My friend Steve Gaynor has put up his review of the year in gaming over at his blog, Fullbright. He’s got some sharp points, but I really liked his commentary on Street Fighter 4 – one of my favourite games of the past year. It deserved quoting in full:

Street Fighter 4: Simply put, I haven’t laughed so much at probably any game as I have playing SF4 in the conference room over lunches at 2K Marin. The fact that humor in games is “hard to do” comes up fairly often– only because people think of “humor” as “jokes,” which lose their power after their first telling. But humor is when something funny happens, and games are the only entertainment medium capable of making funny things happen in completely unplanned and unexpected ways. In the right company, Street Fighter 4, with its cartoonish brutality, over-the-top animations, and always-surprising reversals of fortune is a consistent laugh riot. Thank you, Capcom.

(Emphasis my own).

This has been bugging me for a while, so it’s time to solve it with a game-design exercise. It contains lots of spoilers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, but I’m pretty sure anyone who cares is already spoiled, so don’t read on if you’ll be offended.

No Russian is that level from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Even if you don’t play games, you might have heard about it on the news: it’s a sequence in which the player, as a US soldier undercover with Russian terrorists, takes part in a terrorist massacre. From the outset, is clearly intended to be shocking, and has certainly generated the expected reaction in the popular media.

As a player, I did find it unsettling and unpleasant – enough so that I don’t really want to play through it ever again. As a piece of gameplay, though – indeed, as a piece of a game – it falls completely flat. It’s cheap manipulation, full of holes not only in logic but also in simple interaction, and most of the commentary from the wider games community has had some degree of criticism of it. Kieron Gillen’s post on Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a pretty comprehensive summary of the issues with it. For the most part, I agree with Kieron: tonally, it’s absurb compared to the previous and following levels; his point about player choice confusing the storytelling of the level, rather than enabling it, is also a reasonable one. (I’m not with him on the realism of the airport shoot-out; I think it falls precisely into the authenticity-of-universe that the rest of the game does, namely, mildly bonkers, and I think his digresson on it distracts from his solid, main point – much as this digression does mine).

It’s definitely broken as storytelling. But how would you fix it?

There are some strict criteria to my imagined exercise of “fixing it”: you can’t remove the level; you can’t alter the narrative, however preposterous, in any significant way; the level must play out between “Cliffhanger” and “Takedown“; the state of the world at the beginning and the end of the level must be the same as in the released version of Modern Warfare 2. You’re not allowed to change the style or nature of the game – it can’t become an open-world game all of a sudden; it has to stay true to the linear, semi-corridor-shooter design. All you are allowed to do is fix this one level through game design. (So: this doesn’t solve the problems of the plot, but it might make the level more effective at what it chooses to do).

I have a rough idea, and it involves making two – only two – changes.

1) A new opening

I think to give the player choice in shooting the civilians muddies the intent of the level. Whatever you may think of that, the level is designed to be unsettling, unpleasant, and, narratively, that massacre has to occur. To be honest to Infinity Ward’s intent for this level, there shouldn’t be flexibility in the player’s actions. At least, to begin with.

And therein lies a problem: we can’t wrest control from the player in a first-person view – that’s just dishonest to the perspective. We can’t do third-person cutscenes; that’s not true to the style of the game. We can’t just skip the massacre; that’s not true to the intent of the writing, to the effect Infinity Ward want to have. We have to include it, in a perspective honest to the game, and remove the chance it might not play out.

What we need is a new perspective, without a third-person camera, and to do that, we use the traditional Call of Duty solution: we introduce Yet Another New Player Character. In this case, the Russian CCTV operator.

The level begins with General Shepherd’s voiceover. Instead of smash-cutting to the perspective of Private Allen… we cut to the perspective of a CCTV camera. A subtitle tells us that we’re playing as a CCTV operator at Moscow airport. We’re not sure what to make of Shepherd’s voice-over.

