Hey everyone, another summer mean another game-analysis essay. This one was written for the game design course that I decided to take for fun (which ended up getting me a job with the professor!!) so it's more focused on design than my previous work.

Anyways, enjoy!

Geometric Psychoses: Level Design in Psychonauts

When critically examining video games, much of the focus is often reserved for the game’s narrative and mechanics, with little attention paid to the design of the levels themselves. Through the effective use of level design, players can actually experience those same narratives and mechanics in much more effective and interesting ways than they may have otherwise. Double Fine Productions’ first game, Psychonauts, uses the design of its levels as an extension of its characters’ personalities, with each level using its environment and geometry to depict a different type of psychological state or illness. The game’s levels portray their various psychoses through a blend of both visual and mechanical techniques, which we will examine through the designers’ portrayals of repression in the level Sasha’s Shooting Gallery, and paranoid schizophrenia in The Milkman Conspiracy. In addition to this, the variations in level design allow the creators to change players’ perceptions of the games mechanics, which is best seen in the Lungfishopolis and Waterloo World levels.

In order to fully appreciate and analyze the impact that level design can have on a game we must first define what constitutes a level. In their analysis of two-dimensional platforming games, Smith, Cha, and Whitehead state that “Levels are the space where a player explores the rules and mechanics of a game” (Smith, Cha and Whitehead). By using this definition, we can extrapolate that the purpose of good level design is to allow players to experience the game’s mechanics in a variety of different ways. These critics present a model that separates game levels into two categories: Cells and Portals, where cells represent sections of linear gameplay and portals represent the links between those cells. To give an example, consider a hallway with two doors, where each door leads to a separate room. The hallway and rooms would be cells, with the doorways representing portals that connect them. Cells themselves can be further broken down into sequences of linear gameplay known as rhythm groups, with each rhythm group being marked by some sort of safe area where the player can rest before continuing the level. When using this model to examine a two-dimensional platformer, Smith, Cha, and Whitehead state that individual rhythm groups can be made up of Platforms, Obstacles, Movement Aids, Collectibles, or Triggers (Smith, Cha and Whitehead). To elaborate, Platforms refer to any object that the player can stand, run, or jump on, Obstacles are any object that can impart damage to the player’s avatar, Movement Aids change the way players traverse the level, Collectibles provide rewards such as coins or power-ups, and Triggers change the state of the level.

While Smith, Cha, and Whitehead’s analysis of levels may be excellent for the platforming genre, it is important to note that it does have limitations. When simply looking at this model from a mechanical standpoint, it is clear that it cannot be used to analyze all genres of games. For example, a racing game is not likely to have platforms beyond the race track itself or a puzzle game may not have need for movement aids. Despite these shortcomings, this framework still provides an excellent starting point for an analysis of how game mechanics and level design interact, which is also its primary shortcoming. In focusing solely on the mechanical aspects of level design, Smith, Cha, and Whitehead’s eschew any influence that level design may have on the game’s aesthetics and storytelling, or vice versa. It is important that level designers should focus on mechanics as well as “Things such as color theory, aesthetic quality, lighting, architecture and landscape” (Galuzin). As game development techniques advance, designers may find increasingly interesting ways to use level design as a key tool to communicate their game’s message or theme. From a purely mechanical standpoint, this model can be easily adapted to analyze a three-dimensional action-adventure game such as Double Fine’s Psychonauts, since the genre is largely an evolution of the traditional platformer. The game relies heavily on platforming segments to traverse the world, and players will face many obstacles that are familiar to the older genre such as pits and enemies. There are also movement aids such as ladders that assist players in their traversal and a wealth of collectibles which impart a variety of bonuses. About the only piece of the established framework that does not appear in Psychonauts are triggers, though it is easy to imagine ways that they may have been implemented into the game. Some levels do change in state, such as the enemies that appear at nighttime in the campground, however these state changes are beyond the player’s control. Where Psychonauts truly excels is in its blending of game mechanics with characterization through level design. Each of the games levels, with the exclusion of the open campground area, take place inside the minds of its characters, and as a result are used to depict their various mental states through both their mechanics and aesthetics.

