There’s been some really interesting posts on the games blogs recently about the relationship between the player, their character, and the game’s camera. Obvious highlights include Mitch Krpata’s recent post about cameras, and his follow-up, about the camera’s implementation in EA’s Dead Space. In his first post, Krpata outlines the issues:

In a game, there are three entities sharing control of the experience: the player, the camera, and the character. The difference [between games and eg. books] is that these don’t exist on a straight line. They all overlap, like a Venn diagram. In a first-person shooter like Half-Life, the player, the camera, and the character are all the same. In a third-person action-adventure game like God of War, the camera and the player are distinct, but the player and the character are mostly one and the same. In a strategy game like Warcraft, the player and the camera are the same, but the characters are on their own.

Krpata in turn was responding to Corvus Elrod’s excellent series of posts about the camera in gaming. In one, Corvus comments:

…it’s only a matter of time before someone turns their artistic attention to the video game camera and implements a system so risky, so rewarding, so compelling, that it changes the vocabulary of game cameras forever.

Vocabulary is an interesting word; an important part of the process of understanding an issue is finding a way to express it, and I think a lot of the vocabulary of games-cameras is currently derived from cinema. We need to move towards a game-native vocabulary for cameras, and whilst something might change that vocabulary forever, I think it might be a slower, more evolutionary process.

And that all leads me to the post I wanted to write about originally, which is about a single thing the camera does in Alone In The Dark.

I recently downloaded the demo of Alone in the Dark (hereafter AITD) from Xbox Live, mainly because I was curious about the game: its review scores were all over the place, and the best I could ascertain from the forums was that it was very much a thing of shreds and patches.

The demo confirms that. It veers from moments of brilliance (in terms of graphics engine and interaction design) to appalling control implementations and awkward combat. The in-coat inventory is a classic example – it’s a beautiful interface, and really appropriate, totally ruined by the way you manipulate it. It’s hard to call a game that takes so many risks bad, but it falls on its face in many areas. I’m really not sure I could face playing the whole thing.

But. There’s always a but. And in this case, it was something the game does with the camera that is so daring, so brilliant, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

The game begins in a first-person perspective. Your character is somewhat groggy, having been kidnapped, and his vision has a habit of blurring. The only way to clear it is to blink, an action performed by clicking the right thumbstick. In the first five minutes, you do a lot of blinking.

This is cute, but it isn’t the thing that impressed me.

After the initial sequence, you eventually come across a mirror, and the game jumps to a cut-scene, viewed from the third person, where your character sees himself in the mirror. The camera pans around him, taking him in, as he admits that he has no idea who he is. He doesn’t recognise the man in the mirror.

Then, you realise the cutscene is over, and the game has jumped to a third person perspective.

That’s what I thought was brilliant: the idea of tying the camera into the narrative like that. You’re only allowed to see your character when the character has finally seen himself; the perspective shift represents the amnesiac Carnby seeing himself for the first time. From this point on, you can toggle between first and third person (and you tend to do it a bit – certain actions are easier from each perspective), and the action loses its significance. But the first time it happens, it’s a real surprise, and it’s really smart: the game’s interface reflects the character’s understanding of himself.

That feels like a game-native understanding of camera: the idea that camera can be something that helps to express the seams between the player and the character. Which is, of course, what the camera in games is: a kind of boundary object between the player and the character.

Almost everybody’s linked to the Obama ’08 Official iPhone Application by now. With just cause, as well; it’s a nifty, attractive piece of crowdsourced software development that focuses on a single task that’s well suited to mobile – canvassing – and provides the amateur campaigner with the tools to canvas more effectively.

Skimming over the official page, though, I couldn’t help but notice this in the list of features:

See nationwide Obama ’08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.

So whilst you’re canvassing your friends and recording just how many of them are going to vote for Barack in November, you can also compare yourself to how everybody else using the app is doing. In one click, you’ve got a massively multiplayer high score chart – and of course, you’re going to want to beat everybody else on there, so you go off to canvas some more.

Obama for America just launched an MMO, and nobody noticed.

Introducing: the TIGForums Bootleg Demakes competition. To explain:

The term “demake” was most likely coined by one Phil Fish, to describe a remake of a game on older-generation hardware (or, more likely, a remake that is made to look as though it were running on older-generation hardware). The most obvious demake is, of course, the 3d-to-2d demake.

Got it?