Infinity Ward have a great “fuzzy black-and-white camera” renderer – you’ve seen it in the AC130 mission of the previous game – and it’s ideally suited to rendering the grainy black and white of CCTV. The detached slaughter of the AC130 mission in the previous game is shocking precisely in its detachment, and I want to recreate that in my imagined No Russian.

So: you have two controls as the CCTV operator. You have minor camera control over the camera, moving it left/right/up/down; you also have a button to toggle your viewpoint to other cameras in the airport. That’s it. You have no agency: you are just an observer.

For a minute, it’s a regular day at Moscow airport. And then: four men step out of a lift and all hell breaks loose. The gunfire is distant – there’s no sound on these cameras, just the spill from down the corridor – and instead, the main soundtrack is the panic in the CCTV room, frantic phone calls, chatter and static on the walkie-talkies. Your boss keeps asking you to try and get a clear shot of faces. Nothing can be done, other than follow, as the four men shoot innocent civilians.

We give the player no degree of agency – just a crude tool to spectate. And we remove choice: it’s clear that all four men are shooting. All of them.

And then, just as they are fading from view of our final camera, into the fire-exit that will take them outside…

…the camera perspective does the familiar Infinity Ward smash-zoom into the head of the back man. And, as the subtitle comes on screen, suddenly, the player realises – perhaps, with horror – exactly what Shepherd was talking about in the interstitial before the level: Allen is undercover as one of the terrorists. We’ve just seen what he’s done – and now we have to not only live with it, but control him.

The level now continues as in the released game, with the rolling shoot-out with the Russian security forces. Only now, you know what your character’s just done; the game reinforces the roles of both “the character” and “the player”, and forces the player to question the gap between both of them.

There’s one other change I’d make.

2) Removing the sacrosanct narrative bullet

The other shocking element to the level in the original game is that, as it ends, Makarov shoots and kills the player character, revealing that he knew the player to be an American spy all along.

Infinity Ward pulled off the unavoidable death of a player character excellently in Call of Duty 4 – the death of Paul Jackson in the nuclear blast is shocking, if only because it seems, so briefly, as if you might survive; it jars because it’s a rule-breaking removal agency; it awes in its presentation.

In Modern Warfare 2, though, that trope is flogged to an inch of its life.. Three player characters, at my count, die in Modern Warfare 2 (Roach, Allen, and the poor un-named astronaut who exists for all of ten seconds). It’s beginning to lose its impact; it’s just another pre-scripted event within a level, that we’ve all seen before. (It was the astronaut that made me really angry and convinced that this had become a cheap trick; he doesn’t even get a name before he dies!)

I wanted to introduce some unpredictability into the level, something that would make the player “sit up” in the same way the nuclear bomb did in COD4. It would have to be something unlike anything else in the rest of the game. So my other change to No Russian is simple: when the player is killed, the level ends immediately. There are no restarts for this level. The final narration plays out, explaining that one of the terrorists was an American, and the (deranged) narrative arc of the game continues as before.

I have a dislike for narrative bullets. You know: the single bullet that proves fatal simply because it’s required to do so for narrative reasons. Why does Makarov’s one bullet count, when the hundreds I’ve absorbed in the level already are shrugged off?

Makarov’s bullet doesn’t need to be special; regardless of who kills Private Allen, someone will discover he’s an American when they find his corpse. So: if the player makes it to the end of the level, they’ll be killed by Makarov – but if they’re killed earlier, by the security guards, or the SWAT teams – well, it makes sense to end the level there; from a narrative perspective, their cover is blown as soon as they die. The level is meant to be jarring, a shocking change from the norm of the game; why give someone the chance to replay a massacre? Giving them a single attempt makes the other-ness of the level immediately obvious. It also removes the reliance on the narrative bullet at the end, and as a result, the internal rules of the level to my mind feel “fairer”.

And that’s it.

