"Call me Ishmael," Moby Dick begins, establishing the identity of our narrator for us and giving us an introduction to his character and particular voice as he will be telling us this story for quite a while and we should be comfortable with him. Moby Dick is a book full of strong characters--Queequeg, Ahab, Flask, Starbuck, Stubb--each of these character seem particularly individual and powerful in their own right, just as we feel we "get to know" Ishmael, we can "get to know" the other characters and understand their desires and quirks. However, the story isn't about any one of them, its about (and exists because of) all of them combined. Not only does Melville craft each of these characters expertly to allow each of them their own voice and personality, but the very form of Moby Dick is broken up into distinctive "voices" of different literary genres. Interrupting Ishmael's regular narrative come dramatic monologues (ch. 37), encyclopedic articles (ch. 32), affidavits (ch. 45), as well as histories, articles, and more. Indeed, Moby Dick is designed on a formal as well as a textual level to break up any overpowering voice. In fact, freedom of speech and choice may arguably be what Moby Dick most values, as the ultimate tragedy of its ending comes from Ahab drowning out everyone else with his power and desire.
A couple nights ago around 2 a.m., I finally finished season 1 of The Walking Dead by Telltale Games. When I credits stopped rolling and the epilogue tag showing little Clementine alone in the countryside faded out, I stumbled in daze back to my bed. Before I could roll over to sleep, I couldn't resist the impulse to put my arm around my sleeping wife and hold her tight for a moment. Perhaps more than any other media I've ever encountered, The Walking Dead opened my eyes to my relationships with other people, especially my wife and family. I was intensely grateful for the love I've been so lucky to feel throughout my life, and the forces of order that have made the path of my life relatively smooth and easy. As I felt all this, I concluded that The Walking Dead is really one of the greatest games I've ever played.
Except there's one problem. The Walking Dead isn't a game.
On Wednesday, August 14, 2013, I opened a new page in OneNote and wrote the beginning ideas for a post-apocalyptic survival game that I tentatively titled From the Dust. I recently posted this in my new tumblr Every Day a Game, where I post a game idea every day.
In that concept idea, I wrote this:
Co-op--goal is to rebuild civilization in the city (build all the shelters), but have separate motives? Could lead to personal+co-op victory double win condition?
Yesterday, Plaid Hat Games, one of the coolest tabletop game companies around, really, announced a new game Dead of Winter. Look at this from their announcement post:
Dead of Winter is a meta-cooperative psychological survival game. This means players are working together toward one common victory condition--but for each individual player to achieve victory, they must also complete their personal secret objective.
With this and the AC4 Moby Dick reveal, I'm feeling pretty good about my game design ideas lately. I'm very intrigued with what Plaid Hat is going to do with this idea. This next quote has me especially excited:
Dead of Winter is an experience that can only be accomplished through the medium of tabletop games. It is a story-centric game about surviving through a harsh winter in an apocalyptic world. The survivors are all dealing with their own psychological imperatives but must still find a way to work together to fight off outside threats, resolve crises, find food and supplies, and keep the colony's morale up.
Dead of Winter looks and sounds amazing. I'm glad Plaid Hat is making something so similar to my idea so I can play it without having to make it myself! It'll be interesting to see how it works out.
A couple months ago I posted an open letter to Ubisoft about how and why they should put Ahab and Moby Dick in Assassin'sCreed 4. Well, turns out either they listened to me, or they had the plan all along (probably the latter, but still).
Well, turns out I was right! You can indeed hunt the Great White Whale in AC4. And you kind of have to be an Ahab to ever find it. One article I read said you "may" see one in 48 hours of gameplay. However, if a friend finds one, he/she can choose to share the location with you in-game and the location will show up on your map as well. You have to act quick, though, because the location remains on your map for only 24 hours after it pops up (24 real hours, not gameplay hours).
And that's not all--once you do find the Whale, he's no easy kill. One video I found showed a player only bringing Moby down on his 16th attempt.
So no Ahab character like I suggested, but in reality, the white whale adventure in AC4 is a pretty accurate adaptation of the obsessive hunt from Melville's classic. (Just listen to the guy in that video--you can tell he's become obsessed with killing this whale.) The Assassin's Creed series has always prided itself on making history a "playground" but it's good to see them incorporating literature as well.