And to explain their notion of “bootleg”:

The term “bootleg” generally means “unauthorized or unlicensed copy.” For this competition it means that you cannot use any trademarked names or ripped materials. Everything must be 100% your own (although obviously inspired). Think “Cogs of Conflict,” “Master Chef,” “Great Giana Sisters,” etc. It is your decision how far to take the bootlegging, but under no circumstances can you violate someone’s intellectual property.

Sounds good so far. What blew me away was the quality of the responses in the month since the competition began.

Here is the post summarising every game that has some form of playable code. As you can see, there’s a lot, and they’re all worth a dig – some are funny, some are clever remakes, some are remarkable technically, and some play with the original game concept.

Highlights include:

• Dysaster, an ASCII-roguelike that riffs on Crysis
• VipeÜt Vectrex, a Vectrex-style demake of Wipeout.
• Gang Garrison 2 and Buddy Base II, two pixel-art sidescrolling pastiches of TF2.
• Dance X2 !Revolt, a one-button dance game. Notable for its dedicated hardware controller, and the hilarious official gameplay video.
• Super Maria Cosmos, a delightful piece of homebrew DS programming.
• The Black And White Plane, an Atari-style demake of Ikaruga.
• Advanced Set The Rope On Fire Cartridge, an Intellivision-style demake of You Have To Burn The Rope – funny both for its style but also its twist on the original’s gameplay.

But three really stand out for me.

The first is Super 3D Portals 6, a Portal demake for the Atari 2600. Not “2600-style”; this is actual code that will run on 2600 emulators, and thus should do so on a real 2600 as well. Outstanding for its commitment to retro-dom. (Note: I believe this was completed before the competition was launched, but it’s so awesome I don’t care).

The other has been linked up in many places, and is just remarkably thorough: Soundless Mountain II. The thread is long, and covers a lot of development, but the NES-style survival horror has some impressive touches and is clearly a real labour of love.

I think my favourite demake in the competition turned out to be STACKER: Nuclear Scavenger. The title screen makes it look like a STALKER demake, but in fact it’s so much more: it takes Diablo II-style inventory management, adds a Russian twist… and turns into a Tetris-clone. The more I think about it, the more it makes me smile. Gaming reduced to inventory management. Fantastic.

Anyhow, I thought all the games in the competition deserved bringing to people’s attention, and so that’s what I’ve done. I’m off to sit in a tent for a few days. Back soon!

A quick note: this post is long, and it’s been a lot of work just to bring it down to some kind of coherent structure and size. It perhaps could have been better as a series of posts, but for now, this is the form it takes. I hope, despite the length, that you enjoy it. Shorter content is forthcoming…

I love Braid. It’s a remarkable game that I’m enjoying playing a lot; it’s a game I love to talk about to both gamers and non-gamers; and it’s a game that is always yielding up new insights and interpretations the more I play it. And most importantly, you have to do more than just talk: it’s a game that only really reveals itself through the act of play. Which is, you could say, how all games should be, but it’s still impressive how much Braid concentrates into its mechanics.

Because of the potential for insight it offers, there’s been a lot written about it since its release, and as the amount of writing on Braid grew, I realised that I was growing dissatisifed with much of it, and that I needed to articulate why.

The starting point for this post was a long, invovled forum thread on rllmuk about the story of Braid, which presented a long, coherent (if at times a little sketchy) interpretation of the game as being about the Atomic Bomb.

What frustrated me was the way the author of the post presented it. He began like so:

Braid is a story that focuses on the development and deployment of the atomic bomb, and the irreversible impact it had on all human conflicts thereafter. At the very same time, it deals with the very human story of a relationship breaking down due to one person’s obsessive need to control this power. Finally, at certain points, the perspective of the bomb creator as a child comes through.

As I said: it’s an interesting reading. The commenter has clearly taken a long, careful look at the game, and come to an interesting conclusion. But why does he have to frame it as a solid, single interpretation?

A few posts later, the rllmuk commenter admitted that the unsubtlety of his phrasing was deliberate:

It’s also the absolute proof, if ever such a thing was needed that something like Braid can be any number of things; stylistically, a homage to 2D platformers of old, the play on the hero/princess stories we’ve been sold any number of times over the years, the take on jealously and obsession… I presented my argument the way that I did because it’s the one angle that I don’t think has been commented on yet, and I’m of the opinion that there is sufficient evidence to support it.

This assuaged a lot of my fear – I think, if anything, he pressed on with his take on things even when his reasoning was sketchy precisely in order to illustrate the many ways the game can be read. All credit to him for that.

I’m still playing Braid, but the one thing I’m pretty convinced by is that it’s about more than one “thing”. There’s more than one sensical and valid reading of it, and it supports many that the author may not have originally intended.

