In a Belgrade bar, over a dark lager, Joanne interviewed me for Nostalgia for the Net – the oral history of people’s first encounters with the Internet that she and Melissa Gira Grant maintain.

My interview is now online. In it, I talk about my first online encounters before the Internet proper – over Wireplay, BT’s dial-up gaming service that simulated IPX networking for DOS games of the mid-nineties. And, more specifically, my time in MUD2, their recreation of the Essex MUD.

It’s a story I’ve told before, but I don’t think in public, so I don’t feel bad about repeating myself. You might enjoy it.

I have fond memories of the time I spent in the MUD. Reading old transcripts, I see player names I haven’t seen for years but have vivid memories of – as vivid as you can get, when you only have text to go on. The graphics were years ahead of their time, so to speak. It was a small community, but a tight one, and very friendly. It didn’t have the feature of MOOs, but still rewarded creativity in your interactions and encounters. And there was something about it – in the Land, in the writing, in the world, in the interactions – that felt very… British. Our own little corner of the net.

A small community still exists, playing in a Land I can map almost from memory (though I’ve forgotten the route through the mines to the Dwarven realm now).

Happy memories. Nice to share them over a beer.

Kim asked on Twitter:

“Is there a canon for digital narratives / interactive stories / hypertext literature yet? A list of accepted classics and forms?”

What followed was a lot of us going “we don’t know”. And I wasn’t exactly helpful, by pointing out that those three things are (in some ways) completely different.

But. Nobody got anywhere but not being helpful, and to do so, I’m going to express (a bit) of an opinion, and hopefully something a little absolute. I hate list posts, but let’s put something down for people to argue about.

So, specifically: if I had to draw up a Canon – a canon of the interactive-story-thingies (we all know what they are – “things that the reader/audience interpret differently by interacting” is my best explanation) what would I include?

The rough goals were: not necessarily the best, but important pillars; no bias to high- or low- brow; trying to cover all media appropriately; interpret the question as broadly as you would like; don’t take too long over it. Here’s where I am:

• Cent mille milliards de poèmes, Raymond Queneau, 1961
• The Unfortunates, BS Johnson, 1969
• Zork, Infocom, 1980
• The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone, 1982
• Trinity, Infocom, 1985
• The Secret of Monkey Island, 1990
• 253, Geoff Ryman, 1996
• The Last Express, Jordan Mechner et al, 1997
• Spider and Web, Andrew Plotkin, 1998
• Planescape Torment, Black Isle, 1999
• Galatea, Emily Short, 2000
• The Beast, 2001
• Half-Life 2, Valve Software, 2004
• Gravitation, Jason Rohrer, 2008
• Dear Esther, thechineseroom, 2008/2012
• Fiasco, Jason Morningstar, 2009
• Sleep No More, Punchdrunk, 2011
• The Walking Dead, Telltale Games, 2012
• 30 Flights of Loving, Blendo Games, 2012

Things I wanted represented: pre-digital works; early, web-based hyperfiction; text-based IF, both classic and modern; things that are clearly videogames; an ARG (and the Beast still, in many ways, feels like the best); tabletop roleplaying; mechanical storytelling; a selection of Infocom writers (Moriarty, Meretzky).

I am not always picking things I like the most, nor things that are the “first” – so, for instance, Sleep No More probably is the most refined Punchdrunk work, and thus worth sharing here, but I’d swap it for one of their others easily.

What’s missing at the moment but shouldn’t be: the 1970s; more traditional hyperfiction (about which I don’t know enough); some big chronological gaps; boardgames/cardgames that touch on this (eg Once Upon A Time); anything pre-20th century; David Cage (I’m still not sure if I’d include him or not); no visual novels; no JRPGs (which are fascinating games, but there are few I’d include on this list); no Japanese adventure games (9/9/9 springs to mind, for instance).

There’s a bunch of thought that connects these; it’s not arbitrary, and like I said, not about favourites. Some things you might think to be obviously missing (especially: things from the world of videogames) are sometimes deliberate omissions (and sometimes accidental ones).

