The Mountain

So I’m sitting here with my iPad next to me. On the tablet is a slowly rotating mountain. I’ve seen many things on the mountain: glowing trees, a bronze disc that might have been a UFO or might have been oversized coin, a strange spire that looked like a sword blade stabbing itself out of the ground. If I want I can play simple tunes at the bottom of the screen, but this seemingly has no impact on the mountain. I could rotate the mountain myself by dragging my finger around, but there seems to be little point in doing so. Better to let the mountain rotate at its own pace.

Night comes and a single piano note plays. The words “I WILL NEVER FORGET THIS MURKY DARKNESS” appear. This mountain is alive, you see. Or the mountain is me. I’m not really sure. Other than the occasional piano note and a few ambient sounds - chirping, wind, rain - there is no sound. Sometimes a choir pipes up to signal a change in the seasons. It has changed from summer to autumn now, or I assume so since all the trees have gone a pretty shade of brown.

“I’M PLEASED WITH THIS WONDROUS NIGHT”. Despite the fairly simple, low-poly look this is a beautiful game. Game? Simulation. App? Thing. A drawing pin has appeared on the mountain now, sticking into the top. It’s also started snowing. I don’t know if that means anything. It probably doesn’t. I am strangely entranced by this whole experience, even though the last time I actually touched the iPad was when it almost fell off my desk.

“WHY AM I ALL ALONE?”. It’s winter now and I can barely see the mountain through the snow and fog. The mountain is asking me philosophical questions like I know the answers. Is the mountain supposed to be god? Am I supposed to be god staring at a mountain? Why is god staring at a mountain? Why am I staring at this mountain? A single piano note plays again and the words “ALL I DO IS SPIN AROUND” appear on the screen.

I know, mountain. I know.

The World's Still Open

When I was a child I recall going to the doctors for an injection. A nice nurse lead me through to the room, sat me down, and took a toy off the table and put it in my hand. It was one of those things that had a maze and a little ball and you had to get the ball in a hole. Assuming that she was just asking me to hold it for a second so the table would be clearer, I ignored the toy and stared at my arm as the needle went in. It was only days later that I realised that I was supposed to play with this toy so that I wouldn’t notice the jab. I tell you this story not only to pad out the word count, but to make you understand that I’m someone who doesn’t like to be distracted pointlessly.

Sometimes we all want to be distracted, either because there’s something we don’t want to focus on or because the distraction itself is worth our time. This is something I can get behind. Sometimes, however, there are games seemingly oblivious to the Inception-like recursiveness of the whole exercise that will attempt to distract you from itself.

Saints Row the Third is a hilarious game. American comedy rarely gets to me as much as it does to Americans, but Saints Row had me laughing even alone playing singleplayer. Not just thinking to myself “oh, that was rather clever”, but actually laughing. Do you know what made the game funny? It’s writing and its staged moments. When that chainsaw falls into the wrestling ring and “You’re the Best Around” starts playing? That’s up there with down with this sort of thing. The bits of the game that weren’t funny, well they were the bits that relied on the open world. Sure, occasionally there would be a funny bit of dialogue while driving a character from one place to another, but mostly the open world was boring.

Let’s start with the side missions. They’re bollocks. Either boring or too hard, the game insists that after its excellently paced and written story missions that you play these laborious side missions that serve only as padding. The little amount of context that surrounds them the first time you do them doesn’t succeed in making them funny, and that little bit of context is thrown out of the window if you try to do them again. These missions are simply distractions from the main, interesting, actually funny storyline.

Little else about the open world lives up to the promise of the games writing and set pieces. I realise this is personal preference, but frankly hitting pedestrians with a dildo bat or (in Saints Row 4) a dubstep gun wouldn’t entertain me in the slightest. Torturing AI has never been my thing. That kind of stuff seems like the crux of the enjoyment you are supposed to take from the open world, but I don’t think it works. I know it’s intrinsic to the series, but while the open world isn’t offensively dull, it adds nothing to either Saints Row 3 or 4. Especially 4, in fact, since it marginalizes the role of vehicles in favour of super powers.

Thanks to the VTOL in 3 and the super jumps in 4, moving from one point to another isn’t entirely boring, but it isn’t fun either after the first couple of times. The open world is only an issue when moving from one point to another, and the content of the world serves only as a substandard distraction from the genuinely great parts of the game. The game overloads players with choices, all of which detract from the core of the experience. Like a doctor’s toy, the only purpose they serve is to distract you from the point.