(Beyond that, I’m also convinced of two things: firstly, that wherever the game itself takes place, the world “Tim” lives in is our world, not the world he platforms through, and secondly, that Tim plays videogames.)

I’m tired of games criticsm being so cut-and-dry; so focused on what things are about, rather than what they could mean. We’re not so blinkered in our criticism of any other medium, so why do we have to be like this with games? There’s a nice story, wrapped up in that RLLMUK thread – first I’m frustrated with the tone, but everything turns out alright in the end, as the author’s tone is revealed to be another kind of artifice.

Anyhow, like I said, it got me thinking about the way we currently criticise games.

Then, a few weeks ago, Jonathan Blow (who can unarguably be described as Braid’s “creator”) did an interview with the Onion AV Club, and for the first time, he said something that rubbed me the wrong way. Blow is obviously a smart chap, and he has a lot of excellent things to say about games, and what they can be. Until the release of Braid, a lot of this could only be seen as talk, but now he has a platform to stand on – the game itself, released into the world – and it’s exciting to see someone deliver on their promise of an attempt at change: the game espouses his points itself without any illustration.

But I kept returning to that interview, and the passages that rubbed me the wrong way, and I realised that lot of it was about the nature of criticism (not just games criticism, but criticism itself) and that I had to write about it now or lose it forever.

I don’t want this post to be a Fisking of Blow’s interview, because he says a lot of interesting things in it, and I agree with quite a few of them – but it’s the first time he’s said things that I disagree with at a very fundamental level. And it all began with this statement:

I was a double-major in Computer Science and English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically, the entire bachelor’s degree in English is all about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which was my other major, was exactly the opposite of that. You had to know what you were doing, and you had to know what you were talking about.

This is not what I discovered throughout my degree in English literature (and I’m going to assume that by “English” Blow means the study of literature and its criticism, rather than “creative writing”, as it were). The one thing I learned pretty fast is that the last thing criticism is about is bullshitting. I got away with some heinous bullshit as a secondary school pupil, but believe me, my supervisors forced that out of me pretty fast, and I began to learn how to write my own criticism – rather than a condensation of that of others – that stands on its own and, crucially, shows that I know what I’m talking about.

What Blow is describing is a problem I’ve seen many times before, though: the difficulty of engaging with criticism.

It’s taken a long while to put together, mainly because I wanted to write up my very sketch notes into something approximating what I said, and also because I wanted to experiment with a more representative way of publishing presentations online.

Anyhow, I’m very pleased to share Playing Together: What Games Can Learn From Social Software with you.

It went down pretty well at both NLGD and Develop, and I really enjoyed some of the thinking that went into it. I’m working out what to do about that, obviously, but in the meantime, I thought it deserved a wider audience. Do enjoy, and I’d love to hear your feedback on it.

I wrote a response in a comment on Leigh Alexander’s post at Sexy Videogameland on the “Four Month Bell-curve”, and felt it only fair to reproduce it here, given it’s touching on some ideas I’ve been batting around for a while. And, also, because back before we had comments, we used to respond to each other like this.

Well, sometimes the problem [with the drop-off in interest after you play a game after launch] is that the game changes.

With GTAIV, there are three phases to the player’s relationship with the city. To begin with, you have the shock-of-the-new: a whole world you’re washed up in, lost, just like Niko. You empathise with how lost Niko is, and you slowly learn to love Liberty City.

The second phase is feeling like you fit in – you know the shortcuts, you don’t always need the GPS, and you take pride in every minute you shave off journey time. This is what it felt like a while after moving to London – I felt native, rather than fumbling around like a tourist.

And then you hit this final phase, where you’re no longer even thinking about the neat shortcuts; you’re just picking up the mission, going where you gotta go.

That’s just commuting. And GTAIV turns into commuting about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through, really. I still love the city, but man, it feels like work.

I’ve recently started World of Warcraft, and bits of that game turn into commuting very, very fast – even though I’m still going “wow” at all the new locations my friends charge through.

I don’t know; I think there’s something about the higher fidelity that makes me concentrate on the artifice to begin with, and only when I tire of the artifice is the game stripped back to raw mechanics.

To use your Sonic example – the distance between the raw mechanic and the artifice is much smaller than say, in GTAIV or Bioshock – and so the “commuting” phase never really kicks in. The game is so focused on making you enjoy the act of being in it, stripping away unnecessary walking between Acts or menu interfaces… it’s an easy game not to tire of. By contrast, I find I tire of games more easily than I used to.

