I actually planned this entry before I even started this blog, and in fact I partially arranged my schedule explicitly so I would have the "My Ideas" section on Fridays for said entry. Why? Well, today's entry is about one of my oldest ongoing characters. And today is, well, her birthday.
That's right, I do occasionally figure out the birthdays for my characters. And it's a good thing that I started the blog this year, or I won't be able to use this schtick until 2012.
I'm actually breaking one of my rules a bit here. The character in question definitely surpasses the "100 pages" rule I elaborated on in my first entry. Over the 16 or so years since I made this character, I never wrote up a design document about a video game involving her. I have, however, planned one television series, came up with a quick episode guide for the first few seasons, elaborated on the years of her life after the television series (which I might remind you does not yet exist) ends, including several adventures taking up dozens of pages. I then started an episode guide for a second television series, and this time I included not only an episode guide but also a detailed description of the episodes themselves. All 100 of them. In the meantime, I wrote several novels in the 50-60K word range, including one starring her, and at least two that directly or indirectly reference her.
So I passed up the "investment" level by 500 pages or so. But I'll get around it by not giving any details. Frankly, she's too important for me to ignore.
The character's name, at least, I think I can give out. She's named Dot Fox because, well, she's a fox. That is, she's a literal fox, a talking cartoon fox. I originally made the character as a character for the role-playing game called Toon, where you roleplay a cartoon character. At the time, she wasn't much more than an experiment in the rules. While the game is all about having fun and enjoying the triumph of defeat and the agony of victory, it's still far too easy to make a character with a decent fight skill and just beat your way to totally pointless victory. I wanted to make a character with an awful fighting skill but a number of other, far more creative skills to make up for it.
Dot was the result. After noticing that the rules for disarming traps also let you built things, I wanted to play a mad scientist. So Dot became a super-genius because of a rules glitch. She became a ten year old girl because anachronisms are inherently funny. And she became a talking fox because it was a game called Toon. How boring is playing a human in that situation?
Dot's original gimmick, using elaborate, Rube-Goldberg style traps, lasted about halfway through the first adventure. At that point, I got annoyed with the adventure at hand (I usually run these things for a reason,) said "Screw it," and had Dot transform all of her equipment into one giant war machine of death. This became Dot's main modus operandi from hereon. Of course, this is Toon, where failure was both an option and highly encouraged, and things tended to go very wrong when they did. Thus, her machinery often went wrong, attacked the wrong things, fell apart in an instant, or exploded. This also became part of Dot's main modus operandi.
But her career as a Toon character was short, because I usually was stuck running those things instead, and my friends all lost interest eventually anyway. But as you might have noticed, I hate giving up on a character, and Dot quickly immigrated, along with some of my other characters from the game. Initially, she was supposed to be a sidekick to another character, an even younger child who just happened to be a robotic instrument of destruction himself. This relationship persisted as I created an actual back story for Dot, along with an entire setting to put her and her friends into.
It's here that the description must get vaguer, so I'll let up on the details. Here is a basic summary of the original television show, should it ever exist, and Dot's back story. Dot is still a ten year old talking fox, a super-genius, and a brilliant inventor with an unfortunate tendency to make dangerous experiments. She lived on a planet entirely inhabited by other talking animals and faerie creatures, though most of them were more harmless and traditional. Dot's actions eventually caused her to get banished from her home planet, and after months of wandering her universe, she ended up getting a job on a planet of robots, where she canonically met her sidekick. Yes, I switched that around by this point. Most of the story involved her getting used to a new place to live, a surrogate family, and actual school. It was a classic story of alienation in a school environment, plus robots and mad scientists.
It was around here that Dot started to connect to me as more than a character. Part of it was that I HATED elementary school. I went to this well at least one more time in my designs, but that examples even more in the investment category, so we'll ignore it for now. Anyway, eventually, I moved Dot out of school, and soon out of that environment entirely. I'm not sure why I did so, save for my general desire to advance the plots of my stories instead of getting settled into an unending rut. I put Dot aside for a while, figuring that I would come back to her in a few years.
But she wouldn't go away.
I made a new plot about her, a few years older and in a crisis of identity. That ended without any satisfaction for me or her. So I made another story. This lasted for years, and at this point my plans to age the characters actually put the character at the age of eighteen, and fairly consistently in a human form for reasons I won't elaborate on now. So I thought it would be amusing to put her in college. Then I put her aside again, content to summarize her college adventures again.
Four years later, I finished writing 100 episodes about her college adventures. Mercifully, after that was resolved, I avoided the itch to write another ongoing story about her, but it has only been about two years since I finished them. And Dot's life has continued in my mind, it just hasn't gotten that extensive. What I know about this character disturbs even me. I know about her allergies, her paranoias, her goals, and her paranoias about her goals. But I'm still learning about her. I never even had to write in her voice until about a year ago, for example.
In short, Dot's become a permanent fixture in my brain. I can use her personality to bounce ideas off of. I can hear her criticizing me or offering suggestions when I make a mistake. In short, I can sum up her position in one word: Muse.
Or possibly early onset dissociative identity disorder. It's probably the former, though.
It still boggles me that the character reached this point; I'm still not entirely certain why it's her. She's a role model in many ways, of course. She's incredibly smart, unbelievably talented, cleverly sarcastic, all the things I'd love to be. But she's also like me in some of the less admirable ways. I was briefly worried she was becoming a Mary Sue character, in fact, when I realized no Mary Sue is this neurotic. She's the opposite of me in terms of ambition. I know exactly what I want out of life; I just haven't figured out how to get it. She, on the other hand, is a ball of chaos, constantly questioning her identity. She's ideal in a crisis, but whenever things quiet down, she panics. Notice that pattern even in her back story. I think the personalities work well together; she gives me another viewpoint for my weaknesses, and she provides the motivation for my own storytelling, which obviously helps her, since she can't "live" without them. It's a bizarre mentality, but it's helped more than it hurt, I think.
Plus, I always wanted to write a pilot or a screenplay, just in case the video game thing didn't work. I've got about two decades worth of ideas now. I'd rather work with video games, but I can't stagnate. After all, Dot was willing to traverse universes to find herself, and if I can't be inspired by my muse, who can I be inspired by.
Happy birthday, Dot. Many happy returns, especially since otherwise would technically mean I was dead.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Rantings: The Big One - Are Games Art?
In an official "big week" for this blog, you can't get much bigger than this one. The question has confounded us for decades. It was a deciding factor for court trials. The idea is often commonly accepted, and yet the most famous critic in the country insists that they're not art. Even some of the designers disagree that their products, often masterpieces, are not art. And gamers in general point out that a toilet or a cross in a jar of piss apparently count as art, so Shadow of the Colossus damn well better count. And yet the debate stands.
But here's my two cents on the subject. Are games art?
Yes.
That was easy. Thanks everyone! Good night!
What, I said it was only going to be two cents worth! But then, the entire blog is free, so I guess I have room to expand.
Well, the obvious starting point is defining art itself. Otherwise, this entire debate is as pointless as asking if games are threepzugga.
We'll start with an unorthodox source. Scott McCloud, the writer of Understanding Comics, defined art in that book as any human (or presumably other sentient, I must add,) activity which doesn't grow out of either our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction. In that definition, of course games are art. Most people play them for fun, leisure, entertainment, emotional growth, etc. There are exceptions, sure. Some people play games professionally, and thus get paid, and thus can buy food and shelter, and thus survive. Some people even meet significant others through games. But even in those cases, it's often not the reason to game, just a lucky side effect.
Of course, by this definition, plenty of things are art. Games are art of every sort; poker, chess, basketball. etc. Two people arm-wrestling are artists, at least unless you can define it as asserting tribal dominance. This example does work, but most people reject it inherently because it makes no difference between these examples and great works of literature, cinema, etc. Those just aren't for fun. Those have MEANING!
Okay, fair enough. I probably wouldn't use the above example either, and for the same reason. So, let's move on to more professional sources. The first and least redundant definition at dictionary.com is "The quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. " Wikipedia, meanwhile, says the most common usages denotes "Skill used to produce an aesthetic result." Wikipedia also references Brittanica online, which says that art is, "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others."
What? This is a blog. That's as professional as this gets. I'm not writing a dissertation here.
Nonetheless, we see two elements that stand out. One is that art requires skill, imagination, or at least expression and production. In other words, art requires a conscious effort. Beauty may be found in nature, but art doesn't simply grow there. On the other hand, capturing the beauty of nature does take effort and creativity. I'd have no trouble saying a painting or a photograph of a tree is art, even if the tree alone is not.
The second part is trickier. By the above definitions, it's anything that produces aesthetic results, experiences, etc. That makes things trickier. What is aesthetic in this case? Simply that which is appealing? Then how can we justify intentionally banal or horrific art?
At this point, I'm going to start creating what I consider a more working definition of art in this context. Art is, in the Joseph Barder version, "Anything which requires intent and creativity to generate and which produces an intellectual or emotional response." Thus, aesthetic is anything that makes you think or that makes you feel. That covers our usual "Piss Christ/Saw/Manhunt" examples.
But it then falls into the same problems as the first definition I used. Of course sports make us feel and think; we get obsessed with statistics of the game, we feel excitement as we play or we watch our home team play, we feel comradery with the team and its fans, etc.
Let me modify my definition, then. Art is "Anything which requires intent and creativity to generate and which produces an intellectual or emotional response independent of the physical activity of the product." For example, a police report is not art. The physical activities of the product are the analyzing of the written symbols and the processing of the facts this analysis produces, so even if the story is a horrific one with strong emotional responses, it's not art. A story imagining how the police officer felt, though, is art.
When applied to games, this makes things much clearer. The activity of a basketball game, for example, is mostly not art. The excitement of playing or watching the game, the three of watching your team come out ahead or the agony of their failure, is a direct result of the physical activity of the performers. That is not art, and most actions in the game come not from artists. The three point shot, while exciting, is exciting because it is a calculated risk to get a greater tactical advantage.
The slam dunk, on the other hand...
As that last example suggests, I do think that there is plenty of art to be found in a sport. The slam dunk has no advantage in terms of the game, but it is a staple of the game because of its demonstration of skill and confidence. It can be unique. It is, for all intents and purposes, performance art. The same is true of touchdown dances, the routines of cheerleaders, the antics of mascots, and even the little graphics many stadiums play during games. Using this definition for video games, not all of them are art. Pong is not art; there are no elements that don't come from the gameplay. But art is incredibly easy to find in games. Take a blocky enemy, toss a vague facsimile of a swastika on it, and you're not just killing designated opponents, you're saving the world from Nazis! The enemies of Doom aren't scary because of their tactical advantages; they're scary because their horrific demons.
Art is everywhere in games, and thus games are art. At the very minimum, they're identical to movies and television; just another example of the narrative form of art, a model that goes back to ancient cave paintings and verbal story-telling. But video games are more than that, and they offer their own unique method of experience art, just like every other medium has. But the advantages of video games as an art form is a discussion for another night, and it will be a self-righteous one on my part, I'm afraid. Because no matter what Ebert's bizarre take on art say, video games are art and the video game industry will produce art for as long as it exists, save for the one thing that stands in its way...the video game industry.
But more on that later. Thanks everyone! Good night!
But here's my two cents on the subject. Are games art?
Yes.
That was easy. Thanks everyone! Good night!
What, I said it was only going to be two cents worth! But then, the entire blog is free, so I guess I have room to expand.
Well, the obvious starting point is defining art itself. Otherwise, this entire debate is as pointless as asking if games are threepzugga.
We'll start with an unorthodox source. Scott McCloud, the writer of Understanding Comics, defined art in that book as any human (or presumably other sentient, I must add,) activity which doesn't grow out of either our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction. In that definition, of course games are art. Most people play them for fun, leisure, entertainment, emotional growth, etc. There are exceptions, sure. Some people play games professionally, and thus get paid, and thus can buy food and shelter, and thus survive. Some people even meet significant others through games. But even in those cases, it's often not the reason to game, just a lucky side effect.
Of course, by this definition, plenty of things are art. Games are art of every sort; poker, chess, basketball. etc. Two people arm-wrestling are artists, at least unless you can define it as asserting tribal dominance. This example does work, but most people reject it inherently because it makes no difference between these examples and great works of literature, cinema, etc. Those just aren't for fun. Those have MEANING!
Okay, fair enough. I probably wouldn't use the above example either, and for the same reason. So, let's move on to more professional sources. The first and least redundant definition at dictionary.com is "The quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. " Wikipedia, meanwhile, says the most common usages denotes "Skill used to produce an aesthetic result." Wikipedia also references Brittanica online, which says that art is, "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others."
What? This is a blog. That's as professional as this gets. I'm not writing a dissertation here.
Nonetheless, we see two elements that stand out. One is that art requires skill, imagination, or at least expression and production. In other words, art requires a conscious effort. Beauty may be found in nature, but art doesn't simply grow there. On the other hand, capturing the beauty of nature does take effort and creativity. I'd have no trouble saying a painting or a photograph of a tree is art, even if the tree alone is not.
The second part is trickier. By the above definitions, it's anything that produces aesthetic results, experiences, etc. That makes things trickier. What is aesthetic in this case? Simply that which is appealing? Then how can we justify intentionally banal or horrific art?
At this point, I'm going to start creating what I consider a more working definition of art in this context. Art is, in the Joseph Barder version, "Anything which requires intent and creativity to generate and which produces an intellectual or emotional response." Thus, aesthetic is anything that makes you think or that makes you feel. That covers our usual "Piss Christ/Saw/Manhunt" examples.
But it then falls into the same problems as the first definition I used. Of course sports make us feel and think; we get obsessed with statistics of the game, we feel excitement as we play or we watch our home team play, we feel comradery with the team and its fans, etc.
Let me modify my definition, then. Art is "Anything which requires intent and creativity to generate and which produces an intellectual or emotional response independent of the physical activity of the product." For example, a police report is not art. The physical activities of the product are the analyzing of the written symbols and the processing of the facts this analysis produces, so even if the story is a horrific one with strong emotional responses, it's not art. A story imagining how the police officer felt, though, is art.
When applied to games, this makes things much clearer. The activity of a basketball game, for example, is mostly not art. The excitement of playing or watching the game, the three of watching your team come out ahead or the agony of their failure, is a direct result of the physical activity of the performers. That is not art, and most actions in the game come not from artists. The three point shot, while exciting, is exciting because it is a calculated risk to get a greater tactical advantage.
The slam dunk, on the other hand...
As that last example suggests, I do think that there is plenty of art to be found in a sport. The slam dunk has no advantage in terms of the game, but it is a staple of the game because of its demonstration of skill and confidence. It can be unique. It is, for all intents and purposes, performance art. The same is true of touchdown dances, the routines of cheerleaders, the antics of mascots, and even the little graphics many stadiums play during games. Using this definition for video games, not all of them are art. Pong is not art; there are no elements that don't come from the gameplay. But art is incredibly easy to find in games. Take a blocky enemy, toss a vague facsimile of a swastika on it, and you're not just killing designated opponents, you're saving the world from Nazis! The enemies of Doom aren't scary because of their tactical advantages; they're scary because their horrific demons.
Art is everywhere in games, and thus games are art. At the very minimum, they're identical to movies and television; just another example of the narrative form of art, a model that goes back to ancient cave paintings and verbal story-telling. But video games are more than that, and they offer their own unique method of experience art, just like every other medium has. But the advantages of video games as an art form is a discussion for another night, and it will be a self-righteous one on my part, I'm afraid. Because no matter what Ebert's bizarre take on art say, video games are art and the video game industry will produce art for as long as it exists, save for the one thing that stands in its way...the video game industry.
But more on that later. Thanks everyone! Good night!
Monday, February 25, 2008
My Life: One of the Few Things I'm Getting Right
I was with a girl in my room the other day. We were discussing food, among other things. She then said one of the most wonderful things I ever heard, "I have a delicious apple!"
To clarify, "my room" was my old room in my parents' house, the girl in question is my niece, and she is two. My heart melted.
I know a lot of things are wrong with my life. I'm looking for a better job, I suddenly need a new roommate, the whole "Moon language, love, die alone and unloved, blah blah blah" stuff. But I am happy with the fact that despite it all, or perhaps because of it all, I still am close with my family, or at least my immediate family. I notice that a lot of my friends and women I know (in the sense that they're the ones I actually want to date, not cute misdirections,) have less luck, being constantly frustrated by one or more parents or other family members, so I know I have it relatively lucky.
Not that it's always easy. I try to make sure I keep in touch with them, and I'm close enough to visit them regularly. Usually once a week, on Sundays more often than any other day, I drive the 28 or so miles to the parents home in Darien, or perhaps I visit my brother or we collectively go out to eat. Unless some of us are extremely busy or sick, there are no exceptions. Sometimes, the entire experience gets on my nerves, especially on days when they feel compelled to spend three hours at a restaurant or when it otherwise takes them forever to start a plan. I'm too A type and methodical, and I get impatient easily. But it is worth the occasional day like that.
