Friday, September 30, 2005
It's Not All About The Violence
(My apologies to everyone about the severe interruption in blogging service. Real Life(TM) wins again, over the world of blogging. Your more-or-less regular service will now hopefully resume...)
I've recently discovered a number of interesting Flash games, via the most excellent blog entitled Jay Is Games. There's lots and lots and lots of fabulous material here - danger, Will Robinson, serious danger.
However, one of the most interesting observations for me has to come from a couple of these games specifically. Games which manage to implement completely new types of conflict. By which I mean that they present the player with neither a conflict based on violence (or other physical-type challenges - reflex games, race games, platformers), nor math (in the form of puzzles, pattern-manipulation skills, and so forth). One could include a third form, lumped under exploration challenges, to cover point-and-click adventures and a number of games which are as much eye-candy as game. All of these are well-known and have lots of room for development left. But the games I'm talking about today don't fit these categories... they derive their challenge from some other field of endeavour entirely.
The first one is a game called Tork, which is all about linguistics. You crash-land on an alien world, and require help to get your spacecraft working again. The language of the aliens is unknown to you, and you must work out the meaning of various unknown symbols in order to communicate - it's not initially clear even which ones are verbs and which are nouns. You can assign whatever cognates you wish, so as to compose your statements in that language... if you decide that the doughnut-shaped symbol means "money" then the game will help you record this decision, but it won't verify it for you in any way - except inasmuch as you use it in successful communication. It's a cartoony little game, not long, and is really a lot simpler than the above would imply - but nonetheless it's very neat to see it challenge the player in a very real way using such an unusual mode.
The second and superior game is The Asylum, in which you have to take over diagnosis and treatment at Dr. Kindermann's psychiatric hospital for insane cuddly toys. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, it's hilarious. Once you choose one of the four patients (such as Lilo, the introverted/uncommunicative plush hippopotamus, or Dolly, the stuffed sheep who barks and growls), gameplay takes place in the treatment rooms, where you're constantly faced with a shifting menu of possible therapies or diagnostic approaches, and have to navigate the pitfalls of these poor toys' rather twisted neuroses. Some therapies accomplish progress, some have no impact, some actually regress the patient back toward their original neurotic state, and some flat-out end the session - just ask Cam, who allowed poor Lilo to concuss herself during his session with her on Wednesday. Always it depends on where the patient is in the progress of healing - a treatment which might help finish the cure at the end could be harmful if administered earlier, before the patient has finished confronting some inner demons. This is an incredibly funny, terrifically detailed game; many treatments not only give you a different result depending on how close you are to a cure, but also multiple different results if applied repeatedly. Rob Maa even found that there's a kit for electroshock hidden under the bed, which I hadn't known - but bear in mind that I finished the game without knowing this. That last bit aside, this little nonviolent/nonmathematical gem is a beautiful example of what I'm talking about here.
I'm sure there are others out there. The SimCity/SimAnt series comes to mind, as does the Sims proper. That weird Japanese game about the rolling ball whose name I can never remember (and have never tried) is probably also a good instance. I invite you to suggest others in the comments.
What interests me isn't just that the games are different on such a fundamental level. It's that they also all appear to be really fun games, refreshing and entertaining. Is it just that we only find out about the good ones (Jay Bibby of Jay Is Games has excellent taste), or is it that something in our jaded gamers' souls causes the "done" types of conflict to lose some of their savour, no matter how well implemented -Warcraft, Commander Keen, Betrayal at Krondor- or original -Castle Wolfenstein & Doom, Wizardry & Bard's Tale, Diablo- they may be?
If you look at some of the concepts being played around with in the indie RPG circuit, the "new types of conflict" is an underlying theme there as well. Breaking The Ice, of course, but there's a lot of interest in things like a war correspondents game (Vincent, Josh, and I all talked about it, and some cool things may yet come of this), and various other kinds of games focused - compellingly - on endeavours other than violence, survival, or intrigue.
Really, most things that we do are challenging and evoke conflict. My professional work with MEMS is challenging as hell. Foster parenting, and parenting special needs children - oh, my God, yes. Nursing. Art. Relationships. Journalism. Poverty and pride. Political change. It's up to us, as gamers and game designers, to find out which ones can be modeled in such a way as to distill the conflict, the coolness and the challenge, to make it accessible and enjoyable to a wide audience. I betcha it can be done, for all of those. Mostly, it hasn't. And the record so far seems to suggest that it's worth doing - that the results will be more likely to hit that subtle chord of elegance and worthiness that rings in the soul. Which is what I, at least, am in this for.