But there’s still joy to be had going back. I went back to Bioshock a few weeks ago and have ploughed through the final 75% of the game – and am about to finish it. I’m really enjoying it, and I think being a way from the hype cycle has helped that. I’m looking forward to doing the same to GTA in the near future.

And, in the meantime, I’ve found staying out of the bellcurve – the hype cycle, if you like – has helped me enjoy games like never before. It’s lovely to be surprised by a new game – something we miss out on a lot now.

or: “what games story can learn from Stephen Moffat”

So Braid finally came out. I was in shock when I saw the release date; wonderful as it was, I was never sure I was going to get a chance to play it. I shouldn’t have worried. It’s out, I’ve got it, and so far, it’s been very, very special.

And it’s had me thinking, because with all the coverage of Braid in the past few weeks – not to mention Jonathan Blow’s excellent keynote at Games:EDU last week – I’ve been thinking about games, and stories, and narrative, and writing (which is a special interest of mine if only because it’s one of the few things I know about that I actually studied). To understand what stories that can only be told in games look like, you need to know what stories that can only be told in other mediums look like. And that was when I realised I had some really good, mainstream examples to hand, and that I should explain this on the internet.

Now, to do that, I’m going to have to talk about Doctor Who.

Stephen Moffat wrote easily the best episode of new Who, Blink (from Season 3), and probably the best episodes of the most recent season – Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead.

His episodes have received critical praise (ie: praise from adults); at the same time, they haven’t deviated from the core premise of the show: exciting sci-fi adventure aimed at the family market, which is basically 8-12-year-olds. This is a good thing. I’m very much with Mark Kermode when he points out that there’s far too much of an onus right now for entertainment targeting children to have “something for adults too”. If it’s good, it should appeal to everybody.

Stephen Moffat’s episodes are classic family entertainment; at the same time, they demonstrate very clearly that he understands the medium he’s working in – TV – explicitly, and he’s capable of writing stories that can only be told in TV and film.

Moffat’s episodes are designed around mechanics of fear. Specifically, the very things that most children are afraid of, or have been afraid of at some point in their life.

Blink is about creepy statues (which turn out to be aliens) that only move when you’re not looking at them. It taps into a fear of the uncanny, the ancient, and the inexplicable.

Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead are about many things, but at the core of them is the primal fear of the dark. In it, shadows turn out not to be an effect of light, but creatures – the Vashta Nerada, vast clouds of tiny creatures that eat people.

Who hasn’t been afraid of the dark?

Both are great plot devices. Neither requires much in the way of complex effects. But the most important thing about them – certainly in terms of this article – is that they are plot devices that are entirely native to television and film.

Blink is an entire drama made possible by the fact that whilst TV is a linear medium, the audience understands editing. Editing as an artform has evolved over time; it was developed after the initial invention of film, and it was only a reasonable period after film’s creation that it was understood not only as a technique, but also as an art in its own right. (For a great example, look at the first five minutes of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now – a very important sequence in that film, where it’s important that the editing shows how the characters are perceiving events as much as how they’re happening).

Anyhow, Blink and editing. The audience understands (even implicitly) that the statues aren’t moving in a blink of our eye; they’re moving in a blink of the characters’ eyes. This means they move in that simplest of scary-movie techniques, the jump-cut.

Because this jump-cut takes us by surprise, the creatures scare us like they scare the characters – even if we know that they’re not really moving when we don’t look. This particular kind of delivery of shocks isn’t possible (or at least as effective) in, eg, written fiction, because there is no possibility for edits, for jumpcuts. Prose flows in a linear manner forward, and whilst the writing may contain careful pacing, the act of reading is paced fairly consistantly.

The two-part story in Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead is a drama all about light and dark. The Vashta Nerada, as mentioned, are clouds of creatures that look exactly like shadows – and are, of course, represented as shadows on screen. There are a few important effects shots where characters are seen to have multiple shadows, but most of the time, there’s no need for trickery.

All the “magic” is in set and lighting design, and script: dark corners, nooks and crannies, and the characters telling us they’re afraid of the dark. When the Doctor says “stay out of the shadows,” he reminds the audience that they too were afraid of the dark once. And, of course, as a child, when you say you’re afraid of the dark, an adult tells you there’s nothing there. The Doctor has told us to be afraid of the dark because the dark really is a monster. He’s contradicted our parents and made us even more afraid. It’s terrifying.

We need to find stories that we can only tell in games. We need to find play mechanics that tell us things about the world.

