Tough Love: Left 4 Criticism

Left 4 Dead 2 came out and I all but dropped every other game for it. Was it worth the not insignificant cash outlay to obtain, plus the effort to get the uncensored international version? I think so. Does that mean it’s immune to the infinite gaze of The Critic? I think not.

The first thing I noticed about the new introductory video for Left 4 Dead 2 was that it did not do the same job as the one present in the first game. That video introduced not only the characters of the game to new players, but also began the process of familiarisation with the game mechanics. Virtually every important aspect of the game for a new player to get accustomed to is demonstrated in those first few minutes. The individual weapons; the need to melee infected away from players; what each special infected does; how tanks attack, and what to do to stay away from witches – these are all subtly introduced to players through the intro video. Even pulling up survivors that have fallen off buildings is covered. In contrast, the L4D2 video, while full of sound and fury, introduces the new aspects of the game not nearly as well and doesn’t cover some of the more critical additions.

In fact, the crux of my criticism of the newest incarnation of Left 4 Dead boils down to the fact that, in many cases, it just isn’t up to the usual valve standard of passively and actively teaching players about the game. For the longest time I ignored melee weapons because when I first used them (on the opening level of Dead Centre, naturally) I couldn’t work out how to best use them while avoiding taking damage from zombies – so I went back to what I knew how to use, which was pistols.

In this, the very first level of the first campaign, players don’t start with a primary weapon, so any choice to use a melee weapon comes at the expense of a pistol and any way of, say, shooting a smoker off of a target barring actual physical attack on either the smoker or the ensnared player. By forcing a choice of pistol or a melee weapon on players, valve do not make it easy for new players to best learn how to use melee weapons. It took another player using melee weapons to great effect in versus mode for me to fully appreciate the value of melee weapons. It’s wasn’t completely obvious to me, because at first it would seem the advantage to a melee weapon is in not having to worry about ammo, but pistols already have unlimited ammo, so the real advantage actually lies in not having a timer on melee attacks. Add to that the crucial addition that it also kills infected rather than simply push them back and you've got a real reason to drop that shiny 1-hit-KO desert eagle for a cricket bat or machete.

Another aspect that wasn’t introduced well was the special ammo types, being the incendiary and explosive rounds. The way they work currently they use up the slot shared by a medkit or defibrillator in a player’s inventory, which invites comparisons to the important role played by the medkit. Health is worth its weight in gold in Left 4 Dead, particularly in competitive game modes, so when first presented with an offensive item to replace the spot of heath; my immediate reaction was “Why in the hell would I want that?” By placing it in the same inventory slot as the medkit, Valve are saying this could be worth the health you are forgoing if used right, which is both counter intuitive and runs counter to my own experience, in which it has never been the case.

While I similarly rejected adrenaline initially for its low health boost compared to pills, it’s come to be my preferred item for that slot. Similar to the above case however, there is just nothing outside of a loading screen tip and perhaps a brief onscreen mention that explains the primary benefit of adrenaline, in that it gives you not only a movement speed boost but increases the speed of all your actions by a significant percentage. Used judiciously, an adrenaline shot can be the difference between life and group death, particularly in one of the new crescendo events. Many of these require that an object be reached and switched off to stop the ravening hordes and for these events adrenaline is a significant boon - but again, that’s never satisfactorily explained, and it is left up to players to learn through trial and error or by observing other players (often in many cases only by having it used against them).

Another example of the reliance on ‘trial and error’ for teaching players is seen in the game's treatment of the new weapons – looking at them all it’s impossible to tell which ones are “better” than others, so players have to try them all until they find which ones work best. In the original game it was quite clear which weapons were better, as there was a very limited selection of them and the “tier 2” weapons as they came to be known were clearly improved versions of the starting weapons available at the start of every level. Perhaps this clarity in weapon hierarchy was merely a result of the simplicity of the original game, but simplicity can be a virtue. Faced with too many choices, from experience, I know that people tend to stick with what they know.

A similar level of “decision overload” occurred to me when first playing Left 4 Dead 2 as the amount of on screen activity, coupled with the engorged dismemberment and plethora of viscera, resulted in a visual overload. The signal to noise ratio needed getting used to, coming from the decidedly clean and sparse levels of the original game. This could go either way, as either praise or criticism, and I’ve certainly acclimated to the new levels of visual activity by now. But still, even for as big a fan of the original as I, it was quite the learning curve.

Lastly on my list of gripes, and my major concern, is the four new characters. This is entering the realms of personal preference and taste, but to me it seems that Nick, Ellis, Rochelle and Coach aren’t as memorable as the original quartet. Perhaps it’s because they are less obvious archetypes. Coach seems the closest to a recognisable archetype and for his larger-than-life personality he remains my personal favourite. Nick and Ellis both feel too similar – Nick, I know from the pre-release publicity, is ostensibly a conman but he’s much too nice and average. That aspect of his character is struggling to shine through, however and the only quote of his that has stood out for me is most revealing of that aspect of his character.

In a game recently I heard him admonish someone for shooting him, saying “You did not just shoot the man in the three-thousand dollar suit!” Nick needs to be talking about his suit way more, and Ellis needs something to give his character a similar focus. Valve has said that they wanted him to be “southern” and innocent and naive, while avoiding representing him as a stereotypical hick. While this effort is laudable for wanting to portray southern American culture in a mature light, I wonder if the character suffers for it.

Perhaps Nick’s character too suffers for being in a game as devoted to cooperation as Left 4 Dead 2. Thinking on it, it's possible that a sharkskin-suited conman could still be an appropriate character for L4D, as he could easily be cast as The Reluctant Help, much like Francis in the original. Francis was a grouch, but he was a lovable grouch, and it was always communicated that his character had your back. But how does one pull off “the lovable conman?” I guess what I’m suggesting is that Nick is not wisecracking enough for it; he’s not even sarcastic enough.

I’m probably being a little unfair on Valve here, but I think it’s actually a bit of a shame that they used up their most memorable characters on the first Left 4 Dead game. Unless L4D2 is surpassed by a third game in another year’s time (yeah right) I hazard a guess most will still be playing the second game and not the first come this same season in 2010.

