During a blog debate between Michael Abbott and Iroquois Pliskin on the indie game Braid, Abbott made the observation that the game was extremely hard to follow if you weren’t a gamer. The game relies on numerous inherent assumptions that come from playing Super Mario Brothers, solving game puzzles, and knowing how to learn how to play a game. Jonathon Blow, the game’s creator, pointed out in the comments that we expect someone to know how to read if they want to understand a book. Mitch Krpata added in the comments that Braid is inherently founded on this aspect of gaming to the point that it’s off-beat to even criticize it…but it does raise the issue. How tricky should learning how to play video games actually be? Setting a barrier for experiencing a game also limits the number of people who will play it. If the best way to get at the heart of a game is a pre-existing skill at games, just as being able to read lets you understand a book, how do we make that process easier for people? How do we make it so every time you play a game, any game, you’ll be able to pick it up and start playing? Why not have a standardized method of control?

Think for a minute about what happens when you play a game for a few hours, do something else for a week, maybe play another game, and then go back to it. You have to re-learn the controls. Which button is crouch, which one is jump, how do I talk to people, how do I run? Contrast that to the idea of having to relearn how to watch a film or what to do when you pick up a book. It seems ludicrous that the fundamental mechanics of either media would have to be re-taught every time. It’s true that both film and books require several years of engaging with them before one becomes used to them. It’s easy for people to forget this stage of our development, but watching a six year old ask what’s going on during a movie over and over reveals this process. You have to learn how to watch or read, but you also only have to learn it once because those mediums use those skills over and over. There will always be the necessary changes from game genre to genre, an RTS obviously can’t work the same way as an FPS. Other mediums also have shifts that require some personal tweaking: stream of consciousness literature takes a while to master and numerous post-modern films require a different mental approach. But that’s still incredibly minor compared to engaging with an entirely new control scheme for a game that’s in the same genre as another. Why does Halo 3 need a different control scheme from Call of Duty 4?

Then again, there are lots of reasons these games have different controls. One game has vehicles in it, the other lets you call airstrikes. But these are game design issues, rules for the player to learn, not controls they need to master. Why would an artistic medium whose foundation is player input insist on screwing around with that aspect so much? It’s not as if games don’t already mimic one another’s interfaces or consoles by featuring similar control schemes anyways. They even made a universal controller during the last generation of consoles, to give you an idea of how similar they all are. Nor are the needs of various video games all that different. A brief review of the development of game controllers reveals one fundamental driving force: what is the best way to control an avatar moving in a virtual space? The Atari joystick led to the D-pad to maximize 2-D control. 3-D meant adding the analog-stick and then another one to control the camera. Balancing these issues is where to place the buttons in relation to this scheme. Not to harp on the Wii-mote, but it’s essentially another step in more precise avatar interactions in a 3-D environment. I want my avatar to do what I just did with my hand. Surely we’ll finally hit one method, one player input, that’s the most efficient of the bunch for a decent period of time?

There have been examples of standardized input systems before, chiefly in the adventure games of the late eighties and nineties. Numerous games were built using the text parser system under Sierra-On-Line and their variation in subject matter is indicative of how empowering a standardized input can be. From King’s Quest to Leisure Suit Larry, you could have a huge variety of games and activities using one single method. The icon system is just an extension of that. Refined and simplified, countless other games were created with the icon interface. Westwood Studios and their Lands of Lore and the Kyrandia series were all one click systems. Lucasarts was always screwing with their interface for some reason, but their best games all used the verb system to great effect. You had games about huge fantasy worlds, parodies of fairy tales, or gory voodoo mysteries. The exact same interface for blowing up a space ship was used for a game about saving the princess. And best of all, you could pick up any of those games after playing one and immediately know what you were doing. You knew to look around, hunt for items, and the other basic skills they all relied on. With the exception of the extensive sequels that have been coming out lately, what games coming out do you not have to sit down learn how to play every time? All of those companies making adventure games picked a way you interacted with their games and just stuck with it. As a result, huge variety in content and game design sprung forth because they were working within the confines of a set system of expression.

