Comment by rsbrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsbrown | Hacker News Reader

This article brings to mind what I dislike about the modern game industry.

First off, what is a game? Let's consider two broad types of games: competitive games and puzzle games. Competitive games (like chess) feature more than one player and the outcome of the game is unknown (both in terms of the winner and the final game state). Puzzle games (generally speaking) don't have a strong competitive element and the final outcome is known (i.e., a lone player solves the puzzle).

I contend that first-person shooters (in single player mode) are nothing more than big puzzle games. This isn't bad per se, but the problem lies in how these games have evolved.

Rather than make the "puzzles" in FPS games more challenging and innovative (i.e., focus on gameplay), the major game studios have instead focused on increasing the audio-visuals and cinematic attributes of their products. As a result, gameplay has consistently been minimized in favor of eye candy.

No better example comes to mind than the recent smash hit, L.A. Noire. The extent to which the producers of this game clearly wish they were making movies comes off as obsequious. The tiny sliver of game mechanics they did include is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly without challenge.

These things are no longer "games", they're shitty movies.

While I agree with everything you've said, I really only apply these criticisms to the so-called "triple-A" developers out there. There are quite a few indie developers out there that are making engaging, thought-provoking puzzle games. They are typically short, have interesting gameplay mechanics, and inexpensive.

One great example is SpaceChem. It's a joyously frustrating game that revolves around "programming" reactors to create molecules from other molecules. The joy of finishing a level (particularly if you can beat the curve in terms of time/instructions) is tangible.

Don't despair too much at the state of the game industry, just don't look to the "leaders" for your interesting games.

Braid is another example of this.

Interactive Fiction as a genre is significantly less accessible than FPS. Not only due to the medium of text, which is inherently less flashy and instantly compelling than 3D environments, but due to the nature of the puzzles.

Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.

For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy, thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS comes in.

I feel that both forms are missing the mark for my taste. Essentially, they represent two of the classic failures in crafting a good ("pencil and paper") role-playing game: This game is all fighting and This game is all puzzles. The really fun games are the ones that have a cool environment (like text adventures) and let you make interesting choices.

I know there have been some efforts to do that sort of thing with a text-adventure-y environment (Storytron?) but don't know of anyone who has really gotten it right yet.

the really annoying bit was when you had figured out what to do, but had to play "guess the verb". (i remember the otherwise very fun "unkuulian unventure" having a few frustrating examples, e.g.). and later, when graphical adventures got popular, that was supplemented by "hunt the pixel".

While many generic games may have been reduced to, 'shitty movies', I think developers have evolved gaming into a medium that would have been hard to imagine twenty years ago. Games like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect 2 are brilliantly designed hybrids of action, adventure, startegy, puzzle and rpg elements all wrapped in gorgeous, well written and immersive worlds built to evolve around a player's individual play style.

Even the base concept of challenge is not a given in modern gaming with titles like Little Big Planet where creating games is a major focus, or Kinectimals in which atmosphere and light hearted play trump all (actually, that second title could use even less, 'forced' challenge, IMO).

I applaud modern developers for constantly pushing the limits of what it means to 'experience' a game, rather than just play one as we have in the past.

That said, Zork totally rules! I've always thought there was room for Interactive Fiction in the modern world, it's just a matter of how/when (I hope!).

> I've always thought there was room for Interactive Fiction in the modern world, it's just a matter of how/when (I hope!).

There is room for interactive fiction. The community of interactive fiction writers didn't grow quite as quick as the community of professional and hobbyist video game developers, but they're among us. You may have heard of Andrew Plotkin and his runaway Kickstarter deal: http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/15/technology/kickstart_plotkin.... If you haven't played his games, do yourself a favor and take a look, there's a javascript interpreter, so you don't even need to download anything: http://eblong.com/zarf/if.html. Dreamhold is the easiest to get into; Shade and Dual Transform are both single-room games, but each provides wonderfully peculiar game mechanics.

If you want go get a perspective on the present state of interactive fiction, http://brasslantern.org/ is a hub of sorts, you can find game files and reviews there. There are annual competitions. If you use iOS, there's a port of Frotz interpreter.

Calling all non-competitive games "puzzle games" is too reductionist. For a long time now - as far back as the SNES and perhaps even NES era - games have been about more than just the raw gameplay at their core. They are often just as much about having an interactive experience.

There are so many FPSes that don't match the "bad puzzle" description at all... Portal being one of the very good ones, very close to puzzle type games. Multiplayer shooters which are a good mix of competitive and puzzle (strategy-wise) games - just look at how many shooters and re-releases of the older versions are still very popular: quake 1, 3, 4, rtcw-et, tf. They don't really go for nice video effects. Actually many players happily sacrifice them for higher framerate / responsiveness (or will even tweak the display parameters to get mostly high-contrast, almost flat polygons - like quake3's filtering + overbright). And you can still find servers full of people playing them.

It seems that the shitty movies are pretty much only the single-player ones.

1911: "Edison's Frankenstein proves the simple fact that these things aren't 'film', they're shitty books."