It might seem from all the above like I preferred the first game to the second, having tragically fallen into the “I liked their old stuff better than their new stuff” cliché, but that’s not quite accurate. I really like Left 4 Dead 2, but it’s a functional kind of like. It’s the same kind of like as one gets for Season 2 of The Wire – it’s great that there’s more of it, but it’s not exactly what I wanted. I don’t like it for quite the same reasons I liked the original (with one notable exception, but more on that another time).

The new explicitly linked campaign narratives also fail to live up to the ‘memorability’ test, and while there are a great number of excellent set-pieces very little left me saying ‘this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before’. And that was how I felt about every single campaign of the original on first playing. Take that with a grain of salt perhaps if only to offset the nostalgia and originality of the underlying mechanics, but even so I feel the decision to explicitly link the new campaigns chronologically was unnecessary. Like all well told stories, there will be gaps in which not much happens, and they get omitted. With everything now spelt out from beginning to end and the dots all lined up and connected for us, I feel like it was a misstep.

I’m still pleased with the L4D2 campaigns, but there was something uniquely fascinating in trying to piece together the story of everything happening around you – and even to you – in the original game. This sense of a mystery to uncover has been diminished in the sequel, and that goes hand-in-glove with a lessened sense that the graffiti on the walls of safehouses is part of uncovering the mystery. I’ve looked deliberately at a number of them, but from what I have seen they have retained little of the charm of the original – notably absent are any of the pithy one-liners such as “I miss the internet” from the first game, gone too are the scribbled out notes that tell tales of ongoing discovery by previous survivors.

Still! It’s early days for the game and some of these issues may yet get ironed out. Heck, play versus for long enough and half of these complaints disappear simply because you’ll see all the tricks, all the tactics clever players have already devised and you won’t need teaching. The issue of memorable characters however remains my biggest worry. The new quartet has a lot to live up to, and perhaps that’s the biggest problem – the previous ones were so good. So good in fact, they spawned memes. How can Coach, Rochelle, Nick and Ellis possibly live up to that?

Assassins Creed Official Soundtrack - A Review

If you’ve only recently joined SLRC, since the start of the Permanent Death story perhaps, you might not know that SLRC started life as a music and videogame blog. We don’t do reviews very often here at SLRC (conveniently, if you ever wish to see that change, feel free to commission me) but today sees a reprisal of an earlier trend in reviewing the music for a videogames – this time it’s Ubisoft’s 2007 title Assassins Creed that gets a thorough once-over.

As a brief aside, this will be my last post for a few weeks as I’m taking a break and dropping off the grid for a few days. I’ll probably be back in late September or early October and will hopefully be recharged and ready to take on the rest of the Permanent Death saga. Enjoy!

The album sets the tone at the opening, introducing in the first track solo voices singing in Arabic over arab-esque scales, as well as chanting monks drenched in reverb evoking cavernous Middle Ages cathedrals. Vocals are an important part of the sonic palette of the Assassins Creed soundtrack and provide a sonic element that aims to capture the unique historical period of the game.

The listener is treated to sparing splashes of flutes and piano melodies underpinned by Arabic style light drum percussion. The major feature of the track ‘Flight through Jerusalem’ is a lament sung almost operatically, and placed in a middle distance giving the sense of being heard from across a city – perhaps the singer is crying out over the rooftops at dawn or dusk. A Middle Eastern guitar-type instrument and a string section carry much of the underlying harmonic content of the song.

The following few tracks on this admittedly rather short album – totaling up to around 40 minutes of music – re-introduce more traditional orchestral instruments to contrast with their ethnic co-players; timpani, drums, tambourines, string and brass section stabs, all make appearances in the first third of the album.

The aptly named ‘Spirit of Damascus’ piece uses what sounds like a background of giant steel-works percussion and the metallic timbre works is stark contrast to the fore-grounded Middle Eastern guitar. The mix and meeting of uncommonly related instruments as heard here mirrors musically what would have been a ‘cultural melting pot’ in the particular area of the middle east Assassins Creed is set in. The meeting of Christian and Islam; West and East, would have produced both clashes and unique opportunities for art and expression. That, and a lot of fighting, obviously.

The piece trails off, and ends far too quickly for such a beautiful track, with a synth bed that evokes the monkish chants on previous tunes. The following track, ‘Trouble in Jerusalem’ (a much longer piece at 4minutes) reprises the steel-percussion of ‘Damascus’ and adds Bootmen-style stompy percussion. A synthetic almost sub-audible bass acts as a powerful counterpoint to the breathy, cloistered monk-ish whisperings in (presumably) Latin on the track ‘Acre Underworld’. The use of harsh-cuts and sample loops that remind one of a broken record at the beginning gives the track a uniquely ‘electronic’ feel, utilizing an effect that cannot be easily replicated without modern technology. It is also possibly the first most prominent artificial sound on the album, or at the least, the fist piece that leans more towards using artificial and created sounds than organic or acoustic ones.

The composer, Jesper Kyd, is a great employer of non-acoustic instrumentation, and electronic instruments and synths alternately shimmer and glisten and stutter throughout the album. The most stand-out use is on the track ‘Access the Animus’, a supremely long piece clocking in at nine minutes and which contains a plethora of razor sharp glass-like samples. Additionally, some kind of synth or sample has been manipulated to sound unnervingly like a leopard or jaguar's roar – appropriate imagery for a piece entitled ‘Access the Animus’ with its title a homonym for “Animism”, a philosophical, religious or spiritual belief common in many non-urbanised, non-westernised civilizations, often accompanied by a reverence for animals (particularly large and powerful ones such as big cats). Admittedly it’s a tenuous connection, but it’s also one I can’t help to make – it really sounds like a jaguar or other big cat to my ear. In addition to being one of the longest pieces, ‘Access the Animus’ also marks the mid-point of the album.

The short piece ‘Dunes of Death’ makes use of metallic percussion and flute or pan-pie sound-alike instruments and also brings back a few splashes of melody on the piano.

