't give you a nice happy equation (or whatever) to figure out what to copy - but I think it lays down a rule of thumb that if you don't know why something works, copying it probably won't be great.