One of the game’s early levels, Sasha’s Shooting Gallery, uses its level design to depict the Freudian theory of repression. Freud sees repression as “a consciously intended forgetting, [or] a specific unconscious mechanism of defense” (Zepf), and this theory is fully embraced throughout the level. Sasha’s Shooting Gallery takes place inside the mind of Sasha Nein, a German man who always appears calm and collected. His mindscape reflects this outward facade as it initially appears to be simply a giant featureless cube. Like its owner’s outwards appearance, this cube is both mechanically and aesthetically dull. As events unfold, Sasha’s mind begins to unravel, and the player begins to see aspects of his repressed psyche. All the aspects of his life that he has tried to suppress, primarily his childhood memories, spring forth from within the cube and form the actual layout of the level. Where once there was a flat cube face now we find all of the mechanical aspects of Smith, Cha and Whitehead’s model, such as platforms, enemies, and collectibles. In addition to rendering this level more mechanically interesting, all of these elements are aesthetically themed after the notion of Sasha’s repressed childhood. Players complete platforming segments where they jump off of items such as old shoeboxes, measuring tapes, and a ratty old mattress on a twisted metal bed frame. These thematic elements in the level may go unnoticed to some players; however they paint a clear picture of the childhood, or rather lack of a real childhood, which defines this character. This is also the first level that introduces the players to one of the game’s primary obstacles, the censors. Thematically these are also an appropriate element which fits into the game’s depiction of psychological repression. The narrative justification of the censors is that they seek to rid the mind of any elements which do not belong there. Not only is this the first appearance of these repressive enemies, but it is also one of the only levels that features an endlessly generated supply of them. This aspect serves mechanically to give the players as much time as they need to learn the game’s combat mechanics, while thematically representing a mind that is completely focused on suppressing undesirable elements as a defense mechanism. It is also worth noting that if the player decides to return to this level after having completed it they receive a short cutscene explaining that the outburst of memories from within the tightly packed cube of Sasha’s mind was in fact a planned part of the player’s training. While this may be true, it does not change the way that the repressed material is depicted, which influences the design and aesthetic of the level.

When examining the influence of psychoses that appears in the level designs of Psychonauts it is impossible not to mention The Milkman Conspiracy. This level is set inside the mind of Boyd Cooper, an asylum guard who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, an illness which is heavily represented throughout the level’s design. This disorder is “a type of mental illness in which a person cannot tell what is real from what is imagined. At times, people with [this] psychotic disorder lose touch with reality. The world may seem like a jumble of confusing thoughts, images, and sounds” (WebMD). This last part of the definition is essential in examining the influence that this psychosis has on level design, since the layout of the level is designed to be extremely confusing. The laws of physics are abandoned almost entirely, and instead players traverse platforms that bend over on top of each other, slide across telephone wires to other areas that are perpendicular to the previous one, and generally disregard conventional notions of geometry and gravity. It is also important to recognize that sufferers of this disorder are known for being “preoccupied with false beliefs (delusions) about being persecuted or being punished by someone” (WebMD). This aspect is represented in the game through both its platforms and obstacles. Due to this level’s tendency to have platforms turn over themselves, players can frequently see other areas of the level from perspectives that should not be possible. For example, while standing on a rooftop the player may be able to look up into the sky and see into the yard of another house as if they were looking down on it from above. This aesthetic element of the design conveys a feeling of voyeurism for the player, letting them see things from perspectives that they shouldn’t have access too, while also giving them the feeling that they themselves could be being watched by someone else. This level also introduces players to an obstacle known as the G-Men, who appear to be comical depictions of spies. These enemies appear all over the level, and attempt to act as if they were normal people, only occasionally revealing their true intentions by quickly taking a photograph of something. Mechanically they are designed to impede the player’s progression, however thematically they fill the role of the paranoid schizophrenic’s unknown persecutor. This notion of being watched fills the whole aesthetic of the level, with even static elements of the level such as cars or garbage bins occasionally having cameras appear out of them. This unified theme of surveillance is depicted through both the mechanics of the level as well as its aesthetics to properly portray Boyd’s mental illness.