It doesn’t make the game less preposterous; it doesn’t remove all of the heavy-handedness of a sequence clearly designed to shock. But these two fixes, to my mind, do treat the player more fairly, and emphasise the sanctity of the narrative in this linear, story-driven game. At the same time, the player now has more consistent rules for their death, ensuring they can’t corrupt the narrative of the story through choice. The level also now embraces that lack of freedom of choice, and uses it to strengthen the shock and disquiet of the level.

I still wouldn’t be happy with this level – the issues around its change in tone, how it sits in the plot, how it breaks the pacing still stand – but I think that this remains an interesting exercise: fixing a game level that is, at best, problematic, and at worst, unfixable.

From Software’s forthcoming 3D Dot Game Heroes. Isn’t that just beautiful?

One of my challenges to myself for 2009 was to make a game.

I bang on about them enough on here, and in the real world, but I’ve never actually made a game – at least, not one anyone else has ever played. I decided that needed to change. And now it has.

Noticings is live. What’s Noticings? Well, the about page explains it pretty well:

Noticings is a game about learning to look at the world around you.

Cities are wonderful places, and everybody finds different things in them. Some of us like to take pictures of interesting, unusual, or beautiful things we see, but many of use are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don’t take in the things around us.

Noticings is a game you play by going a bit slower, and having a look around you. It doesn’t require you change your behaviour significantly, or interrupt your routine: you just take photographs of things that you think are interesting, or things you see. You’ll get points for just noticing things, and you might get bonuses for interesting coincidences.

You play Noticings with a camera, Flickr, a single tag, and making sure your photographs are geotagged. That’s it. There are no points for value judgments or aesthetic opinion; there’s no win-condition (though you might temporarily be top of a leaderboard for the past seven days, or for a neighbourhood, or for a city).

Tom and I had batted around the idea of some kind of game like this for quite a while, and it went through several different phases of complexity and big-design-up-front, showing it to select friends who had smart ideas, and thinking about how to Get It Done and perhaps get paid for it.

And then we threw most of that out of the window (for now) and just made the damn thing work. It went live with one simple rule: you get ten points for a noticing. Then we invited some friends – many of whom have been playing this game for years without knowing it – and waited to see what would happen.

There’s some elegant engineering that means it’s dead easy to roll out new rules, which we’re doing, slowly, along with changes to the code and the site. Some of the forthcoming rules will be obvious; some might be curveballs. We might not tell you about everything up front. You might have to challenge yourself a little to get the more interesting bonuses. We might change everything in a bit.

It’s fun working on a game whilst people play it, and for now, we make no apologies for the work-in-progress state.

And it’s fun to start seeing the world with a slightly different lens; seeing something that might be a good noticing, or recognising something you’ve seen in the game that you want the bonus points for re-noticing. I’m getting much more diligent about uploading cameraphone pictures; I’m getting much less precious about my photostream; I’m taking more pictures as a result. It’s interesting to see a game that encourages you to see patterns and collect the world in photographs, much as Martin Parr or Tom Phillips have done. It’s fun to see more of the city around you.

So, a work in progress. And: it now needs more people to join in. We took the temporary password off this morning, and now, anyone can join in. You can play anywhere in the world – we’ll be doing some interesting stuff around places, I hope, to make it easier to see stuff that’s near you (rather than just all over the place) – and we’ll see how it goes. You might also want to follow the Noticings blog, where we’ll keep people updated with new rules as they happen, and changes to the game.

It’s 2009, and I’m working on a game, and it’s already making me very happy. Let’s see what happens next.

From the TeamFortress 2 Classless Update:

Added a color blind option to add a Jarate icon above enemies who are busy accepting a terrifying existence where they have no dignity.

That’s Jarate, the Jar-based Karate, if you weren’t aware.

Yep, still in love with Valve.