Among my family, though, the one that impresses me the most is my brother, because he at least made something work right. Now, I love my family, but we're not the most successful or lucky people. We all have jobs we dislike or are unsatisfied with, despite collectively being smart people. And socially, we tend to be introverts or socially awkward. Some of us, like my mom, fake it better than most, and she's managed to become pretty popular, but it's not something that is instinctive or that comes naturally to us. Despite all that, my brother at least is on the right track to success in life, if not vast financial riches. Over the last few years, he got married, had a child, got a decent starter house, and is otherwise on the fast track to adulthood. Not bad for someone 26 years old. And he may be sick of the long hours of his job, but at least it’s in a field that he loves. He can stand to improve there, but at least he has that.
I'll never forget when I learned about my brother having a child. I was visiting the family, and we decided (for reasons I would later figure out,) to go out to eat instead of the normal meal at home. I was tired and annoyed that day, as I often am, though more the former than usual. I had three soda refills before the talk even turned to the...subject at hand.
I then yelled out "Holy Crap!" in a crowded restaurant.
I was wide awake after that, it should be noted. Despite my surprise, I was happy for both of them. My brother, Mike, and his wife Rose made an excellent couple. The always seemed to get along, they were happy together, and it was remarkable how quickly she became part of the family even before they got married. I was best man at the wedding, which save for the record heat and broken air conditioner at the reception went without a hitch.
And their niece, Violet, is a wonder. I saw he grow up a week at a time, watching her learn how to crawl, walk, and talk. She is incredibly smart for her age and usually very friendly. We all hope she'll get over any social awkwardness we have built in. For now, though, it's just wonderful seeing her every week, watching her act so excited and curious at the world.
I don't agree with every decision my parents made when we were kids, but they remain concerned, sacrificing people, and I want them to know that I love them, and my brother, sister in law, and niece very much. I think they're one of the few things keeping me from just moving to, say, California and starting over with the first job in the industry I could find. I may not be happy with all of my life, but starting over with nothing, including family, would be unbearable.
To clarify, "my room" was my old room in my parents' house, the girl in question is my niece, and she is two. My heart melted.
I know a lot of things are wrong with my life. I'm looking for a better job, I suddenly need a new roommate, the whole "Moon language, love, die alone and unloved, blah blah blah" stuff. But I am happy with the fact that despite it all, or perhaps because of it all, I still am close with my family, or at least my immediate family. I notice that a lot of my friends and women I know (in the sense that they're the ones I actually want to date, not cute misdirections,) have less luck, being constantly frustrated by one or more parents or other family members, so I know I have it relatively lucky.
Not that it's always easy. I try to make sure I keep in touch with them, and I'm close enough to visit them regularly. Usually once a week, on Sundays more often than any other day, I drive the 28 or so miles to the parents home in Darien, or perhaps I visit my brother or we collectively go out to eat. Unless some of us are extremely busy or sick, there are no exceptions. Sometimes, the entire experience gets on my nerves, especially on days when they feel compelled to spend three hours at a restaurant or when it otherwise takes them forever to start a plan. I'm too A type and methodical, and I get impatient easily. But it is worth the occasional day like that.
Among my family, though, the one that impresses me the most is my brother, because he at least made something work right. Now, I love my family, but we're not the most successful or lucky people. We all have jobs we dislike or are unsatisfied with, despite collectively being smart people. And socially, we tend to be introverts or socially awkward. Some of us, like my mom, fake it better than most, and she's managed to become pretty popular, but it's not something that is instinctive or that comes naturally to us. Despite all that, my brother at least is on the right track to success in life, if not vast financial riches. Over the last few years, he got married, had a child, got a decent starter house, and is otherwise on the fast track to adulthood. Not bad for someone 26 years old. And he may be sick of the long hours of his job, but at least it’s in a field that he loves. He can stand to improve there, but at least he has that.
I'll never forget when I learned about my brother having a child. I was visiting the family, and we decided (for reasons I would later figure out,) to go out to eat instead of the normal meal at home. I was tired and annoyed that day, as I often am, though more the former than usual. I had three soda refills before the talk even turned to the...subject at hand.
I then yelled out "Holy Crap!" in a crowded restaurant.
I was wide awake after that, it should be noted. Despite my surprise, I was happy for both of them. My brother, Mike, and his wife Rose made an excellent couple. The always seemed to get along, they were happy together, and it was remarkable how quickly she became part of the family even before they got married. I was best man at the wedding, which save for the record heat and broken air conditioner at the reception went without a hitch.
And their niece, Violet, is a wonder. I saw he grow up a week at a time, watching her learn how to crawl, walk, and talk. She is incredibly smart for her age and usually very friendly. We all hope she'll get over any social awkwardness we have built in. For now, though, it's just wonderful seeing her every week, watching her act so excited and curious at the world.
I don't agree with every decision my parents made when we were kids, but they remain concerned, sacrificing people, and I want them to know that I love them, and my brother, sister in law, and niece very much. I think they're one of the few things keeping me from just moving to, say, California and starting over with the first job in the industry I could find. I may not be happy with all of my life, but starting over with nothing, including family, would be unbearable.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Reviews: This Isn't Good Bye, Guitar Hero 3, Technically
In general, I want to wait for a game or other source of review to be finished before I review. Technically, this is true for today's subjecgt. I did beat every single song on easy, and I did beat medium. I did not, however, beat all of the songs, and the infamous "bonus song" looks impossible even at this difficulty. As for hard and the expert levels, I'll have to pretend that fifth orange button is just a technical mistake for now.
When I got this game at Christmas, I didn't know how far I would go with it. I'm not usually the type to play through the same game multiple times just to clear all the difficulties, but it's not a very long game if you just play all the songs, either. My decision to more or less stop playing at this point, at least for now, came from a few things. For starters, it came from my desire to focus on Persona 3, a huge RPG I'll likely have to take over 100 hours to beat, so I can finish it before Smash Brothers Brawl comes out in about two weeks. But it also is because of which kinds of fun Guitar Hero 3 offers, and which ones I focus on.
Contrary to anything Raph Koster says, there are many kinds of fun that videogames offer. The first is the task of overcoming the challenges of the game, ranging from physical accomplishments to more logical puzzles. The Guitar Heroes are ultimately about these challenges. Winning the game requires increasingly precise and rapid finger motions, mental recognition spill, and incredible speed. Fun type #2 is fantasy fulfillment. Most videogames offer this by letting one become a superhero and save the world, or at least defeat evil. Guitar Hero, though, is no different, even if the role played is not inherently heroic and it exists in the real world. Nonetheless, the idea of being a rock star is incredibly appealing; one of the most glamrous and sought after jobs on the planet. There's the money, the ability to travel the world, the almost obligatory hedonism, but even without that point, there's the ability to be an artist, inspiring millions with your unmatched physical abilities. Plus, guitars are cool; we're not playing Pianist Hero for a reason.
Fun type #3 is the sense of wonder and exploration; seeing things you've never seen, hearing things you've never heard. You see a lot of this appeal in games like World of Warcraft, where the world is very large and full of strange, wondrous things to find. Type #4 is the same type of fun we get from watching an engrossing movie or television show; the fun of interesting characters, engrossing plots, and twists both horrifying and hilarious. For #5, there's the social aspect of games, and friends are made or simply enjoy each other's time in the game. Finally, fun type #6 is the customizable aspect, letting people make their own stories, or at least their own characters.
This is a scattered list, and it would make a good Rant blog at some point, but really I just needed to get some ideas out there for Guitar Hero to be evaluated on. How does it match up? Well, the customization options are pretty limited. You can pick your own characters and their costumes, but that's it, and options in that regard are limited. Social fun can be done online, but I haven't had much of a chance to figure that out in time. That will be part of the elements I will look into, but not yet. Otherwise, it requires a friend with his/her own fake guitar and the same time and interests to play the game as I do, which I do not have. Sense of wonder is not the focus, but it is not nonexistent. Most of the songs in this games are ones I never heard before or just never thought much about, and as a result there's a good dozen new bands I want to look into from the game, and a few new favorite songs. Of course, most of that sense of wonder ended as soon as I beat easy.
Plot and character are practically nonexistent in Guitar Hero 3, save for a few brief, barely animated cut scenes between areas, so that's out. That just leaves Guitar Hero 3's biggest strengths, the sense of escapism and fantasy and the excitement of puzzle solving. The former was still there, but the harder the game gets, the less you can enjoy that element. You go from rocking out to applause and 5-star reviews to struggling to even finish the songs while the music is often replaced by long strings of silence and the "you screwed up" plinking noise. That doesn't make me feel like a rock star, that makes me feel like the incompetent guitar player without a single iota of training that I actually am. And that leaves just the puzzle solving fun. The problem there is that while there are mental elements to the puzzles, most of it is simply getting your fingers to react fast enough to finish the song. This is just not a fun type that I get into. I did enough data entry for my jobs to say that I can't enjoy that element when taken by itself.
So, that's my justification for letting the game go for now. Of the six types of fun, three never were part of the game for me, two were really strong elements that faded as I finished medium, and one only partially appeals to me. Even so, .5 out of 6 is enough for me to return to the game. The thrill of a challenge is always a part of that desire to learn and win. And that social element is another thing to explore, when the time is right.
That's a lot of words about why I'm not playing a game, and not enough about what I thought about the game in the first place. Well, I liked it enough to play through it twice in a row. The sense of wonder of the music, the sheer thrill of being a rock star, the white knuckle, gripping, breathless emotion you get as you struggle to finish a tough song; these things are enough for me to recommend this game to nearly everyone. I never tried the earlier ones, at least not for more than a few minutes at a party, but I'm very glad I played this one. After all, one of the appeals of video games is to try new things, and I have saved the world as a superhero oh so many times. This, this was different. And so I'll be returning to the game, and happily so.
But it will probably be in smaller doses. If you stand up while you play, and you damn well should, it starts to hurt like hell after a while.
When I got this game at Christmas, I didn't know how far I would go with it. I'm not usually the type to play through the same game multiple times just to clear all the difficulties, but it's not a very long game if you just play all the songs, either. My decision to more or less stop playing at this point, at least for now, came from a few things. For starters, it came from my desire to focus on Persona 3, a huge RPG I'll likely have to take over 100 hours to beat, so I can finish it before Smash Brothers Brawl comes out in about two weeks. But it also is because of which kinds of fun Guitar Hero 3 offers, and which ones I focus on.
Contrary to anything Raph Koster says, there are many kinds of fun that videogames offer. The first is the task of overcoming the challenges of the game, ranging from physical accomplishments to more logical puzzles. The Guitar Heroes are ultimately about these challenges. Winning the game requires increasingly precise and rapid finger motions, mental recognition spill, and incredible speed. Fun type #2 is fantasy fulfillment. Most videogames offer this by letting one become a superhero and save the world, or at least defeat evil. Guitar Hero, though, is no different, even if the role played is not inherently heroic and it exists in the real world. Nonetheless, the idea of being a rock star is incredibly appealing; one of the most glamrous and sought after jobs on the planet. There's the money, the ability to travel the world, the almost obligatory hedonism, but even without that point, there's the ability to be an artist, inspiring millions with your unmatched physical abilities. Plus, guitars are cool; we're not playing Pianist Hero for a reason.
Fun type #3 is the sense of wonder and exploration; seeing things you've never seen, hearing things you've never heard. You see a lot of this appeal in games like World of Warcraft, where the world is very large and full of strange, wondrous things to find. Type #4 is the same type of fun we get from watching an engrossing movie or television show; the fun of interesting characters, engrossing plots, and twists both horrifying and hilarious. For #5, there's the social aspect of games, and friends are made or simply enjoy each other's time in the game. Finally, fun type #6 is the customizable aspect, letting people make their own stories, or at least their own characters.
This is a scattered list, and it would make a good Rant blog at some point, but really I just needed to get some ideas out there for Guitar Hero to be evaluated on. How does it match up? Well, the customization options are pretty limited. You can pick your own characters and their costumes, but that's it, and options in that regard are limited. Social fun can be done online, but I haven't had much of a chance to figure that out in time. That will be part of the elements I will look into, but not yet. Otherwise, it requires a friend with his/her own fake guitar and the same time and interests to play the game as I do, which I do not have. Sense of wonder is not the focus, but it is not nonexistent. Most of the songs in this games are ones I never heard before or just never thought much about, and as a result there's a good dozen new bands I want to look into from the game, and a few new favorite songs. Of course, most of that sense of wonder ended as soon as I beat easy.
Plot and character are practically nonexistent in Guitar Hero 3, save for a few brief, barely animated cut scenes between areas, so that's out. That just leaves Guitar Hero 3's biggest strengths, the sense of escapism and fantasy and the excitement of puzzle solving. The former was still there, but the harder the game gets, the less you can enjoy that element. You go from rocking out to applause and 5-star reviews to struggling to even finish the songs while the music is often replaced by long strings of silence and the "you screwed up" plinking noise. That doesn't make me feel like a rock star, that makes me feel like the incompetent guitar player without a single iota of training that I actually am. And that leaves just the puzzle solving fun. The problem there is that while there are mental elements to the puzzles, most of it is simply getting your fingers to react fast enough to finish the song. This is just not a fun type that I get into. I did enough data entry for my jobs to say that I can't enjoy that element when taken by itself.
So, that's my justification for letting the game go for now. Of the six types of fun, three never were part of the game for me, two were really strong elements that faded as I finished medium, and one only partially appeals to me. Even so, .5 out of 6 is enough for me to return to the game. The thrill of a challenge is always a part of that desire to learn and win. And that social element is another thing to explore, when the time is right.
That's a lot of words about why I'm not playing a game, and not enough about what I thought about the game in the first place. Well, I liked it enough to play through it twice in a row. The sense of wonder of the music, the sheer thrill of being a rock star, the white knuckle, gripping, breathless emotion you get as you struggle to finish a tough song; these things are enough for me to recommend this game to nearly everyone. I never tried the earlier ones, at least not for more than a few minutes at a party, but I'm very glad I played this one. After all, one of the appeals of video games is to try new things, and I have saved the world as a superhero oh so many times. This, this was different. And so I'll be returning to the game, and happily so.
But it will probably be in smaller doses. If you stand up while you play, and you damn well should, it starts to hurt like hell after a while.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
My Inspirations: My Ode to a Little Blue Metal Boy.
In exchange for missing last Wednesday's update, I plan on doing a week or so of more personal, important entries. Well, I actually had one of them set up for next Friday specifically anyway, and I wanted to do a big one last Wednesday and now just had to move it up a week, but when the cosmos thinks its onto something, I might as well indulge it. My review will be fairly simple this week still, though.
For now, though, it's time to discuss one of my favorite heroes in the video game world, at least among the actual characters, as opposed to the designers. This is a hero that caught my attention and held it for years. Hell, this is a hero that almost made me appreciate the greats like Mario less simply because there was someone else to root for. That never happens to me. I live in Chicago, home of two baseball teams that hate each other, or at least their fans do. I smirk when one team does well and the other team's fans are compelled to root against them, even hoping one of their own home teams fail as a result. But this hero, this series, this very concept makes me care.
This hero is Megaman.
And yes, as a result, the final roster for Smash Brothers Brawl really has depressed me, thank you very much.
I first learned of Megaman from my babysitter in grade school. To clarify, I was in grade school, the babysitter was not. That would be criminal. Anyway, he had an NES, and often we would play video games on it or, much more likely, watch him play it. (Sense a pattern here?) Once, he showed me Megaman 2, starting rather inscrutably with the game's final levels. With time, though, I saw them all, and I understood the connection between the levels and the bosses, the bosses and the powers they provided.
For those who haven't played the games, a brief description could be necessary. Megaman is a series of games about a humanoid robot. This man (or boy, as he tends to more resemble in later sources despite his name and the vague 8-bit graphics,) has to take down a typical mad scientist by the name of Dr. Wily. To start this mission, he has access to 8 (6, in the first game,) levels that are nonlinear; that is, he can explore them in any order. Each has a boss, as video game levels are wont to do, and each boss had a naming schema of a noun or adjective descriptor plus man. For example, enemies in the game series include Fireman, Quickman, and Magnetman. The level usually matched the boss's theme, as did the boss's attack. Best of all, after defeating a boss, Megaman earned one of its attacks, or a variant thereof, and this weapon was especially effective on at least one of the other bosses. Only after defeating all of the original bosses (dubbed Robot Masters in the series,) can Megaman go into the series of final levels, which tended to take place in Dr. Wily's fortress or that of an ally or patsy of his.