There’s definitely a particular thread I wanted to start stitching together, and these are the places I’d begin. Most items on this list are picked as representatives of categories; not as absolutes. This is definitely not the “n best interactive narratives list“.

Clearly a work in progress. But: if I had to teach this, or start writing some kind of giant thesis, I could do worse than begin here.

I don’t really have an order to the games I enjoyed most in 2012, so I thought I’d just write something about all of them (titles of games are in bold).

When I sat down to look at my list, there was a clear trend, and it was to do with the stories I got out of those games.

Many of them had something you might call a “narrative” within them, for sure. They in quality varied from poor to completely fine, and those are not the stories I’m talking about. No, what most of my favourite games of 2012 have in common is that they led to wonderful player-generated stories, and they did so intentionally, through their systems and mechanics.

FTL was a perennial this year: with its low system requirements, it came everywhere with me on a laptop, and a short burst could fit into a lunch hour or train journey. It inevitably told tales of plucky ships fleeing the Rebellion, their crews always heroic, always doomed.

Most of my adventures in FTL end in the crew being overwhelmed by boarders; some ended when, in a vain attempt to fight back, the crew opened all the airlocks and asphyxiated alongside the boarders; and, in the cruellest twist of fate, once ended having fought off boarders, but the door control was broken, and thus all the open doors would not close… and they all died trying to shut the airlocks.

And then I swore at the screen and started again.

The word “Roguelike” gets used to describe FTL; I presume for its randomness. It doesn’t tickle my Rogue Gland in the way Torchlight or Demon’s Souls do, so I tend not to use that phrase – but it does hit the “short games, played again and again” button. I still plough on, trying to “complete” a run, but I must have made many, many attempts.

And throughout, I’m overlaying stories onto the little pixelated people on my spaceship. That’s probably because FTL followed the first rule of Generate Player Empathy: you give the characters names. Every time a new crewmember, with a new name, beamed aboard, I cheered a little for their new skillset; I yelled their name whilst they desperately tried to fix the shields; I cursed them when they failed to be any good at fixing things. But they were little people (and aliens) with little lives, and the pictures it painted in my head – helped by a youth of space sims, and a fondness for Firefly – were rich. Tom Jubert’s writing is also solid, but most of the stories in FTL I loved were the ones I made myself.

Another game that followed the “if you name it, they will cry” maxim was XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I was really, really wary of XCOM before it was released; the original UFO is massively influential for me, and one of my favourite games ever. Fortunately, Firaxis delivered a superbly apt update: a turn-based tactics and strategy game I could play from my sofa.

Most importantly, they replicated one of the original’s key features: they gave everybody a name. Not only that: they gave them arc. Every character in XCOM starts with a name and nationality – and then they develop skills, specialities; at Sergeant, they’re gifted a nickname, as well, automatically picked for their class. The longer they live, the more useful and differentiated they become – and the more those names mean.

I was somewhat attached to my Scottish sniper; when he was christened “Garotte” after he earned his stripes (I like to think, by his squadmates), it only made me like him more. He sat at the back of the formation, terse and silent, picking Thin Men and Sectoids off from afar. He made Colonel, and I become horrendously attached to him.

And I can still remember the rest of them; Roadblock, the first Major in the group, who went down on a botched operation; Caper, the South American assault trooper with an aggressive mohawk and a barking shotgun. The stories start in their names and nationalities (such a shame we only got American voice acting) – and then flow out of the game system.

Turn-based games do two interesting things for story. Firstly, they give you a chance to take stock of what’s happening, so you have more time to brood. And then: you have to interpret what’s happening a bit, and pretend it’s all really taking place simultaneously. The turn-based structure is an abstraction.

And so a little of the gameplay of XCOM happens in my head – how I join up the little boardgame on screen into the Ridley Scott movie that’s really going on. Everyone’s lasers running out of ammo before a lucky sniper bullet takes out the Muton; the rookie that gets lucky on their first mission, before getting themselves horribly trapped – and the veteran who wades into the fray to save them; the two soldiers who go everywhere hand in hand, the buddy movie stereotype, until one of them gets hit by a Chrysalid.