Aside from its depictions of various psychoses, Psychonauts also uses its inventive level design and aesthetics to reinvigorate the game’s mechanics, as we can see in the Lungfishopolis level. Since this level takes place inside the mind of a fish, the player’s avatar is rendered proportionally to its host, resulting in what appears to be a towering character stomping through a tiny city as if they were a giant monster. Despite this level feeling quite different from the rest, the feeling is achieved without any substantial changes to the game’s mechanics, and is primarily accomplished through level design. Players will traverse similar rhythm groups to what they have experienced earlier in the game. There are sections of platforming, where players must jump between several objects, or combat scenarios where players use the same skills that they learned previously to defeat enemies. For this level, the designers simply made adjustments to the game’s aesthetics as well as its pacing. Hullet and Whitehead describe pacing as “the overall flow of a level resulting from raising or lowering tempo, tension, challenge, or difficulty throughout the level” (Hullett and Whitehead). In the game’s previous levels, players rarely faced more than a mere handful of enemies that took a few hits to defeat, but here they must fight significantly more enemies at once. Most of these enemies can be destroyed in one strike, with the player sometimes destroying several at once, giving them a greater feeling of power over their obstacles. Aesthetically, all of the models in the level are rendered in miniature. Rather than simple platforms for the players to traverse, they are climbing large buildings or bouncing off of blimps. The enemies are similarly depicted as tiny little tanks, boats, etc… which are hardly larger than the player’s foot. Because of the changes in pacing, the rhythm groups of this level also appear to be longer, with players rarely finding areas where they can safely rest between bits of platforming and combat. This lends a sense of urgency to the player’s traversal of the level, and also gives the illusion that they are travelling through the world much more quickly due to its small scale.

Another section that effectively changes the player’s perception of the game’s mechanics through level design is the board-game inspired Waterloo World. Taking place in the mind of Fred Bonaparte, a distant descendant of Napoleon, this level changes the player’s objectives to depict what is essentially a turn-based strategy war game. The player descends into this game, as it is being played between Fred and Napoleon, and is tasked with helping the man defeat his ancestor. In order to accomplish this, players must move around the board themselves, accomplishing various tasks and moving Fred’s pieces along a hex-grid. Again the rhythm groups of this level remain similar to what players have already experienced to ensure that they do not feel confused. They still run and jump between platforms, fight enemies, and collect collectibles. To give the illusion of the board-game’s turn-based mechanics, the pacing is slowed almost completely to a halt, since the main enemy only moves his pieces after the player has moved theirs. Contrary to the Lungfishopolis level, players have the opportunity to rest just about anywhere that they wish, resulting in far shorter rhythm groups which turn the level into more of a puzzle game than an action game. Aesthetically, this level is the complete opposite of Lungfishopolis, with everything being rendered much larger than the player. This gives them the impression that they are one of the many small pieces of this board game, and successfully unifies the visuals of the level with the changes in pacing to give the desired illusion of different mechanics.

Despite its limitations, Smith, Cha, and Whitehead’s model for examining platformer games provides an excellent departure point for the analysis of level design. Mechanically, Psychonauts plays with the concepts of rhythm groups and pacing to establish a variety of different perceptions of its mechanics. This is best represented in the Lungfishopolis level, where players are given the illusion of being a giant monster destroying a city, and Waterloo World, which takes on the feel of a turn-based board-game. Not only can the effective use of level design give the appearance of different game mechanics, it can also be used to infuse the geometry of the world itself with narrative significance. With each of their levels, Double Fine depicts some varying form of mental illness, such as repression in Sasha’s Shooting Gallery or paranoid schizophrenia in The Milkman Conspiracy. Psychonauts serves as a perfect example of how the proper integration of level design into the mechanics, narrative, and aesthetic of a game can result in a much more profound and memorable experience.

Works Cited

Galuzin, Alex. "Why I Failed for Years at Level Design and Game Environments." 29 November 2011. World of Level Design. 21 February 2013.

Hullett, Kenneth and Jim Whitehead. "Design patterns in FPS." FDG (2010).

Smith, Gillian, Mee Cha and Jim Whitehead. "Level Design and Mechanics." ACM Sandbox (2008).

