EDIT: It has come to my attention that my definition of Ludonarrative was wrong. Ludonarrative is the relationship between events in a cutscene and events in the game. My points are still valid, but when I say Ludonarrative dissonance I am reffering to a disparity between a player's motivations and their actions.

(This article was a little more timely when I wrote it, but due to a change in circumstances I figured that I may as well throw it up here)

In my view, the term “video game” has become something of a misnomer. It certainly makes sense most of the time, but at this point video games are far more than sets of rules and goals. They are designed to make the player experience things, which do not always come down to the highs and lows of tactical decision making. That said, the sheer fact that one is able to acknowledge the broad potential of the video game medium does not make for great art. Just like any other form of media, the video game still requires a focus and purpose to be truly great, and that is why The Killer can fuck right off.

A brief description is necessary, though The Killer is free and only a few minutes long. I do recommend that you play it yourself, simply to make it more clear how utterly worthless it is. The Killer is a “notgame” in which you play as a man with a gun. That gun is pointed at a prisoner. The first few minutes are spent walking through various 8-bit environments by holding the space bar. After this trek, you are given a crosshair and told to shoot the prisoner. The game then does a rather clever transition (I give credit where credit is due) from a field of dead stick figures to the credits.

To recap, the entire interaction consists of holding the spacebar to walk and then choosing whether or not to shoot a prisoner. There is no context given for any of this, and no character development to speak of. It is merely a soldier, a prisoner and the overall theme of killing.

The problem that I have, the reason that The Killer can fuck right off, is that it completely fails to make a point. There is no reason to shoot the prisoner, so most people simply won’t and that will be that. The game does nothing to put you in the place of the soldier, to make you understand your character. There is extreme ludonarrative dissonance in the game, which essentially eliminates the biggest strength of interactive fiction.

But we aren’t done yet. Perhaps this ludonarrative dissonance is the whole point. By taking this moment out of context, the game proposes that any context would simply be a post-rationalisation. When you are presented with the choice to kill or not kill somebody, not killing them is the right choice. That is a valid theme for a work of art, but making a video game out of it is an absurd thing to do. The strength of video games is that they allow us to poke and prod at a system and experience it as the characters do. The Killer does NOT allow you do any of these things. It is a linear story that does nothing to make the player feel like they are experiencing it.

Imagine that The Killer was a short film. The characters never speak; all that exists between them is the power of the gun and a subtle emotional connection. This creates a world for your mind to explore during the process of the film, and it feels natural because the characters WILL behave accurately to themselves, whatever that happens to be. This is in stark contrast to a video game in which the soldier will behave accurately to the player, not themselves.

At this point one could be justified in saying that The Killer has value merely because THERE IS a message to it that can be interpreted. The problem is that I’m still not really sure what the game’s message is supposed to be. I didn’t come up with my explanation until thinking about The Killer for the express purpose of this article. There is no way to find a message in the game without facing the extreme intellectual flaws in its design.

Perhaps there is no message. Perhaps The Killer is just a thing to be experienced, and you take away from it whatever message you want. I suppose that it serves that purpose very well, but if we are satisfied with “a thing that you can experience, ” as either artists or consumers, then video games are never going to reach their true potential as an artistic medium. The Killer is ill-conceived and poorly designed. It isn’t my ambassador to the art world, it is not the thing that I would show to somebody to expose the strengths of games as a form of expression. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, The Killer can fuck right off.

In which I invent acronyms and try to finding a practical unit for measuring our experience of time.

In which I discuss Okami's unique approach to game difficulty and failure.

In which I ponder the narrative impact of the fail state further, and a few methods to improve it.

In which I discuss how the fail state impacts different types of players, and what the ultimate effect is on the player experience. 
Direct Link
 

I have a love/hate relationship with Halo. Halo: CE is horrible, Halo 2 fixed all the problems that I had with CE,  Halo 3, ODST and Reach were just too much of the same to feel special. I will acknowledge that every Halo game is an improvement over the previous ones, but I think that the series has been getting steadily worse since Halo 2. The reason for this, I think is that Halo suffers from a sever identity crisis, and needs to shut it's damn face and focus on the killing.
 
This is on my mind because I played through Reach last night, and could not get over the compromises that fill that game, or perhaps how often they were unwilling to compromise. Bungee cannot decide if the story or the standard shooty gameplay are most important, and both suffer for it. I could cite several examples, but let's go straight for the ending. Yo, spoilers.

Quick recap: The ending of Halo Reach is you fighting alone (or in my case with an online buddy) against a never-ending horde. It is a "supposed-to-lose" fight that is designed to give the player the feeling that they are heroically fighting a battle that they will lose. When you take damage, cracks appear in your visor to indicate some kind of attrition. The problem is that you still have a big fancy regenerating shield and an infinite supply of bullets, so the player is destined to die from a burst of damage, not at the end of a slow siege. I love this idea for an ending, but Bungee simply would not compromise their gameplay to make it work. Even worse, they added a bunch of stuff AFTER this sequence (an animation of the the Noble 6 fighting some more and then dying, then somebody talking to the DEAD player), removing the feeling that you were living through your last moments.
 
I actually think that this was a great IDEA about how to end the game, but Bungie failed on execution by refusing to alter their gameplay for that sequence. There are other examples that I could explain in detail, but I think my point is made. Bungie really needs to either focus on the gameplay (the part of Halo that is really genuinely good) and stop clinging to this notion that they know how to tell a story through gameplay, or start designing their games to actually BE the telling of a story, instead of a series of battles with some kind of (actually ok in spots) plot that randomly interrupts the shooting.

As many of you know, I want to be a game writer/narrative designer. To this end, I have a project planned out this summer. It's sort of like a very complicated choose-your-own-adventure novel in which you run for election (think Alpha Protocol but bigger and without the action game attached). I told a friend in Computer Science about this, and he convinced his group to do something vaguely like it as an end of term project. I also promised to write a big chunk of it, as it seems like good experience and gives me a chance to try out some ideas for my own project.

The game that they are working on is really a simple strategy game, in which the player puts some points into 3 stats (charisma, knowledge and intelligence). The player then plays some scenarios in which they get to make a series of dialog choices based on those stats. Different provinces (we are Canadian) will respond strongly to different characteristics, so that's part of the strategy. There are some other elements, but ultimately this is not going to be an especially deep game. It's a first year CS project being done in about a month, don't judge.

Here's the problem: This game involves a huge amount of tedious writing (much more than mine does, given the projected length of the game). Each line of dialog has to be written at least 6 times, once for each stat and then doubled based on whether they have more or less than 50 points in it. Then I have write more dialog to make sure that there is an appropriate line for each political position the player could have picked at the beginning of the game (left, center and right). And all of those lines need to start and end roughly the same way, so that the next set of lines will flow naturally. This is a great exercise, but it is incredibly tedious and I'm kind of sad that I don't actually believe that the end result is going to be a particularly great game.

I have to have 30-40 of these lines done in a week. I presently have 2, and that took 10 hours (though I have figured out ways to make it go faster). I also have exams. Worst of all, I have writer's block and LoL-itis.

I guess I don't need any advice, just wanted to vent and maybe offer a peek into this process. I also think writing this might have helped warm me up a little. Back to work, but if you have any questions I would happily answer.