I suppose there’s something to be said that my point of references are genre pieces – action movies, SF. But, well, that’s what the game apes, and genre is a great way of encouraging the player to invent within a fixed framework.

Every little skirmish in XCOM is a thrilling event, even if it plays out over 20-30 minutes, not the three it likely takes at real time.

One touch that helps this narrative generation: the “ant farm” view of the base, and, specifically, that when you zoom in on the barracks, the faces you see aren’t just generic models, running on the treadmills, kicking back in the kitchen; they’re your guys. My little guys: drinking tea, jogging, and then I’m going to send them back against the aliens.

I counted them all out, I’ll tell you that much. We didn’t have to count them back; one man down, and you could feel that the Skyranger was lighter.

Speaking of boardgames, and the invention that happens between turns: the biggest story in a game I saw this year was our game of Risk Legacy.

Kieron has already written about the game at Eurogamer, but it’s worth telling again. We began the game in February, with snow on the ground; we finished the fifteenth game in December, in the frost.

Eleven months! That scale alone makes it feel like nothing else. It’s the same reason I love test cricket: you can make an epic just by pushing at the boundaries of endurance.

Eleven months is also a long while to write your own backstories. And we did: South America was laid waste early on by Imperial Balkania, who renamed it with particularly fascistic tendencies. Mark insisted on playing the same race throughout, and the one game where we took it away from him (through a particular mechanic) was so grumpy, so painful… that the retaliation he brought in the next game (simply for taking his favourites) was almost a relief. Everyone’s tendencies and preferences were enhanced, brought out, joked about; we had time to fall into character.

And again, the game has arc. As you meet the criteria for opening envelopes and boxes, the plot develops beats: a rule change means the pace of games (which had been getting out of hand) is slowed again; another adds new layers of strategy; another turns the underdogs into heroes, briefly. And the tubs… god, when we opened the first one (in easily the most memorable game of the campaign) we yelped; it completely changed everything we knew – about the board, about the rules, about the story we were telling. It reminded us that anything was possible in the game. And then we threw ourselves into telling the new story.

There’s a final, hidden packet, in the box – much-written about – that says DO NOT OPEN EVER on it. Reader, we did. I won’t spoil what was in it, but it lent the final game a particularly apt, apocalytpic feeling.

We played fifteen games, and I think we all need a break from it, but we’re going to dine out on the stories for a while.

A late entry, because it’s what I played after Christmas. Far Cry 3 is a bit of a mish-mash: it has far too many things going on at once, a hyperactive HUD, the worst loadscreen known to man, and a story that wants to ram itself down your throat. It’s not dreadful, just not strong, and a bit weird in such an open game, especially compared to how Skyrim handled the same issue.

Once you get out of the starting areas, and explore, and the systems open up and the stories start dribbling out. Deep inside Far Cry 3 is a delightful hunting game, a game about hiking (just as Skyrim was about hiking before it), a thrilling stealth game, a violent Etsy parable, and a pretty great coasteering game.

These lead to exciting stories – hiding in the bushes chasing a goat (which I need to craft with; the crafting in FC3 is nonsensical, but provides forward momentum); sneaking through an enemy base with a bow-and-arrow; driving into uncharted territory, hiking across mountains, to climb a radio tower to unlock more map. It’s in those moments that the best systems – navigation, shooting, hiding – and the beautiful environment (always varied, always colourful, worth exploring to the full) – come to the fore, and the game is at its strongest. I’m still playing it, but I’m mainly playing my Far Cry 3: the great big sunny playland to make adventure stories with. I’m worried that’ll collapse when I return to the main thrust of things.

(I wasn’t a huge fan of Skyrim’s main plot, but FC3 reminds how good it is at balancing its “main plot” with the player-generated ones; you are the Dragonborn, but you’re also leading a civil war, or a rebellion; you’re picking flowers; you’re solving crimes in towns; you’re blacksmithing. Skyrim ensures that all of these stories are compatible. Unlike Far Cry 3, which seems to be a game about your friends being captured by pirates, and your response being to go hang-gliding and flowerpicking).