A big feature of this album is that many of the towns have specific themes or sound-palettes. For example, Jerusalem-themed tracks almost always employ monks and male choirs, appropriate imagery for the cities strong religious significance to both Christianity and Islam. Compare and contrast with the piece ‘Masyaf in Danger’ which uses none of the same vocal elements, using only a light sprinkling of female synth voices.

The third from last track, ‘Mediation Begins’, has at it’s core Arabic percussion, a steel-stringed Arabic guitar-like instrument, and a melody played on a pipe-flute instrument all sounding so much like a group of street performers. The band fades in and at first the scene could be any of a thousand street corners in the Middle East, however a bed of synth and reverb-soaked synthetic sounds soon appears to underpin the group. The effect, and it is one that is used in many of the pieces, is the juxtaposition of normal surface appearances with underlying tensions and fears – another musical metaphor perhaps for the cultural tensions of the historical period.

‘Meditation of the Assassin’ has almost no organic or instrument sounds. The return of the nearly sub-audible bass from earlier in the album along with ominous whispers and out-of-place, non-harmonic dissonant electronic noises gives the piece a strong sinister feel. The brief appearance of wind chimes is far from reassuring and only further adds to the eeriness of the piece. A quiet Arabic guitar struggles vainly against the overpowering bass towards the middle and end. The final song ‘The Bureau’ is a bit of an anti-climax for an album sprinkled with such a number of great moments.

Overall, the album hangs together quite well, however it is dominated somewhat unflattering by the 9-minute long track ‘Access the Animus’ which, despite covering a variety of rhythmic and instrumental feels throughout its duration, still feels like it drags too long. Add to this the fact that some of the more intriguing pieces are overly short and the album is left feeling lopsided and uneven. It does, thankfully, avoid the common pitfall of other videogame soundtracks and avoids any awkward song transitions or strange stops and starts.

Ultimately, however, if the listener does not have the same level of positive associations with the music generated through playing the actual game of Assassins Creed as I acknowledge I have, I think it would ultimately prove a largely unsatisfying listening experience.

The Assassins Creed Official Soundtrack, is composed by Jesper Kyd and has a running time of 40:37.

Beyond Good and Evil Official Soundtrack - A Review

We don’t do reviews very often here at SLRC, and naturally this ‘review’ is probably only part review, with a bit of musical analysis throw in for good measure. I started listening through the Beyond Good and Evil soundtrack in conjunction with the Vintage Game Club’s play through of the game and couldn’t resist taking a few notes. I should preface by saying that it is one of the most impressive soundtracks for any game I have ever heard. Stylistically, the music on this album is amazing – the diversity of sound is a testament to the composer’s ability to create an incredible range of music, and even with the sheer amount of it present there are no pieces that sound like the standard licensed fare you get in many games (even many ‘AAA titles’). It’s impressive in that it manages a cohesive sound while including pieces that evoke calypso, ambient, jazz and funk feels.

While there is an official soundtrack, just as popular it seems is an ‘unofficial version’ which is straight rips of the music from the game (obtained from the PC version, I assume) – and while that’s kind of cool in it’s own way, I’m preternaturally attracted to the OST because of my love for the album form. The majority of my music listening is accomplished by putting on an album and letting it play through while engaged in some other activity and outside of my iPod, I rarely at best use the shuffle function in iTunes. The direct rips are also problematic for me because they often contain ‘unfinished’ tracks that end abruptly where a song would loop and start again, with the game applying fadeouts and transitions wherever appropriate.

I eventually discovered and downloaded the free official soundtrack, with the expectation that it was an album, which it is. However just as nothing is as it first appears in the city of Hillys the same holds true for this album, and in this post I’m going to try and outline why.

The album opens and closes with iconic pieces of music form the game, over which are played a selection of the in-game dialogue and sound effects in a way that builds up a rather complete aural picture of that moment in the game. I’m quite a fan of this technique as it can evoke some very specific moments in films and games particularly well. It really works well when the aim of your album is to re-tell the audio story of the film or game especially, and it works here.

So let’s cut to the chase and talk about the album as a whole. My initial comparisons were to the Halo series’ soundtracks which similarly capture the feel of ‘all the songs you hear when playing the game’ in their approximate order, but the comparison is not entirely beneficial to BG&E. While the Halo album releases definitely feel like complete album each, and can be listened to on their own repeatedly, BG&E ends up wearing a bit thin after a few listens.

Firstly, it seems to me that there is not enough variation to maintain interest in the more ‘ambient’ background pieces that in the game play while exploring dungeons. This criticism is perhaps a bit of a cheap one to level at the album, since the music obviously works in game, however it’s inclusion on the album strikes me as a somewhat thoughtless choice. The decision to include all or as much of the music from the game as possible, and in roughly the order it gets heard, has subordinated the need for the album to exist and be listenable as a work in itself. Don’t get me wrong, attention has definitely been paid to making the album, but maybe not quite enough.

The first hiccup in the album comes with the tracks ‘Mineshaft Madness’ and ‘Say cheese, fellas’ (tracks 7 & 8) which both drag on for just a bit too long. The latter piece uses a bit of in-game audio again at the start (omitting spoken word however) to remind listeners that this is the music from the first boss battle. Again, while both these tracks hold up well in the game their inclusion on the album is a bit questionable, especially since there is enough quality on this album to avoid using any filler tracks.

This would be a good point to talk about the uneven pacing of the album, which I think is the result of wanting to put the music in the order the player of the game encounters it. Conventional wisdom regarding pop records is that you generally try to give your album a ‘flow’ by arranging tracks so that you get a pleasing and natural progression between songs and also a particular kind of dynamic to the album. Think, for a moment, of how many albums you know that open with their best song, add a few in the middle (usually none of which are perhaps catchy enough for release as a single but which can still often be quite good) and in the last 1/3 of the album bring out all the stops, lifting the album to it’s crescendo. It tends to follow roughly that same curve that is used to describe a good narrative – with the high point somewhere around the 2/3rds mark, or roughly the point of the Golden Mean.