Both of these stories are natively filmic: a story that can only be told when you understand editing; a story built around the visual representation of light. These are, of course, not the only things the story is about – far from it; their richness and brilliance is the real reason Moffat has been so admired. But it’s important to appreciate that these two storylines stem from an individual technique or aesthetic that’s uniquely represented by the medium (TV/film).

Or, to put it more simply (and I think more effectively):

something everyone is afraid of when they’re eight + a plot device that can be satisfactorily represented on television/film without being too expensive or convoluted.

So what has this got to do with games?

The notion of telling stories appropriate to a medium is one response to what Braid developer Jonathan Blow is getting at in his Games:EDU keynote. Rather than resolving the conflict between ludic and narrative elements by wrapping gameplay around the story, why not write stories that can only be told through gameplay?

Braid is a game about trying to reverse the past; its time-control mechanic is an important commentary on the central character’s predicament. Moffat’s Blink would make a poor videogame, simply because it’s unfair; the Weeping Angels essentially have a cheatcode to the world, and their movement patterns wouldn’t make for fun.

But a game built around shadows – genuine light and dark area – as a foe might work. It’s very gamelike – and it’s that that set me thinking on this whole endeavour. We have spent so much money on lighting technologies and graphics cards and we can now make beautiful light and dark – both realistic and expressive. Why can’t that be a game – or at least, the starting point for a game – in its own right? Just because at the moment it just a neat visual effect doesn’t mean we can’t put it front and centre. This is something that, for a while, James Cameron did very effectively. The Terminator, T2, The Abyss, even Titanic; these are all movies that require sophisticated visual effects to tell a key part of the story – the T-800, the T-1000, the underwater creature, the ship; without convincing, cutting edge effects technology, these movies fall apart. But Cameron is interested primarily in his characters: once he has his core, visual-effect oriented premise in place, he turns his camera to the characters. He wants to tell human stories; he just happens to have found stories about that need remarkable visual effects to play out.

We need to find stories that we can only tell in games. We need to find play mechanics that tell us things about the world. And if we’re stuck for inspiration, it’s worth considering how other mediums have approached this issue. Above, there are a few examples; there are many more, when it comes to literature, and film, and radio drama, and theatre (and especially those last two). But when it comes to games, there aren’t enough.

We need to start considering what they might look like. Stories about shadows and lighting. Stories about physical worlds told through physics engines. Stories about direct control, or the lack of it.

Some of these exist; more need to. That’s the challenge facing games right now. If you’re looking for an example, download Braid and savour it. It really does succeed at the things Blow hints at. It tells a story you need to experience, and you need to experience the mechanic at the core of it to appreciate the game’s message. It’s remarkable.

So that was Develop.

To put it in a nutshell – or at least, what I remember that can be bounded by a nutshell:

strong ideas, building bands, Kirks and Picards, theatre, cultural studies, mise en scène, horror through constraint, good individuals versus great teams, cultural studies, importing the wrong ideas about movies, rather good chocolate cakes, putting many names to faces, impromptu One Life Left appearance, listening to children, being a good teacher, nuArgs, still needing to play Chain Factor, developers’ main hatred of Flash being its lack of IDE (and static typing), all games are alternate realities, feelies, importance of good user-testing, importance of realistic user-testing, input-behaviour-control, cybernetics as model for AI, de-emphasising behaviour in favour of farming out to concepts, fish and chips in a Hove park, sea air, 2K Boston’s virgin-hiring practices, Kotaku-headline meme, lists of fantasy movies, The Final Countdown on four-player Band Brothers DX, raspberry coffee.

As for my talk, it seemed to go pretty well and people were positive. I’ll try to get it up within the week. I’ve also got some notes from a few sessions I’d like to write up, because my web and design readers might enjoy them. Doing that might make sense of some of those notes.

Thanks to everybody who made it so memorable: it was a pleasure to meet you all.

Lots of brain-food and notes to come from Develop, but in the meantime, this cracker from Matt Southern’s session:

“a game is an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilbrial outcome“

(Elliott Avedon and Brian Sutton Smith; emphasis mine.)

or: trust the designer, not the mechanic.

I have a problem with not finishing games. I doubt I am the only one. But sometimes I become disappointed with my inability/lack of time to finish a game, and Bioshock is one title I’m disappointed not to have put more time into.

Most games stop being played either because my interest wanes or beacuse they demanded too much time. Bioshock did neither. Bioshock was, whilst I was playing it, wonderful: simple mechanics, but deep design; beautiful architecture; solid story-telling.

I was really enjoying it, and really into it – and then we broke up. We broke up because of what it asked me to do.