After a long period underground, Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Conviction emerged at E3 substantially different to its previous incarnations. And whilst I, for one, am grateful for the removal of Sam Fisher’s trampy hairdo, the new feature that got me really, really excited seems to have passed with relatively little fanfare. Here it is:

Mission objectives – or, at least, reminders thereof – written into the environment, mapped over space, appearing to the player along; subjective and stylistic, but never part of a HUD. It’s classy and striking, and not something people are playing with in games nearly enough. Prior to this, easily my favourite type design in games came from Codemasters’ GRID:

which placed text into the world as first-class 3D objects, and let the player spin and pivot the camera around it, as if to emphasise both its subjectivity and genuine 3D-ness.

But this has been a thing in movies and TV for a while, now. Here’s JJ Abrams’ Fringe:

which even nails the reflections in the water. And, of course, one of the earliest points of reference for this in genuine 3D is David Fincher’s Panic Room:

which, as Ben has pointed out, owes a great debt to Saul Bass’ titles for North by Northwest:

which makes quite a nice list.

Next week is Develop in Brighton, the UK’s premiere games industry conference, and I’m going to be involved in two sessions there.

The first session is part of “Evolve“, a single day before the conference proper combining their old online and mobile tracks into something more focused on the edges of the games industry – so now including social and casual gaming as well.

With a panel of industry experts, I’ll be asking the question “What Do Social Networking Sites Have To Offer The Games Industry“:

Facebook and Myspace each have over 100m unique users. The users of these sites are not only coordinating their leisure time through them, but spending their leisure time on them, and even playing games on them. What does that mean for the games industry? How can traditional games and game companies engage with the social networks – their users, their platforms, and the core gamers already using them? Are Facebookers casual-gamers-in-waiting? This panel invites representatives from top social networks to explain what gaming means for their products, and how they can support your efforts as games developers.

Hopefully, given the panel’s strengths and expertise, we can come up with some wide-ranging – and interesting – answers.

In addition to that, as part of the conference proper, I’m going to be talking about Games As A Service: what service design is, what it means for games and products of the future, and how some of the territory Schulze & Webb has been exploring when it comes to unproduct might apply to games. It’s called Never Mind The Box: Games As A Service:

The effort and finances needed to build full retail games is growing unsustainable. But what if you weren’t making a product? What would Games As A Service look like? Services encourage loyalty; they turn products into platforms; they empower users; they play well with others and connect to existing services; and at the large scale, they wrap other products and become super-products. Using examples from inside and outside the games industry – from tiny, open-source Davids to console-licensed Goliaths – Tom Armitage examines already successful notions of service design and explores what it will mean for your games, big or small.

So that’s next week, then. Better start writing them. And if you’re going to be at Develop next week – do come say hello!

(or: ‘More Hudson, Less Hicks’)

“I’d like to introduce you to a close personal friend of mine.”

That close personal friend is Corporal Dwayne Hicks. James Cameron’s Aliens has many things to answer for – especially when it comes to the world of videogames – but I’d argue that in its characters, I see the archetypes of players on every Call of Duty 4 server I’ve visited, every Halo 3 TDM game I’ve joined. Hicks isn’t just a model of professionalism for the survivors of the USS Sulaco’s marine team; he’s a model for legions of gamers everywhere.

The online gaming world is full of Hickses. It’s why I don’t frequent public servers very often. I’m just bored of playing against people who seem to take no joy in their games; just a dreary sense of workmanlike competence. Somehow our games have managed to emphasise competence, professionalism, and dead-eye accuracy over having fun. Perhaps not emphasise; perhaps they go further, fetishizing skill – the reams of statistics detailing kill ratios, the obsession with XP, score, and rank, is often taken by players to be not a part of the game, but the reason to play it. And that seems sad.

Because whilst being the best, and having the best ratio, or the best kit is part of the fun of games, a lot of the fun of online gaming comes from a peculiar kind of theatre that emerges from the best online games.