If I could draw a similar graph of the dynamic of Beyond Good and Evil’s soundtrack, it would be a series of tiny humps. All the stand-out tracks are separated by 2 to 3 songs that either feel like filler or feel out of place. Consequently, the album never really gets off the ground and can’t escape the feeling of ‘a collection of semi-related tracks’. Not helping this problem is the fact that, like the music in the direct rips I mentioned earlier, a number of tracks stop abruptly, where adding a simple fadeout would have worked wonders. One last issue – the song ‘propaganda’, the most iconic and memorable song from the game, is frustratingly mixed quieter than the rest of the album detracting from what should have been one of the highlights of the album.

I was originally planning on doing some musical analysis in this post as well, however this review has run on long enough as it is. If there is a lesson to take away from the album it’s that for any release to stands on it’s own, attention needs to be paid to conventions and expectations of the medium. As videogame music it succeeds flawlessly, however as an album, for me at least, it critically fails. Hopefully before long I’ll be back with some less critical things to point out about the music of BG&E and elaborate on just how good it is as 'music', rather than album.

Audiosurf - Breakfast of Champions

I’ve been playing Audiosurf recently, and it struck me that buried deep within my thesis was a nice little bit of theorising about the game. So I've chosen to reprint it here, slightly edited, for the convenience of anyone who can’t be arsed to wade through my multiple thousands-of-words thesis and pick out the good bits (probably most people).

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Audiosurf was the work of primarily by one person, Dylan Fitterer, and was released on the Steam digital distribution platform in February 2008. Audiosurf requires music to play – it takes your music collection, and creates a 3D track based upon features of the music which is then navigated by the player who, depending on the game-mode, collects coloured blocks that visually correspond to the music. The game ostensibly provides a way to ‘ride your music’ as the game’s tag-line suggests[1] - a feat of musical gameplay that is operating on a rather different level to a game like Guitar Hero. It’s also a great step towards overcoming some of the widely acknowledged problems with games like Guitar Hero - many critics have noted that the strength of a music game is largely subject to how good its track listings are[2]. Alec Meer says,

…we were all playing Guitar Hero and wishing we could stick our favourite music into it. Audiosurf says “fuck it, why not?” and provides the scaffolding of a game around it[3]

Audiosurf’s particular implementation of representing and performing music in a game does however come with a number of its own disadvantages. Firstly, the way the three dimensional track is generated by the program is fixed and determined by a set algorithm[4]. In an interview with Ars Technica, the developer Dylan Fitterer commented on the way that the algorithm turns the song into a three dimensional track, saying;

…when the music is at its most intense, that's when you're on a really steep downward slope, like you're flying down a rollercoaster in a tunnel. When the music is calmer, that's when you're chugging your way up the hill, watching that peak in the distance you're going to reach.[5]

The experience of playing the game itself is where I personally find the major innovations of Audiosurf as well as its major problems. When surfing a song the game’s analysis algorithm has pre-determined the majority of the course’s parameters from the musical elements contained within the recording. Some aspects of the course are determined from relatively transparent musical parameters – the track’s length corresponds directly to the length of the song and the contours of the course are derived from reasonably straightforward aspects such as volume and dynamics. In music with a strong steady beat, the track will often appear to undulate along beneath the player’s ship character in time with the rhythm of the song. The comprehensible translation of the music into visuals, or lack thereof, is where I encounter the main problem of Audiosurf.

In the examples outlined above, the relationship between music and the visuals (the track environment) is clear and direct, making sense to the player and allowing for a pleasurable and organic merging of knowledge of the song with knowledge of the corresponding Audiosurf track. This is a significant aspect of the appeal of the game as much community discussion goes on about the suitability of tracks for surfing[6]. Indeed the process works effectively on the macro structural scale, however a core component of Audiosurf is a ‘match 3’ type block collection game, where the block placement – called ‘traffic’ by the game – is generated from the rather more musically ambiguous parameter of “volume spikes”. The developer, Dylan Fitterer, describes the process saying

…whenever there's a spike in the music, the intensity of that spike determines the block's color. So the most distinct spikes, like a snare drum, that would tend to be a red block, a really hot block. If something is a little more subtle, like a quiet high hat, that would be a purple block, which is worth less points.[7]

This kind of relationship between music and visuals or environment becomes, musically at least, increasingly murky on this micro level as a sheer ‘spike’ in volume is no guarantee that a listener would make the corresponding connection to what they are hearing. Indeed the issue of what a listener actually perceives about a song when listening to it is much, much more complicated. Albert S. Bregman, author of the comprehensive text ‘Auditory Scene Analysis: The perceptual organisation of sound’ coined the term “stream” for what he identified as an audible cognitive process which was lacking adequate terminology. Bregman’s research noted a significant distinction between the cognitive process of the grouping of sounds that ‘go together’[8] from what might be distinguished as pure ‘sounds’. He notes that, ‘A series of footsteps, for instance, can form a single experienced event, despite the fact that each footstep is a separate sound.’ He also makes a musical comparison, saying that,

A soprano singing with a piano accompaniment is also heard as a coherent happening, despite being composed of distinct sounds (notes). Furthermore, the singer and piano together form a perceptual entity – the “performance” – that is distinct from other sounds that are occurring.[9]

Kieron Gillen writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun says that

The problem with Audiosurf is that the concentration you take to really make the block game work is entirely the opposite of what you need to do to feel the music. The two parts of the game can tug at each other a little...On one hand, a zone game. On the other, a high-speed sorting puzzle.[10]

What I believe that Gillen has identified here is the inherent disjunction between what the musical listener focuses on when listening to the song, and what the game makes the player focus on. I suggest that this phenomenon is somewhat analogous to Ian Bogost’s term ‘simulation fever’. The concentration Gillen identifies as being necessary for successful play means that the player is acutely aware of block placement, largely determined by the volume spikes mentioned earlier.