How to Do Things With Videogames might not be the book you're expecting it to be. It's not a game How Things Have Been Done With Videogames. As such, it reads more like a highlight reel of Bogost's blog posts on videogames than a single argument that unfolds from chapter to chapter.
design book that discusses technical solutions, neither is it a book of videogame criticism focused on the effectiveness of individual titles. Rather, it's an eye-opener book meant to show anyone and everyone what has been done with videogames so far in their relatively short history. Indeed, a better title for this book might be
Once you understand that purpose of this book, it's easy to see how well that purpose is fulfilled. The examples Bogost provides are varied and plentiful, allowing any curious reader to use the chapter on their topic(s) of choice as a starting point for a deeper study in a specific use of videogames. Rather than settling into the common and heated debate of "videogames as art," Bogost addresses that as simply one use for the medium in this book's first chapter, then moves on to much more varied and surprising uses for videogames, from empathy and kitsch to reverence and exercise.
While the individual chapters do not linearly unfold a single argument, Bogost frames the collection as evidence for one major point he wishes to make. He states this point explicitly in the introduction and conclusion: "We can understand the relevance of a medium by looking at the variety of things it does." The collection of essays that follows this introduction proves this point, which in turn is used to argue his final point in the conclusion: "Soon gamers will be the anomaly. If we're very fortunate, they'll disappear altogether. Instead we'll just find people of all sorts. And sometimes those people will play videogames. And it won't be a big deal, at all."
It may seem contradictory to write a book about videogames just to suggest that the gamer community will die out, but really what Bogost is trying to do is show how games will only continue to increase in use and relevance in our society such that we will no longer consider those who play videogames as some kind of specialized hobbyists. It's an interesting blend of hope and submission that Bogost presents the reader; videogames will indeed continue to grow in scope and legitimacy in society, but at the same time they will lose their edgy appeal and excitement until they become just another medium we interact with.
As Bogost says himself, this is certainly not headline material. It is, however, the most realistic and all-encompassing view of the future of videogames out there. The excitement of videogames as a medium is bound to die down in the coming years as current generations will grow up with them as a fact of daily life. When that happens, the excitement will come from individuals exploring and exploiting videogames' seemingly infinite uses in innovative and provocative ways. Bogost himself has done that elsewhere, but that's not what this book is about. This book is about showing the world videogames are here to stay and inviting us all to accept this new medium like we would any other, then inviting us to get past that and start using videogames as well and as interestingly as we do any other medium of expression.
Fonts and typefaces make for fascinating study, and we depend on them far more than most of us know. Before you even get the sense of the words, fonts shape your reaction to the content. Companies spend millions developing and picking the fonts for their marketing and packaging to make sure it sends the message they want. Steve Jobs famously insisted on the importance of typefaces, as Ashton Kutcher so kindly shows us in this clip:
Fonts are important because they aren't the content itself but they are deeply tied to the content in our minds. For longer works, the best fonts are "transparent," in this case meaning they don't distract the reader from the content itself (and in many ways the best fonts actually help the reader along without the average reader even knowing it). The most readable fonts like this are called old style fonts. For titles and design, the best fonts reflect the content in some way--think "Happy Halloween" in a font that looks like it's dripping ooze of some kind. Fonts like this are often called display fonts.
In videogames, the controls are in many ways the "font" for the medium. While this may not make sense at first, consider how the controls sit in exactly the same place between the content and the user as fonts do. Fonts aren't content, but they link the user to the content and help shape the user's experience with the content. Similarly, the controls for the game aren't the game itself, but they're the crucial link between the player and the content of the game. Just like good fonts, good controls are transparent--they get out of the way and let the user experience the game without having to work too hard to get through the controls to the game itself.
A Halloween-themed display font
I would argue that some controls are "display font" controls--the controls themselves attempt to mimic the content in some way--and some controls are "old style font" controls, meant to just let the user pass through them to the content without distraction.
On the "display font" end we find stuff like the Wii remote motion controls and QTEs (quick time events). These controls try and immerse the player in the moment by making them somehow mimic the action of a character within the game. When a zombie's trying to push through the door, for instance, and the game prompts you to push a single button repeatedly as fast as possible, the designers are trying to pass the feeling of urgency and strain to the player through the controls. As the character pushes frantically, the player pushes frantically. This is very similar to the idea of display fonts--what's seen reflects what's read.