Not messing around, breaking the rules – that’s no fun – but the kind of play that emerges when you succeed badly. Succeeding despite your skills, rather than because of them.

To go back to Aliens a moment: really, I’d like it if more gamers were more like Bill Paxton’s Private Hudson.

“Game over, man! Game over!”

No, really. Sure, Hudson is a similarly competent professional to his NCO, and I can’t deny that he doesn’t fetishize his toys a little… but he’s also the soul of the party. He’s the goofball you can trust with your life. (Which, now I come to think of it, is Bill Paxton’s stock-in-trade). I’d take a legion of stumbling, wise-cracking Hudsons over a dour Corporal Hicks any day.

And nowhere is this more obvious than in Left 4 Dead.

Lee described the joy of Left 4 Dead as “making dangerous mistakes in the company of friends“. What could be better than that? Taking risks, sometimes being punished, usually being chastised, but then having a chance to redeem yourself, with the people you love? That sounds like the best kind of gaming. Better than competence any day.

And it sounds a lot like a Left 4 Dead campaign a few of us ran a few weeks ago. Time for a story!

It’s the end of the third map of Dead Air – the escape over the skybridge – and the four of us have got to the outside of the airport. We’re a bit worse for wear – we haven’t been bringing our A-games – and by the time we get to the multi-storey carpark, we’re on our last legs; a tank and two horde encounters outside the airport took its toll.

So we decide to run.

It is, after all, not far from the car park to the other side of the skybridge.

We belt it through the carpark, capping the odd zombie on the way, and make it to the safe room. All three of us make it to the safe room.

Jones – who is playing Louis – is nowhere to be seen. We yell for him, and, with our magic Survivor X-Ray vision, see that he’s back outside the carpark. Uh-oh.

So we yell for him to come upstairs. We’ll leave him behind in a heartbeat if we have to, but for now, he deserves a fair crack of the whip. So we watch, as X-Ray Louis limps his way into the carpark. He might just make it.

And then he sets off a car alarm, and we hear the baying of the zombie horde.

What went from being a minor cock-up is now a hilarious balls-up of the highest order. Alice and Mike hunker down in the safe room – sensible them – and I take up position crouched in the corner of the skybridge, assault-rifle ready.

(I am playing Bill, and taking the role-playing of the gruff old veteran a little seriously for the purposes of drama).

“Come on, Matt,” we cheer, and soon we see Louis limping through into the corridor of the skybridge. He’s about halfway down the corridor when the express-train that is the zombie horde piles through the door behind him.

I dump an entire clip of rifle ammo into the zombie-train; Jones gets into the safe room; the gun clicks dry and I run back through the doorway –

– straight into the arms of about eight zombies. This is not, in fact, the safe room. It is an amusingly-positioned closet next to the safe room. Desperately, I bash as hard as I can, scrabbling through the horde, and into safety next door.

Somebody, I forget whom, fends off the crowd of zombies I appear to have dragged into the safe room with me, and the door slams shut.

Not only have we survived, we have also not stopped laughing since the car alarm went off. It’s possibly my favourite Left 4 Dead experience ever. We didn’t survive a round on Expert, we didn’t get an all-headshot round, we didn’t drop a Tank with no damage. We messed up, we made stupid mistakes, and as a result it was more like a zombie movie than any perfect run could be. Together, we made a strange kind of consensual theatre, and we still survived, and it was all an absurd amount of fun. (This session is also is one of the many reasons I’m very excited that Valve are introducing Gauntlets – hectic, running-chase Finales – to Left 4 Dead 2).

I don’t play videogames because I want to have competent, professional militaristic encounters with friends. I’d take Dangerous Mistakes In The Company Of Friends over competence any day. Sure, they may be mistakes, but they’re dangerous! They’re exciting! And sometimes, they make the game better than it ever could be when you play it “right”. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Old news, but worth an announcement: I now appear to be doing some semi-regular writing for Offworld, the Boing-Boing stable’s wonderful gamesblog. As well as making the odd post from time to time, I also seem to be writing a regular feature entitled Something For The Weekend, which each week looks at one game – which you can play right now – that I’m going to be spending some time with over the coming weekend.