Wide Open Space

In the year of our lord two thousand and fourteen it was decreed by the lord of gaming, Sir Mario Chief Drake, that all sequels released thenceforth would be open world. So it was, then, that The Witcher became open world. So it was that Zelda and Dragon Age and probably Mass Effect became open world. A good sequel, so the accepted wisdom goes, should be bigger and better than its predecessor. As such the strategy of taking a previously non-open world series and opening it up seems fairly self explanatory. Open worlds are as bigger as can be, and as games like Skyrim and World of Warcraft’s towering sales demonstrate, many would see them as better.

Having not play these games that haven’t been made yet, I can’t tell you for sure if they’ll be good. I’ve never liked Zelda (well, Link’s Awakening was passable). Dragon Age Inquisition will probably be good even if some of the changes to the combat worry me a little. Mass Effect 4 will likely be good as well, although the potential outcomes of some of your decisions in Mass Effect 3 are so far reaching that they’ll probably have to scrap half of the existing species and lore. I thought the first Witcher was alright but hated the second one, so Wild Hunt probably won’t be for me.

Still, as much as I’ve enjoyed many open world games I can’t help but worry about this trend. Maybe these games will be great, maybe they’ll be terrible, but the important point is that an open world can be a detriment to games as well as a boon. In a game like Skyrim exploration and discovery is key. The game is chocked to the brim with content, and the purpose of playing it is to find as much of that content as possible. Skyrim is an example of a great open world game. Games in which the open world proves detrimental fall into one of two categories: those without enough content and those with too much.

In this article, let’s deal with the first. L.A. Noire was a police procedural released in 2011. One of the many rebirths of the adventure genre, it managed to be worth playing despite a long and abusive development cycle. It had a large, beautiful open world that was lovingly crafted to evoke mid twentieth century Los Angeles. The time that must have been spent getting every detail right, making all the cars and buildings and foley. Time that was utterly wasted.

When you got a mission you’d walk out of the precinct to your car. On the first couple, you’d get in and drive to your destination thinking “ooh, how nice this world looks”. For every other mission you’d just hold the skip to destination button. There were a few side missions that weren’t worth the silicon they were printed on, but otherwise the open world was just space. It existed to add an arbitrary amount of travel time to your mission. Each case would then take place in a couple of tight environments that never felt like they needed to exist within an open world. I wonder how many marriages would have been saved if Team Bondi had skipped making the entire city. The ending was bollocks too, but that’s an article for another day.

Other games are guilty of this, Mafia II being a prominent example. An open world must be core to your game design for it to work, otherwise it’s just a scenic commute. As anyone who’s lived in Wales will tell you, a commute only remains scenic for as long as it takes you to notice the sheep dung.

Big Games

I’m an indie. I make little games about maritime farming, adapt seminal pieces of seminal literature into interactive Unity things, and make match three games which are also hardcore side-scrolling shooters for some reason. So, it is with some guilt that I admit that I love big, sparkly, costly games. I love ‘em. Indie Twitter is filled with doomsaying about the mainstream game industry, preaching the superiority of little indie games about, I don’t know, uniform fetisism. There seems to be truth to the idea that the mainstream industry is unsustainable in its current form.

Indie games are at the forefront of exploring new ideas, new forms of play and new types of interactive narrative. I love indie games like Dream Fishing, The Stanley Parable and Papers, Please, but despite this there is something the majority of indie games lack, something that requires big teams and lots of time and resources. Games, unlike any other medium, can create universes that are near-infinitely big, because they can be explored only at the pace of the player.

My favorite series of books is probably Discworld, Terry Pratchett’s series of insightful and funny tales. For me they are more than anything about the world they are set in. Exploring it in minute detail through the eyes of the protagonist. This aspect it shares with my favourite mainstream games: Mass Effect, Dishonored, Fallout (the games I never shut up about on this website), Knights of the Old Republic, Persona 3. Pokémon, even. “Immersion” is a word thrown around a lot, and it is not the be all and end all of goods games. However, the epitome of the medium for me is when I can be immersed in an alien world. One of strange cultures and tiny details. Games let you explore worlds of breathtaking complexity at your own pace, learning slowly and going only as deep as your interest.