I mentioned coasteering – Far Cry 3 has perhaps the best swimming I’ve seen in an FPS. It has variable speeds, sure – a gentle paddle and a crawl attached to the sprint button. But it also has excellent jumping into water – because you don’t just land on the surface; you sink, according to the velocity you hit the water with. Leaping off a cliff, Butch-and-Sundance style, isn’t met with a gentle plop, but a huge splash, a moment of unconsciousness, and the realisation you’re 12 feet down in a pool and need to swim for the surface before you pass out. It’s exhilarating every time – and also makes you much warier of shallow pools.

And no, it’s not quite the equal of Far Cry 2 for me; for every move it makes towards accessibility, it loses some of the atmosphere, the tension. For all the fun it adds, it loses some of the immersion of FC2 – even if, at times, that was immersion in things that were not fun, like the outposts.

And then there’s the big-hitter in terms of Choicy Gameplay: Dishonored. I was quite excited for Dishonored, and I think, in the end, it came off admirably. I’ve got a longer piece to write about it (juxtaposing it with a Punchdrunk show I saw), so won’t say a vast amount here.

Its great success was to make its choicyness coherent: though it had a well-written story to tell, which it told as much through beautiful environment-work as through any writing or acting (and a good thing too, given how wooden its showy cast managed to come off), it was very much a tale about my Corvo. Everyone plays a different Corvo, and even though Corvo has far less control over the direction of his tale than Shepard did over the story of Mass Effect, every single mechanic in the game helps round out what kind of man Corvo is.

Is he an assassin? Maybe, though he might not kill anyone at all throughout the game. Is he a mage? Depends how far down the path of the Outsider you want to go. Doesn’t he spend most of his spare time doing chores for Granny Rags? Not if you’re my Corvo – he didn’t speak to her once in the game, and not because he was rushing through things.

As such, it’s game (like FTL) that gets richer as you return to it, not just because you can try new paths, but also because you fill in blanks from before; every level contains multitudes, and in a very nonlinear way. My Corvo wasn’t a completist – he didn’t visit every corner of every street because he was driven, trying to further the Resistance’s goals and put a Kaldwin back on the throne. As such, returning to it, I keep playing new Corvos, discover new things, and each Corvo feels as viable and valid as the others.

Also, Blink was probably my favourite game mechanic of the year – from the way it changes the topology of levels, to its sound effect, to the way time slows as you come out of it to give the player a chance to re-orient. Very nice.

Then, there were a few other titles worth a mention because they don’t fall into this category, but they were still great:

That Borderlands 2 was very good was not a surprise; that it was as good as it turned out really was. It wasn’t just a competent sequel; it was superlative. The first game had delivered a lovely set of mechanics – randomised loot in an FPS, meaningful skill trees, fun co-op – in an unusual world that looked like nothing else. The second game took that ball and ran with it – the writing that mainly dotted quest-text in the first game now filled the universe.

One friend pointed out that whilst they might not enjoy the style of the humour and writing, its sheer consistency made it the best writing of the year. There’s a tonne of characters and dialogue here, and the jokes aren’t just limited to pop-culture references (though they’re entertaining enough); there are whole sidequests worth diving into for the dialogue alone. Every character filled out nicely, and the decision to make the previous game’s vault hunters into NPCs was a great way of expanding them from the cutouts of the previous game.

And then Gearbox re-jigged the skilltrees, giving us all manner of new stats to play with, and techniques to try. And on top of all that: they fixed the framerate issues, added even more ridiculous weaponry, and beefed up the physics and character animation – combat felt weighty and janky, like it should in the roughshod, cartoon world of Pandora.

Basically, it makes me smile every time I play it, and then it satisfies my game-mechanics gland, and it’s such a polished package – without (nota bene, Far Cry 3) being overloaded with systems and mechanics. Very, very good stuff, and the fact that all the DLC to date has been great is just a bonus for its life.