There was a lot to like about the games. There were the technical achievements the series managed, despite the limited prowess of the original NES. The music was astoundingly catching; I could still remember the music for every Robot Master's level years later, though admittedly buying the soundtracks helped. The graphics were crisp and well-animated, with some of the later games getting into multi-layer backgrounds and other tricks the NES seemed incapable of. The gameplay was usually challenging yet fair, requiring some memorization but mostly quick reflexes and pattern recognition skills. Every level, as a result of the boss theme elements, was by necessity unique from all the others. Given that games of this generation sometimes produces sewer and caves for a good third of the game, that remains remarkable to me. The boss fights, while often unbalanced by the power level of the attacks, were ultimately designed to be simple one-on-one duels. Both sides had no real allies and an identical, visible life bar. It felt less like a three-hit-wonder behemoth and more like an actual duel among equals. Small wonder that, a few years later, the same company would make Street Fighter 2 and turn fighting games into a phenomenon.
But I'll tell you the first reason for my love of the series; it was pure, distilled inspiration for designers. Like any hopeful designer, as a child, I thought about ways to do sequels for games that already existed. They were for the most part terrible. Every Mario game was little but an amalgam of earlier ideas. Who could blame me? The Mario games are famous for their innovations; the fantastic leaps of logic and rejection of gameplay assumptions that help make the series one of the primary drivers of the entire business. Megaman, on the other hand, was a perfect template. Toss a word in front of "man," and imagine the possibilities! There were billions of worlds to play with, ideas to ponder at all times, inspiration in every direction.
In some ways, this could practically be dubbed a weakness of the series. After all, almost every great series is known both for the individual stories and for the ongoing arc, the development of the heroes and its ongoing changes. Megaman, at least if you focus on the original model, barely changes at all throughout the series, save for some consistent new powers. Granted, the later spinoffs, like X, Legends, and Zero filled out the series' future in a way that created a much more elaborate, viable story arc, but individual games changed the plot little, especially for the original series that remains my favorite. Now, this is reasonably common in other artistic mediums. The most long-lasted scripted series of our times are things like CSI and Law and Order, which are notorious for focusing on a very strict focus on episode arcs and limited changes among the characters and overarching plot. But I never liked those shows; I prefer dramas that feature extended growth and changes, like Lost, Heroes, and Buffy.
It's the hardest thing about the Megaman mythos for me to explain, but let me give it a try. I already explained how easy the series was for designer fodder. I made plenty of complete games using the series' format; I even plan on devoting an "Ideas" blog to them some day. Maybe the simple story combined with the ease of design to imprint on me the idea to take the simple idea, and make it more so. For example, the earliest of my Megaman ideas copied the concept precisely. The later ones, though, actually started to implement a plot. It went from a simple rise to a new villain other than Wily to the final classic game, which ended with the destruction of the planet, the realization and discovery of Wily's real ambitions, and a climax to the entire series, putting things to a definite end. It wasn't a very good end, but 20 years later, you still haven't seen Capcom do any better, have you?
So what I'm saying is that Megaman not only was one of my first and most tenacious inspirations to be a designer, it made me want to become a better one. After all, the world of Megaman enchanted me; I had to try to improve on them! It's the rules! That I made up.
Sadly, that's still as far as I went on this series. I moved on from making sequels of others' ideas to making my own; another advancement I can thank Megaman personally for. But the best ideas not only were salvaged for the new games, some of them served as the starting archetypes for entire games themselves. So, that little part of Megaman will always be with my designs, and thus always with me. But, in a perfect world, I would still jump at the chance to make my own Megaman game or level. Though seeing the little Blue Bomber in a Smash Brothers would be nice too.
That does bring up the single thing that most annoys me about the character, though. The nickname Blue Bomber is an awful nickname for Megaman. He. Doesn't. Use. Bombs! At least not regularly. Blue Blaster or something would be so much more appropriate.
For now, though, it's time to discuss one of my favorite heroes in the video game world, at least among the actual characters, as opposed to the designers. This is a hero that caught my attention and held it for years. Hell, this is a hero that almost made me appreciate the greats like Mario less simply because there was someone else to root for. That never happens to me. I live in Chicago, home of two baseball teams that hate each other, or at least their fans do. I smirk when one team does well and the other team's fans are compelled to root against them, even hoping one of their own home teams fail as a result. But this hero, this series, this very concept makes me care.
This hero is Megaman.
And yes, as a result, the final roster for Smash Brothers Brawl really has depressed me, thank you very much.
I first learned of Megaman from my babysitter in grade school. To clarify, I was in grade school, the babysitter was not. That would be criminal. Anyway, he had an NES, and often we would play video games on it or, much more likely, watch him play it. (Sense a pattern here?) Once, he showed me Megaman 2, starting rather inscrutably with the game's final levels. With time, though, I saw them all, and I understood the connection between the levels and the bosses, the bosses and the powers they provided.
For those who haven't played the games, a brief description could be necessary. Megaman is a series of games about a humanoid robot. This man (or boy, as he tends to more resemble in later sources despite his name and the vague 8-bit graphics,) has to take down a typical mad scientist by the name of Dr. Wily. To start this mission, he has access to 8 (6, in the first game,) levels that are nonlinear; that is, he can explore them in any order. Each has a boss, as video game levels are wont to do, and each boss had a naming schema of a noun or adjective descriptor plus man. For example, enemies in the game series include Fireman, Quickman, and Magnetman. The level usually matched the boss's theme, as did the boss's attack. Best of all, after defeating a boss, Megaman earned one of its attacks, or a variant thereof, and this weapon was especially effective on at least one of the other bosses. Only after defeating all of the original bosses (dubbed Robot Masters in the series,) can Megaman go into the series of final levels, which tended to take place in Dr. Wily's fortress or that of an ally or patsy of his.
There was a lot to like about the games. There were the technical achievements the series managed, despite the limited prowess of the original NES. The music was astoundingly catching; I could still remember the music for every Robot Master's level years later, though admittedly buying the soundtracks helped. The graphics were crisp and well-animated, with some of the later games getting into multi-layer backgrounds and other tricks the NES seemed incapable of. The gameplay was usually challenging yet fair, requiring some memorization but mostly quick reflexes and pattern recognition skills. Every level, as a result of the boss theme elements, was by necessity unique from all the others. Given that games of this generation sometimes produces sewer and caves for a good third of the game, that remains remarkable to me. The boss fights, while often unbalanced by the power level of the attacks, were ultimately designed to be simple one-on-one duels. Both sides had no real allies and an identical, visible life bar. It felt less like a three-hit-wonder behemoth and more like an actual duel among equals. Small wonder that, a few years later, the same company would make Street Fighter 2 and turn fighting games into a phenomenon.
But I'll tell you the first reason for my love of the series; it was pure, distilled inspiration for designers. Like any hopeful designer, as a child, I thought about ways to do sequels for games that already existed. They were for the most part terrible. Every Mario game was little but an amalgam of earlier ideas. Who could blame me? The Mario games are famous for their innovations; the fantastic leaps of logic and rejection of gameplay assumptions that help make the series one of the primary drivers of the entire business. Megaman, on the other hand, was a perfect template. Toss a word in front of "man," and imagine the possibilities! There were billions of worlds to play with, ideas to ponder at all times, inspiration in every direction.
In some ways, this could practically be dubbed a weakness of the series. After all, almost every great series is known both for the individual stories and for the ongoing arc, the development of the heroes and its ongoing changes. Megaman, at least if you focus on the original model, barely changes at all throughout the series, save for some consistent new powers. Granted, the later spinoffs, like X, Legends, and Zero filled out the series' future in a way that created a much more elaborate, viable story arc, but individual games changed the plot little, especially for the original series that remains my favorite. Now, this is reasonably common in other artistic mediums. The most long-lasted scripted series of our times are things like CSI and Law and Order, which are notorious for focusing on a very strict focus on episode arcs and limited changes among the characters and overarching plot. But I never liked those shows; I prefer dramas that feature extended growth and changes, like Lost, Heroes, and Buffy.
It's the hardest thing about the Megaman mythos for me to explain, but let me give it a try. I already explained how easy the series was for designer fodder. I made plenty of complete games using the series' format; I even plan on devoting an "Ideas" blog to them some day. Maybe the simple story combined with the ease of design to imprint on me the idea to take the simple idea, and make it more so. For example, the earliest of my Megaman ideas copied the concept precisely. The later ones, though, actually started to implement a plot. It went from a simple rise to a new villain other than Wily to the final classic game, which ended with the destruction of the planet, the realization and discovery of Wily's real ambitions, and a climax to the entire series, putting things to a definite end. It wasn't a very good end, but 20 years later, you still haven't seen Capcom do any better, have you?
So what I'm saying is that Megaman not only was one of my first and most tenacious inspirations to be a designer, it made me want to become a better one. After all, the world of Megaman enchanted me; I had to try to improve on them! It's the rules! That I made up.
Sadly, that's still as far as I went on this series. I moved on from making sequels of others' ideas to making my own; another advancement I can thank Megaman personally for. But the best ideas not only were salvaged for the new games, some of them served as the starting archetypes for entire games themselves. So, that little part of Megaman will always be with my designs, and thus always with me. But, in a perfect world, I would still jump at the chance to make my own Megaman game or level. Though seeing the little Blue Bomber in a Smash Brothers would be nice too.
That does bring up the single thing that most annoys me about the character, though. The nickname Blue Bomber is an awful nickname for Megaman. He. Doesn't. Use. Bombs! At least not regularly. Blue Blaster or something would be so much more appropriate.
Friday, February 22, 2008
My Ideas: Dark Banner of Kylaria
As you already guessed, no, I didn't get a chance to make up for the "suffering from a horrible disease" missed entry. It turns out that my cold is actually a sinus infection, and while the normal cold symptoms have passed, I still have a horrible cough. But the show must go on! Any of my 1.3 or so readers can feel free to wish me well, health-wise, but I will continue to do these blogs either way. Besides, tonight's is my favorite subject, the old ideas I had. And, since my future looks to be full of unpleasant yellow substances and hacking noises, let's focus on the past, and a game idea of the genre classification. A game idea that was once, at least, three game ideas.
This is a response to a particular neurosis I have. I can never let an idea die. Well, I can, but it would have to be incredibly stupid first. Otherwise, even if a game idea itself never manages to get anywhere (creatively, obviously, since professionally none of them have yet to reach this achievement,) some of the characters, ideas, settings, or game play features are interesting enough to salvage. This game idea, known as the Dark Banner of Kylaria, is unique in that it was made of almost nothing but.
The concept had its base from an earlier "Me too!" genre idea. Specifically, it came from trying to make an idea for a real time simulator after being enchanted with Warcraft 2, and yet disappointed with its map-making features. I had elaborate plans in my head of maps involving massive slave revolts, hunts for hidden objects, quest to overthrow empires, and so on. But Warcraft 2 just wasn't at that level of complexity; it was kill the other side or be killed. Plus, it began my irritation with a common staple of the genre; anything you do on one map doesn't carry over to the next.
The Kylarian Campaign was my response to this. It was a ludicrously elaborate RTS with not two, not three, but TWELVE unique sides. This was also my "unnecessary overkill" period, I must admit. I assumed each would be less individually developed than a Warcraft race, at least. There would be four "good" races, like a good human kingdom, ye olde typicale elves and dwarves, and a pack of northern barbarians who used ice-based powers. There were four evil races, include ye juste ase typicale dark elves, an allegiance of evil humanoids like orcs, an undead horde, and an evil magic-hating human empire. The neutrals were pretty weird, though, and they included dragon-based lizard people, an allegiance of aquatic races, a force of intelligent nonhumanoid monsters, and magical space travelers. Ideally, you could select your level from a number of options, and your choices would affect which of the other 11 side would ally with yours and which would become enemies. This idea, while neat sounding, eventually faded due to lack of interest.
But it was brought to my attention again when I tried to rip off ANOTHER genre after playing Final Fantasy Tactics. It's the usual formula among designers. 1: See something we like. 2: Play/watch/read/etc. it until we become completely enchanted with it. 3: Figure out how to make it better. There wasn't much in this case, barring translation errors, but I tried anyway. Eventually, I needed backstory, and Kylaria came back to me.
This time, events occurred some 500 years after the RTS would have finished. Good won, but not completely. The evil humans were supposedly wiped out, the evil humanoids and undead formed their own empires and started a fantasy equivalent of the Cold War, and the neutral races mostly were retconned out of existence. This game began when the supposedly destroyed evil human empire returned, wiped out the northern barbarians in a traditional "look how evil we are" move, and then began a plan to destroy the other races.
But I needed more material. More importantly, I needed actual characters; RTSes at that stage were notoriously limited on that subject, but after Final Fantasy Tactic's brilliant if almost indecipherable plot, I had to do more. I responded as by salvaging even more ideas. For the protagonists, I reached deeper into the past into a game so old, I don't even know if it has a name. It involved a group of pale, attractive humanoids who lived underground and would dissolve instantly if exposed to the light of day. This version changed it to "damaged over time," and took the three leads, a mostly personality-free protagonist and his two female friends/potential love interests, as they had to leave their sheltered underground habitat to find help on the surface after their home was threatened by a magical rock elemental thingy.
As for villains, I reached even farther into the past. I utilized a game called The Black Flag, which came before I ever heard of the other things named after that. I think there was a band and a pesticide, but I'm not sure. Anyway, this idea was nothing but a hypothetical side-scrolling action game I created when imagining what sort of projects I would make when I went to Digipen. Well, if I went to Digipen, but I hoped at the time.
This is actually a bit of a sore subject, so we'll get to that in a later blog.
Anyway, the noteworthy thing was that Black Flag itself, or at least the boss enemies, were THEMSELVES salvaged from at least two other ideas I had for licensed projects. One of these was started about the time I was eight. That's a long history for a project I don't even work on much as of late.
But, hey, we finally have a semblance of a plot. The heroes are three outsiders thrust by crisis into the intrigue of a good nation forced into shaky ground with more dangerous empires, once sympathetic, one inherently evil (save for vampires and the occasional ghost, undead never get nice treatments.) And all three were being played by the new force, which included several mechanical and bio-engineered monsters from my older game designs (and you know that'll be another blog.) I just needed an explanation for the robots and such. I eventually figured that the evil empire, now known as the Dark Banner, spent those 500 years becoming a technologically advanced nation while the other empires were locked in magical advancement.
Even that was a stretch until I worked out the game's big climax. They gained this rapid advancement rate by creating a creature called Intellect. Intellect was a nation-wide social engineering program. They sought out the most brilliant scientists and overall geniuses, arrested them, and eventually merged all of them into one being. A decade later, I have to admit I have no idea how they started this process, but here we are. As the years passed, they continued this, sacrificing hundreds or thousands of super-geniuses into the collective mind of Intellect, which was forced to advanced technology several times faster than all of Earth's scattered intellects could. Of course, in the climax, Intellect goes insane, destroys its masters (or any left after the party killed most of them in boss fights,) and tries to conquer the world, so the party kills it. Hey, it's not a Jesus allegory, but it would do.
I actually was a little proud of this game. The villain's plot revolved around splitting its army into different combat units, each with its own theme. They would separately attack each empire but randomly spare certain parts, leading to accusations of treason between each nation and within as well. Meanwhile the Dark Banner itself was not unified, especially in the machinations of their spymistress. And there were even branching story paths, including if the party can return home and stop the earth elemental in time, and multiple possible new party members, which admittedly mostly came from the party I used to beat Final Fantasy Tactics the first time. There are ideas everywhere!
So what have I learned from this project? Well, I learned the sad truth that you can't write "this game has intrigue!" without getting in to more detail about how that intrigue will play out. I learned that interest is often difficult to maintain, though if I had this idea today, who knows how it would have played out? And nonetheless, I learned that every idea is a lead to another. Every past character or concept may very well be just what the next idea needs. And hell, if I ever get into a company that's looking for some new strategy-based IP, I know how that meeting will go (unless they read this blog, I guess.)
This is a response to a particular neurosis I have. I can never let an idea die. Well, I can, but it would have to be incredibly stupid first. Otherwise, even if a game idea itself never manages to get anywhere (creatively, obviously, since professionally none of them have yet to reach this achievement,) some of the characters, ideas, settings, or game play features are interesting enough to salvage. This game idea, known as the Dark Banner of Kylaria, is unique in that it was made of almost nothing but.
The concept had its base from an earlier "Me too!" genre idea. Specifically, it came from trying to make an idea for a real time simulator after being enchanted with Warcraft 2, and yet disappointed with its map-making features. I had elaborate plans in my head of maps involving massive slave revolts, hunts for hidden objects, quest to overthrow empires, and so on. But Warcraft 2 just wasn't at that level of complexity; it was kill the other side or be killed. Plus, it began my irritation with a common staple of the genre; anything you do on one map doesn't carry over to the next.
The Kylarian Campaign was my response to this. It was a ludicrously elaborate RTS with not two, not three, but TWELVE unique sides. This was also my "unnecessary overkill" period, I must admit. I assumed each would be less individually developed than a Warcraft race, at least. There would be four "good" races, like a good human kingdom, ye olde typicale elves and dwarves, and a pack of northern barbarians who used ice-based powers. There were four evil races, include ye juste ase typicale dark elves, an allegiance of evil humanoids like orcs, an undead horde, and an evil magic-hating human empire. The neutrals were pretty weird, though, and they included dragon-based lizard people, an allegiance of aquatic races, a force of intelligent nonhumanoid monsters, and magical space travelers. Ideally, you could select your level from a number of options, and your choices would affect which of the other 11 side would ally with yours and which would become enemies. This idea, while neat sounding, eventually faded due to lack of interest.