Exploration as the core is not unique to mainstream games. Gone Home and Journey are excellent examples of indies doing it right. But doing so at a scale, creating not a home or a village but a city, planet or universe still needs big developers and a lot of cash. With the right people leading it and the right people behind it, a Discworld game could be something incredibly special. As much as I love being an indie and playing indie games, if I ever got a chance to work on a game like this, to help craft a universe, I would abandon my indieness instantly. Maybe I’m a traitor.

I Should Make a Pet Game

Pets are pretty great. As a kid I was surrounded by dogs and cats and despite the general chaos of the house and the animal hair everywhere it was awesome. Tamagotchi’s were pretty big at this time as well, and I remember having one and really enjoying it. I had an old clamshell DS and I remember whatever magazines I read at the time raving about how great this Nintendogs thing was, so I figured I’d grab a copy. I love dogs, I love Nintendo, I really liked my Tamagotchi. I’m going to love Nintendogs.

I hated Nintendogs. It wasn’t until recently when I started thinking about how much I love the idea of pet games but actually enjoy so few of them that I realised why I didn’t like Nintendogs. It wasn’t that it was boring, repetitive and not very much like owning a dog at all. It was that there was no consequence to your actions. Tamagotchi’s were infamously easy to kill. Don’t feed it enough or pay it enough attention or let it become ill and you will soon find yourself with an ex-Tamagotchi. If you stopped feeding your dog in Nintendogs there was no consequence, nothing you did could have any negative outcome. This made a Nintendog not a pet but a toy.

Now obviously a dog dying is horrible and I don’t think I’d play a game that let that happen (seriously, this is why I never played any of the original Tomb Raider games), so I think it’s important that a virtual pet not be a representation of a real pet. It’s OK to let a Tamagotchi die because it’s not a dog, cat, ferret or tarantula. If it was any of those things then it wouldn’t be OK, even if it was still virtual. But a pet without risk and consequence isn’t a pet. Without that element there isn’t an incentive to keep looking after your virtual dependent.

Let’s see, if I was making a pet game I think I’d make it a fish with a human face voiced by Leonard Nimoy. No, nobody would publish a game like that, that would be silly. Better to be some abstract digital representation with a cutesy voice, like a Digimon but with less Pokémon impersonation. Then, a challenging but not-too-difficult care system that meant you had to remember to look after your pet, perhaps with rewards that incentivise continued play like gear unlocks or an evolving emergent personality for your pet. After that all you need is a hard failstate for if you fail to look after your pet, forcing you to start again with a new pet with a new personality. I realise at this point that what I’m pitching is a hardcore roguelike pet game, but come on. That would be awesome.

Yeah, I should totally make a pet game. Even if it probably would be a lot like a Tamagotchi.

When I'm Cleaning Windows

I was a proper nerd at university. Not content with being a little too interested in all this video game lark, I also ran Linux on my laptop. Linux Mint, specifically, an offshoot of Ubuntu (which itself is an offshoot of Debian). The wired internet had some particularly weird security on it that interacted fairly poorly with my computer, and of course being 64bit things like Flash never worked properly and yeah I couldn’t run Silverlight so I had to boot into Windows if I wanted to use my Netflix subscription. Still, running Linux was preferable just because of its light footprint. I had a Playstation 3 for playing video games and would watch most videos on my iPad, so its primary purpose was for word processing and some light game development (I programmed my first game, in Space, entirely in GEdit).

Simply put, despite its problems Linux booted about three times as fast as Windows did, ran faster and crashed less often. I suppose it’s my fault for being a cheapskate and buying a budget, display stock laptop, but running Windows simply wasn’t worth the hassle. Another advantage of running Linux was that it’s essentially virus-proof, and when you’re doing a degree studying intelligence (spying) and future warfare (nukes, ASAT and cyber attacks) you end up on some fairly iffy websites. I remembering stumbling across an article on a website full of people who were convinced the world was about to end. The article discussed how the best thing to do after the Fallout-style apocalypse was to hunker down with a bunch of guns and protect your food supply from raiders, and I had the almost overwhelming impulse to write the guy a letter explaining every tactical mistake he’d made in the piece.

I didn’t by the way. I figured I was on enough Interpol lists already.