It’s nice to be able to recommend a non-violent game; now is not the time for another conversation about violence and games, but I do note that there’s a lot of Direct Conflict in the list. That’s partly my taste for technical, involved games; partly a heritage that stretches from Quake onwards; but it’s not deliberate. I played a lot of other non-violent games this year, but these are the ones that stuck in the memory. Sorry, people.

And yet: how lovely to say that Fez delighted and cheered me as I played through it in the summer.

It had been trailed so long I was a bit tired of it; the rotating of the Trixel engine looked like its One Gag. So how delightful to discover that it had far more to give than that: a delicate, minimal narrative; lots of Actual Puzzles buried in frequency analysis and lateral thinking; beautiful artistic jokes; a wonderful soundtrack, to which I only have to listen in order to be transported back; a huge, well-realised world.

For a few months, the TV had bits of notepaper with Fez-language all over them, and a pen, for when I needed to take notes. It’s a long while since I’ve played a game that needed pen and paper.

And then, on all that, there’s Gomez’ charming animation, the fluidity of navigation that you can get to when you get good at the game, the fiero when you suss a puzzle. Really, really good, ignoring all the hoo-haa that surrounded it.

Of course, a couple of games tried to tell a decent story, and had the balls to actually do it right for once.

I’ve not played much of The Walking Dead, but it’s clearly quite a thing – and something I definitely want to finish.

In many ways, it’s a barely-game: it’s not exactly full of Deep Systems. But it’s still very much on the game-spectrum, because at its heart are a long series of meaningful choices.

Meaningful choices, by the way, is one of Firxais’ key tenets of good game design. And they made XCOM and Civilisation, so they’re probably onto something.

What Walking Dead does so well is not, really, the choices per se; it’s how it imbues them with meaning. It imbues them with meaning simply through… good writing. That’s it. Not “good for games”, just good. Chris Remo made this point nicely on Idle Thumbs: he pointed out that whilst it’s very commendable to be trying to advance storytelling in games through mechanics and systems that inherently drive narrative, and narrative that’s assonant with those game mechanics… you could also start by putting better writing in games.

Much as I’m a systems-advocate, he’s right; there are two forks to this attack, and we shouldn’t forget that second one.

To that end, The Walking Dead (much like its source material, and like all good post-apocalyptic fiction) pushes the zombies right to the background, and focuses on its human tale. And then, through wonderful writing (and perfectly stylised art) it makes you care about its gang of survivors; it’s human, well-realised, realistic. Which means making choices about them hard. And better still: it logs those choices in the long term. This isn’t about the turgid binary good/evil decisions that dog games; this is about somebody remembering something you did days ago and it coming back to haunt you.

Also, it’s on almost every platform and playable by almost anyone, which is probably a good anecdote to the highly technical gameplay I usually recommend. Anyhow: if you’re interested in the state of commercial Interactive Fiction, this is a great place to start.

Or you could play 30 Flights Of Loving, which pips Walking Dead for my favourite game narrative in 2012 – and I only played it a few days ago.

It is fifteen minutes long, or therabouts.

And yet: look at all the things it crams in; look at the storytelling techniques it uses. When you’re using as swift an engine as the Quake 2 one, smash-cuts become a thing you can use (because you don’t have the memory pipeline issues of a modern, hi-res game). It’s the first time in ages I’ve seen a game embrace non-linear editing like film did – and yet it’s not a lift from film; in a first-person, subjective viewpoint, it’s far weirder than that.

A smash cut takes me to new geometry – have I teleported? Is this a bug? Has time gone forwards or backwards? Only by paying attention will you work it out. And, just as you do, the narrative lurches again.

There’s so much in it, such condensation, like the best short stories or movies: it takes fifteen minutes to play, but it will stay with you days (as Christian points out in his excellent Eurogamer write-up).