I think at their best, video games do better than "shitty movies". If someone made a list of "Top 10 Moments" from film & video games, I'm betting Aeris' death at the hands of Sepiroth makes that list.

Building games around movie-like cutscenes is like filming a stage production of a play and calling it a movie. There were plenty of people who did essentially that in the early days of movies, because of the higher prestige of stage drama and their desire to produce "art", but that wasn't how film developed into an art form. If games want to fulfill their potential as art, they have to evolve toward their strengths instead of being just a shitty way of presenting mediocre renditions of an existing art form.

I'm not GP, but Aeris's death was a big deal because it happened after the player had invested several hours into playing her (and probably given her some nice items). This is one of the strengths of the form you're talking about.

P.S.

Since I've heard about Aeris being killed by Sepiroth before, I went ahead and watched it on YouTube, and I wasn't impressed. It must have been because I didn't play the game. If that scene affected you at all (if it looked like anything but cheesy crap animated with expressionless plastic dolls) it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way. You can watch a clip of "La Strada" or "Midnight Cowboy" or "Unforgiven" or "Casablanca" out of context and at least get a sense of the emotional dynamics of the characters. That's the strength of movies. The strength of games is the immersion and feeling of personal involvement with the characters, personal involvement driven by your own actions, choices, and sacrifices. I may have felt like Ratso Rizzo was my friend, but I never picked up a john to get money for a bus ticket for us to leave town together. I may have shared Rick Blaine's feelings as he put Victor and Ilsa on the plane to Lisbon, but I didn't decide to do that. It just happened to me.

Games will always be second-rate next to movies when it comes to presenting scripted drama, but they don't have to feel that way. Aeris and Sepiroth is proof of that, I guess. Gameplay allows games to affect us in ways that movies can't and enables different and stronger emotional contexts for experiencing games as art. The art of games is in the gameplay. Detaching from gameplay is just a crutch, like filming a stage production, copying another art form because we don't understand the new one well enough yet.

Aeris' death is a bad example to show off the power of games due to the fact that most of the emotion in the scene comes from the players investment in the character. It's shocking and emotional because of the context, and you're right that it doesn't hold up without it. when FFVII was released, the state of graphics technology made expressing emotion in videogame characters solely through visuals difficult, at least for that 3D style. For some contrast, take a look at the intro of FFX. (I'm personally nowhere as fond of that as VII, but that's another debate) You have no idea who this guy his, who these people and this giant cat man are, but you can get the sense of emotion in that scene without context because the visuals were much, much better. Shiny graphics and audio may not matter if there's no story to hold them up, but they are useful to get a point across.

The example I've always use for how gameplay can make a scene more emotional is the end of your first battle in Shadow of the Colossus. You know your main character has been tasked to slay these massive creatures to bring back his dead love, but there's little information about them. It just lumbers slowly into view when you confront it, and what follows next is one of the most tense battles I've played in a videogame. You're clearly outmatched, a young man who barely knows how to swing a sword against this massive moving monolith, but you somehow manage to succeed. Just as you're ready to cheer out in victory as it falls, the game takes a shift. Instead of the triumphant battle theme, the music turns soft and sad, and you watch your foe slowly tumble down. Instead of glory, you feel regret, and your victory now seems like a tragedy.

Seeing that in film would be emotional, but it's not some character doing it on a screen. You did this, and you killed this strange and magnificent creature. Was it worth it? There's a similar example in the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3, but I'd rather not spoil the amazing ending of that game (which would generally works as well in film, except that one particular moment).

"It just happened to me."

No, you have years of experience in a medium that prepared you to interpret that event a certain way.

"it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way."

That's like saying, "Yeah, I jumped into the Iliad at the funeral games for Patroclus, and I just don't get it: it didn't have an impact at all." Duh. The literary experience leading up to that event leads to a connection to the characters that has little weight if you skip it. Saying the same thing applies to video games isn't an argument as to why video games can't be expressive. It means they can, and you have to invest in them to have that experience, much like reading a book.

And the best games aren't "built around" movie-like cutscenes. But suppose they were, and that those scenes were evocative. How, exactly, is that a bad thing? It's not, unless you've a priori decided it is.

That's like saying, "Yeah, I jumped into the Iliad at the funeral games for Patroclus, and I just don't get it: it didn't have an impact at all." Duh.

Actually, my point was just the opposite. You can appreciate a passage from the Iliad or a scene from a movie without context. Not fully, but there's something there.

I think the analogy falls apart because with both books and movies, you just watch or read them. Since games are interactive, watching a cutscene without any of the prior interaction is, I think, substantially different from reading a passage in a book without having read prior passages.

There's as much 'there' in, say, the 'never let go' of "Titanic" as there is in FFVII. You being obstinate does not an argument make.

Absolutely true, I think destroying the "companion cube" in Portal is a much better example of what video games can do. Before you finish the level, you have to destroy the cube. You can't get through the game with the illusion that you would have done something differently than the protagonist, because you choose to destroy the cube. It's a completely different experience than you can get from a movie.

That crushed me until I discovered the secret where you could go back in time and bring her back to life.

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