I would argue that simply focussing on volume spikes is not adequately representative of the music to withstand the scrutiny that a player applies to it. I propose that, in a situation of high concentration on music, a more complex system is needed, one which addresses the issue of how a listener perceives a song. Admittedly, this is a daunting prospect and one inevitably encounters certain apparently insurmountable barriers to rendering onscreen what any one particular person is most likely to concentrate on within a song at any one time, needing as it would to take into account personal differences and background as well as individual musical training. However, the fact remains that this process is undertaken by humans themselves leads me to believe that a more accurate model is possible. When listening we can (and do) lock onto a number of particular elements of a song – the melody, a catchy lead rhythm or hook – and this is not always represented visually on screen. While Audiosurf often wonderfully represents the underlying kick-drum rhythm, especially if it is prominent, it will rarely pick up and single out an element like the aforementioned melody or hook unless it stands out in a particular way – namely through sheer volume.

Guitar Hero, in contrast, sidesteps some of these problems through both its position as a guitar game (with the player’s concentration largely limited to being focussed on the guitar) and by having a human pre-define the on screen actions the player has to undertake to ‘perform’ the song. However it does not yet allow for any meaningful input of a players own music library, and for that I am continually thankful for Audiosurf’s existence – imperfect though it may be.

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[1] Wikipedia contributors, "Audiosurf," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Audiosurf&oldid=241996378, accessed October 7, 2008.

[2] See for example, Mitch Krpata, ‘Rock Band 2: Why now?’, Insult Swordfighting, http://insultswordfighting.blogspot.com/2008/07/rock-band-2-why-now.html, accessed October 7^th, 2008.

[3] Alec Meer in ‘The RPS Verdict: Audiosurf’, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/03/03/the-rps-verdict-audiosurf/, accessed March 3, 2008.

[4] Thomas Wilburn, ‘Catching Waveforms: Audiosurf Creator Dylan Fitterer speaks’, Ars Technica, http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/03/11/catching-waveforms-audiosurf-creator-dylan-speaks, accessed

[5] Dylan Fitterer in Thomas Wilburn, ‘Catching Waveforms: Audiosurf Creator Dylan Fitterer speaks’.

[6] See the comments section of any Rock, Paper, Shotgun Post tagged ‘Audiosurf’ – every single one involves readers suggesting songs that others should try: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/audiosurf/

[7] Dylan Fitterer in Wilburn, ‘Catching Waveforms: Audiosurf Creator Dylan Fitterer speaks’.

[8] Albert S Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis : The Perceptual Organization of Sound, 2nd MIT Press paperback ed., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999, p.9

[9] Ibid, p.10

[10] Kieron Gillen in ‘‘The RPS Verdict: Audiosurf’, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/03/03/the-rps-verdict-audiosurf/, accessed March 3, 2008.

An investigation of new musical potential in videogames; A Thesis

So the day has finally arrived and the chickens can now be counted. First the raw mark:

For my thesis, which I spent all year writing, I received a mark of 86 which is safely within the High Distinction band. Accordingly, the full text of my thesis is now available here. Go read it, print it, bind it, critique it, lambast it, or just put it on your coffee table and let it look pretty.

So here's the inside scoop on what to expect:

- Chapter 1 is me raving, perhaps somewhat inadvisably, about a loony Indie game for 1000 of my 17,000 word limit before getting around to talking about music and what I'm going to say in this wordy monstrosity.

- Chapter 2 is my literature review (highly skippable if you aren't interested in either a) Ian Bogost or b) Gonzalo Frasca)

- Chapter 3 is all about how I think the current musical paradigm in videogames is, erm... how you say? COMPLETELY RUBBISH (okay, not quite, but almost) and then I talk about games like Guitar Hero, Audiosurf and Everyday Shooter and how wicked awesoe they are....

- Chapter 4 is the thesis, really, and it's where I interview the awesome Marty O'Donnell in an attempt to glean some insights about music for videogames from him. If you only read one chapter, it should really be this one.

Which also reminds me that I've got the full text of the interview ready to put up, so I'll kick start that series later in the week - keep an eye out for it. I think Marty has some genuinely interesting and important things to say about sound and music in games - and about game design more generally.

What are you still doing here? Go download it already!

Also: props to my man in Melbourne, Dan Golding, who recently posted his own thesis for which he got an even better mark (90) so go download and read his when you're done with mine.

Edit: Matthew Gallant from The Quixotic Engineer has graciously provided hosting for my thesis so I don't have to use Mediafire. Isn't he lovely? =)

I have two hands and with them I touch the world

I have two hands, and with them, I touch the world.

In the post release discussions of Far Cry 2 that I have read few others have mentioned what I think is perhaps the single most genre-innovating aspect of the game. The first person shooter’s de rigeur level of interaction is based on weapons – usually guns. Since as far back as Doom and earlier however, the ‘fist’ or ‘gauntlet’ or other hand-held melee device has been a present reminder that a person can readily do other things with their hands than simply aim and squeeze a trigger. Far Cry 2 takes note, and says ‘alright, let’s see what that means for the FPS’.

The things my hands hath wrought in Far Cry 2 are as varied as their real world counterparts – they are utilitarian, opening doors and containers, picking up objects like weapons, briefcases and diamonds. Immersion in the first person perspective is apparently paramount, and the realistic application of my hand to a door-handle is one small detail that is by no means lost on this author. The ‘procedural animation’ system makes my hand always appear to touch the object I am reaching for, twisting, collecting, opening. While it is intentionally perhaps not quite as versatile as the animation system in Spore, it doesn’t need to be. Yet it remains a significant raising of the bar for the standards of first person interaction. We will see only in time whether those standards are met, much as I suggested in my initial post on the game. If Gillen, et al. are to be believed, the Half-Life cycle of influence takes approximately two years, and I would add that the case of Halo seems to follow a similar pattern. That seems an unfortunately long time to wait for someone who, like me, is now well and truly ensnared by the Far Cry 2 immersion factor.