So basically, all I’m saying is that all games should have all their buttons be one particular set of buttons. This will shift from genre to genre, but even within that context each genre should have a standardized control scheme. It makes it so I can pick up any action game and start playing immediately. You wouldn’t need a tutorial because game design elements like what a gun does or how to use your special powers would be a self-explanatory menu system. Enforcing this would be a rather unpleasant affair (as is the reaction people would have), publishers would have to bluntly force any developer using their console to adhere to such a system. But the potential for games to start focusing on content and creating interesting experiences makes this a reasonable price to pay. Mitch Krpata once made an observation while trying to review a game whose genre he wasn’t use to: “When I play an action-adventure game, I’m drawing on decades of experience with that style of play. I can zoom right up the learning curve, without getting hung up on the basics.” Think of the enhanced artistic potential of games if players could do that with a game from ten years ago just as easily as a game today. In order for the medium to advance in complexity, it has to start with a simple foundation that is used repeatedly.

In a week that appears to signal the end of the tremendous 2008 holiday gaming glut, it’s nice to see that there are still a few essential buys that are impossible to ignore, even if they are of a decidedly smaller nature than most of the big ticket items we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.

The first thing I’m going to be doing this week is rediscovering my Shoryuken thumb for the sake of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.  Actually, “rediscovering” might not be the right word, as I never was able to pull off the damn dragon punch with anything approximating consistency.  Why can my thumb not master the mechanic of forward-down-down/forward?  I dunno, but I’ll be getting more practice at it this week with my boy Ken.  Seriously, this is another stop on the nostalgia train that’s shamelessly torn through the downloadable console services this year, but it looks like another fantastic one.  No fighter has ever come close to the pick-up-and-play appeal of Street Fighter II, and to see it all prettied up for an HD audience ought to be just enough to convince a whole bunch of people to lose their lives to it again for another month or so.

Of course, while I’m talking about the nostalgia train (which I’m sure looks a lot like a steam engine), I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the DS update of Chrono Trigger, which finally hits this week.  You know, since it almost broke the internet when it was announced back in the summer, I’ve heard almost nothing about this re-release…I guess with so many new properties making their way to portables and consoles this time of year, we don’t really have time to be spending on the graphical tweaks of a classic RPG.  Still, classic it is, and you’re going to be glad you have it next summer when you’ve got 30 hours to kill and no more Xbox games to play.

Other than those two?  Not much to see!  The DS’s Neopets Puzzle Adventure is actually a surprisingly challenging puzzler in a crowded DS market, so that’s certainly worth a look.  Band Manager, on the PC, could be fun or it could be a snooze (but if it has to do with music I may give it a run-through), and the Wii gets a couple of cooking games where you cook food that you can’t actually eat (I may never understand the appeal of this).  Am I overlooking something?  Banjo-Kazooie, maybe?

It’s a slow week, so maybe this is the time to catch up on some of the stuff you missed over the last month and a half or so (surely there’s something, yes?).  Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Gamasutra has an excellent write-up and collection of links for the 2008 Machinima Festival. Winner of several prizes was ‘The Monad’ whose creator was interviewed at Popmatters in this feature. Since his work received extensive coverage in that piece, this post is instead going to focus on the other breakout video of the awards: Egils Mednis’s The Ship.

The video contains no dialogue and is 11:18 minutes long. A man and a small boy, fully clothed, trudge through a long icy valley. When they eventually stop after several long minutes of them walking, the pair collapses and sleeps on the ground. Before long, a dull roaring sound awakens the man and boy. The Ship finally reveals itself, an enormous black monolithic structure that encompasses the entire valley and slowly approaches at an equally mind numbing pace. The movie continues on with the agonizingly slow chase of the Ship while the pair, dragged down by their own physical exhaustion, eventually succumb to its inhuman, constant pace. I’ll leave the ending’s surprisingly poignant comment on what this elaborate metaphor represents for those willing to watch the entire video. It’s open to interpretation and yet…not as much as one would expect.

As with other Machinima, the film is remarkable on its own and yet still serves as a prime example of what a director can accomplish without financial inhibition. This is a small project that is visually depicting what would usually cost thousands in animation or live footage. Counting in that you would have to use CGI to create the ship and that the icy valley would be impossible to depict without computers, the video’s sad metaphor and plodding pace would probably not justify the expense of making this video under normal means. Where would you find someone willing to pay for it? Yet with Machinima, such art not only has a place, it is warmly welcomed. Having an artistic medium where a director can achieve whatever he imagines is only half the struggle, having a welcoming audience and means of distribution for that creativity is the other half. I like to think ‘The Ship’ would be praised at any film festival, but at Machinima 2008 the artist walked away with top honors and praise. You can watch it anytime online through the link.