But it was brought to my attention again when I tried to rip off ANOTHER genre after playing Final Fantasy Tactics. It's the usual formula among designers. 1: See something we like. 2: Play/watch/read/etc. it until we become completely enchanted with it. 3: Figure out how to make it better. There wasn't much in this case, barring translation errors, but I tried anyway. Eventually, I needed backstory, and Kylaria came back to me.
This time, events occurred some 500 years after the RTS would have finished. Good won, but not completely. The evil humans were supposedly wiped out, the evil humanoids and undead formed their own empires and started a fantasy equivalent of the Cold War, and the neutral races mostly were retconned out of existence. This game began when the supposedly destroyed evil human empire returned, wiped out the northern barbarians in a traditional "look how evil we are" move, and then began a plan to destroy the other races.
But I needed more material. More importantly, I needed actual characters; RTSes at that stage were notoriously limited on that subject, but after Final Fantasy Tactic's brilliant if almost indecipherable plot, I had to do more. I responded as by salvaging even more ideas. For the protagonists, I reached deeper into the past into a game so old, I don't even know if it has a name. It involved a group of pale, attractive humanoids who lived underground and would dissolve instantly if exposed to the light of day. This version changed it to "damaged over time," and took the three leads, a mostly personality-free protagonist and his two female friends/potential love interests, as they had to leave their sheltered underground habitat to find help on the surface after their home was threatened by a magical rock elemental thingy.
As for villains, I reached even farther into the past. I utilized a game called The Black Flag, which came before I ever heard of the other things named after that. I think there was a band and a pesticide, but I'm not sure. Anyway, this idea was nothing but a hypothetical side-scrolling action game I created when imagining what sort of projects I would make when I went to Digipen. Well, if I went to Digipen, but I hoped at the time.
This is actually a bit of a sore subject, so we'll get to that in a later blog.
Anyway, the noteworthy thing was that Black Flag itself, or at least the boss enemies, were THEMSELVES salvaged from at least two other ideas I had for licensed projects. One of these was started about the time I was eight. That's a long history for a project I don't even work on much as of late.
But, hey, we finally have a semblance of a plot. The heroes are three outsiders thrust by crisis into the intrigue of a good nation forced into shaky ground with more dangerous empires, once sympathetic, one inherently evil (save for vampires and the occasional ghost, undead never get nice treatments.) And all three were being played by the new force, which included several mechanical and bio-engineered monsters from my older game designs (and you know that'll be another blog.) I just needed an explanation for the robots and such. I eventually figured that the evil empire, now known as the Dark Banner, spent those 500 years becoming a technologically advanced nation while the other empires were locked in magical advancement.
Even that was a stretch until I worked out the game's big climax. They gained this rapid advancement rate by creating a creature called Intellect. Intellect was a nation-wide social engineering program. They sought out the most brilliant scientists and overall geniuses, arrested them, and eventually merged all of them into one being. A decade later, I have to admit I have no idea how they started this process, but here we are. As the years passed, they continued this, sacrificing hundreds or thousands of super-geniuses into the collective mind of Intellect, which was forced to advanced technology several times faster than all of Earth's scattered intellects could. Of course, in the climax, Intellect goes insane, destroys its masters (or any left after the party killed most of them in boss fights,) and tries to conquer the world, so the party kills it. Hey, it's not a Jesus allegory, but it would do.
I actually was a little proud of this game. The villain's plot revolved around splitting its army into different combat units, each with its own theme. They would separately attack each empire but randomly spare certain parts, leading to accusations of treason between each nation and within as well. Meanwhile the Dark Banner itself was not unified, especially in the machinations of their spymistress. And there were even branching story paths, including if the party can return home and stop the earth elemental in time, and multiple possible new party members, which admittedly mostly came from the party I used to beat Final Fantasy Tactics the first time. There are ideas everywhere!
So what have I learned from this project? Well, I learned the sad truth that you can't write "this game has intrigue!" without getting in to more detail about how that intrigue will play out. I learned that interest is often difficult to maintain, though if I had this idea today, who knows how it would have played out? And nonetheless, I learned that every idea is a lead to another. Every past character or concept may very well be just what the next idea needs. And hell, if I ever get into a company that's looking for some new strategy-based IP, I know how that meeting will go (unless they read this blog, I guess.)
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Well, that was quick.
I didn't want to skip a day so quickly, but this is the second time in a month I got sick, and this time I'm barely able to move without it hurting. Depending on how things go tomorrow, I might be able to catch up, but that requries that I be healthy enough to do so and have enough time. We'll have to wait at see at this point. Either way, I should be back on track for Friday!
Oh, and there is some good news. I allowed for anonymous comments. This way, people without gmail accounts can reply. If I get 300 spams as a result of this, though, things might change again.
Oh, and there is some good news. I allowed for anonymous comments. This way, people without gmail accounts can reply. If I get 300 spams as a result of this, though, things might change again.
Monday, February 18, 2008
My Life: Weirder Beliefs Than Religion.
Hello, my names is Joseph Barder, and I'm a transhumanist.
Is that right? Let me check Wikipedia, to make sure there's not an obscure variant definition or misinterpretation here...
Okay, yeah, that's about right. The short version of what I believe in is that I think humans should and/or will eventually make themselves into something more than human. In other words, some combination of cybernetics and bio-engineering will become technologically viable. Another alternative is more digital, though, similar to movies like the Matrix. Honestly, though, I'm not as enthused about that possibility. I think one of the concerns I have about the future is that technology will not only let us do without the labor and difficulties of life, it will make life's benefits seemingly redundant, and I like the concept of having a semi-permanent body, even if it is a malleable one. But that sort of futuristic discussion is for yet another blog, even if I'm not sure if it counts as a life, rant, inspiration, or game idea.
No, I think the basic minimum for this concept is simple alterations of the body, instead of downloading ourselves into a new system entirely. My reasons are pretty numerous, so let's start with the easy ones. For starters, there are the obvious humanitarian benefits; immunity to diseases, lack of genetic deformities, that sort of thing. And, on a less mature note, there's the obvious appeal for, well, superpower-related reasons. Who hasn't wanted to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Or run as fast as a car? Or fly? Of course, this reason is less viable for the spread of worldwide transhumanism, since then everybody could do it, or more likely the really "fun" changes would be regulated by the government. My best bet in getting these selfish reasons to work is being in on the ground floor, so I get the superhero fantasies out before the whole thing gets as boring as, say, airbags.
But it's not just about fantasies and basic human treatments. I believe in transhumanism because I believe in order and advancement in general. I believe that, like all limits to our intellect and our capacities, the limits of our bodies is meant to be understood and surpassed. And, even more importantly, there is the matter of identity. As sentient beings with the capacity for identity, we strive to be known, to be unique, to be something special. That means being able to define ourselves on our terms. We can do this with our careers, our interests, and our talents, but in a planet of six billion, with those numbers likely to grow exponentially in the future if advances in terraforming and space travel also develop, that often is not enough. Defining our appearances is a primal urge for people, leading to everything from fashion to body modification surgery. Transhumanism is just the next step of that goal.
Of course, there are pitfalls. There is the "Gattica" scenario, for example. That is, if human alteration makes those affected too good, and the result is not universal, won't that lead to a class division greater than any created by simple politics and economy? This is a risk, and one that has concerned me. But I believe it's a short-term problem; with time, technology will catch up until alterations can be done at any point in one's life. Other risks include the usual "bio-engineered/cyborg soldiers go out of control and turn evil" scenario. I'm less concerned about that one. Besides, any advancement in transhumanism will be met by advancements in weapon technology and AI. Controlling technology is a concern at every point, not just this one.
A more sociological concern is that, well, for civilization to advance, people need to die. Not only is mortality a major realization in our psychological development, but it makes the processing of new ideas faster. Imagine trying to introduce new ideas about society in a culture where there are still millions of people still alive from when slavery was acceptable, and they still vote. Now imagine them involved in a society where vast numbers of people are engineering themselves into inhuman forms. The outcry would surpass even what we experienced in the past five decades of race, gender, and sexual conflict.
My solution, as seen in some of my video game ideas and to be elaborated there, is to use space travel in concordance with societal development. In other words, the communities of the future won't be based on nationality, but on archetypal idealism (or simple nostalgia.) Colonies will develop based solely on what people of that community consider the idea community, whether that community was medieval Europe, 1950s suburban America, or something out of a fantasy novel. Now, obviously all those communities would have some concessions towards modern ethics (good luck to get enough people together to re-support feudalism,) and modern medicine and education would be commonplace, along with inter-community travel and communication, but the general feel of each place will be just what its people want. It will be the ultimate fulfillment of self, and who wouldn't want that?
Is that right? Let me check Wikipedia, to make sure there's not an obscure variant definition or misinterpretation here...
Okay, yeah, that's about right. The short version of what I believe in is that I think humans should and/or will eventually make themselves into something more than human. In other words, some combination of cybernetics and bio-engineering will become technologically viable. Another alternative is more digital, though, similar to movies like the Matrix. Honestly, though, I'm not as enthused about that possibility. I think one of the concerns I have about the future is that technology will not only let us do without the labor and difficulties of life, it will make life's benefits seemingly redundant, and I like the concept of having a semi-permanent body, even if it is a malleable one. But that sort of futuristic discussion is for yet another blog, even if I'm not sure if it counts as a life, rant, inspiration, or game idea.
No, I think the basic minimum for this concept is simple alterations of the body, instead of downloading ourselves into a new system entirely. My reasons are pretty numerous, so let's start with the easy ones. For starters, there are the obvious humanitarian benefits; immunity to diseases, lack of genetic deformities, that sort of thing. And, on a less mature note, there's the obvious appeal for, well, superpower-related reasons. Who hasn't wanted to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Or run as fast as a car? Or fly? Of course, this reason is less viable for the spread of worldwide transhumanism, since then everybody could do it, or more likely the really "fun" changes would be regulated by the government. My best bet in getting these selfish reasons to work is being in on the ground floor, so I get the superhero fantasies out before the whole thing gets as boring as, say, airbags.
But it's not just about fantasies and basic human treatments. I believe in transhumanism because I believe in order and advancement in general. I believe that, like all limits to our intellect and our capacities, the limits of our bodies is meant to be understood and surpassed. And, even more importantly, there is the matter of identity. As sentient beings with the capacity for identity, we strive to be known, to be unique, to be something special. That means being able to define ourselves on our terms. We can do this with our careers, our interests, and our talents, but in a planet of six billion, with those numbers likely to grow exponentially in the future if advances in terraforming and space travel also develop, that often is not enough. Defining our appearances is a primal urge for people, leading to everything from fashion to body modification surgery. Transhumanism is just the next step of that goal.
Of course, there are pitfalls. There is the "Gattica" scenario, for example. That is, if human alteration makes those affected too good, and the result is not universal, won't that lead to a class division greater than any created by simple politics and economy? This is a risk, and one that has concerned me. But I believe it's a short-term problem; with time, technology will catch up until alterations can be done at any point in one's life. Other risks include the usual "bio-engineered/cyborg soldiers go out of control and turn evil" scenario. I'm less concerned about that one. Besides, any advancement in transhumanism will be met by advancements in weapon technology and AI. Controlling technology is a concern at every point, not just this one.
A more sociological concern is that, well, for civilization to advance, people need to die. Not only is mortality a major realization in our psychological development, but it makes the processing of new ideas faster. Imagine trying to introduce new ideas about society in a culture where there are still millions of people still alive from when slavery was acceptable, and they still vote. Now imagine them involved in a society where vast numbers of people are engineering themselves into inhuman forms. The outcry would surpass even what we experienced in the past five decades of race, gender, and sexual conflict.
My solution, as seen in some of my video game ideas and to be elaborated there, is to use space travel in concordance with societal development. In other words, the communities of the future won't be based on nationality, but on archetypal idealism (or simple nostalgia.) Colonies will develop based solely on what people of that community consider the idea community, whether that community was medieval Europe, 1950s suburban America, or something out of a fantasy novel. Now, obviously all those communities would have some concessions towards modern ethics (good luck to get enough people together to re-support feudalism,) and modern medicine and education would be commonplace, along with inter-community travel and communication, but the general feel of each place will be just what its people want. It will be the ultimate fulfillment of self, and who wouldn't want that?
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Reviews: The Desperate Attempt to Give Colbert Less Than An "A"
This week's review covers Stephen Colbert's first novel, at least since his induction into late-night television godhood, called "I Am America, (And So Can You.)" You might remember this novel back when you read it in October, along with the rest of the world. My excuse is a huge backlog of books at the time, the rationalization that I could just ask for the book for Christmas, as it would make for an easy gift, and then getting seven more books at Christmas, creating another backlog. When you are mentally obligated to keep up with music, television, video games, movies, writing, webcomics, podcasts, and actual employment, you find the amount you can read ever night decreases somewhat.
Nonetheless, I finally got around to the book this last week, and I finished it a few days ago. For those who don't know, let me sum up the book and Colbert's character in the first place. Since he first started working on the Daily Show shortly before Jon Stewart's arrival to the same show, he has almost constantly used a public persona almost completely unrelated to the actual man. This persona, also called Stephen Colbert and sometimes printed in quotations to differentiate, started out as a completely serious yet utterly clueless reporter, starting a style that reporters on the Daily Show emulate to this day. When he got his own show, though, he expanded the concept, essentially becoming a parody of popular right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly.
This gimmick could become tedious or mean-spirited with time, but Colbert manages to make it work for two reasons. For one thing, he makes the character's motivations tied not to malice, but to general nostalgia-fueled cluelessness, his arguments usually stemming from desperate projections of his own neuroses. More importantly, though, Colbert manages to project a charismatic image, even while playing a clueless jerk, that lends itself well to a cult of personality development. Not only does this match the similar auras of those he parodies, but this wins him fans who would normally disagree with his character's positions and lets him perform actions outside of punditry, as he tries (and often succeeds) at forcing his image to the public at large, even those who never heard of him or don't know his often ridiculous arguments are just an act.
This last part is one of the reasons the book wasn't as good as his show. It was funny, yes, but it can't really capture that second part. There were no audiences to interact with, no guests to rebound his persona off of, no way to accomplish a seemingly impossible public fiasco like his attempts to get a bridge named after himself or his famous routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Instead, we got basically a written version of the first kind of humor mentioned above. Watching "Stephen" rail against Hollywood, other religions, etc. in printed form still is humorous, but it misses half the point.
The second problem is by constantly using the persona, it's harder to see the spirit of the book, the heart if you will. Compare it to The Daily Show's own novel, "America: The Book." While that book, like the show, is a parody of news entertainment, both also have a message. They often rile against honesty in politics, the quality of news versus the hunt for sensationalism, and the general value of integrity. To get the message from Colbert's novel, the best you usually can do is take whatever "Stephen" says, and then assume the opposite is right. There is a benefit to the way one subconsciously crafts arguments against his fallacious claims, but it's more smug and less heartfelt.
Nonetheless, all of this is, as the title suggests, just a way to keep the grade from reaching an easy way. The book clearly understands the appeal of "Stephen" and has made efforts to pass some of the show's visual gags into print form. For example, the show constantly references and meta-references its own author, from the exclusive pictures of him in every chapter to the constant self-affirming footnotes. Other captions make a nice counter-point or punch of the regular jokes, just as the "bullet" captions on the show do (or did, pre-Writer's Strike.) And the insecurities of the character are revealed in stories about the characters' childhood. It is remarkable how well Stephen is able to enter this alternate personality and keep it consistently funny. And the novel ends with the transcript of the above-mentioned speech at the Dinner, providing a fresh reminder of that other element that makes his show so popular.
So, I'd give the book a solid B if I gave letter grades here, but it helped affirm one of the points I'm trying to make in this blog regularly. Every artistic and entertainment ideas has its own place where it is at its peak, and while adaptations might be successful, they can't fully capture the spirit. That's one of the reasons my focus has remained on video games. Yes, many of my ideas either started as or could be made into television or movies, but the ideas were created in the language of a different artistic medium entirely. Pretending that the idea can be easily transferred risks killing the spirit of the idea entirely. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how well even Colbert's novel, funny as it is, would do had the show now existed first.
Nonetheless, I finally got around to the book this last week, and I finished it a few days ago. For those who don't know, let me sum up the book and Colbert's character in the first place. Since he first started working on the Daily Show shortly before Jon Stewart's arrival to the same show, he has almost constantly used a public persona almost completely unrelated to the actual man. This persona, also called Stephen Colbert and sometimes printed in quotations to differentiate, started out as a completely serious yet utterly clueless reporter, starting a style that reporters on the Daily Show emulate to this day. When he got his own show, though, he expanded the concept, essentially becoming a parody of popular right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly.