My hands are also my last saving grace when an explosion or gunshot wound renders me close to death, and given sufficient time can work their restorative magic upon the rest of my body. Indeed they themselves appear to miraculously heal from wounds that were inflicted mere moments earlier – an interesting parallel with the gradual healing of whole body wounds which we now take for granted and which are, admittedly, perhaps even sillier in concept than the somewhat arbitrary hit-point ‘n’ health pack combo paradigm they seem to universally have replaced. However I would not wish a return to those heady days of fighting Nazi’s on 5 hp as a result of an inability to find a health pack within arms reach. After all, the health pack only allows me to increase a semi arbitrary numerical value that somehow represents my ‘wellness’ and distance from death. Admittedly, auto regenerating health and body parts vastly improves game flow and rhythm – but it remains an abstraction. Still, even on that front Far Cry 2 proposes a slightly more refined version: Take too much of a beating and your health won’t regenerate beyond a certain point. That is, only until you stop to pump some more morphine into your blood stream – delivered via your hands and lower arms, of course – a novel mix of the arbitrary health pack and the auto regeneration systems.

Lastly, my hands are more than up to the task of bringing swift retribution to those who would visit violence on my own body. After all the above, this almost seems like the least interesting possibility, and I wonder whether compared to the amount of time spent holding a map in your hands or steering a vehicle, this last option does not actually plateau into a more even distribution. My hands are, after all, the most prominent manifestation of my avatar that I see through the game – and that they should spend most of their time trying to kill and maim others starts to seem oddly nihilistic. Then again, that is what the game’s about isn’t it?

Fun and Loathing in Las Vegas Washington D.C.

Why is this not as funny as it should be?

Lately, I’ve been trying to play Fallout 3 in a way that doesn’t get me as angry and annoyed as the situation I described in my previous post about the game. I’ve started using a few mods that both improve the interface and make the ‘karma’ system more opaque. While welcome, sadly the changes are a case of ‘too little too late’ to enable anything more than a “meh” feeling about Fallout 3 in general. While the rage has died down, I can’t resist but add my .02c on what’s still bothering me.

Mostly it’s to do with the moral judgments the game makes and the attendant Karma system. One reviewer (I fail to recall who, perhaps Alec Meer?) in their write-up of Fallout 3 mentioned that whatever character you chose to play, the Fallout 3 world would resist the temptation to punish you harshly or judge you for your actions. Having only first hand experience with Fallout 2, I can’t speak for the whole series, but this seems quite consistent with the feel established by the first two games. If you wanted to kill random people and take their stuff, you’d be feared, naturally, but that was about it. There was really no judgment about what kind of person you were. Similarly, the villains were primarily cartoon-stereotype individuals, deluded madmen (and women) or brutish bullies. They conformed to typical archetypes that allowed them to transcend cliché and enter the realm of intelligent satire.

In Fallout 3 there is a character called Mr. Burke. He is a suit who works for a very rich man and apparently revels in nihilistic destruction. Let’s imagine how this character would have appeared in Fallout 1 or 2. He would probably be suited, probably comes with a bodyguard or two and would fit into the “madmen killer” stereotype. You understand him, and that he is meant to be a stereotype. You know that he is unstable, a ruthless killer, but also otherwise completely rational. He sees life as something that is made more precious by death, and so seeks to spread death in order to re-value life in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. You understand his twisted and flawed logic, his broken personality and know that there is some kind of rationale for why he is this way, something in his past, perhaps. Maybe he just read too much Nietzsche, either way, you are never supposed to believe that he is inherently bad or evil, just misguided in the extreme. There is no presiding moral outrage here unless you choose it yourself, just impartial acknowledgement of the fact that he must be stopped or he will continue to kill. End of story.

Let’s contrast this with the character of Mr. Burke in Fallout 3. His voice and character says he’s some of these things, and his dialogue is written to make sense this way… but his voice actor (voiced I am sure by the same person who did the The Speaker for The Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion) inflects in his voice that, “I am slimy and evil”. His voice drips with “evil” and “nastiness”. You should hate me and be outraged by my actions, it says. This is not Fallout. This is too ham-fisted for Fallout. If Mr Bourke is to be serious, it should be more like the disturbing style of Heath Ledger as ‘The Joker’ than cartoon-villain Jack Nicholson.

The difference lies in that while my earlier characterization of Mr. Burke was intentionally simplistic, he was a parody of and commentary on that simple-minded, 1950’s aesthetic. His character manages to pose deep questions while being simplistic when the latter is a po-faced affair that lacks the same semi-aware playfulness that says “I know I am a stereotype and I’m playing up to it”. In short, Mister Burke pisses me off for taking himself too seriously. It would be fine if he did, except there is no accompanying pay-off in additional depth. He should be scary to be around, intimidating and edgy.

This picture also has nothing to do with this post.

I think most of this is a result of a combination of voice acting, writing and animation, and Fallout 3 to me seems to end up making judgments without asking the real questions with regards to the Mr. Bourke character. Instead of traditional morality being destroyed by the nuclear bombs that wiped out so much else of civilization, it has been dragged into the apocalyptic wasteland without a care for how well it fits. It fails to capture the levity of the original titles and loses the accompanying ability to contrast the whimsical with the horrific. It would be all too easy to blame this on the transition from cartoonish 2D sprites to full 3D models, but I think that’s a bit of an easy out.

I don’t quite know what the answer to this problem is. I have the feeling, though, that there’s something they could learn from Left 4 Dead’s ability to blend being constantly surrounded by death in the apocalypse (the serious) with the decidedly upbeat characters. The aesthetic at least seems closer to my taste than Fallout’s. That said, however, the beautiful wasteland remains pretty much the only place in Fallout that I can enjoy without cringing at something or someone every other second.

Hocking's Masterpiece

I went to bed last night thinking about the ending of Far Cry 2. My response, entirely subjective, was a mix of dismay and real, genuine sadness. The feeling was comparable to the one I get at the very conclusion of the Harry Potter series – a kind of melancholy sadness at having to say goodbye to this mind-blowing world, compounded by the tragic events of the closing pages. Similarly, I know there are many people who don’t like the Harry Potter series, or the ending, and can’t help but think that some people will react similarly to Far Cry 2. The ending is imperfect. It’s flawed. But for those few of us who now care about this game, it’s also deeply emotional.

I can forgive the flaws of the ending, however, and now rate it as one of my all time favourite videogame conclusions ever. Partly it's because it is going to be somewhat unpopular, and I don’t want it written off or forgotten. But in it’s depths I can see the glimmer of the potential that it was trying to achieve. Hocking’s Masterpiece.

