As is the case with life, the problem with early arcade games was that eventually you have to die.  Be it Pac-Man, Frogger, or Donkey Kong, early single player gaming experiences had no win-state, only a fail-state.  These games were largely feats of endurance, efforts to rack up points, before an inevitable and expected failure.  Of course, I’ve addressed this idea before in other writings (“Pac-Man Will Die: Cynicism and Retro Game ‘Endings’”, PopMatters, 28 July 2010). 

One could, of course, compare one’s “more successful” failure to others’ failures on High Score screens on which one could enter one’s initials at the end of a session, but even those score boards were transient, as scores would be erased when a machine was turned off.  Games were measured in lives, and multiple deaths were the way in which they ultimately ended.

I think there’s a right way to play a game, a way of approaching the game that the developers intended for and designed around. Unfortunately, the word “right” carries certain connotations of value that I don’t think are appropriate when talking about games. If you want to play a game other than how the developer intended, you’re not wrong for doing so. You can play however you like, but you also have to admit that some games don’t cater to some play styles. 

Sadly, it seems to be getting harder and harder to play some games the “right way,” especially when the “right way” involves other people. What if none of my friends have the game or want to play it? Thankfully, a game like Left 4 Dead advertises its emphasis on cooperative play, so if I suspect I won’t get the best experience because no one else I know will be playing it, I just won’t buy that game. But it’s getting harder and harder to tell, ahead of time, whether I’m going to get the best experience out of a game or not. It’s trendy to integrate social features into ostensibly single-player games, which is fine in theory, but it becomes a problem when single-player games suddenly include so many social features that it ceases to be a solo experience.

This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want.
—Don Draper, Mad Men

At last year’s E3, there was a pervasive feeling of a show on the edge of some massive change. We all knew that the following year, 2013, would be the year of the “next-gen” console. The 2012 event was just the vestigial tail of the last console cycle leaving the building. The vague future, at that moment, let us choose to see huge and almost limitless potential.

After this week’s Microsoft press conference, we now know what that future entails. Hell, we all knew it on the show floor in 2012, just no one said it out loud. These consoles will feature shinier graphics, more RAM, and a few new features that tie us closer to our machines. I cannot imagine the expectations of anyone genuinely surprised by the recent console announcements. Were we really waiting with bated breath for a new console to satisfy our unmet gaming and entertainment needs?

This post contains spoilers for Photopia and Galatea

Last time I looked at two examples of contemporary interactive fiction that were iterations of the classic text adventure genre. If I can borrow from Scott McCloud’s Six Steps of Art from his book Understanding Comics, those games sought to adjust and play with the craft and structure of their chosen medium. Photopia and Galatea are not iterations, but something entirely new that happen to use the same form. The two games I want to talk about now dig down and look at what the form of interactive text can accomplish and focus instead on the story and form levels of McCloud’s same steps.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been absorbed in Persona 3. The fourth in the Persona series is usually credited as the one that left the biggest impact on its players (Leigh Alexander, “High School Memories”, Polygon, 4 April 2013), but, though I’ve only played halfway through its predecessor, I can’t imagine any game improving on Persona 3. It’s a truly excellent game, and it’s disappointing that it seems to often get lost in its successor’s shadow.

Persona 3 casts the player as a newcomer to a Japanese private school, where a hidden “dark” hour after midnight puts all but a few students into stasis. During this hour, cracks in the world open up and allow monsters to emerge and suck out people’s minds while they’re vulnerable. The power that the player character and his classmates uses to defend the town, their personas, grows as the player builds friendships with people in everyday life.