Maybe it’s just an experiment – but it’s such a challenging, dynamic, exciting one, it makes me wonder what a few hours of it would feel like. Anyhow: it’s just wonderful, and is probably my best counterpoint to the exciting things you can tell with games that aren’t just player-generated narratives. Good stuff.

There were many other great games in 2012 – some I played, some I didn’t, and I don’t quite have the energy to talk about SPACETEAM other than to say yes, it also leads to the best kinds of emergent stories, mainly from its spectators – but these are the ones I wanted to share. Gosh, that was long, though.

Quick work note, because it’s well worth pointing to:

On Monday 17th September, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank, Hide&Seek are running Playing In Public: a conference about the present and future of play in public spaces.

It’s exciting to see such a focused lineup of speakers exploring this topic. I’m excited to see Bennett Foddy, Ricky Haggett, Kerry Turner and Leanne Bayley dive into what games makers make of sport post-Olympics; I’m looking forward to having my brain tickled and expanded by Pat Kane’s keynote; and it’s always a pleasure to see Kars Alfrink speak.

It comes after three days of actual public play at the Hide&Seek Weekender, which should be a lot of fun of all shapes and sizes, and you can just drop into most events at the South Bank Centre over the weekend of the 14th-16th.

Tickets for the conference – which are very reasonably priced – are available from the South Bank Centre. Perhaps see you there!

Spelunky is a little clockwork world in which items and enemies behave in defined ways, but when mixed together cause a delicious feedback loops that you can, with experience, predict. My boy loves systemic games like this, games that are built on coherent systems that you can play in an open-ended way. Toy boxes like Minecraft and Plants Vs Zombies, Animal Crossing and (we play this together) Civilization – where he can tinker and learn cause and effect.

He spends hours playing them, or would if we let him. And these are the kind of games that, though they were much cruder back then, I liked when I was a boy too, especially Elite. Where anything seemed possible.

But the big games today, in which play comes fixed to immutable stories, aren’t like that. So I asked him: “Do you like games that tell stories that you follow as you play them, or do you like games that let you do what you want?”

“The second one.” My heart burst with pride.

Last Day Of School, from lovely chum Alex Wiltshire.

The big computer games I grew up with – the ones that made an impression – were Rogue, Prince of Persia, and countless flight sims (beginning with MS Flight Simulator 3.0 then 4.0, and then getting steadily less realistic through the MicroProse back catalogue). And there, really, is a lot of the things I like: deep systems, short repeated play sessions, complex things to master, coupled t worlds to do whatever you want in. I got to about level 14 of the dungeons of Yendor; I landed a Cessna 182 on a Nimitz class carrier without an arrestor wire (only just) and took it around the Michigan bay; I explored the deep 60-minute run/jump mechanics of Mechner’s early triumph.

My tendency to simplification as I grew up has a lot to recommend it – in particular, desigining for sofas or tiny bursts – but my heart swells too when I see the conversations Alex and his son have. Not just because of what they like – but because of how they like it, and, most importantly, how they talk about it together.

Robert Yang recently did a series of interview with game designers over at Rock, Paper Shotgun. Entitled “Level With Me”, it examined designers’ approach to their work, whilst culminating in them adding elements to a Portal 2 level that Yang was designing with them.

Having realised the completed level in a mod – bookended by two of his own – Yang has written up some commentary on the reaction to it. He’s a bit frustrated and sad. And I think I would be too, if I were him.

I was shocked, then, by the most common line of criticism I saw: a refusal to read, an insistence that a level without a puzzle-y Portal puzzle is a bad level. It’s like the rhetorical equivalent of donkeyspace. I literally can’t go through the mental gymnastics required to conclude that challenge is the only interesting thing about first person single player games. Comments like that make me miss all the people who said it was pretentious; I want a higher level of criticism.

That’d be a nice enough quotation in Pinboard, but the whole piece is great, and had enough meaty thought in it that I had to break it out a bit more. It especially chimed with my beliefs around games as mechanical systems, and a literacy in those systems being what emerges from learning how to read them.