Far Cry 2 is about the individual; death; nihilism. The contentious design decisions, even the whole game, only starts to make sense when viewed through this lens. Like a David Lean epic from the golden era of cinema it deals with many concepts and issues all viewed through the prism of a central concern. Doctor Zhivago’s conceit was viewing the Russian revolution through the personal story of one man. Similarly Lawrence of Arabia also possessed the same focus on viewing history as it orbited around an individual. Far Cry 2 is about you and death. Of course every single person you meet wants to kill you. Of course you spend about as much time fighting the environment as other persons. Of course you are clinging to the barest scrap of health and well-being; Even the malaria is trying to kill you.

Some people will probably want to throw around that clichéd phrase “You’re a survivor” and the sentiment that goes with it, but the truth is, you’re not. Take from that what you will, but Far Cry 2 reminds at every possible opportunity that life is fatal. No one gets out of this place alive. It makes for what I believe to be truly the first game that goes beyond, or outright rejects, the mental switch-off performed by pathological mass-murderers and videogame players. That switch you flick in your brain when playing a shooter - the small part up the back that empathises with your victims, and which is incompatible with what most games narcissistically tell us – that you should survive, you deserve it, you’re the hero. Here instead, nihilism is the name of the game.

As the man you have been trying to kill says, “No one is going to die today that didn’t have it coming.” Far Cry 2 screams that we all have it coming.

What speaks to me the most

In Mitch Krpata's Taxonomy of Gamers I'm dead-set a Tourist. Indeed before Mr. Krpata's series there was Richard A. Bartles 'HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS' which I think extends to offline games remarkably well also,and in which I am similarly an 'Explorer' type player. The point that I want to make is that when I'm being a tourist, I prefer to do so from a First Person Perspective.

Corvus Elrod posted a few weeks back a small, almost throw-away, theory that personality type might have an influence on what perspective videogame players prefer to play in, whether First or Third. He asked for a quick poll in the comments and it seemed to me to be a little bit inconclusive, but I think that he's probably actually onto something.

The issue seems to me to be 'what flavour do you like your story'? All story driven videogames in recent memory that have captivated me have (primarily) told the meat of their story through story and plot that I experience in the game from the first person perspective. I'm experiencing it as the character. Now, I don't want to pretend that this could become some kind of hard and fast rule - after all I have also previously passionately enjoyed third person games like The Baldur's Gate series, and even many FPS games like Halo use 3rd person cut-scenes for certain sections of exposition.

Still, if you know me and have been paying attention to my thesis updates, etc, you'll know my shtick is all about what things are unique about videogames, and that we should be trying our best to capitalise on them. It's just what gets me excited about the medium - the idea of the new and things that have genuinely not been tried.

So I'm now wondering why more games haven't gone the route of the Half-Life's and the Call of Duty's. Both games tell their story exclusively (with very few exceptions) through first person experiences. Obviously I don't want to advocate that all videogames should ever do is tell a story in First Person Perspective, but it does seem like the industry hasn't really pushed the envelope very far past the previously mentioned examples. When can I expect the FPS equivalent of, Apocalypse Now (I'm talking about in terms of mood, atmosphere and focus on the psychological experience rather than the setting - Vietnam has been almost been done to death as much as WWII)? Casablanca? Doctor Zhivago?

The obvious point is that FPS games like those great films would be impossible, granted. After all, there's really very little shooting in them - but that's actually OK with me. I'm a tourist after all - I've climbed the highest peaks in Oblivion before just to see it, not because it had any intrinsic reward. I don't think I'm alone in this, there is definitely space in the videogame market for more tourist appealing games.

So, on that note, I've been talking to Corvus about the issue of perspective and personality type and he's suggested we set up a more comprehensive poll and aim for a bigger survey of people - if anything comes of it, I'll let you know.

A post for Xenia: Simulation and an apologetic explanation of Super Columbine Massacre RPG

This post is going to try and do a couple of things. Firstly, it’s a (very) short summary of the first half of Gonzalo Frasca’s essay “Simulation vs. Narrative”. Secondly, after explaining the ideas contained in Frasca’s paper, I hope to convince my good friend Xenia (the wife of one of my best friends, and a genuine friend of mine in her own right) that the videogame Super Columbine Massacre RPG is not the result of a sick and perverted mind, but instead a serious and thoughtful attempt to come to grips with the whole, messy, horrible situation. Thirdly, I’m going to try and apply a couple of Frasca’s ideas to the videogame Oblivion and suggest an explanation for why another of my good friends, Michael Abbot over at The Brainy Gamer, didn’t enjoy Oblivion as much as he should have (or maybe if I’m being more honest, could have. In the interest of Full Disclosure: I really like Oblivion in all it’s half-baked glory.)

Frasca opens his paper saying that “So far, the traditional –and most popular– research approach from both the industry and the academy has been to consider video games as extensions of drama and narrative.[1]” Frasca also states that:

Representation is such a powerful and ubiquitous form that it has become transparent to our civilization. …This is especially true with a particular form of structuring representation: narrative[2]

He argues that by its ubiquity it has become almost transparent to us and that we actually have a very hard time accepting “that there is an alternative to representation and narrative: simulation.[3]” Frasca provides some very excellent examples of where simulation is present outside of computation: in children’s play, when a toy plane becomes a plane (even a story is created about the plane, the game is still simulating a plane) as well as in Governmental legislation. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly makes something a simulation? Frasca says that

to simulate is to model a (source) system through a different system which maintains to somebody some of the behaviors of the original system.[4]

Returning to our examples of a child at play – the toy plane is modelling the behaviour of a real plane – while it may not actually fly, when the child is whooshing it though the air, to him or her it may as well be. The ‘to somebody’ part of Frasca’s definition in this case is obviously the child – someone not engaged in the simulation (which incidentally may be running only in his or her head, but might also equally be shared by a playmate) the toy remains only that - a toy. To contrast this idea and demonstrate its difference from narrative – Frasca says that

A film about a plane landing is a narrative: an observer could interpret it in different ways (i.e. “it’s a normal landing” or “it’s an emergency landing”) but she cannot manipulate it and influence on how the plane will land since film sequences are fixed and unalterable. On the other hand, the flight simulator allows the player to perform actions that will modify the behavior of the system in a way that is similar to the behavior of the actual plane.[5]

The previous example of the government legislator is somewhat different again, and it shows that the notion of authorship of simulation is quite different to authorships of narrative. A government legislator when writing a new series of laws or by-laws is not explicitly authoring the story of the single working mother who may now be safe from exploitation by her boss as a result of the new law, and yet that story may indeed arise from it. Instead, the law maker is authoring rules as part of the society’s system and the stories (or narratives) that arise from the rules remain a largely unknown consequent.