Tetris is a difficult game to screw up. A certified classic, it’s gripping in its ease of play and demands thumb-numbing madness because of its no-two-snowflakes-are-alike conception and ever-increasing difficulty. There’s little that hasn’t already been written about or executed in the puzzler, which was originally released in 1985 and has seen countless new incarnations and spinoffs, and just when you think you’ve seen everything, the WiiWare-released Tetris Party finds a way to add more to the discussion.

Tetris Party‘s main selling point—besides the fact that it’s, ya know, Tetris—is its mass of new features, which includes a co-op mode, online battle, field climber, stage racer, and a fill-in-the-blanks-style puzzle. Many of these spinoffs are Wii-exclusive and haven’t been seen in the Tetris lexicon in the past. But for all of the ingenuity in these new formats, Tetris Party is worth little more than its already-proven foundation.

The most useful function of Tetris Party is the online play. An obvious addition to any game at this point, it was just the sort of thing that would’ve been forgotten, making this game almost completely useless. What’s most innovative about this mod, however—and this is true of the regular battle mode as well—is the addition of a Mario Kart-esque weapons system. By eliminating specific blocks, players are afforded a number of different weapons ranging from time attacks (stop the other players or make their pieces come extraordinarily fast), who-is-that-little-dude attacks (taken from the field climber mode), and attacks that allow you to utilize the Wii’s point-and-shoot controls.

Outside of the battle and traditional marathon modes, Tetris Party offers little in the way of enticing incentives. In stage racer, you’re given a single block that you have to navigate through a scrolling level, making sure you don’t fall too far behind. It’s a good idea but its execution becomes increasingly simplistic when you realize you can basically just mash the turn buttons until your piece craftily moves its way through the seemingly dead end puzzle.

Field climber features a tiny man that climbs up the blocks you’ve already placed, in order to make his way to the top of the screen. It’s an interesting idea, placing the focus on the negative space of Tetris rather than the space you fill, but it offers little in the way of replay value—once you meet your goal the first time, it’s not a very captivating play. The other negative-space-related mode is one in which you use custom pieces to fill such shapes as letters and apples.

The worst part about Tetris Party? 1,200 Wii points. For what you’re getting, it’s pretty hard to justify spending more than most Virtual Console/WiiWare games because ultimately, you’re just getting online Tetris in return. So if you’re a huge puzzle gaming fan or have just been jonesing for some new Tetris mods, this is right up your alley. If you’re like everyone else, however, Tetris Party is very hit or miss.

One of the most prolific themes of modern video games is the idea of creating a roller coaster or theme park ride experience for the player. Just as you would go through an amusement park and jump on the various rides, in video games you go through and try out the various experiences offered. The designer creates a roller coaster path through a series of action-packed events. A prime example of this design is Call of Duty 4’s single-player campaign. Whether it’s operating the turret in a gun ship, dying in a nuclear fallout, or battling in the streets of a Middle-Eastern city, this is the gaming equivalent of an amusement park ride for modern warfare. Three specific moments are particularly impressive in this design because they push the norm for shooter experiences and offer something besides generic victory scenarios. What Call of Duty 4 tackles in three distinct sequences is dying in a war zone.

The first roller coaster sequence takes place in the midst of a Civil War. The developers pull the rug out from the player in this sequence because up until this point the game has been acting like a fairly typical shooter. Suddenly, we are thrust into the body of the President as he is being dragged to his execution. You have no control over movement but can move the camera, a logical game design choice given the linear narrative. What makes it interesting is that players almost never play the victim in an FPS and suddenly, here they are experiencing it. Once it dawns on the player that this is a passive sequence though, there is a risk for things to become boring. In Half-life 2 there are many passive exchanges that are dull. But here, the developers keep it interesting by surrounding the player with activity. Civilians run in terror, firefights are going on, and every atrocity of war one can imagine is going on at all sides. The player still controls the camera and they immediately start trying to see everything going on as the car drives through the city. It is, literally, like going on the Pirates of the Carribean ride except everything has been replaced with modern warfare events. By coercing the player to frantically look all around they are mimicking what a person in that situation would be doing. In this way, the game involves the player into being a willing camera man. A willing participant in making the event be presented the way that it would be for someone actually in that situation. The slow dread the player feels as they see the inevitable gun barrel coming upon them and finally being aimed is also present. The game gives you the experience of being executed and it coerces our involvement through both game design and player input.

