A lot of folks compare the video game industry to movies. I know I used to. And to some extent I still do. The film industry is still relatively young and lots of people have dreams of “playing a movie.” Movies have a little to do with video games, but not much. Nonetheless, looking towards older forms of media is a good start in developing a language for talking about this new medium of video games. Why not books? Music? Or just plain life? Let’s break it down.

Why do we want to be a movie?

As I pointed out earlier, gamers once thought the ultimate gaming experience was playing something so real, it was like playing a movie. Words like “cinematic gameplay” have become selling points on large titles beefing up their integrated cut-scene chops. But what does film [as an art form] really have in common with games?

• They both involve moving pictures. [film, animated frames etc.]
• Both attempt to deliver some kind of narrative.
• They are both linear. [A point of contention, but games are linear, because the player lives within a linear time-frame, i.e. Planet Earth. Even non-linear games can't erase the player's memory.]

Frankly, the comparison has much more to do with business/industry behind-the-scenes types of deals than it has anything to do with the process and expressive characteristics of the two mediums. Hollywood has acted as a model for large publishers/developers to produce games, and it may have been a good move for the industry, but not the art form.

Hey, devs are the new rockstars!

As much as I’d like this to be true, it’s simply not going to happen. The process of creating games is not an act of performance. Their memes and humor can be translated into a culture of sorts, but that’s about it. And besides, watching people develop games is boring. Trust me.

Music runs an interesting parallel to games insofar as that it relies on technical excellence [muscianship] but it ends there. Music is moving because of its rhythm, exploring the pace of the human heart and elaborating on that in order to control our emotions. That’s a gross oversimplification, but I think it works here. Music can only go so far until it is performed live. It’s then that the connection is made personal between the author and our ears joined with “the moment.” When, all at once, everyone is engaged simultaneously in both the creation, execution and retention of the musical expression at hand. When done right, it is an awe-some experience, and often a religious one for me. But without those elements of the musicians playing their piece, the collective audience receiving it and the overwhelming fact that we all know it’s “all happening now,” that is lost.

What’s the most interactive ancient media?

Books. Words are the most abstract representation of an idea we’ve ever had, and somehow we manage to communicate using their tiny minutiae everyday. This doesn’t exclude speaking either. Speech is the most ancient form of communication, but still, the word “tree” has absolutely nothing to do with a real tree. It’s just an abstract piece of data used to represent something explicit to a certain group of people. But I’m going to leave speech, since that’s performance art. But in books, this is where the interactivity comes in. It takes a brain to translate all that crazy language into workable imagery that can be understood, moved around and formulated into a world. The simple nature of words and representational glyphs generate an environment for the reader to imagine their own world, in their own way, whether it be separate from the author’s intention or not.

Games are the same way, not just video games. The rules of the game provide a world of bounds for the players to interact. Even if the game is sound and proven, players may choose to play it in a way that they think is fun, and perhaps outside the intention of the author. Say for instance, team-killing in co-op Halo to prevent any progress. While Bungie may not mind, their original intention for the co-op experience probably had more to do with the pacing of the action and drama of each mission than accounting for 50 master chief corpses blown sky-high with a pile of frag grenades after hours of assassination TKs.

But that’s what ’s great about our video games, isn’t it? Expanding the bounds of the worlds we love to inhabit. In great books, the worlds will travel with me. They’ll follow me into my sleep and iterate inside my dreams. The reality of that world, that impossible “science fiction,” becomes real in my head and all those books had were some ink on a book of paper. I’ll cut it short, but here’s a few more about books and games.

Also, from a business perspective. Books are bought and consumed in private. They are not to be spoken aloud, played or shared. You purchase games in the exact same way. There are no video game premiers [Cliffy B aside], and no awards for best performance [screw the VGAs, it's an adapter not an award], and you can’t go see it with a date. You possess it, and consume it on your own time however you want. Sometimes you don’t play your game for weeks and then come back to it, to that… bookmark.

Nonetheless, the artform of writing still has little to do with designing games themselves. It is much more useful to think of the experience of reading in regards to playing video games, than applying the process of writing to game development.

Playing games in the car.

There’s really no prior medium to inform us on the nature of interactivity. Well except one. But it’s one that was here all along. Life. I know. I’m really deep. But seriously, one of the most interesting quips about game development I’ve ever heard is the little story from Miyamoto on how he got the idea for Mario.

I got the idea for Mario while riding a train. I had a window seat and found tracing the trees and clouds with my finger to be pretty entertaining.