I don’t think I’m demanding much of players because we all already have the ability to read just by virtue of playing. Frank Lloyd Wright could read houses; as Portal players, you know how to read Portal levels, and you know when Portal levels don’t make sense. What if we used the “words” of a Portal level in different ways, to say different things? What if we used the “words” that form video games, and used them in different ways?

I think I agree with that. And Yang goes on to talk about materials a bit:

Puzzles and mechanics (like narrative, graphics, or sound) are just different materials you can use. (I think Dan Pinchbeck said something like that.) It’s the house you build in the end that counts. If that house uses wood but not concrete, that’s okay.

But if you want to argue that the resulting house isn’t actually a house, by your narrow reductionist definition of “house,” and it’s “totalitarian and unamerican” like Frank Lloyd Wright said about the Farnsworth House, then just know that history, if it remembers any of us at all, will think you were a silly person. Or you can ignore how architecture had the same debate we’re having right now.

One of Yang’s great disappointments is one of literacy. At the end of the mod, you walk into another Test Chamber. Not one of the many Test Chambers in the Aperture complex – but the Black Mesa Test Chamber, from the very beginning of Half-Life. And so many players just didn’t notice; didn’t get the reference; didn’t see the point being made. They were illiterate in the medium they enjoy.

…maybe it’s a problem of education. We force kids to read Shakespeare; we should also force kids to play Myst, Fallout 2, Half-Life 1, Planescape: Torment, etc. and their ability to read and ask questions will be much richer for it. A “Game Studies AP” class might assign System Shock 1 and X-Com. I mean, if you play Battlefield 3 for hours every day, shouldn’t you, at the very least, know that its core design is practically untouched from the original Quake Team Fortress mod nearly 15 years ago?

Or, you know, I guess we could just keep letting those players get upset when a game calls them out for thinking / studying so little about this thing that they invest so much time into.

And I think that’s important. In the comments on Yang’s post, readers have pointed out the “difficulty” of doing that – that the medium restarts itself every n years or so in a “hardware generation”, that only players “actively engaged in critical play” care about that sort of thing.

I don’t think that matters. Very few works are solely referential: they may call out to history, but by dint of existence they are also their own thing. So some players are, of course, going to miss the Black Mesa reference. Level With Me still exists, still has something to say, but those players will have a different – perhaps, lesser – reading of it. But that doesn’t mean Yang should stop trying to make the point he believes players can read; he’s right to assume the level of literacy he does.

We have to fight the “forgetting every seven years” a little. We need to make sure that somehow, we talk about old games, educate one another on things they haven’t played. Fifty-odd years into electronic gaming, we shouldn’t already be at the Fahrenheit 451 point of having to each take it upon ourselves to memorise particular works, particular publishers. This isn’t retro fetishism; this is basic history – and basic historiography. And that’s important to a work.

So, you know, keep on reading games. Keep on reading games that didn’t come out this year. It’s all useful.

This year, my Games of the Year got rolled into Kill Screen’s end-of-year countdown. It’s a fine list.

Kill Screen have also put up the individual participants ballot, and you can read mine here. I also wrote some notes about the list of ten:

Here’s my secret: I’m shamelessly mainstream. When I get home from a day at a desk, designing or programming, I like to play games on my sofa. And so: lots of major console releases there, from the advanced hiking simulator that is Skyrim to the elaborate team sport (disguised as a military shooter) that is Battlefield 3. It’s not all AAA-ware, though. The fact that games like Bastion and From Dust saw release on major platforms makes me enormously happy, and they deserve their place.

What binds all these titles together? Perhaps it’s just about wonderful worlds to escape to. Wonderful for their aesthetics: the cold mountains of Tamriel; the endless greyboxes of decades of Aperture Science; the silhouetted landscapes of Outland; the spectacular 17th century Mars of Jamestown; the steely glowing cyberpunk of Frozen Synapse; the rich, detailed decay of Arkham City.