WebMD. "Schizophrenia: An Overview." 2005. WebMD. 12 04 2013.

Zepf, Siegfried. "Repression and Substitutive Formation: The Relationship Between Freud's Concepts Reconsidered." The Psychoanalytic Review 99.3 (2012): 397-420.

The Permanence of Death and the Military Fantasy in Games

War, violence, and death are some of the subjects most frequently tackled by video games. The reason behind this stems from the much larger question of why people play video games at all. According to many gaming-centric forums and websites, games can provide a form of escapism, a power fantasy, or even a way of relieving anger and stress. Additionally, first-person shooter games in particular are seen as one of the more accessible genres because of their frequent use of pre-established gaming conventions such as controls . The attraction to these types of games may be psychological as well, as described by Yahoo Answers member Ziegenkonig.

“People crave new and exciting experiences in life. Most of the new experiences, such as the thrill of a battle or war, are rather dangerous. So, people turn to the next best thing, which would be [first-person-shooters]. [Shooters] provide people with a turn from the normal everyday boring routines of life, to a more fast-paced, adventurous lifestyle. It lets everybody do what seems impossible, which is fighting in a violent battle without risk of actually losing your life” .

The vision of carrying out brutal conflicts without bloodshed is not confined to the imaginary worlds portrayed in games. It serves as a driving force behind the development of military technology such as remote-operated drones, and is described by Ashley Dawson and Stephen Graham as the “military fantasy” . The notion of a war without death is already so deeply ingrained in the minds of players that the expectation of “re-spawning” in games feels as normal as Althusser’s descriptions of the unconscious acts of greeting that are societal norms . Very few games are able to break through these conventions, especially regarding player death, despite the fact that in reality death is permanent. Embracing the permanence of death can be used to great emotional effect in smaller art games such as One Chance, but the notion may not be viable for larger commercial products. This is why most prominent first-person shooter games, particularly multiplayer focused ones such as Battlefield 3 and Counter-Strike Source, interpolate players with this military fantasy of a war without the risk of death, and make it possible to experience victories that could never be. Electronic Arts and DICE’s Battlefield series aims to do so by negating the significance of death almost entirely through its advanced uses of “re-spawning” while Valve’s Counter Strike Source actually gives players a taste of the consequences of their actions before allowing them to return to the game.

As military technology advances, its developers dream of approximating the deathless conflicts that are currently only possible in fictional worlds such as those of video games. Dawson defines the modern ideal of the military fantasy as “the desire to avoid eroding domestic consent through the high death toll of city-based combat” . Urban combat is regarded by many soldiers as the bloodiest and most difficult of combat scenarios . In order to reduce casualties armies seek to develop their technology to the point that they are able to remove living soldiers from the battlefield entirely. While robotic foot soldiers are presently confined to the realm of science fiction, developers of military technologies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have manufactured and deployed both fully-automated as well as human controlled drones with a variety of potential applications. The eventual goal is to “help save lives by taking humans out of harm’s way” . The military fantasy is a war fought by proxies, a war with little to no casualties, at least on the winning side. Advancements in game development are also being applied to advance the development of military technology. Johnson describes how the United States Armed Forces have been working with Crytek’s CryEngine 3 to develop a hyper-realistic simulator to train their soldiers for real-world combat scenarios . While the final product will never be something that the average consumer would be able to play, it is still built on a platform that was intended for the creation of mass-market products. As the lines between games, simulations, and reality become blurred we begin to approach the same ideals behind the fictional Battle School from Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game . While it may be pure conjecture, it is not impossible to imagine a future where soldiers can control combat drones in a manner similar to the way players control their avatars in first-person shooters.