The nuke sequence is still probably one of the most incredible experiences a video game has yet provided for its audience. What would the final moments of being at ground zero for a nuclear blast be like? The level opens with the player acting as the character they’ve been playing for several missions and whom we assume is going to be escaping from the blast in yet another frantic battle. Crawling out of the crashed chopper is done at a crippling pace and the player cannot see outside until they get to the exit. It’s an excellent piece of level design that controls the visual flow of the surroundings to the player. Like the passive sequence of being executed, there is a great deal of careful design architecture occurring. Each sight and sound is carefully paced in the level all while the player is still in control. The first thing you see once you get outside the chopper is a dead marine. Any thoughts about escaping begin to fade at that ominous sign. Movement is heavily inhibited and the player falls over several times while they try to move. Your crippld state is heavily emphasized by the sound here as well; each footstep makes a dragging sound and there is heavy breathing in the soundscape. You’re able to make some progress but slowly you start to realize maybe this level is different. Maybe you’re not getting out of here. A glance to the right reveals an incinerated playground and then the moment we were wondering about finally happens. The game design makes you collapse. You look up and finally see the mushroom cloud glowing bright yellow in the background. A crashing sound to your left draws your attention to a sky scraper crumbling to dust. No more walking and the lights dim, with only the strange sound of children playing in the burned out playground going on around you.

The final passive sequence is at the end of the game and it’s just as startling as the others. A lot of people criticized it for coming seemingly from nowhere, but given the almost cliché briefing where the soldiers all talk about buying each other drinks and the fact that you never really know when a mission is doomed in war anyways, it didn’t disrupt my personal experience. Your attempt to escape the Russian Ultra Nationalists goes awry and you end up stranded on a bridge. After two missiles from a helicopter slam your position, you struggle around in shock while everyone in your squad is brutally shot or injured. The camera is controlled somewhat by the player but the game does not hesitate to jerk your head for you, so you can only move it around a small amount. Your fellow soldier is shot while he drags you to safety, the approaching soldiers kill your team-mate, and your captain is struggling with the gun in his belt. In this instance, absolute freedom as in the other levels would cause you to miss the designers intended experience. The final moments of seeing the game’s main villain walking towards you culminate in the player performing the ‘Last Stand’ activity that they have witnessed throughout the game. A downed soldier pulls out their pistol and fires off a few shots before they’re finished off. Only now, it is the player performing the doomed action. Because of the other two cutscenes we are desensitized to our dying and when the gun is slid towards us concerns about staying alive are forgotten. All you want to do is take aim and finish off the person responsible for all of this. Yet the game’s final twist is perhaps its most clever, because just as we are preparing ourselves to die because the game has demonstrated that it has no qualms about killing us, we are miraculously saved. The game explores both elements of combat, dying for no reason as with the nuclear strike and being saved while others die around you.

There are a lot of fundamental elements in these moments of Call of Duty 4 that have little to do with game design or even narrative and instead boil down to aesthetics. When a game puts you into a passive situation where you can only observe one must instead approach it as an architect. How is this room conceived? Where do my eyes go? What is the flow? An excellent essay proposes just such an approach to games by pointing out the possibilities an architecture student would see in a video game. What is the perfect way to design the scenery and landscape of an atomic wasteland? Of the room you intend to be the last thing the player sees? It’s an aesthetic that Call of Duty 4 explores with these passive moments and that is greatly enhanced by the emotion the landscape design brings out. It’s not enough to just stick the player in a car that’s surrounded by people being shot. It’s not enough to have people speak to your character instead of shooting at them. Several other FPS games, such as Quake 4’s horrific Strogg conversion sequence or F.E.A.R.’s blending of cutscene and explosions have all explored the idea of passive sequences. What happens in Call of Duty 4 is a passive sequence that doesn’t take away the excitement of participating in those moments because the roller coaster ride always gives us something to look at.