To return to the point about the difficulty in acknowledging the difference of simulation from narrative, Frasca says that

To an external observer, the sequence of signs produced by both the film and the simulation could look exactly the same. This is what many supporters of the narrative paradigm fail to understand: their semiotic sequences might be identical, but simulation cannot be understood just through its output.[6]

That is, a flight simulator cannot be judged and evaluated as a simulation by simply watching it run – the experience of controlling the simulation is entirely different from the one of watching it – and this is an extremely important point as it has implications for videogame representations.

To turn my attention to the second point, many people when told of the existence of a Super Columbine Massacre RPG game are shocked, disgusted or even outraged, and I think largely because, as a society, we have little to no experience with having to deal with shocking images and situations unless it is presented as a narrative. The disconnect between a persons actions and a persons beliefs, cognitive dissonance even, is perhaps not possible outside of simulations like videogames. When reading a book about the holocaust, one does not feel complicit in the actions of the Nazi’s at Auschwitz, even when recounted in a novel from a personal perspective.

So let me ask you this: A person would be less likely to respond like the one mentioned above if it was instead a thoughtful, reasoned novel that attempted to examine and explain the tragedy of the columbine high school massacre, correct? Well, perhaps someone would, and that would be a valid reaction, potentially based in a general unease with trying to identify with the two killers – Eric and Dylan. But the objection would likely not be to the fact that there was a book about it, but rather the content of the book. So why then, does just the idea of a videogame about the events of Tuesday, April 20^th 1999 provoke such consternation?

The answer is far from as simple as I am proposing, as numerous other legitimate, real factors come into play, however I am of the inclination that it is because many people do not have the requisite experience with simulation, and indeed with engaging seriously with simulational media, that is required to accept and understand the reasoning behind creating something like Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Frasca says that indeed ‘Video games imply an enormous paradigm shift for our culture because they represent the first complex simulational media for the masses’[7]. I guess what I would like every reader to understand is that, far from being designed for the glorification of the shooters themselves, the game is part of what can be described as the ‘the search for rationale’ in much the same way as any book or film about the subject, however instead of employing a narrative to make his point, the creator Danny Ledone decided to use a simulation – and that leaves people without the experience in disconnecting their actions in a simulation from their beliefs, quite understandably uneasy.

Sadly, I personally feel that, while an excellent effort and a great start, Super Columbine Massacre RPG does not succeed in its efforts but not through any fault of the medium. Without getting into an in depth critique of the game, it suffers from much of the same failings as many big budget videogames, such as Oblivion, which I have written about on the blog previously. Let me explain by saying that, if we take Frasca’s view, and that games are indeed simulations, then the vast majority of the source systems videogames are modelling (and I cannot stress this point enough) are narratives! Super Columbine Massacre RPG deploys Role Playing Game tropes and contentions but fails to escape the trap of trying to model a linear, progressive narrative story.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is similarly an RPG and I believe falls into exactly the same trap. My good friend from the other side of the planet, Michael Abbott, failed to find Oblivion enjoyable for a number of reasons, among which the fact that he ‘just got bored’ and stopped enjoying the game. I propose that, similar to Super Columbine, Oblivion tried to render, intentionally or not, a narrative as their source simulation; however, I also believe that they had a conflicting desire to simulate a world (a distinctly non narrative thing)– a fact that is evident in much of the free-form structure of the game. If the developers of Oblivion had of concentrated on modelling a consistent world and, dare I suggest, left out entirely the narrative elements like the main storyline instead focussing on emergent possibilities – perhaps by finetuning the ‘Radiant AI’ system which gave each non-player character such things as motivations, desires and habits and then made them go about their business to satisfy these conditions – then I genuinely think the game would have been both extremely different and more attractive to some certain players. Now, I’m not 100% confident of this evaluation, but based on comments made by Michael and others, such as that ‘the NPC’s were very boring’ (a valid assessment – they were very generic) then perhaps by dropping the (I suggest crippling) overarching need to model a narrative, Oblivion would have been significantly better – there would still have been significant challenges to overcome to realise this ideal, but overall I think the point still stands.

In summing up, let me return, once again to Frasca who points to suggestions by proponents of Interactive Narrative that “Aristotelian closure” is the source of ‘the user’s pleasure’[8]. He says that ‘The biggest fallacy of “interactive narrative” is that it pretends to give freedom to the player while maintaining narrative coherence’[9]. Frasca says that instead

the gratification for [participants in simulation] is not the one of the professional actor but rather the one of the child who plays make-believe. The child is constantly adapting fantasy to different changes, without the grown-ups obsession with closure.[10]

As an interesting comparison, think of the difference between something like Hamlet and your typical game of Theatresports – the former is a narrative, and any attempts to incorporate interactivity would probably compromise its narrative coherence, whereas the latter, if constrained by a script, loses all of the charm and attractiveness derived from its spontaneity. The difference between simulation and narrative is a wide and often mis-understood (even at times mischaracterised) chasm, but one which remains largely uncharted. Let’s start today – I’m game, are you?

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[1] Frasca, ‘Simulation vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology’ in Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Eds., The Video Game Theory Reader, p.221, also available as a PDF at: http://www.ludology.org/articles/VGT_final.pdf

[2] Ibid., p.222-223

[3] Ibid., p.223

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p.224

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., p.229

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.