This gimmick could become tedious or mean-spirited with time, but Colbert manages to make it work for two reasons. For one thing, he makes the character's motivations tied not to malice, but to general nostalgia-fueled cluelessness, his arguments usually stemming from desperate projections of his own neuroses. More importantly, though, Colbert manages to project a charismatic image, even while playing a clueless jerk, that lends itself well to a cult of personality development. Not only does this match the similar auras of those he parodies, but this wins him fans who would normally disagree with his character's positions and lets him perform actions outside of punditry, as he tries (and often succeeds) at forcing his image to the public at large, even those who never heard of him or don't know his often ridiculous arguments are just an act.
This last part is one of the reasons the book wasn't as good as his show. It was funny, yes, but it can't really capture that second part. There were no audiences to interact with, no guests to rebound his persona off of, no way to accomplish a seemingly impossible public fiasco like his attempts to get a bridge named after himself or his famous routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Instead, we got basically a written version of the first kind of humor mentioned above. Watching "Stephen" rail against Hollywood, other religions, etc. in printed form still is humorous, but it misses half the point.
The second problem is by constantly using the persona, it's harder to see the spirit of the book, the heart if you will. Compare it to The Daily Show's own novel, "America: The Book." While that book, like the show, is a parody of news entertainment, both also have a message. They often rile against honesty in politics, the quality of news versus the hunt for sensationalism, and the general value of integrity. To get the message from Colbert's novel, the best you usually can do is take whatever "Stephen" says, and then assume the opposite is right. There is a benefit to the way one subconsciously crafts arguments against his fallacious claims, but it's more smug and less heartfelt.
Nonetheless, all of this is, as the title suggests, just a way to keep the grade from reaching an easy way. The book clearly understands the appeal of "Stephen" and has made efforts to pass some of the show's visual gags into print form. For example, the show constantly references and meta-references its own author, from the exclusive pictures of him in every chapter to the constant self-affirming footnotes. Other captions make a nice counter-point or punch of the regular jokes, just as the "bullet" captions on the show do (or did, pre-Writer's Strike.) And the insecurities of the character are revealed in stories about the characters' childhood. It is remarkable how well Stephen is able to enter this alternate personality and keep it consistently funny. And the novel ends with the transcript of the above-mentioned speech at the Dinner, providing a fresh reminder of that other element that makes his show so popular.
So, I'd give the book a solid B if I gave letter grades here, but it helped affirm one of the points I'm trying to make in this blog regularly. Every artistic and entertainment ideas has its own place where it is at its peak, and while adaptations might be successful, they can't fully capture the spirit. That's one of the reasons my focus has remained on video games. Yes, many of my ideas either started as or could be made into television or movies, but the ideas were created in the language of a different artistic medium entirely. Pretending that the idea can be easily transferred risks killing the spirit of the idea entirely. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how well even Colbert's novel, funny as it is, would do had the show now existed first.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
My Inspirations: Crappy 80s Cartoons, Part 2
Last time we dealt with my early inspiration cartoons, we covered Voltron, a classic anime that caught my attention and fired up my imagination last time. This time, we will discuss a show a few years newer. This one is a bit difference, because while it was the general style of anime and action cartoons that attracted me to Voltron, this second example had a few things that I liked specifically, things that arguably set my mind on mental paths for the rest of my life.
This is a very good thing, because the rest of the show kind of sucked.
The show in question is Silverhawks. You may remember it (but you probably don't) as a contemporary/rip off of Thundercats that took place IN SPACE! Instead of a band of proto-furries, however, the characters were all cyborgs, though less cool cyper-punky variants and more powered-armor superheroes. In fact, their faces were pretty much the only organic bits they had left, at least from the outside. This raises some obvious questions, but they didn't to my eight-year old mind, so let's not get into them here.
So the characters, five cyborgs of this sort plus an older leader with more usual "Human with metal limbs/plate on head" style cybernetics, fought against an evil alien despot. Said despot, when exposed to the light of a certain sun, transformed into a horrible monster via the same transformation sequence, complete with evil rant, every episode. If this reminds of you Mum-Ra from Thundercats, well, good job.
His minions were a more creative lot than the mutants, though. They included various robots, like a minotaur robot, a buzzsaw-using robot, a shape-shifting robot, a...casino-owning robot (odd, that one,) and the rare-non robot that couldn't be easily blasted apart without provoking the ire of the censors. There was a mechanical genius who built most of the group's weapons, a guy with a killer tuning fork, an evil 80s glam/punk rock singer, and a kid with a watch that stopped time. That last one seems a little overpowered, in retrospect.
A few years ago, when a discussion on a message board turned to the show, I had to come to the sad realization that the show sucked, often on a basic design level. Most importantly, of the five main heroes, four of them had the exact same abilities. Why? I suppose there is something to the idea that "mechanical" implies "uniformity in design," but this seems like a real flaw in designing a band of superheroes. Also weird was their weapon design. All of them had the same laser-based weaponry, but the weapons fired from the top of their shoulders. Since they also had the ability to fly, this made some sense; they could use the ability to attack while flying, making strafing attacks easier. This was great, but a weapon that normally only fired straight up wasn't exactly useful when you had to fight enemies while standing.
And then there were the weird things. The most obvious was the Copper Kid, who was another child star that I idolized, much like Pidge. The fact that he was a literal alien mime that only communicated via whistling was more surreal, however. I thrived on weirdness of this nature as a kid, but now I'm more than a little embarrassed by it all. Also strange was the fifth regular member of the team, a cyborg cowboy who couldn't fly but had a guitar that fired sonic blasts. Strange, yes, but outside of oddballs like these two, none of team had any personality. I can't even remember their names, let alone when they ever did anything interesting throughout the whole series. A quick wikipedia search could fix that, but it shouldn't have to.
So what did affect me? I think it was the concept of the characters themselves. This quite possibly could be the first time I ever saw cyborgs, or at least ones presented as heroic and regular characters. Cyborgs in general fascinate me, as they reflect one of the ways I feel humanity itself will end up evolving in the future. Sure, they probably won't turn themselves into hokey superheroes, but that aspect opened up possibilities about future civilization and culture that I take into my designs to this day. It also helps me identify more with the heroes. Unlike most heroes from this era, they weren't created from accidents, alien origins, or simple genetic mistakes. They made themselves into heroes. I certainly used accident and prophecy in my heroes quite often, but the self-created hero was a new alternative, and I learned it from this show. That's probably good, because all the space trivia I learned from their edutainment closings went one ear and out the other.
This is a very good thing, because the rest of the show kind of sucked.
The show in question is Silverhawks. You may remember it (but you probably don't) as a contemporary/rip off of Thundercats that took place IN SPACE! Instead of a band of proto-furries, however, the characters were all cyborgs, though less cool cyper-punky variants and more powered-armor superheroes. In fact, their faces were pretty much the only organic bits they had left, at least from the outside. This raises some obvious questions, but they didn't to my eight-year old mind, so let's not get into them here.
So the characters, five cyborgs of this sort plus an older leader with more usual "Human with metal limbs/plate on head" style cybernetics, fought against an evil alien despot. Said despot, when exposed to the light of a certain sun, transformed into a horrible monster via the same transformation sequence, complete with evil rant, every episode. If this reminds of you Mum-Ra from Thundercats, well, good job.
His minions were a more creative lot than the mutants, though. They included various robots, like a minotaur robot, a buzzsaw-using robot, a shape-shifting robot, a...casino-owning robot (odd, that one,) and the rare-non robot that couldn't be easily blasted apart without provoking the ire of the censors. There was a mechanical genius who built most of the group's weapons, a guy with a killer tuning fork, an evil 80s glam/punk rock singer, and a kid with a watch that stopped time. That last one seems a little overpowered, in retrospect.
A few years ago, when a discussion on a message board turned to the show, I had to come to the sad realization that the show sucked, often on a basic design level. Most importantly, of the five main heroes, four of them had the exact same abilities. Why? I suppose there is something to the idea that "mechanical" implies "uniformity in design," but this seems like a real flaw in designing a band of superheroes. Also weird was their weapon design. All of them had the same laser-based weaponry, but the weapons fired from the top of their shoulders. Since they also had the ability to fly, this made some sense; they could use the ability to attack while flying, making strafing attacks easier. This was great, but a weapon that normally only fired straight up wasn't exactly useful when you had to fight enemies while standing.
And then there were the weird things. The most obvious was the Copper Kid, who was another child star that I idolized, much like Pidge. The fact that he was a literal alien mime that only communicated via whistling was more surreal, however. I thrived on weirdness of this nature as a kid, but now I'm more than a little embarrassed by it all. Also strange was the fifth regular member of the team, a cyborg cowboy who couldn't fly but had a guitar that fired sonic blasts. Strange, yes, but outside of oddballs like these two, none of team had any personality. I can't even remember their names, let alone when they ever did anything interesting throughout the whole series. A quick wikipedia search could fix that, but it shouldn't have to.
So what did affect me? I think it was the concept of the characters themselves. This quite possibly could be the first time I ever saw cyborgs, or at least ones presented as heroic and regular characters. Cyborgs in general fascinate me, as they reflect one of the ways I feel humanity itself will end up evolving in the future. Sure, they probably won't turn themselves into hokey superheroes, but that aspect opened up possibilities about future civilization and culture that I take into my designs to this day. It also helps me identify more with the heroes. Unlike most heroes from this era, they weren't created from accidents, alien origins, or simple genetic mistakes. They made themselves into heroes. I certainly used accident and prophecy in my heroes quite often, but the self-created hero was a new alternative, and I learned it from this show. That's probably good, because all the space trivia I learned from their edutainment closings went one ear and out the other.
Friday, February 15, 2008
My Ideas: My First Actual Creations
Again, we have the standard disclaimer. This isn't my first creation, but this is the first major one, not just a chalk drawing, etc. It's also the one that took out an early chunk of my social life, possibly traumatizing me for life. But getting over shit like that is one of the reasons for my blog, so let's focus on the positive; the creation itself.
The year was 1987ish. I was 8 or so and had recently moved from the quaint but apparently doomed small town of Broadview to the much nicer but vastly preppier town of Darien. Not that I had any idea about any of that at the time. I was just a weird introvert new kid. That...didn't really change over the years, save maybe for the "new" part. But I got along. At any rate, as things developed, I took a minor game by some of my friends at the time into an early creative obsession. I mean, as creative and obsessive as one can get when one is 8, but you get what I mean.
I have no idea who named the thing, so I'll take credit for it. I called it a "bite bug." It was basically using your hand to emulate a bug; the fingers were legs, and so on. In theory, the game was to pretend to fight them, using other things like the standard finger gun. In practice, I was the only one to give a damn. Even at the age of 8, after all, most people were already getting too cynical about this sort of play.
I saw it less than a game, anyway, and more a source of inspiration. It was more a matter of finding an artistic medium, and more importantly one with limitations so blatant yet so easy to work around, than a game to me. I began to create a more elaborate backstory for the bite bugs, including their powers. The default, one, for example, could form a nearly invincible shell when attacking (by making a fist, obviously.) The concept expanded from there, and many of their minions and allies were often humanoid (by making a human form with the hand, using the index and middle finger as legs.) I decided that they attacked other races and altered them, turning them into biological weapons. One particular brutal example was a human wreathed in fire (one hand in humanoid pose, one behind to make "fire" effects.) That was pretty dark stuff for an eight year old.
So what happened to the bite bugs? Well, there are positives and negatives. The biggest negative, sadly, is that an early obsession with this sort of thing and video games helped cost me a friendship at that age. To my surprise, this proved a much harder entry to write than I expected when I first listed the ideas for this blog. It reminded me of those times, and what could have been. So I guess that's lesson one I learned from these creations. No matter what your age, if you're artistically inclined, you will be prone to obsession. You will want to create, and focus on the details, and expand your plans, and tell the world about them. But there are times you can't, and times where you have to learn to live as well. After all, life is our first inspiration for our art, and without it, we wouldn't have anything to start with.
The idea for the bugs became a part of larger ideas, even ones too invested for this blog. As time passed, I of course realized that there were elements I couldn't use for "serious" settings, including their name and the most obvious visual element used in their designs. Still, they inspire me. For example, in my Dungeons and Dragons group, which I'll discuss in a later blog, the PCs are facing a race of insects called the Infernal Swarm. Their soldiers are simple brutes known only for the shells they can form to roll over and crush enemies, but they also are known for capturing samples from the population and adapting them into new, living weapons. And, when I started making new forms suitable for the setting, I relied on an old method that lay dormant for years. After all, every artist needs a hand every once in a while!
The year was 1987ish. I was 8 or so and had recently moved from the quaint but apparently doomed small town of Broadview to the much nicer but vastly preppier town of Darien. Not that I had any idea about any of that at the time. I was just a weird introvert new kid. That...didn't really change over the years, save maybe for the "new" part. But I got along. At any rate, as things developed, I took a minor game by some of my friends at the time into an early creative obsession. I mean, as creative and obsessive as one can get when one is 8, but you get what I mean.
I have no idea who named the thing, so I'll take credit for it. I called it a "bite bug." It was basically using your hand to emulate a bug; the fingers were legs, and so on. In theory, the game was to pretend to fight them, using other things like the standard finger gun. In practice, I was the only one to give a damn. Even at the age of 8, after all, most people were already getting too cynical about this sort of play.
I saw it less than a game, anyway, and more a source of inspiration. It was more a matter of finding an artistic medium, and more importantly one with limitations so blatant yet so easy to work around, than a game to me. I began to create a more elaborate backstory for the bite bugs, including their powers. The default, one, for example, could form a nearly invincible shell when attacking (by making a fist, obviously.) The concept expanded from there, and many of their minions and allies were often humanoid (by making a human form with the hand, using the index and middle finger as legs.) I decided that they attacked other races and altered them, turning them into biological weapons. One particular brutal example was a human wreathed in fire (one hand in humanoid pose, one behind to make "fire" effects.) That was pretty dark stuff for an eight year old.
So what happened to the bite bugs? Well, there are positives and negatives. The biggest negative, sadly, is that an early obsession with this sort of thing and video games helped cost me a friendship at that age. To my surprise, this proved a much harder entry to write than I expected when I first listed the ideas for this blog. It reminded me of those times, and what could have been. So I guess that's lesson one I learned from these creations. No matter what your age, if you're artistically inclined, you will be prone to obsession. You will want to create, and focus on the details, and expand your plans, and tell the world about them. But there are times you can't, and times where you have to learn to live as well. After all, life is our first inspiration for our art, and without it, we wouldn't have anything to start with.
The idea for the bugs became a part of larger ideas, even ones too invested for this blog. As time passed, I of course realized that there were elements I couldn't use for "serious" settings, including their name and the most obvious visual element used in their designs. Still, they inspire me. For example, in my Dungeons and Dragons group, which I'll discuss in a later blog, the PCs are facing a race of insects called the Infernal Swarm. Their soldiers are simple brutes known only for the shells they can form to roll over and crush enemies, but they also are known for capturing samples from the population and adapting them into new, living weapons. And, when I started making new forms suitable for the setting, I relied on an old method that lay dormant for years. After all, every artist needs a hand every once in a while!
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Rantings: Why Dumb is Stupid
This may be a tricky story to tell, because it revolves around two characters from one of the game ideas I have dubbed too invested for me to share here, due to the time and page investment involved. But I believe I can get the general gist across without giving away details.
So here is the story of two women. The names have been changed to protect, well, to protect me really. Said characters were, in the original incarnation of this game idea, professional thieves, criminals, ne-er do wells, etc. They're not evil, at least in the world-conquering way that villains usually are in video games. They were more rivals to the party who took their failures personally. Well, one of them did. The first, who we'll call "L," was the brains of the operation. A professional thief, she was known for her elaborate plans, skills in infiltration, and an extremely large gun she stole from another villain. She thus became increasingly frustrated with every failure. Her partner, who we'll call "C," was more low-key, and by low-key I mean stupid. She didn't understand her partner's plans, her clumsiness and lack of observational skills usually was part of winning fight against them, and it was obvious she could barely avoid dying without her partner's constant supervision.
And it was funny, for what it was. It was also a total, unashamed rip-off of Kiyone and Mihoshi from Tenchi Muyo, though to my credit I at least made the blonde the smart one this time. But when I remade the entire story last year, in an attempt to make one of my oldest and most personal game ideas consistent with my current level of competency, something happened to them; I realized I had to do something new to make me give a damn about them.
I started to realize that this was very consistent with my work in character design over the recent years. One of the very easiest ways to make a character stand out is to make that character really stupid. This is very easy to telegraph to the audience; they behave like one of the classes of people we assume are stupid (the blonde ditzy cheerleader, the bullying child, the monosyllabic thug, etc.) they get confused with words we assume the audience will understand, they require exposition about every plan, and they misinterpret jokes and sarcasm literally, to name a few.