On the "old style font" side we find thumb stick controls and dedicated buttons. Little thought and effort go into pushing the stick forward to moving the character forward. The controls are transparent--they get out of the way and let the player get immersed in the game world. When a player knows the triangle button is going to pick up an object, he or she no longer looks at onscreen prompts and just pushes the button when the character nears an object. These controls get out of the user's way and don't call attention to themselves, letting the content through to the player easily just like old style fonts.
Screenshot of Tomb Raider showing a QTE in which the player must "hold on"
to the ledge by repeatedly pressing the "Y" button
(image credit: gamepressure.com)
Rather than just being interesting, this analogy can help us both design and play games better. Suddenly, studying the principles of typography helps us understand principles of good game design and critical playing of games. Understanding the intent of the controls will help us understand the effectiveness of the controls, and, more importantly, what the game is communicating through the controls. For instance, when we understand the connection between WarioWareprompting us to put the Wii remote to our noses like an elephant's trunk to collect digital peanuts and petals coming out of the "o" in the word "flower" on a flyer for a community garden, we understand more how we're supposed to react to those controls--WarioWare's supposed to feel childish and a little absurd, just like a flyer for a community garden's supposed to be inviting and friendly.
Not only does this help us read individual games, but it helps explain recent trends in the gaming industry. Nintendo has always been the "family friendly" gaming system, but in the past there were always at least a few more mature titles for their consoles. The Nintendo 64 was meant for kids, but it still had James Bond games. The Wii, however, is nearly devoid of any serious or mature titles. As a result, "core" gamers have all but left Nintendo behind, something the company tried to fix with the Wii U by attracting more mature titles like Batman: Arkham City and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag to the system. But why did Nintendo lose this market in the first place? Because the Wii is inherently "display font"-control oriented. When motion controls are added to the mix, suddenly everything about the game becomes about imitating with your body what you see on the screen, and that interface becomes the whole enjoyment of the experience rather than the content itself. To use our analogy, playing a serious game like The Last of Us with a Wii remote would be like reading the entirety of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in a font with little cartoon zombies peeking around the letters. If Nintendo wants to bring back "core" gamers, they need a way to provide more transparent controls, not more gimmicky ones.
This analogy also explains why developers continue to use QTEs in games despite increasing player complaints. From a developers' point of view, a QTE is attractive--it cleanly and efficiently brings up a sense of urgency and allows for very a cinematic moment that still requires player interaction, thus looking and feeling like a movie while superficially remaining a game. From the players' perspective, however, it calls too much attention to the controls and actually pulls them out of the game world to deal with the physical demands of the controller. (Also, QTEs quickly become cruelly repetitive and eliminate strategy, but those are different issues.) Like display fonts themselves, QTEs can be emotionally effective when used sparingly and intelligently, but too many just distract from the content and cheapen the experience of the game.
Obviously, this analogy can't be taken too far, but it's useful in both designing and playing games to create more exact and emotionally effective communication. Intelligent controls can be the cherry on top of a great game (I'm thinking of Batman: Arkham Asylum/City's amazing Freeflow Combat controls) or they can be the reason a great concept becomes a trashed title (as was the frustrating and unfortunate case with the in-line skating/graffiti game Jet Set Radio).
So, next time you're playing or designing games, take a second and consider what font they're in.
This post originally appeared on a blog for a digital culture class. See it here. One of the major aspects of remix culture that Dr. Burton touched on but didn't have much time to get into is modding. Essentially, modding is digging into the code of an existing game to alter it in some way. Mods range from basic "unofficial patches" that just fix a few bugs that annoy players to complete overhauls that change nearly every aspect of the game such that it's unrecognizable from the original.
Interestingly, modders haven't faced much trouble with copyright issues, and many of the best mods have been adopted by the games' original developers and released as official content. The main reason for this is good mods sell games, and bad mods get ignored. If a mod is good enough, people will buy the original game just to play the mod, so it's in the developers'/publishers' interests to just let the modders do their thing. On the modders' end, it's good for them because it's an easy way to show their coding skills and get it out to a lot of people quickly without having to build a game from scratch.
Just like music remixes, however, mods have produced an entire subculture, and many of the world's most successful games actually began as mods. I'll show you three quick examples: Counter Strike, League of Legends/DOTA 2, and DayZ.