~ Miyamoto, not the quote, but paraphrased by me

I thought this was genius, and immediately thought back to all the games I would play with my brother when riding in the backseat of our station wagon. We’d come up with some stupid stuff to pass the time. One game was shooting all the birds with our “laser” [a recessed cap that covered a screw on the door handle] while calling out “got one!” to one another. Perhaps more promising, I would pick out a speck of bug guts on the windshield and focus on it. By moving my head around, I would dodge the oncoming terrain, weave between the dotted lines of the interstate, and jump around in the clouds. To this day, this is probably why I play with an inverted mouse/joystick.

There is nothing more interactive than life itself. And often, a single life has no real cumulative meaning. Even those with great purpose, such as MLK, Ghandi or Bill Gates [wait, what?] have meaning as icons to the greater society. Unto themselves, their lives were [and are] probably much more fragmented than we would care to know. Our lives are filled with short bits of meaning when the pieces come together at the right time to create something greater than the sum of their parts. My life is chaotic, imbalanced, unfair and mostly dull, but it is the most important thing in the world because I am doing it!

Comparing games to other media again!?

Maybe I’m late to the party, or just hung around too long to be kicked out onto the patio with road-beer in hand. This is just my thought-vomit over the last few days of driving around the barren Midwest.

So this book came out over a decade ago, and in true Iowa-boy fashion, I just read it. We are a decade behind. But whatever, from the looks of things the future looks grim, so I’ll live in the past no questions asked.

“Consider it a primer for art history, the creative process and critical thought.”

Banter aside, this book is quite the tome for anyone in the creative arts and with each chapter I read, I became inspired to use the information for the power of good! And this is partially why I’m writing this in segments. I want to tackle a specific concept in the book, if I were to try to talk about the whole book, I’d end up gushing and ultimately saying nothing. Kind of like this entire post up until now. Also, because I don’t feel like spouting over a thousand words in a single post. Laziness.

Let me first start with a recommendation. A glowing and personalized one. If you are a creative person, even a coder [God's castaways], this is the first book you should read. Consider it a primer for art history, the creative process and critical thought. Sure it’s specifically about comics, but the lessons learned throughout the book can be applied to many other forms of “new media”. Game development in my case. In fact throughout the course of the book, while I wasn’t pondering the picture plane or the cultural differences in expression, I was thinking: “Why the hell wasn’t I handed this on the first day of design school?” It’s such a great piece of cut-n-dried badassery, that any aspiring painter, sculptor, architect, designer, decorator, programmer, musician, installer, or any other creative folk would benefit tenfold from its lessons. Now design/art school taught me many of the lessons McCloud covers [much more directly] but not in such a stark and matter-of-fact way that leaves an impact worthy of the weight of that particular lesson. Also, I should mention the whole book is one big comic, which not only makes the read more interesting, but also acts as a testament to the communicative form of comics itself. Ok seriously, end of the glowing, now onto some cold data.

The first topic that really blew me away was McCloud’s “Big Triangle” which he explains in that link. Basically, the triangle allows for a gamut in which all forms of visual art can be placed. Each vertex of the triangle represents a particular extreme of pictorial representation. On the top, the picture plane, which in extremes encompasses the most abstract of art. On the right, pictorial abstraction, in which its extremes include text. And finally on the left, pictorial realism, of which its extremes include photographs. Now all these exist on a 2D surface, but yet in this unassuming little triangle lives all of the world’s 2D art. Quite a feat, and because of this device McCloud has invented it allows people not only to map certain artists/movement and so on, but also to understand art better.

Weird huh? Understanding stuff. But using this triangle it’s easy to see why or how art styles evolved. And shown to a lamen who thinks Mondian or Kandinsky are taking the American people for a ride, can maybe see the value in these artist’s work. And that’s just the triangle. I think it’s perhaps McCloud’s finest discovery within the whole book, but perhaps not his most exciting when it comes to inspiring artists. That will come later, maybe in part 3. I am skipping things, mainly symbology and sign/signifier/signified type relationships covered in dry and grim detail throughout my graphic design education. Had we covered it with McCloud’s comics, I imagine we’d all be a lot happier. Regardless, the lessons are numerous and thorough. To know them and be constantly aware of them will make you a better artist/designer/person.

In sort of the same vein as my earlier Bionic Commando:Rearmed review, I should mention AGDInteractive’s Quest for Glory II remake. This is old news, in fact it might be a month old, but this game has real sentimental value for me. It’s arguably the reason I love video games so much.