Why do we use characters like this? Well, the easiest answer is they provide comic relief. Another convenient answer for storytellers is the above-mentioned need for exposition. If a smarter character must explain a plot in the simplest way possible, then it also provides an excuse to give that information to the audience without breaking the reality of the story environment, and it especially helps justify common elements about the story's setting that any native with sense would know about from years of experience, but the audience is clueless about. A much less positive reason is to use the character's stupidity to target the identify of the person who is stupid. I shouldn't even have to mention the ways this could be insulting and offensive based on the stupid character's race, gender, or religion. But other social groups and identities are just as easy targets. Let's face it, gamers tend to be geeks or at least grew up as such, and we might still feel emotional conflict or even jealousy towards more popular social groups. The results are umpteen feral jocks, dimwitted preppies, and moronic authority figures.
I propose that while there are some cases where a genuinely stupid character is appropriate, this is a form of character definition we as an artistic culture should avoid. Never mind that it all too often becomes a cheap substitute for actual personality or it either is or it can easily be interpreted as petty revenge fantasies, it's not even realistic. Modern research on this subject tends to split what we call intellect into many categories: social skills, language skills, mathematical abilities, spatial awareness, and so on. Our stereotypical "dumb" characters might have some skill in social abilities or spatial abilities, but otherwise idiocy in one category reflects across multiple spectrums of intellect. And even the areas that dumb characters supposedly excel are often brushed aside. Instead of being portrayed as a shrewd manipulator of emotions and interpersonal dynamics, the high school ditz is simply portrayed as such a perfect physical specimen that she is attractive automatically. The brutish thug is portrayed as relying on pure strength, not any martial arts regimen or superior observational capacity.
I can't say that I am perfect on this subject, at least not yet. In my favorite game idea (which I once again can't go into detail here,) one of the characters remains such a dimwitted bully caricature that it could have been made 50 years ago. Another of the characters, however, has been transformed from a simple sadistic lackey into someone with a gift for wordplay, wit, and deception, making him both a deeper and a more dangerous opponent.
As for the ladies from my introduction, they have changed quite a bit from my original design. "C" is not the bimbo of the first idea at all. She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but her problems are stemmed not from inherent stupidity, but by a form of naiveté. She is so committed to her friend and her ideals that she sees the two of them not as villains in the first place, but rather as noble, Robin-Hood like rogues. This hope still is often foolhardy, and it does get them in trouble; she once is so eager to defend her friend from an insult that she almost gets them both drowned when trying to retaliate. But it also humanizes her, sympathizes them both, and makes their own goals a reflection of the actual heroes. In fact, it makes their quest so much more interesting that I considered making their own spin-off game! Well, I would if the original game ever existed, but you see the point.
So here is the story of two women. The names have been changed to protect, well, to protect me really. Said characters were, in the original incarnation of this game idea, professional thieves, criminals, ne-er do wells, etc. They're not evil, at least in the world-conquering way that villains usually are in video games. They were more rivals to the party who took their failures personally. Well, one of them did. The first, who we'll call "L," was the brains of the operation. A professional thief, she was known for her elaborate plans, skills in infiltration, and an extremely large gun she stole from another villain. She thus became increasingly frustrated with every failure. Her partner, who we'll call "C," was more low-key, and by low-key I mean stupid. She didn't understand her partner's plans, her clumsiness and lack of observational skills usually was part of winning fight against them, and it was obvious she could barely avoid dying without her partner's constant supervision.
And it was funny, for what it was. It was also a total, unashamed rip-off of Kiyone and Mihoshi from Tenchi Muyo, though to my credit I at least made the blonde the smart one this time. But when I remade the entire story last year, in an attempt to make one of my oldest and most personal game ideas consistent with my current level of competency, something happened to them; I realized I had to do something new to make me give a damn about them.
I started to realize that this was very consistent with my work in character design over the recent years. One of the very easiest ways to make a character stand out is to make that character really stupid. This is very easy to telegraph to the audience; they behave like one of the classes of people we assume are stupid (the blonde ditzy cheerleader, the bullying child, the monosyllabic thug, etc.) they get confused with words we assume the audience will understand, they require exposition about every plan, and they misinterpret jokes and sarcasm literally, to name a few.
Why do we use characters like this? Well, the easiest answer is they provide comic relief. Another convenient answer for storytellers is the above-mentioned need for exposition. If a smarter character must explain a plot in the simplest way possible, then it also provides an excuse to give that information to the audience without breaking the reality of the story environment, and it especially helps justify common elements about the story's setting that any native with sense would know about from years of experience, but the audience is clueless about. A much less positive reason is to use the character's stupidity to target the identify of the person who is stupid. I shouldn't even have to mention the ways this could be insulting and offensive based on the stupid character's race, gender, or religion. But other social groups and identities are just as easy targets. Let's face it, gamers tend to be geeks or at least grew up as such, and we might still feel emotional conflict or even jealousy towards more popular social groups. The results are umpteen feral jocks, dimwitted preppies, and moronic authority figures.
I propose that while there are some cases where a genuinely stupid character is appropriate, this is a form of character definition we as an artistic culture should avoid. Never mind that it all too often becomes a cheap substitute for actual personality or it either is or it can easily be interpreted as petty revenge fantasies, it's not even realistic. Modern research on this subject tends to split what we call intellect into many categories: social skills, language skills, mathematical abilities, spatial awareness, and so on. Our stereotypical "dumb" characters might have some skill in social abilities or spatial abilities, but otherwise idiocy in one category reflects across multiple spectrums of intellect. And even the areas that dumb characters supposedly excel are often brushed aside. Instead of being portrayed as a shrewd manipulator of emotions and interpersonal dynamics, the high school ditz is simply portrayed as such a perfect physical specimen that she is attractive automatically. The brutish thug is portrayed as relying on pure strength, not any martial arts regimen or superior observational capacity.
I can't say that I am perfect on this subject, at least not yet. In my favorite game idea (which I once again can't go into detail here,) one of the characters remains such a dimwitted bully caricature that it could have been made 50 years ago. Another of the characters, however, has been transformed from a simple sadistic lackey into someone with a gift for wordplay, wit, and deception, making him both a deeper and a more dangerous opponent.
As for the ladies from my introduction, they have changed quite a bit from my original design. "C" is not the bimbo of the first idea at all. She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but her problems are stemmed not from inherent stupidity, but by a form of naiveté. She is so committed to her friend and her ideals that she sees the two of them not as villains in the first place, but rather as noble, Robin-Hood like rogues. This hope still is often foolhardy, and it does get them in trouble; she once is so eager to defend her friend from an insult that she almost gets them both drowned when trying to retaliate. But it also humanizes her, sympathizes them both, and makes their own goals a reflection of the actual heroes. In fact, it makes their quest so much more interesting that I considered making their own spin-off game! Well, I would if the original game ever existed, but you see the point.
Monday, February 11, 2008
My Life: Crotchety D&D Gamers
My college life will be discussed more thoroughly in a later blog. I'm avoiding it for now, for various reasons, including that I'm trying to avoid the more "downer" blogs for now. Suffice to say that I don't have as many interesting or pleasant college stories as I would like, but I'll start with one of the better ones. One thing that fascinated me as a kid was the Dungeons and Dragons game. But no matter how hard I tried, I never could get into it in junior high and high school. I tried running games, but my friends were ambivalent, and otherwise you didn't have many options at that age, especially when high school was a more preppy environment.
But that's what college is for. Well, college is for a lot of things, but if you're a geek, that's one of them. Even then, it took me a while. If you're looking to spend a lot of time in college gaming and watching anime, a Jesuit university is not necessarily the best choice. Eventually, though, I made my way to one of the nearby friendly local gaming stores by bus, and signed up for a one-shot game one of the local players wanted to test before trying to get it professionally published. The game went fairly well, and after the player told me he was starting a new campaign, I jumped at the chance, even if it meant taking a bus every Saturday.
They were a ragtag bunch, that first group. Most were older than me, and most were at least somewhat successful professionally and romantically. Most were also heavier drinkers, among...other things we won't get into. They also mostly smoked like chimneys, which was hell on my lungs after 6-8 hours in the room with them. But it was my first game, and my first gaming group. That was always magical. When it wasn't hell.
An interesting thing about gamers is that, if you find ones who played earlier editions, they sort of sound like your stereotypical grandpa cliché. You know, walking five miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways, etc. Except in this case it's more "In my day, if you failed a saving throw versus fireball, you had to roll to see if every one of your magic items survived! And once you hit zero hit points, you were dead, end of story! And if you were an elf, you multiclassed and you were awesome until seventh level, and then you were useless! And mages accomplished nothing for the first four levels, which they take twice as along as everyone else to get past! And we liked it!"
And so on. And being with this group was no different. In fact, it was probably worse, because the DM made us work for everything. It was a brutal campaign. In the two and a half years that I played in it, my character died four times before the campaign finale. And in said campaign finale, the entire universe was destroyed and EVERYONE died. And we liked it!
Well, honestly, I didn't always like it. Sometimes the game was too punishing. I didn't like the parts that were unfair, or losing elements of the character that I personalized to destruction or the various rules and edition changes. But it was a trial by fire. I went from being clueless about the game, at a practical level at least, to being, if not an expert, at least knowledgeable. And I have the memories. I remember the silly things, like when my plans involving illusions went horribly wrong or the jokes made at my wizard's, who had a Dexterity of 6 on a good day, expense. I remember my brilliant plans, like when I killed the parasitic worms inside my shooting myself with my own lightning bolt. And I'll never forget the elaborate scheme I made where we had to sneak into the massive army of the main campaign villain, steal his magical artifact and the very horse he rode in on, and escape via magical airship. And it worked! And only three people died!
So, what have I learned from all this? Well, I learned that no matter how hard it seems, no matter the hazings and the frustrations, if you truly want to learn something, if it's something you really enjoy, you will learn it. As I look more into both learning to become a game designer and to eventually take on that job myself, you can't possibly have a better realization than that. What I would give to one day say, "Yeah, I worked as a game designer. I had to work 80 hours during crunch time, eat so much pizza it oozed out of my pores, and stare unblinking at layouts and screens and brainstorming sessions for hours at a time. And I liked it!"
But that's what college is for. Well, college is for a lot of things, but if you're a geek, that's one of them. Even then, it took me a while. If you're looking to spend a lot of time in college gaming and watching anime, a Jesuit university is not necessarily the best choice. Eventually, though, I made my way to one of the nearby friendly local gaming stores by bus, and signed up for a one-shot game one of the local players wanted to test before trying to get it professionally published. The game went fairly well, and after the player told me he was starting a new campaign, I jumped at the chance, even if it meant taking a bus every Saturday.
They were a ragtag bunch, that first group. Most were older than me, and most were at least somewhat successful professionally and romantically. Most were also heavier drinkers, among...other things we won't get into. They also mostly smoked like chimneys, which was hell on my lungs after 6-8 hours in the room with them. But it was my first game, and my first gaming group. That was always magical. When it wasn't hell.
An interesting thing about gamers is that, if you find ones who played earlier editions, they sort of sound like your stereotypical grandpa cliché. You know, walking five miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways, etc. Except in this case it's more "In my day, if you failed a saving throw versus fireball, you had to roll to see if every one of your magic items survived! And once you hit zero hit points, you were dead, end of story! And if you were an elf, you multiclassed and you were awesome until seventh level, and then you were useless! And mages accomplished nothing for the first four levels, which they take twice as along as everyone else to get past! And we liked it!"
And so on. And being with this group was no different. In fact, it was probably worse, because the DM made us work for everything. It was a brutal campaign. In the two and a half years that I played in it, my character died four times before the campaign finale. And in said campaign finale, the entire universe was destroyed and EVERYONE died. And we liked it!
Well, honestly, I didn't always like it. Sometimes the game was too punishing. I didn't like the parts that were unfair, or losing elements of the character that I personalized to destruction or the various rules and edition changes. But it was a trial by fire. I went from being clueless about the game, at a practical level at least, to being, if not an expert, at least knowledgeable. And I have the memories. I remember the silly things, like when my plans involving illusions went horribly wrong or the jokes made at my wizard's, who had a Dexterity of 6 on a good day, expense. I remember my brilliant plans, like when I killed the parasitic worms inside my shooting myself with my own lightning bolt. And I'll never forget the elaborate scheme I made where we had to sneak into the massive army of the main campaign villain, steal his magical artifact and the very horse he rode in on, and escape via magical airship. And it worked! And only three people died!
So, what have I learned from all this? Well, I learned that no matter how hard it seems, no matter the hazings and the frustrations, if you truly want to learn something, if it's something you really enjoy, you will learn it. As I look more into both learning to become a game designer and to eventually take on that job myself, you can't possibly have a better realization than that. What I would give to one day say, "Yeah, I worked as a game designer. I had to work 80 hours during crunch time, eat so much pizza it oozed out of my pores, and stare unblinking at layouts and screens and brainstorming sessions for hours at a time. And I liked it!"
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Reviews: The Best Vampires are Socially Awkward Vampires
Though the writer's strike has deprived me of my favorite shows, or at least polished versions of them, it has had an upside. With it going on, my time to watch DVDs of shows I missed before increased, and anticipating this, I made sure to accumulate enough television to last me for months at and around Christmas. I'm like a squirrel of pop culture entertainment, storing little laser-etched discs for my long hibernation instead of nuts.
The main show I've been watching is Angel, starting with season 2, thus continuing my lovely and totally non-linear exploration of Joss Whedon's work. We'll get to Mr. Whedon in detail in a later inspiration post, but I found it strange how I watched his work. I only watched Buffy sporadically at first, watching maybe two or three episodes a season while slowly learning about the actual fate of the characters. So I see one good episode, and in the meantime I learn that this character is dead, and that one is now gay, and so on. This continued until I finally watched it regularly in order around season 6, which is terrible timing, I know.
Angel was no different. I started watching consistently late season 4, well aware of the general fate of earlier characters up to that point. It strange that, despite this odd route through his work, Joss Whedon remains one of my favorite writers. Nonetheless, it makes for an interesting experience when I watched the season 2 episodes for the first time, well aware of the fates of the characters. And, since this WAS a Joss Whedon show, knowing that they were all doomed.
First of all, let me admit something right now; I'm much more of a Buffy fan than an Angel fan. I could relate more to the characters, since I never was a centuries old vampire doomed to live a life of repentance or a resident of L.A., but I have been socially awkward in high school. I also liked the seasonal themes, with their usual big bad villains thwarted upon season's end, more than the eternal adversary of Wolfram and Hart. I guess Buffy just had a more consistent theme for me.
Nonetheless, there is a lot to like about Angel. My favorite elements are when they take the usual "badass" elements of the heroes and subvert them. Angel himself is a great example of this. He's physically extremely competent and oozes style, but his years of isolation and brooding make him react as expected when forced to engage in real, human interaction. It makes him stuttering and awkward, which never fails to be funny. The same is true whenever his image is called into question in any way; he tries to make a joke, he gets ignored, or someone just laughs off his self-imposed identity as a tragic figure. Early on, the character Wesley has a similar experience. The difference is that Wesley imagines himself as a similar tragic badass, but he lacks even the capacity to perform that well. So the two characters are reflections of each other; one is only confident in the image he maintains of himself, and the other is least successful and confident when he tries to force himself into the same image.
But this is still season 1 material. Season 2 sees the identities of both characters crumble, as one's image falls apart due to the return of a lost love and the other has the role of leader thrust upon him, ironically making him more into the tragic hero just as he tries to escape his earlier identity. A similar experience comes to the third male lead, who is forced to reassess his own role as a champion for the least fortunate as his work with the group makes him distant to old friends, and the final main character watches her own identity as a bubbly socialite crumble, her new duty taking a toll on her time and her mentality.
It's a lot to work with, and unfortunately this season doesn't always succeed with it. For one thing, it's forced to endure multiple cast changes and other obstacles to the story as written, and as a result we see major characters drift into the background and new plots get inserted with little connection to the last. The four part season finale was particularly jarring; it transported the entire cast to a new dimension entirely, and while it was often amusing, it didn't really conclude the themes of the season. So in many ways it was about the journey more than the meaning. Between the season's beginning and ending, Angel went from the leader of the team to a subordinate after venturing into dark territory one time too many, setting the stage for things to come more than actually resolving things.
There were positive changes as well, though, the most important being the introduction of a fifth main character, the demon bartender Lorne. For most of the season, he serves as little but a humorous source of exposition and thematic underpinnings. His ability to read the souls of others (but only when they're singing, leading to a running gag of watching people who really shouldn't sing do exactly that,) gave plots momentum and characters motivations, but in the end, the expansion of his character was arguably the only positive to come out of the finale.