After I graduated, having being jaded to the whole political process to the point where I wanted to pursue a career in the games industry instead, I got a new computer. Well, I built one. I am a proper nerd after all. I wanted a computer that could play next generation games (not necessarily with everything maxed out), and that could run Unity really well. I was briefly tempted to continue using Linux, since this was around the time people were getting excited about Steam Boxes. In my experience with games that run on both Linux and Windows, they almost always run better on Linux. But I decided that the age of using a Linux box as a primary gaming machine was still some time away (and I wasn’t very fond of the idea of running Unity under WINE), so I installed Windows 7.

I thought getting used to Windows again would be difficult, but coming back to it I realised just how interchangeable operating systems are becoming. Since the vast majority of my time on a computer is spent within a web browser (I’m even writing this article in Google Docs), the only practical difference is that Flash doesn’t crash as often, and since we live in an HTML5 utopia now that isn’t really a big deal. The only main annoyance is fixing problems. The best thing about Linux is that it lets you tinker with every aspect of the operating system, so there really are no problems that are unfixable. In Windows 7 everything’s hidden behind needlessly obfuscated control panel menus, and there are aspects of your experience that it simply won’t let you change.

Then again, back when I used Windows 98 or even XP the operating system was full of bugs and nonsense that it would break if you so much as looked at the wrong registry item, whereas these days things are a lot smoother. The days of having to go through carefully cleaning Windows, clearing and defragging hard drives and regularly doing day-long virus scans that would slow your computer to a halt are pretty much over. I remember when I was a kid there was a popular song called something like every OS sucks. Well I’ve used modern versions of Linux, and Windows 8 and even whatever this months version OS X is, and the fact is that assuming you’re not using a crappy second hand laptop, they’re all fine. Most things are done within web browsers these days and the only reason you’d really want to use one over the other is if you need a specific program. I guess Every OS is Perfectly Adequate doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Playing it Wrong

I love playing games wrong. I love games which allow you to play wrong. When you pause to look around and your support character just repeats your objective on a loop, that sucks. “Open the door”, “You need to open the door”, “Open the door”. As a kid one of my favourite games to play wrong (although I didn’t realise I was doing so at the time) was Pokémon. The phrase “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” never really sank in for me. Why bother with training up other Pokémon when you can just train one up to such a high level that you need never swap it out? My level 99 Blastoise was a sight to behold, and by the time I got to the Elite Four, which was basically the only bit of the game where multiple party members was useful, there were a bunch of easily capturable level 70s to pad out the numbers.

Always having a really high level Pokémon suited me. I used to act as a training service to other kids, taking their low level ‘mon and training them up super quickly by one shotting everything with André the Giant Tortoise. Now, if I’m honest, I can’t say that this was the most fun way to play the game. In many ways it actually makes things too easy, given that I could usually one-shot every gym leaders Pokémon even if my attacks were not very effective… It was probably about a year ago that I decided to replay one of the original Pokémon, although I elected to go with the GBA Blue Sea edition rather than the the original Pokémon Blue I played as a kid. This time I decided that I was going to do this right. Maybe I wasn’t going to Catch Them All™ but I would try a lot harder to have a varied team than I did when I was the correct age to play these games.

Having a series of long train journeys ahead of me with which to sink a few tens of hours, I set out to play through the entire game, and I discovered that I still really like Pokémon. I’m not sure I’d want to play through one now if I didn’t have some travel planned, but the game has aged far less than I expected. I never named my Pokémon as a child, but I decided to have a naming convention this time: I would name the Pokémon after whatever I was thinking about at the time. I liked the idea of having a party full of names that had no relation to each other, but that I could think: oh, “ChknCaesar”, I caught him when I was really hungry and about to pause the game to eat a sandwich. “ArnoldRimmer”, oh yeah I got her when I was trying to remember that really funny Red Dwarf line.

Notice how none of the names I just made up went over the twelve character limit for naming Pokémon? Professionalism.

I might not have quite beat whatever I named my rival (it was something mature like “TOSSER”), but I’m glad that I have now played the game that defined my childhood in the way that other people played it. It’s a fairly small thing, but when something is important to your history I think trying to re-appreciate it as an adult can help you understand its impact more. As a game designer I’ve been influenced by the games I played as a kid in ways I don’t consciously think about, so for me playing it again helped break it down in my mind and see a lot of the tropes I do or want to put in my games. Also, having entire teams of enemy Pokémon plowed down by “ArrivaSucks” tickled me.