Bones? This is a long post - Read the rest.
I've recently discovered a number of interesting Flash games, via the most excellent blog entitled Jay Is Games. There's lots and lots and lots of fabulous material here - danger, Will Robinson, serious danger.
However, one of the most interesting observations for me has to come from a couple of these games specifically. Games which manage to implement completely new types of conflict. By which I mean that they present the player with neither a conflict based on violence (or other physical-type challenges - reflex games, race games, platformers), nor math (in the form of puzzles, pattern-manipulation skills, and so forth). One could include a third form, lumped under exploration challenges, to cover point-and-click adventures and a number of games which are as much eye-candy as game. All of these are well-known and have lots of room for development left. But the games I'm talking about today don't fit these categories... they derive their challenge from some other field of endeavour entirely.
The first one is a game called Tork, which is all about linguistics. You crash-land on an alien world, and require help to get your spacecraft working again. The language of the aliens is unknown to you, and you must work out the meaning of various unknown symbols in order to communicate - it's not initially clear even which ones are verbs and which are nouns. You can assign whatever cognates you wish, so as to compose your statements in that language... if you decide that the doughnut-shaped symbol means "money" then the game will help you record this decision, but it won't verify it for you in any way - except inasmuch as you use it in successful communication. It's a cartoony little game, not long, and is really a lot simpler than the above would imply - but nonetheless it's very neat to see it challenge the player in a very real way using such an unusual mode.
The second and superior game is The Asylum, in which you have to take over diagnosis and treatment at Dr. Kindermann's psychiatric hospital for insane cuddly toys. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, it's hilarious. Once you choose one of the four patients (such as Lilo, the introverted/uncommunicative plush hippopotamus, or Dolly, the stuffed sheep who barks and growls), gameplay takes place in the treatment rooms, where you're constantly faced with a shifting menu of possible therapies or diagnostic approaches, and have to navigate the pitfalls of these poor toys' rather twisted neuroses. Some therapies accomplish progress, some have no impact, some actually regress the patient back toward their original neurotic state, and some flat-out end the session - just ask Cam, who allowed poor Lilo to concuss herself during his session with her on Wednesday. Always it depends on where the patient is in the progress of healing - a treatment which might help finish the cure at the end could be harmful if administered earlier, before the patient has finished confronting some inner demons. This is an incredibly funny, terrifically detailed game; many treatments not only give you a different result depending on how close you are to a cure, but also multiple different results if applied repeatedly. Rob Maa even found that there's a kit for electroshock hidden under the bed, which I hadn't known - but bear in mind that I finished the game without knowing this. That last bit aside, this little nonviolent/nonmathematical gem is a beautiful example of what I'm talking about here.
I'm sure there are others out there. The SimCity/SimAnt series comes to mind, as does the Sims proper. That weird Japanese game about the rolling ball whose name I can never remember (and have never tried) is probably also a good instance. I invite you to suggest others in the comments.
What interests me isn't just that the games are different on such a fundamental level. It's that they also all appear to be really fun games, refreshing and entertaining. Is it just that we only find out about the good ones (Jay Bibby of Jay Is Games has excellent taste), or is it that something in our jaded gamers' souls causes the "done" types of conflict to lose some of their savour, no matter how well implemented -Warcraft, Commander Keen, Betrayal at Krondor- or original -Castle Wolfenstein & Doom, Wizardry & Bard's Tale, Diablo- they may be?
If you look at some of the concepts being played around with in the indie RPG circuit, the "new types of conflict" is an underlying theme there as well. Breaking The Ice, of course, but there's a lot of interest in things like a war correspondents game (Vincent, Josh, and I all talked about it, and some cool things may yet come of this), and various other kinds of games focused - compellingly - on endeavours other than violence, survival, or intrigue.
Really, most things that we do are challenging and evoke conflict. My professional work with MEMS is challenging as hell. Foster parenting, and parenting special needs children - oh, my God, yes. Nursing. Art. Relationships. Journalism. Poverty and pride. Political change. It's up to us, as gamers and game designers, to find out which ones can be modeled in such a way as to distill the conflict, the coolness and the challenge, to make it accessible and enjoyable to a wide audience. I betcha it can be done, for all of those. Mostly, it hasn't. And the record so far seems to suggest that it's worth doing - that the results will be more likely to hit that subtle chord of elegance and worthiness that rings in the soul. Which is what I, at least, am in this for.
Bones? This is a long post - Read the rest.