The lack of permanent death in video games has become something so conventional that most gamers would view anything different as being unplayable. Althusser describes how ideological interpolation works by appealing to the subject’s pre-existing notions of what is normal . By playing to these notions, one can garner a greater feeling of association from the target audience. Video games frequently follow these established conventions as a way of appealing to a larger player base, but certain games such as Awkward Silence’s One Chance are able to embrace the confines of death’s permanence. The game was created for the sole purpose of exploring the idea of permanency. As the title suggests, the player is only ever given one chance to complete the story since, upon ending, the game saves a file to the player’s computer that actually prevents them from being able to start over. The game deals with the notion of impending and unavoidable death, and gives the player the choices of how they wish to spend their final days. After each day the game declares “In [X] days every single living cell on planet earth will be dead, you have one chance” . What is never explicitly stated by the game is what the “chance” is for. The player is thus given the option of whether to desperately work to attempt to cure the virus that will eradicate all life or spend their final days with their loving family, with them never being able to know what may have happened had they chosen differently. In addition, the game never actually tells the player that they will be unable to re-play it, and only makes it apparent when one attempts to do so. It plays to the dominant ideology that games can be repeated even after player death. The notion of not being able to return to the game after death may seem novel when it comes to video games, but it is actually a reflection of reality. Everyone knows that as humans we cannot return after death, yet all players expect to have multiple lives in videogames. What’s more is that players are keenly aware of the difference, as remarked by Yahoo Answers member Osito “Better yet, join war if u want to. See how many respawns you get” [sic] . People acknowledge that the lack of death in games represents an unattainable fantasy. The opposing assumptions that players make about how death functions in reality and in video games act as a terrific example of Althusser’s notion that, whether they realize it or not, everyone is always the subject of ideology . While it may be possible for smaller games like One Chance to highlight the importance of death’s permanence, such an idea would not be feasible in the expensive consumer focused products such as Battlefield 3.

EA Game’s blockbuster first-person shooter Battlefield 3 chooses to eschew the reality of death’s permanence in favor of a representation of the military fantasy of a war without death. It accomplishes this primarily through its multiplayer mode, which allows up to 64 players to wage large-scale battles in teams of 32 players each. While it is entirely possible for the player’s avatar to die in such conflicts, the game is built to minimize the consequence of death, allowing them to re-spawn into the game, usually within less than ten seconds of their demise. Death is not only inconsequential in the game, but it is actually entirely common. In the average fifty-minute game of Battlefield 3’s conquest mode, the total number of player deaths can often reach four or five hundred deaths per team. As a comparison, consider that the total death toll of American troops in Afghanistan for the entire year of 2010 was approximately four hundred . The result is that the player views their in-game avatar as just that, a blank slate for them to operate and then discard before beginning anew in another body. Battlefield 3’s re-spawn mechanic so wholly embodies the military fantasy that it can even allow death to be used as an advantage; dead players are temporarily given a significantly larger tactical view of the battlefield as well as the ability to spawn in a location of their choosing to ensure that soldiers can immediately be where they need to be. Using death as a strategic advantage is so embedded into the game’s mentality that the developers actually included a Suicide button that allows the player to kill themselves if they were ever to be in a less favorable position. Being able to view the entire battlefield and dispense soldiers to the exact locations where they are needed is exactly the type of fantasy technology that Graham describes as DARPA’s “Combat Zones That See” project which seeks to apply similar mechanics to real-world battlefields, albeit without the suicides .

Valve’s Counter Strike Source may employ techniques that give dead players a tactical advantage similar to those present in Battlefield 3, but it differs in the fact that death actually carries with it larger consequences. While the game does still offer players the ability to re-spawn after death, it restricts the option to only allow them to return after the completion of a full round. The result is a more realistic representation of death’s consequences; a dead player means one less soldier on the battlefield to help his brothers in their mission, which leads to players making a greater effort to protect their comrades and to remain alive themselves, just like in real combat. Counter Strike also allows players to experience another aspect of the military fantasy: counter-narratives of victories that have never taken place. The game itself is a depiction of the war on terror, featuring teams of elite soldiers from several of the world’s benevolent military powers confronting terrorists. The counter-narrative arises from player’s ability to play as the team of terrorists, whose goal is frequently to detonate a bomb and cause destruction. It thus allows players to enjoy committing acts of terror that they would ordinarily condemn, and frequently the game will end with the announcement of “terrorists win”. This is not dissimilar to what Penney describes as the revisionist war narrative in Japan. There, several forms of fictional media depict the events of the Second World War as ending with Japan’s armies victorious . Just like these counter-narratives, Counter Strike allows players to rewrite their notions of the war on terror to turn their enemy’s victories into something positive.