So far, it’s covered Outrun Online Arcade and The Chronicles of Riddick; this week takes a turn for the indie with Popcap’s awesome Plants Vs Zombies.

If you’ve not been reading Offworld, do check it out; Brandon – the esteemed editor – is a lovely chap, it’s got some fantastic regular contributors (including comrades Rossignol, Robertson, and Parkin), a great take on the world of games and game culture that really marks it out from most of the other gamesblogs there, and a lot of fine writing. In short: worth your time.

Service announcement over. You may return to the rest of your RSS feeds.

I’ve written about Skate before, in the context of designing online games for a generation of players used to a world where they are in control, and where everything is shareable. Writing last year, I said:

I find Skate exciting because it’s a prime example of a game that understands Generation C; it allows players to share game-information outside the game – and in a manner that is so much more easily referenced, due to it having a permanent link – just as they share movies, photos, and blogposts.

The original Skate had an impressive community website, for sharing screengrabs and videos. It wasn’t without faults, though – it was very difficult to permalink to, as every request to Reel (the video-sharing community) first asked you what country you were in, and then redirected you to a homepage, rendering the permalink useless.

How refreshing, then, to see the improvements made to the new Reel site for Skate 2, released at the beginning of this year. Now, permalinks are encouraged – here’s an example – but the concessions to creative end-users go several steps further.

Once you’ve uploaded a video, Reel not only lets you view it and share it with friends, but also now provides proper good embed code, making it trivially easy to re-contextualise the video on your own site. Even more remarkably, though, Reel allows you to download the FLV (flash video format) file for the video, so you can upload it somewhere else – Youtube, Flickr, Revver, wherever you store your video. Here’s a video of me skating a short session – just click on it to watch:

They let you download the FLV! That’s brilliant. Because, you see, even though Reel is good, it’s not where my friends are; my friends are on Youtube and Flickr. When the first game was out, smart Skate-rs wanting to upload their videos to Youtube had to rip the FLV file by peeking into the source of the page; now, EA are enabling them to do that licitly. The file is, after all, still watermarked with the Skate 2 logo, still understood as a fragment of that product – so what if somebody wants to tweak it in iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, or cut it into a best-of compilation, or re-upload it to Youtube? They created the content, and so they should be free to do what they want with it.

The web facilitates and encourages this – the FLV file was always present, it was just obfuscated. By adding an explicit download link, EA demonstrate that they understand not only the fact that you want to share your footage, but also the reasons why you might want to share it, and also that they understand their place in the ecology of the web. They’ve provided the hard part: exporting video from a 360 or PS3 to the web. Now, you should be free to do what you want with it.

EA have even released a downloadable pack with more advanced cameras for filming replays – cameras that can track and follow motion-controlled patterns, for instance. Whilst you could argue that this functionality should have been free, it’s interesting to note an add-on for a game that’s about creativity and sharing, rather than gameplay – and more interesting to note that as well as providing more tools, the “filmer pack” also bumps the amount of video you can store online nearly four-fold.

The Reel site for Skate 2 is a great example of the enabling of permanence, and ‘going where people are”, that I discussed in my talks at NLGD and Develop last year. It’s also an interesting example of the kind of social play that’s much more common than simultaneous, co-operative play – namely, the sharing of play experiences around or after the fact; the objects that emerge out of play. That’s something I talked about at Playful last year (and which, I discover, shamelessly isn’t online yet. Will rectify that soon!) As ever, it’s always exciting to see real-world, big-money, examples of good practice in action. And, as a bonus: here’s my profile on Reel.

(I’ve been meaning to write this post for ages, and it’s been sitting in my draft folder for way too long. If in doubt: just release it into the world)