Flip that around, though, because they’re also wonderful systems to get lost in: Skyrim‘s bottomless, endlessly free systems; the careful addition of gels to the Portal formula; the binary-coloured bullet-hell of Outland; the marvellous Vaunt mechanic in Jamestown; the perfection of turn-based (and play-by-mail) strategy in Frozen Synapse; the bottomless gadget-belt and inventive environment of Arkham City. At heart, I’m an escapist, and I escape into beautiful worlds and deep mechanics equally.

Ten was hard to pick, and I wanted to represent some potentially overlooked gems (oh, Outland) as well as some obviously great mainstream games. Two games slipped off the list for me: Deus Ex: Human Revolution just slipped off, but was a surprisingly lovely way to spend the middle part of the year, and Crysis (in its re-released, updated downloadable XBox and PSN port) wasn’t eligible for inclusion as it was a remake. It was, however, definitely one of the ten best games I played last year, and the Games on Demand version is worth your time, if only for the bottomless tropical sandbox of fun it offers in its early stages.

Go read my list, and, indeed, the whole Kill Screen feature.

Chris Dahlen on Dark Souls and, in particular, how it uses “difficulty” not as “a club the designers bash you with, but the palette with which they paint the experience.“:

In music, film, and literature, difficult works provoke the same kind of response. We talk about them in terms of whether we can deal with them: War and Peace is too long, Ulysses is too opaque, Lars Von Trier’s films are too disturbing. Audiences may balk at a work because it’s unfamiliar, complicated, opaque, taboo, exhausting, unpleasant to the senses, and so on—but in every case, the audience has to think about that barrier and make sure they’re ready to cross it. We wonder, are we the problem? Or is the work failing us? Is it challenging because the challenge is key to the form, the message, and the experience—or is it challenging because the artist is a jerk? If the artist has a message to send us—well, to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, why couldn’t they just send us a telegram?

Games shed new light on this old debate, because here, challenge is understood from the get-go as being integral to the experience. All games test their players, and the players accept that they are taking a test and they will be graded. By comparison, if you read a great short story, your failure to respond to it happens in the privacy of your mind.

…

The primary language of Dark Souls is difficulty. The game paces and varies that difficulty with the same craft that goes into its character builds, sound effects, and environmental design, and with the same purpose: to explore distinct, exquisitely-realized variations on one unified experience. What starts as a dare is revealed to be the reward.

Too long a quote to go into Pinboard, so onto the blog it goes in full. And do read the whole article; it’s thoughtful and as with all Chris’ stuff, well-written.

My latest Game Design of Everyday Things column is now up at Kill Screen. It’s about the relevance of landscape gardening to game design.

We talk a lot about the influence of architecture on game design. Indeed, it’s something Kill Screen asked me about in the original formulations for this column. We can all see the influence on games of a medium in which geometric form and structure is used to influence behavior and manipulate the movement of people through space. It feels like there’s an obvious comparison between architecture and the design of three-dimensional game levels.

But I think landscape gardening is perhaps a much more interesting comparison point for the structure of game spaces, and one that is oft-neglected.

Landscape architecture shapes the behavior and intent of its observers without walls or markers. Instead, it focuses on surprise and delight: as your eye follows the gentle slope of a path down to a lake, it should feel like you discovered this. It feels like a coincidence of marvellous proportions, a secret that you discovered, that the eye is led so gracefully. In fact, it’s a carefully designed experience.

Also, it’s been illustrated by Trip Carroll with an illustration of John Marston in front of Broadway Tower, which is really quite something.

Anyhow: rather pleased with this. You can read the full column at Kill Screen.

I went to see a promenade production of a few of Pinter’s political plays the other week, put on by Hydrocracker at Shoreditch Town Hall. When I got out of it, it reminded me a lot of the way first person videogames gate progress through staged encounters. I wrote a bit about this for the Hide&Seek blog:

The security guards weren’t just human gating tools; they were good gating tools because they were human. A marine in a doorway in Call of Duty has a couple of repeated “barks” to explain why you can’t pass him. But a human actor can improvise, responding sympathetically and organically to the situation in front of them. The gates feel much less forced when you can have a dialogue with them.

Read the full post over at Hide&Seek.