The military fantasy of war without death may still be far from becoming a reality, but it is alive and well in video games such as Battlefield 3 and Counter Strike Source. Most players are already interpolated with the opposing notions of death in games and reality, and smaller art games such as One Chance are able to expose that ideology by reversing the convention. Larger games such as Battlefield 3 instead choose instead to embrace the ideology of death’s impermanence in games and fully depict the military fantasy through their use of death as a tactical advantage. Other games like Counter Strike Source still acknowledge this convention, but still realistically depict the consequences of a soldier’s death in a combat scenario. The fictionalization of these conflicts also allows players to rewrite reality and view the virtual victories of their nation’s enemies as something positive. As the line between military technology and video games becomes increasingly blurred, the military fantasy that games depict inches ever closer to reality.

[Reposting For Posterity - I have another, much longer and more in-depth video games paper in the works]

Hey everyone, here's a paper that I wrote for my Videogames as Theory Class. The video series that GiantBomb ran about the development of Bastion was instrumental in helping me write it, so I figured why not share with the GB community. If you guys like this kinda stuff leave some comments and I might post similar papers in the future.

Enjoy!

Breaking Down the Bastion

Storytelling in videogames is often a very linear and directed experience. They frequently rely on cut-scenes, either in real-time or pre-rendered, to break up gameplay sections and convey their narrative to the player. These stories regularly focus on either explaining what the character has just accomplished or providing a set-up for objectives to come. The result is an experience that is heavily guided by the developer, and to the player it can feel entirely scripted like a film. Supergiant Games’ debut title Bastion blends narration with its action and visuals in a way that makes the storytelling feel reactionary rather than pre-defined, and uses these techniques to convey themes of war, racism, and genocide.

Bastion was developed by a small team at Supergiant Games and published by Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment; it was initially released as a downloadable title for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service in July of 2011. Traditionally, download-only platforms such as Xbox Live Arcade have been chosen by independent developers as a means of distribution because of its low barrier to entry when compared with disc-based products . By capitalizing on a service that caters to shorter, more focused games, developers such as Supergiant are able to produce high-quality products on significantly lower budgets and in much shorter time-frames than their retail-store counterparts. Less than a month after its debut on the Xbox 360, the game was released through Valve Software’s Steam service, and later through Google’s Chrome Web Store. The Steam version differed from the original Xbox version in its inclusion of the turrets from Valve’s Portal series, a form of cross-promotion commonly used as a way of attracting a larger audience to a videogame .

Selecting the Xbox as lead platform allowed the developers to easily port the game to Windows because of the similarities in coding language between the two. The team developed their own editing tools using C-sharp in order to accomplish many of the unique aspects of the game, and thus were able to easily tweak their engine whenever necessary . The game’s visuals evolved significantly throughout the development process, beginning with basic shapes and monsters scanned out of Dungeons and Dragons manuals and eventually evolving to whimsical hand-painted art. The distinctive mechanic of having the world form under the player’s feet was present from the very beginning of development, and posed a challenge to the designers who needed to ensure that players could both easily determine their orientation without seeing the entire path ahead as well as be unable to outrun the world as it forms .

Bastion borrows many of its gameplay mechanics from older games such as the Super Nintendo era Legend of Zelda titles as well as Square’s Secret of Mana. The camera operates solely from an isometric perspective and the action is fairly simple. Several gaming conventions appear, such as basic controls as well as some traditional weapons like the hammer, bow, and shield. These practices allow many new players to be immediately familiar with aspects of the game as soon as they begin their play. There are also many aspects of the game that were implemented to comply with Microsoft’s certification process, for example the text that appears during loading screens and the quickness of the game’s introduction.