If you haven’t played it, which is likely, it’s an action-adventure game from Sierra released in the 90s, with the action part of the formula being a bit of a breakthrough for Sierra adventure games. This is one of those games that you type “run” and you start running wherever you click. While it seems archaic now, at the time it was a revolution, and much more freeing. At any point in the game I could make “our hero” say whatever I wanted. Much to the same effect as speaking in an MMO when nobody is around, just to amuse yourself at your own agency.

Also, this game is free. Completely free. If you have a PC, which I don’t, go download it and check it out for yourself. What you’ll find might surprise you. That an old design, and old game dialog can seriously compete with the newer, fast-action AAA titles of modern day. The game is self-aware at points, which is a common theme throughout Sierra adventure games. Some more-so than others. But through the grace of the eyeball-cursor, players could look at literally anything on the game screen and the “narrator” [or resident overlord typist] would explain said object, often to the delight and laughter of the player. I miss it. Maybe I’m getting old. Well, not maybe. Yes, I’m old now. I’ve assuredly scaled that hill of awesome [sense of awe] perception and passed over it, into the early stages of nostalgia-sickness.

I was up pretty late playing the challenge rooms. I had over 100 attempts in one room, and I couldn’t help but think about Flywrench while torturing myself. And that’s just the challenge rooms. This game has a lot to offer and I’m still excited to play it tonight. For me, that’s really rare these days. Why is that? More on that later…

The remake is flawless, and any additional work that went into it only added to the experience that was Bionic Commando for the NES. NOTE: I may be a bit biased here, since Bionic Commando NES is one of my favorite games of all time, so giving me a super-fun, faithful and semi-nostalgic revitalized experience got all my circuits going. GRIN did an excellent job with the menu system, the execution of the gameplay and the added features of co-op multiplayer, and multiplayer deathmatch.

That all said, I want to touch on the bigger picture here. The title of this post. Why shouldn’t a remake of an awesome game, taking all the fine-tuned gameplay elements verbatim be awesome? The NES version was just as awesome. When remaking a game verbatim, updating it, the only way to go is down. But this is a great case study in what makes games fun.

It isn’t the 3D graphics, the remixed music, the improved interface and usability, or even the added features like challenge rooms or co-op. It’s the core gameplay. The feel of your avatar swinging from the grappling hook, and your ability to control that and own the sprite’s movement on the screen as your own. That’s what the original had, and it’s emulated to perfection in the remake. But why is this lost on so many games today? They’re simply too complicated. The Halo series is a perfect example.

Halo: Combat Evolved.

A perfect example of relatively simple gameplay. Two races of weapons. A single player mode and same-screen/LAN multiplayer. It was obvious that Bungie went to great lengths to fine-tune the feel of the game. Halo was the first FPS to get that right on a controller. Both thumbs attached the player with the avatar’s movement completely. And with only a few options for direct action [grenade, gun, melee, switch] all things were available at all times to the player. This is something hard to explain in words, since the balance is so delicate, it’s a feeling better felt than heard.

Halo 2

Much of Bungie’s effort here was probably centered on the net-code and revitalizing the IP with a new race. The brutes. Enter duel-wielding, swords, completely new weapons almost entirely across the board, and an expansive multiplayer ranking system with gamecast features. The energy was put into the added features, not the core gameplay. But that would have been fine if the gameplay stayed the same. And to the untrained eye, it did. But the feel had been lost. Play felt more frantic and jittery now that there were way more options.

Halo 3

The latest installment. It seems here that Bungie decided that Halo 2 most certainly was better, probably because it sold better. But that’s largely due to artificial features such as the multiplayer architecture, given X-box Live making its way onto the scene, giving players a huge reason to come back day-after-day. Halo 3 added items. And didn’t change much else from Halo 2. Also, notice how the marketing grows more and more fascist and iconic as the series progresses… Ok, that was unfair.

Now this is all well and good. Features are good. They make players happy and keep them around longer, and I’m all for that. But the Halo series is a great example of the core-gameplay, that tiny nugget of immaculate worth, being drown out by easy-to-design features. Super fun games are hard as hell to design, and when we find/develop that, never compromise the fun for anything. It is paramount.

Back to the BC:Rearmed review. There’s only one thing I don’t completely love. The graphics. I know I’m crazy, and I do like the graphics. They are really well done. I just… I dunno, 3D models in a completely 2D game. Kinda weird… But this doesn’t really have any bearing on how awesome the game is in my opinion.

ps. On that note… Diablo III looks awesome. If you don’t think so, then please never come back here again, I don’t want your kind here. I am not one of those, nor will I entertain them at this blog.