So what can I learn from this sort of season? For starters, one of the greatest curses of most game designers is that they almost never have control over their own projects. The lead designer, publishers, and test groups might have priority in determining the game's story and identity, and it's up to the designer to take these changes in stride and keep the story coherent and the themes recognizable. Television is no different; if a major character's actor has to leave the show, it is up to the writers to explain why and alter the story to fit this. It also introduces a dichotomy you rarely see in video games; the heroic character and the personality that doesn't quite match up. Usually, a character that is a badass in gameplay is a badass in all aspects of life, but it doesn't have to be this way. Lara Croft could reveal a dorky side not seen when raiding tombs, or Mario could admit to some hidden angst, though actually his brother Luigi has lately become a perfect example of this. It won't change gameplay much, but it makes the character more three dimensional and identifiable; always a welcome thing in the sea of uninspired protagonists we must sometimes endure in this industry.
The main show I've been watching is Angel, starting with season 2, thus continuing my lovely and totally non-linear exploration of Joss Whedon's work. We'll get to Mr. Whedon in detail in a later inspiration post, but I found it strange how I watched his work. I only watched Buffy sporadically at first, watching maybe two or three episodes a season while slowly learning about the actual fate of the characters. So I see one good episode, and in the meantime I learn that this character is dead, and that one is now gay, and so on. This continued until I finally watched it regularly in order around season 6, which is terrible timing, I know.
Angel was no different. I started watching consistently late season 4, well aware of the general fate of earlier characters up to that point. It strange that, despite this odd route through his work, Joss Whedon remains one of my favorite writers. Nonetheless, it makes for an interesting experience when I watched the season 2 episodes for the first time, well aware of the fates of the characters. And, since this WAS a Joss Whedon show, knowing that they were all doomed.
First of all, let me admit something right now; I'm much more of a Buffy fan than an Angel fan. I could relate more to the characters, since I never was a centuries old vampire doomed to live a life of repentance or a resident of L.A., but I have been socially awkward in high school. I also liked the seasonal themes, with their usual big bad villains thwarted upon season's end, more than the eternal adversary of Wolfram and Hart. I guess Buffy just had a more consistent theme for me.
Nonetheless, there is a lot to like about Angel. My favorite elements are when they take the usual "badass" elements of the heroes and subvert them. Angel himself is a great example of this. He's physically extremely competent and oozes style, but his years of isolation and brooding make him react as expected when forced to engage in real, human interaction. It makes him stuttering and awkward, which never fails to be funny. The same is true whenever his image is called into question in any way; he tries to make a joke, he gets ignored, or someone just laughs off his self-imposed identity as a tragic figure. Early on, the character Wesley has a similar experience. The difference is that Wesley imagines himself as a similar tragic badass, but he lacks even the capacity to perform that well. So the two characters are reflections of each other; one is only confident in the image he maintains of himself, and the other is least successful and confident when he tries to force himself into the same image.
But this is still season 1 material. Season 2 sees the identities of both characters crumble, as one's image falls apart due to the return of a lost love and the other has the role of leader thrust upon him, ironically making him more into the tragic hero just as he tries to escape his earlier identity. A similar experience comes to the third male lead, who is forced to reassess his own role as a champion for the least fortunate as his work with the group makes him distant to old friends, and the final main character watches her own identity as a bubbly socialite crumble, her new duty taking a toll on her time and her mentality.
It's a lot to work with, and unfortunately this season doesn't always succeed with it. For one thing, it's forced to endure multiple cast changes and other obstacles to the story as written, and as a result we see major characters drift into the background and new plots get inserted with little connection to the last. The four part season finale was particularly jarring; it transported the entire cast to a new dimension entirely, and while it was often amusing, it didn't really conclude the themes of the season. So in many ways it was about the journey more than the meaning. Between the season's beginning and ending, Angel went from the leader of the team to a subordinate after venturing into dark territory one time too many, setting the stage for things to come more than actually resolving things.
There were positive changes as well, though, the most important being the introduction of a fifth main character, the demon bartender Lorne. For most of the season, he serves as little but a humorous source of exposition and thematic underpinnings. His ability to read the souls of others (but only when they're singing, leading to a running gag of watching people who really shouldn't sing do exactly that,) gave plots momentum and characters motivations, but in the end, the expansion of his character was arguably the only positive to come out of the finale.
So what can I learn from this sort of season? For starters, one of the greatest curses of most game designers is that they almost never have control over their own projects. The lead designer, publishers, and test groups might have priority in determining the game's story and identity, and it's up to the designer to take these changes in stride and keep the story coherent and the themes recognizable. Television is no different; if a major character's actor has to leave the show, it is up to the writers to explain why and alter the story to fit this. It also introduces a dichotomy you rarely see in video games; the heroic character and the personality that doesn't quite match up. Usually, a character that is a badass in gameplay is a badass in all aspects of life, but it doesn't have to be this way. Lara Croft could reveal a dorky side not seen when raiding tombs, or Mario could admit to some hidden angst, though actually his brother Luigi has lately become a perfect example of this. It won't change gameplay much, but it makes the character more three dimensional and identifiable; always a welcome thing in the sea of uninspired protagonists we must sometimes endure in this industry.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
My Inspirations: When Mario was a Video Game Character
This next inspirational posting is about Super Mario Brothers. But it's not really about Super Mario Brothers.
We return, again, to my childhood and very early into it. How early? I'm not positive, but back in the six-seven age range again. I was already falling into patterns that defined and plagued me for the rest of my life so far. I was, and often still am, timid, introverted, and unable to try new things without taking time to study them. This was the ancient, almost lost, truly terrifying era where I, among other things, was afraid of video games.
Oh, there were some I liked as a kid. I never had an Atari growing up; my parents settled for the Intellivision instead at this early age. A few of the games were fun. There was Snafu, an early Tron knock-off that moved at white knuckle Intellivision speeds (yes I'm joking,) and had some excellent music for its time (not joking.) I could conjure up its tunes in my brains now. In fact, here they come. That'll get old soon. And there was Frog Bog, where your character leaped in between two lily pads and tried to catch bugs. There were almost no obstacles, dangers, or consequences, but I liked it that way. There was a higher difficulty setting where the frog could fall in between the lily pads, but I didn't prefer that one. That's right, I didn't yet have the hard core skills for the real version of Frog Bog.
As for the other games, they terrified me, especially the ones where death was inevitable and the entire point of the game was just to survive as long as you could. But there were many games that scared me. Dungeons and Dragons, where your own arrows could reflect and kill you faster than the monsters and you could hear those monsters growling before they burst out of the darkness at you. And then there was a space fighter I no longer can remember the name of. You flew through some planet's canyon or trench system (I'd guess that Star Wars came out shortly before the game did, yes,) and shot at missiles fired at the Earth. The entire screen shook when a missile was destroyed, but if you failed to destroy them all in time, they launched at our home planet and blew it up. It was terrifying stuff when you're seven.
I spent most of my video game time watching my dad play the games, and at the time, my time spent in arcades were about the same. The closest thing to an arcade that we went to, though, was the old Showbiz Pizza. If you don't know what Showbiz Pizza was, think of the modern day Chuck E. Cheese with slightly different creepy musician automata. In those days, my parents would give me two dollars to play in the arcades. Hours later, I would return and give them back $1.50. I spent that time watching the games.
Was it motivated by fear? Probably. But with time, fascination began to replace the fear. I studied the games and how people played them, but mostly I wanted to see how they worked when a competent player was playing it. Rarely, at least at first, did it matter. But as I got older, the games got more complex, until I saw what was my first video game love.
Its name was Super Mario Brothers, and damned if it wasn't the most incredible thing I ever saw. By that point, I probably knew what Donkey Kong and even the original Mario Brothers were, but that didn't matter to me then. Mario was just a video game character, not THE video game character, so I could see the game with no assumptions and bias. What did matter was that every time I saw this game, it was different. Once, Mario was on a grassy overworld. The next, he was swimming underwater. Then he was in a castle full of spinning lava lines. Then it was night, and turtles were throwing stars at him (I have no idea why child me thought hammers were stars, but I vividly remember that was exactly what they were at the time.) I didn't understand this game at all as a kid, and that enthralled me.
This wasn't the first game that I personally began to play, at least fairly regularly and seriously, but I like to think that it was what won me as a gamer anyway. It was here that I first saw games as something to cherish, something worth more than a study. And it was this game that made me realize that games were not simple patterns and tests of memorization and skill. They were adventures.
It was also here that I did find the first game I really started to play, but that is a story in itself. Since the game in question kind of sucked, it should make an interesting one.
We return, again, to my childhood and very early into it. How early? I'm not positive, but back in the six-seven age range again. I was already falling into patterns that defined and plagued me for the rest of my life so far. I was, and often still am, timid, introverted, and unable to try new things without taking time to study them. This was the ancient, almost lost, truly terrifying era where I, among other things, was afraid of video games.
Oh, there were some I liked as a kid. I never had an Atari growing up; my parents settled for the Intellivision instead at this early age. A few of the games were fun. There was Snafu, an early Tron knock-off that moved at white knuckle Intellivision speeds (yes I'm joking,) and had some excellent music for its time (not joking.) I could conjure up its tunes in my brains now. In fact, here they come. That'll get old soon. And there was Frog Bog, where your character leaped in between two lily pads and tried to catch bugs. There were almost no obstacles, dangers, or consequences, but I liked it that way. There was a higher difficulty setting where the frog could fall in between the lily pads, but I didn't prefer that one. That's right, I didn't yet have the hard core skills for the real version of Frog Bog.
As for the other games, they terrified me, especially the ones where death was inevitable and the entire point of the game was just to survive as long as you could. But there were many games that scared me. Dungeons and Dragons, where your own arrows could reflect and kill you faster than the monsters and you could hear those monsters growling before they burst out of the darkness at you. And then there was a space fighter I no longer can remember the name of. You flew through some planet's canyon or trench system (I'd guess that Star Wars came out shortly before the game did, yes,) and shot at missiles fired at the Earth. The entire screen shook when a missile was destroyed, but if you failed to destroy them all in time, they launched at our home planet and blew it up. It was terrifying stuff when you're seven.
I spent most of my video game time watching my dad play the games, and at the time, my time spent in arcades were about the same. The closest thing to an arcade that we went to, though, was the old Showbiz Pizza. If you don't know what Showbiz Pizza was, think of the modern day Chuck E. Cheese with slightly different creepy musician automata. In those days, my parents would give me two dollars to play in the arcades. Hours later, I would return and give them back $1.50. I spent that time watching the games.
Was it motivated by fear? Probably. But with time, fascination began to replace the fear. I studied the games and how people played them, but mostly I wanted to see how they worked when a competent player was playing it. Rarely, at least at first, did it matter. But as I got older, the games got more complex, until I saw what was my first video game love.
Its name was Super Mario Brothers, and damned if it wasn't the most incredible thing I ever saw. By that point, I probably knew what Donkey Kong and even the original Mario Brothers were, but that didn't matter to me then. Mario was just a video game character, not THE video game character, so I could see the game with no assumptions and bias. What did matter was that every time I saw this game, it was different. Once, Mario was on a grassy overworld. The next, he was swimming underwater. Then he was in a castle full of spinning lava lines. Then it was night, and turtles were throwing stars at him (I have no idea why child me thought hammers were stars, but I vividly remember that was exactly what they were at the time.) I didn't understand this game at all as a kid, and that enthralled me.
This wasn't the first game that I personally began to play, at least fairly regularly and seriously, but I like to think that it was what won me as a gamer anyway. It was here that I first saw games as something to cherish, something worth more than a study. And it was this game that made me realize that games were not simple patterns and tests of memorization and skill. They were adventures.
It was also here that I did find the first game I really started to play, but that is a story in itself. Since the game in question kind of sucked, it should make an interesting one.
Friday, February 8, 2008
My Ideas: Cataclysm
This is a very noteworthy and more than a little terrifying entry. You see, it will be the first I'll be posting one of my video game ideas; more importantly, it's one of my former "Big 16." For most of my life, I slowly cultivated my ideas, writing design documents when possible, and separating them into categories with time. For years, this division was purely temporal. The first division was the first four games, then the next four, and so on. I soon had four folders of four ideas each, each representing an approximate period of my life.
But I soon realized that this was, well, completely arbitrary, and about the time my fourth folder filled up, I renamed them to reflect my general mental state and design style at the time. The first folder contained what I called Heritage ideas, since they stretched back for years, as far back as high school or even older. They lacked a purposeful design similarity, instead coming from very early whims, adaptations of popular series that I made out of naiveté or practice and altered into original ideas, or the fragments of literal dreams. The second folder, which is as far as today's description will take us, is for the genre ideas. Made early in college, they are, honestly, not the work I'm the proudest of. In short, these are the games I made when a specific genre of game or a single game of that genre appealed to me, and I wanted to make a game that aped and/or improved this genre. In short, this was my "me too" period, and for years I sort of was ashamed at the minimal depth of these games. Yes, the original four games of this set were part of the original Big 16, but I tended to avoid thinking about or working on them.
Well, no more. If I'm going to expose my brain to the public (heh, if my microscopic audience counts,) then this is the perfect place to start. So let's start with the game that probably got the least love over the years: Cataclysm.
Cataclysm's origins were simple. I wanted to make a fighting game. This was in the year 1997 or so. Fighting games were long since passed the point of being new, but the fight for the heart of the genre had begun. As long as the Super Nintendo and Genesis were the consoles du jour, the games had to remain in two dimensions, and Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat flourished. But the same was not true of the arcades, and the first Virtua Fighters and Tekkens began to stake their own territory; territory that would become theirs once the Playstation became that generation's controlling console. Its 3D processing made such games naturals, while the Dark Stalkers and other carriers of the 2D banner were more ideally suited to the less popular Saturn.
As if often the case, I saw this revolution and mostly hated it. I liked ki-based projectiles and the impossible physics two dimensional sprites emphasized. Hell, I wanted it to go farther after seeing games like Dark Stalkers. Years later, Guilty Gear and the various Marvel/Capcom projects helped fill the void, but for the time I wanted to try making a game that used three dimensions but never lost the alien and overkill elements of earlier fighting games.
The result was Cataclysm. Like all games of this folder, I created this basic concept first and the story and setting second. I eventually decided on the clichéd fighting tournament with a sci-fi twist. The Cataclysm of the game was the universe-wide accepted term for the Big Bang, presumably because they determined that the universe followed the Deep Crunch/Big Bang model, and thus our universe's origin meant that the last one died. But that's more than enough depth for a fighting game. The important part was that not all of the Cataclysm split to form the universe. Twenty seven pieces remained more or less whole from this first moment, manifesting as physical objects that granted power.
Empress Verona, the despotic ruler of the Star Wars-style galactic empire, discovered this and managed to gain fourteen of these pieces, becoming nigh-unstoppable. However, until she got her hands on all twenty seven pieces, she would still fall short of perfection. The trouble was that the last thirteen pieces were not just physically within their hosts; they had bonded in various ways and could not be forcefully taken. For her to gain these pieces, she had to compel their owners to voluntarily risk their loss. She started the tournament and used herself as the incentive, promising that she would have a private audience with the tournament's winner.
The game's thirteen original, non-hidden playable characters were these thirteen owners of the Cataclysm, and each wanted a reason for this audience. The power an empress could offer was usually moot, as the Cataclysm wielders could sense each other and would know of her power as well. They fought each other for the right to fight her, though as usual for these games each had their own motivation. Some wanted the power of the unified Cataclysm shards, just as Verona did. Others wanted to fight her to get revenge, after being victims of her empire's military. Some just wanted to get proof of their own skill. Whatever the goal, Verona was unconcerned. After all, even a challenger that managed to earn the Cataclysms of all of their fellow competitors would have only thirteen parts, one less than Verona herself used.
The game featured attempts to make combat much simpler, yet flashier. I was impressed with the idea of having a single button that activated all special moves, selecting a direction or performing a directional combination and pressing the button would let the player use any of the special moves. I was impressed with this until Smash Brothers came out, at least. More important at the time was that most characters had their own system. For example, there was a character named Gemini that was actually a brother and sister from a deer-based humanoid race. The sister was the Cataclysm holder, but only the brother had any fighting training, so she used her Cataclysm shard to merge their bodies. This not only made them a better fighter, this gave them the ability to do two things at once, so they could perform a special move while blocking or use two moves at once. Another character was a ghost trapped in undeath by the Cataclysm. He could phase through attacks or even walls and the floor. Other characters included a demonic alien who could summon minions using the Cataclysm, and an especially stupid character whose stone-based Cataclysm powers were more dangerous than that of other fighters, but they all had a risk of damaging him.
The game was noteworthy for a few others things, not all of which I'm that happy about. For example, the main character, Ares the Earth's champion, was supposedly from Africa, making him the first non-white main character I created. I felt pretty good about that at the time, though he was a completely flat character, and the fact he came from my most reviled idea doesn't help. Fortunately, since then, nearly all games with any characters to speak of have a minority character or characters as the lead or among the main characters. But that's a complicated issue and worth another blog entry entirely.