The game interfaces with its players primarily through audio and video. Contrary to most other videogames which are completely static, these two layers react directly to the player’s actions. With Bastion, what the player inputs on their controller is reflected in the game with much more than just player movement. The geometry of the levels forms in the player’s path as they move through each level, making the world much more dynamic, even if the paths themselves were pre-defined by the developers. By tying the creation of the world to the player’s actions, it ensures that no part of the world is a static place; instead each tile that rises to form the ground becomes part of the game’s space. The world itself becomes an active part of the game, rather than a simple backdrop for the action. The most dynamic aspect of Bastion is the reactive narration. The game will frequently select differed pieces of dialogue based on the player’s actions and the different ways that they may vary. When describing the narrator, writer Greg Kasavin elaborated that “We want him to respond to what you are doing rather than just talk all the time” . For example, when fleeing from destruction a player who frequently uses the roll maneuver to move quickly will hear the narrator comment on how he is “somersaulting like crazy”. The designers filled their game with these individual audio comments that not every player may hear. The technique of observing and directly responding to an audience’s actions is a type of focalization that is normally impossible in other forms of media such as film, and it works to better incorporate that audience in the story.

The emotional investment that Bastion gets from players through its reactive visuals and narration allows its story to have a much greater impact. The events of the game deal with important social issues such as war, racism and genocide. While these central themes pervade the storyline, none of them actually have a significant impact on gameplay; the player has no incentive to side with any particular opinion other than their personal moral compass. Films have often tackled these very same issues, but the nature of the medium always leaves the audience detached from the true experience. By giving the player choices related to these issues and using reactive narration to better convey the impact of those choices, Bastion can make the player feel the weight of its message and better understand its characters’ motivations. In addition to the impact on story, the game’s use of visuals also leads to different player experiences. Because the ground only forms in areas that the player is exploring, levels often feature secret areas that not all players may locate. Habitually these areas contain additional pieces of backstory that lend their gravitas to the world, and further separate each individual player’s experience with the game.

To conclude, Bastion differentiates itself through its unique reactionary mechanics. The developers both designed their own tools and played to the pre-existing strengths of their platforms to achieve the game’s goal of being a dynamic experience. Both its audio and its video aspects are intelligently used to emotionally connect players to the game’s narrative, and thus convey a story by integrating the player’s own morals and the choices that they make. Bastion applies the strengths of gaming interactivity by engaging players and delivering its message in a way that would not be possible in static mediums such as film.

With Starcraft 2 on the horizon there's been a lot of talk about how strategy games have evolved over the years.  The best strategy games of the last few years have been the ones with a much smaller scope like Dawn of War 2, and yet I don't think that this is a sign that strategy genre has changed, merely that there is a new genre starting to appear; let's call them Strategy Role Playing Games (SRPGs).  When you think about it, for a while the only company to really make any significantly different RTS games was relic with hits like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2.   
 
I'll use Dawn of War again because it's such a perfect example, but if you compare the first and second game you'll see that they don't have the slightest similarity.  The original Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War was my favorite strategy game when it came out.  You had all the familiar strategy trapping like tech trees and base building with some nice additions like passive resource gathering to let you focus more on the combat that making sure you didn't require more vespene gas.  Now, years later, the sequel is released and it couldn't be more different.  Don't get me wrong, I loved my entire playthrough of DoW 2 and I think it was by far one of the best games of last year, but in no way did I feel like I was playing a strategy game, it just felt like Warhammer 40k the RPG.  Think about it, you select no more than 4 characters to bring into battle with you, you gain levels, spend skill points to unlock new abilities and collect better loot to equip your party.  From this perspective, Dawn of War 2 has much more in common with something like Dragon Age: Origins than with a strategy game like Starcraft.  
 
 Since these new Relic-developed, closer focused strategy games were getting such amazing reviews people started to hold them up as the evolution of RTS games, and then along came Command and Conquer.  C&C 4 was so desperate to be part of the fun of this "evolution of strategy games" that it forgot to actually be good.  Gone was the illusion that making your game have a narrower more streamlined focus would make it better than ever, paving the way for traditional strategy games like Starcraft 2 to come out and not be seen as outdated.   
 
But no matter what, no one should look at more traditional RTS games and say that they're outdated because new games are so much different, because these newer games really belong in a genre of their own.  Much like first person shooters splintering into third person shooters over time, the two genres can easily co-exist and each have merits of their own.

Anyone who disagrees needs to hear kleiner's "start having sex again" speech from ep1

I love it
espescially the banner