Other things that bother me these days include the fact that the game's big twist amounted to basically just math (Oh no, the villain has 14 ultimate artifacts of power! And I only have 13 ultimate artifacts of power!) and several silly or flat characters. Ares, for example, was the genetically engineered, amnesiac, cybernetic member of a secret society with an evil father/creator. I'd have to work hard to make him a bigger cliché than that. Another character could use her Cataclysm to make aerial attacks and wanted all the shards to give her the ability of true flight. So this advanced galactic empire spanned the entire universe, but it took twenty seven pieces of ultimate power to fly? Jetpacks weren't invented?
Still, the idea had several kernels of a good idea, like the one-button special movies, and a later idea that replaced block with several types of defenses. Characters could block, parry, evade, etc., and each were a more effective (or the only effective) defense against each attack, adding another layer to offense and defense. Mind you, I mostly "borrowed" this system from the later system of saves that 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons introduced, but it's still new to the fighting game. And with a little work, a galaxy-wide fighting game could introduce very original characters and fighting styles. Though I still needed to work out how capturing shards of the Cataclysm from enemies would improve a character. The easy answer would be to simply give a character one additional special move for every enemy shard captured, but would that be the answer I would have now, if I were to remake the game? I don't think it would be.
Finally, this game (and more importantly my recent analysis of it,) is making me less apprehensive of the idea of making more genre-based ideas. These are not necessarily the dregs of my creativity, not if I refuse to let it be so. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I entered the first new idea into my genre idea folder since college. The idea is only a page or two in length, but it has a lot of promise. With some effort, I can make it say something more than "me too." What other ideas can I make say that, ideas I may have abandoned?
But I soon realized that this was, well, completely arbitrary, and about the time my fourth folder filled up, I renamed them to reflect my general mental state and design style at the time. The first folder contained what I called Heritage ideas, since they stretched back for years, as far back as high school or even older. They lacked a purposeful design similarity, instead coming from very early whims, adaptations of popular series that I made out of naiveté or practice and altered into original ideas, or the fragments of literal dreams. The second folder, which is as far as today's description will take us, is for the genre ideas. Made early in college, they are, honestly, not the work I'm the proudest of. In short, these are the games I made when a specific genre of game or a single game of that genre appealed to me, and I wanted to make a game that aped and/or improved this genre. In short, this was my "me too" period, and for years I sort of was ashamed at the minimal depth of these games. Yes, the original four games of this set were part of the original Big 16, but I tended to avoid thinking about or working on them.
Well, no more. If I'm going to expose my brain to the public (heh, if my microscopic audience counts,) then this is the perfect place to start. So let's start with the game that probably got the least love over the years: Cataclysm.
Cataclysm's origins were simple. I wanted to make a fighting game. This was in the year 1997 or so. Fighting games were long since passed the point of being new, but the fight for the heart of the genre had begun. As long as the Super Nintendo and Genesis were the consoles du jour, the games had to remain in two dimensions, and Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat flourished. But the same was not true of the arcades, and the first Virtua Fighters and Tekkens began to stake their own territory; territory that would become theirs once the Playstation became that generation's controlling console. Its 3D processing made such games naturals, while the Dark Stalkers and other carriers of the 2D banner were more ideally suited to the less popular Saturn.
As if often the case, I saw this revolution and mostly hated it. I liked ki-based projectiles and the impossible physics two dimensional sprites emphasized. Hell, I wanted it to go farther after seeing games like Dark Stalkers. Years later, Guilty Gear and the various Marvel/Capcom projects helped fill the void, but for the time I wanted to try making a game that used three dimensions but never lost the alien and overkill elements of earlier fighting games.
The result was Cataclysm. Like all games of this folder, I created this basic concept first and the story and setting second. I eventually decided on the clichéd fighting tournament with a sci-fi twist. The Cataclysm of the game was the universe-wide accepted term for the Big Bang, presumably because they determined that the universe followed the Deep Crunch/Big Bang model, and thus our universe's origin meant that the last one died. But that's more than enough depth for a fighting game. The important part was that not all of the Cataclysm split to form the universe. Twenty seven pieces remained more or less whole from this first moment, manifesting as physical objects that granted power.
Empress Verona, the despotic ruler of the Star Wars-style galactic empire, discovered this and managed to gain fourteen of these pieces, becoming nigh-unstoppable. However, until she got her hands on all twenty seven pieces, she would still fall short of perfection. The trouble was that the last thirteen pieces were not just physically within their hosts; they had bonded in various ways and could not be forcefully taken. For her to gain these pieces, she had to compel their owners to voluntarily risk their loss. She started the tournament and used herself as the incentive, promising that she would have a private audience with the tournament's winner.
The game's thirteen original, non-hidden playable characters were these thirteen owners of the Cataclysm, and each wanted a reason for this audience. The power an empress could offer was usually moot, as the Cataclysm wielders could sense each other and would know of her power as well. They fought each other for the right to fight her, though as usual for these games each had their own motivation. Some wanted the power of the unified Cataclysm shards, just as Verona did. Others wanted to fight her to get revenge, after being victims of her empire's military. Some just wanted to get proof of their own skill. Whatever the goal, Verona was unconcerned. After all, even a challenger that managed to earn the Cataclysms of all of their fellow competitors would have only thirteen parts, one less than Verona herself used.
The game featured attempts to make combat much simpler, yet flashier. I was impressed with the idea of having a single button that activated all special moves, selecting a direction or performing a directional combination and pressing the button would let the player use any of the special moves. I was impressed with this until Smash Brothers came out, at least. More important at the time was that most characters had their own system. For example, there was a character named Gemini that was actually a brother and sister from a deer-based humanoid race. The sister was the Cataclysm holder, but only the brother had any fighting training, so she used her Cataclysm shard to merge their bodies. This not only made them a better fighter, this gave them the ability to do two things at once, so they could perform a special move while blocking or use two moves at once. Another character was a ghost trapped in undeath by the Cataclysm. He could phase through attacks or even walls and the floor. Other characters included a demonic alien who could summon minions using the Cataclysm, and an especially stupid character whose stone-based Cataclysm powers were more dangerous than that of other fighters, but they all had a risk of damaging him.
The game was noteworthy for a few others things, not all of which I'm that happy about. For example, the main character, Ares the Earth's champion, was supposedly from Africa, making him the first non-white main character I created. I felt pretty good about that at the time, though he was a completely flat character, and the fact he came from my most reviled idea doesn't help. Fortunately, since then, nearly all games with any characters to speak of have a minority character or characters as the lead or among the main characters. But that's a complicated issue and worth another blog entry entirely.
Other things that bother me these days include the fact that the game's big twist amounted to basically just math (Oh no, the villain has 14 ultimate artifacts of power! And I only have 13 ultimate artifacts of power!) and several silly or flat characters. Ares, for example, was the genetically engineered, amnesiac, cybernetic member of a secret society with an evil father/creator. I'd have to work hard to make him a bigger cliché than that. Another character could use her Cataclysm to make aerial attacks and wanted all the shards to give her the ability of true flight. So this advanced galactic empire spanned the entire universe, but it took twenty seven pieces of ultimate power to fly? Jetpacks weren't invented?
Still, the idea had several kernels of a good idea, like the one-button special movies, and a later idea that replaced block with several types of defenses. Characters could block, parry, evade, etc., and each were a more effective (or the only effective) defense against each attack, adding another layer to offense and defense. Mind you, I mostly "borrowed" this system from the later system of saves that 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons introduced, but it's still new to the fighting game. And with a little work, a galaxy-wide fighting game could introduce very original characters and fighting styles. Though I still needed to work out how capturing shards of the Cataclysm from enemies would improve a character. The easy answer would be to simply give a character one additional special move for every enemy shard captured, but would that be the answer I would have now, if I were to remake the game? I don't think it would be.
Finally, this game (and more importantly my recent analysis of it,) is making me less apprehensive of the idea of making more genre-based ideas. These are not necessarily the dregs of my creativity, not if I refuse to let it be so. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I entered the first new idea into my genre idea folder since college. The idea is only a page or two in length, but it has a lot of promise. With some effort, I can make it say something more than "me too." What other ideas can I make say that, ideas I may have abandoned?
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Rantings: The Concept of Intromo
Today's subject, which will hopefully and mercifully be shorter than the last ranting, is a concept I came up with about a year ago. It relates to the ongoing fight for the "soul" of video games. That is, are they art or entertainment? Is multi-player, whether cooperative or competitive, the superior, default, or even the only valid system to use? Are narrative games doomed to extinction, and should they be?
All of these are excellent questions, and some variant of them will be addressed later on in this blog. However, the concept of "Intromo" is more mercenary. How successful is an intellectual property going to be for the multiplayer environment? And, more importantly, when is making a single-player game the best way to attract a multi-player audience? Intromo tries to address that.
The entire multi-player standard as a revolution came from the success of a few very successful individual games or series, including Halo and World of Warcraft. However, the big problem with these games is that their greatest strength is also the industry's greatest weakness; there is no ending to the gameplay. A narrative game has an ending, and after it's completed, attention will usually wane after another replay or two at the most. For games with ongoing payment systems like a subscription, that's a death sentence. On the other hand, it means that the gamer is then ready to buy a new game, probably of a similar genre. When the gameplay lasts forever, there's no incentive for the gamer to get a new game, let alone maintain a second game that offers a regular subscription.
This makes it harder for other companies to work around a multi-player game with such legs. The ur-example, and the one that made me start to think on this subject, is World of Warcraft. At least for games with a subscription model and a price point of their level, they have moved beyond dominance of the industry. They are, unquestionably, THE fantasy MMO. So, let's say you're a company that wants to make a new MMO. They couldn't compete with WoW; they lack the fan base and the financial resources to create a game that attracts the same audience. The comparisons to WoW would be inevitable, and when the point comes where WoW becomes so graphically or technically out of date that a replacement could defeat it, Blizzard is in the easiest position to make the sequel that does just that.
The first alternative to this death sentence is easy; just make a game different enough to attract a different audience. And many companies and games do just that. EVE Online has scored a niche among science fiction enthusiasts, City of Heroes did the same for superhero fans, and so on. But there are only so many settings to go around, and while there are some interesting gaps to fill, they can't last forever. And while none of the games mentioned above have remotely dominated their setting the way WoW has, that brings up a dangerous question for prospective publishers; are they not as popular because they don't have the polish of WoW, making this potential new game the one to accomplish this, or because these settings just don't have as large an audience as the traditional fantasy setting? If the latter, they may fail to compete with the established game, let alone replace it.
The next option is to base the new game on something that already has an audience. Lord of the Rings, for example, managed to create a successful MMO by appealing to Tolkein fans. And remember, Warcraft was an established IP well before their MMO came out. This is risky as well, however, as Dungeons and Dragons Online and even Star Wars Galaxies have found out. Granted, there's more to attracting an audience than a popular name, and the quality of the game must also be of a certain standard.
But it is my opinion that to be successful in the long-term, both quality and the attraction of the setting are necessary elements. This is originally where the term Intromo came from. It suggests a game that has limited multi-player options, but the world it creates is so exciting that it brings its audience with it to a later multi-player game. So Intromo is short for Introduction to MMO, which itself an anagram for Massively Multiplayer Online. But the concept is expansive, and it can refer to any later multi-player systems an IP develops, or even additional multi-player features added to a primarily single-player game.
What sort of game has good Intromo? There are a few components. First, the world of the game must be expansive, full of interesting characters, and distinctive traits. For example, many Final Fantasy games would be capable of supporting multi-player gameplay, and the series as a whole created such a recognizable experience it supported its own MMORPG for years now, though I still suspect that had they found a way to include popular locations like Final Fantasy 7's Midgard, it could have neared WoW's level of success.
Also important is the impression that the world of the IP exists beyond that of the single-player game's characters. As good a series as it is, God of War would be a bad example. Nearly every character exists as an eventual target for Kratos to destroy, and there's little appeal to playing anyone but him. By contrast, while Master Chief is easily the most popular character of the Halo universe, the series has succeeded by surrounding him with sympathetic allies and pointing out that the character is merely the most noteworthy example of an already impressive species of warriors, the Spartans, and the player can easily insert himself or herself into the role of any other Spartan and feel just as important.
Finally, the world must demonstrate a wide range of actions people in it can participate in. If the only thing you see people do in your IP is shoot each other, you might have enough for competitive multi-player deathmatches, but an MMO would be nearly impossible. The more people you expect your game to attract, the wider the range of heroes you have to provide, from battle-ready soldiers to free-spirited mercanaries to pacifistic entertainers.
The concept of Intromo has already been instructive in my game designs, and I have reconsidered earlier ideas and reverse engineered them to include more multi-player options or room for such expansions, even in ones that must initially be single-player narratives. At the very worst, it makes your world more vibrant, your characters more multi-dimensional, and your gameplay more varied.
All of these are excellent questions, and some variant of them will be addressed later on in this blog. However, the concept of "Intromo" is more mercenary. How successful is an intellectual property going to be for the multiplayer environment? And, more importantly, when is making a single-player game the best way to attract a multi-player audience? Intromo tries to address that.
The entire multi-player standard as a revolution came from the success of a few very successful individual games or series, including Halo and World of Warcraft. However, the big problem with these games is that their greatest strength is also the industry's greatest weakness; there is no ending to the gameplay. A narrative game has an ending, and after it's completed, attention will usually wane after another replay or two at the most. For games with ongoing payment systems like a subscription, that's a death sentence. On the other hand, it means that the gamer is then ready to buy a new game, probably of a similar genre. When the gameplay lasts forever, there's no incentive for the gamer to get a new game, let alone maintain a second game that offers a regular subscription.
This makes it harder for other companies to work around a multi-player game with such legs. The ur-example, and the one that made me start to think on this subject, is World of Warcraft. At least for games with a subscription model and a price point of their level, they have moved beyond dominance of the industry. They are, unquestionably, THE fantasy MMO. So, let's say you're a company that wants to make a new MMO. They couldn't compete with WoW; they lack the fan base and the financial resources to create a game that attracts the same audience. The comparisons to WoW would be inevitable, and when the point comes where WoW becomes so graphically or technically out of date that a replacement could defeat it, Blizzard is in the easiest position to make the sequel that does just that.
The first alternative to this death sentence is easy; just make a game different enough to attract a different audience. And many companies and games do just that. EVE Online has scored a niche among science fiction enthusiasts, City of Heroes did the same for superhero fans, and so on. But there are only so many settings to go around, and while there are some interesting gaps to fill, they can't last forever. And while none of the games mentioned above have remotely dominated their setting the way WoW has, that brings up a dangerous question for prospective publishers; are they not as popular because they don't have the polish of WoW, making this potential new game the one to accomplish this, or because these settings just don't have as large an audience as the traditional fantasy setting? If the latter, they may fail to compete with the established game, let alone replace it.
The next option is to base the new game on something that already has an audience. Lord of the Rings, for example, managed to create a successful MMO by appealing to Tolkein fans. And remember, Warcraft was an established IP well before their MMO came out. This is risky as well, however, as Dungeons and Dragons Online and even Star Wars Galaxies have found out. Granted, there's more to attracting an audience than a popular name, and the quality of the game must also be of a certain standard.
But it is my opinion that to be successful in the long-term, both quality and the attraction of the setting are necessary elements. This is originally where the term Intromo came from. It suggests a game that has limited multi-player options, but the world it creates is so exciting that it brings its audience with it to a later multi-player game. So Intromo is short for Introduction to MMO, which itself an anagram for Massively Multiplayer Online. But the concept is expansive, and it can refer to any later multi-player systems an IP develops, or even additional multi-player features added to a primarily single-player game.
What sort of game has good Intromo? There are a few components. First, the world of the game must be expansive, full of interesting characters, and distinctive traits. For example, many Final Fantasy games would be capable of supporting multi-player gameplay, and the series as a whole created such a recognizable experience it supported its own MMORPG for years now, though I still suspect that had they found a way to include popular locations like Final Fantasy 7's Midgard, it could have neared WoW's level of success.
Also important is the impression that the world of the IP exists beyond that of the single-player game's characters. As good a series as it is, God of War would be a bad example. Nearly every character exists as an eventual target for Kratos to destroy, and there's little appeal to playing anyone but him. By contrast, while Master Chief is easily the most popular character of the Halo universe, the series has succeeded by surrounding him with sympathetic allies and pointing out that the character is merely the most noteworthy example of an already impressive species of warriors, the Spartans, and the player can easily insert himself or herself into the role of any other Spartan and feel just as important.
Finally, the world must demonstrate a wide range of actions people in it can participate in. If the only thing you see people do in your IP is shoot each other, you might have enough for competitive multi-player deathmatches, but an MMO would be nearly impossible. The more people you expect your game to attract, the wider the range of heroes you have to provide, from battle-ready soldiers to free-spirited mercanaries to pacifistic entertainers.
The concept of Intromo has already been instructive in my game designs, and I have reconsidered earlier ideas and reverse engineered them to include more multi-player options or room for such expansions, even in ones that must initially be single-player narratives. At the very worst, it makes your world more vibrant, your characters more multi-dimensional, and your gameplay more varied.
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