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.

With Baited Breath

Warning: Rambling ahead. Don’t forget your dirty mac and walking stick.

I have only preordered a game once in my adult life. One single time. I enjoyed the first game in the franchise so much that when the sequel was announced I felt no need to wait for reviews. That game could not be anything but incredible. That game was Dragon Age 2. You know what? Dragon Age 2 wasn’t bad. It wasn’t as good as the first one. It was way too short, the environments were repetitive and the UI was very, very poorly thought out. I liked most of the characters though, I enjoyed it’s over-the-top macabre, I thought the pirate lady was pretty cool... It was not incredible.

I had never much seen the point of preorders before Dragon Age 2, and I don’t particularly see their value to the end user now. If there was some significant discount, perhaps. If there was a risk of the game selling out before I had a chance to pick it up, maybe. But in todays world games don’t significantly discount before release (unless they’re early access) and so few games are subject to limited stock that these are poor arguments. Back in the days of postal delivery there was a small incentive in that Amazon and its ilk could deliver it to you on day one, meaning you didn’t have to brave the decepit halls of GameStation. But for those of us that live in the future, meaning those that mostly buy all their games through Steam, the age of the preorder has ended.

For me, the age of buying a game soon after release has ended too. My backlog stretches far enough that if a game comes out I really want to play, I find it hard to justify paying full price for it when I know I could wait. I could play another game in my library that I’ve been meaning to try, and in a couple of months to a year that game I seek will be on some 75% off sale or other. In a way this is really bad: I make games myself, and obviously when people don’t pay full price I don’t get fully paid either. On the other hand, I feel like modern games might have become too expensive. Maybe £10 is too little for a game that I’ll spend fifty hours playing, but maybe £40 is too much.

With the cost of traditional gaming soaring, with the price of consoles being as much as a good computer these days, it’s no wonder that cheaper mobile platforms are becoming dominant. In many ways there seems to be a class division between the people who look down on mobile games from the lofty seats of the Playstation 4s, and those who can’t invest hundreds or thousands of pounds into their hobbies. People who argue that, yes, an iPhone is nonsensically expensive and even a decent Android phone will set you back as much as a console once you factor in the data plan are missing the point. In the modern world people need to be connected, they need phones. They need phones that can check their email and Twitter, and by coincidence these devices play games as well.

But I think the root of some distrust of the mobile sector is the quality of games. There are some standouts, of course. The Room, Sword and Sworcery, Super Hexagon. These are games that would be considered good on any platform. But these are not the games that dominate the space or earn any sort of exceptional income for their creators. The games that do, the Angry Birds and the Clash of Clans are, frankly, shit. Alright for phones but still cynically designed shit. Many console and PC games are pretty bollocks too, but the most visible games in the space are at least passable. I may not particularly like Call of Duty, but it is well crafted. I’d never call it shit. I may not particularly like DOTA 2, but that’s just because I’m an idiot who can’t multitask.

Increasingly, however, the bad practices of the mobile industry and creeping into the traditional spheres of gaming. Games designed to make money with no concession made to entertainment or quality. Games like Ryse, Watch Dogs or anything with prefix Kinect. The value of preorders to justify the industries’ relentless focus on picturesque but barely playable games is immeasurable. A trailer that you play may be about as much fun as a roast beef sandwich that you can drink, but it’ll make a damn good trailer. The game, that is. Not the sandwich.

The mobile industry suffers, then, because it is more transparent in its attempts to shaft you. Enough has been done to soften the cynicism that goes into big budget games that their increasingly malignant designs are more subtly implemented. Since there is no place for trust in a room full of liars, I’m going to keep buying mainstream games on discount. Whenever there’s a problem with the PC gaming industry then at least we can point to consoles and say, “well, at least we’re not them”. Whenever there’s a problem with the console industry they can point to mobile and say, “well, at least we’re not them”. Whenever there’s a problem with the mobile industry there is nothing left to say but, “yeah, this is a bit shit”.

Old Man Shooters

 

The last multiplayer shooter I played any decent chunk of time was Team Fortress 2. This was back when one had to pay for multiplayer games, so quite a while ago. Even then, I doubt I played more than twenty or thirty hours of it, which might as well be nothing for a game like that. Before TF2 was Unreal Tournament. I’m not sure whether I invested more time into the original or 2004, but either way I became pretty damn good at it. I loved the concept which ran through the series of every single weapon being overpowered in the right hands, so if you really got to know one weapon you could wreck people with it.

These games employed an obscure and foreign concept called balance. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when a game isn’t bullshit. Everyone on a level playing field, intelligence asymmetry. There are games that capture this so well that winning feels like a real victory, and that from losing you can learn to do better. There are games that capture this, and then is every shooter to have come out in the last seven years.

To be honest, I have played very little of Modern Warfare. I played the single player campaign of the first one and maybe half an hour of the multiplayer, and then I have never touched a single other game in the franchise since. I find the idea of integrating RPG progression into skill-based multiplayer to be conceptually flawed, and while in theory it might enable a rubber banding effect between teenagers with a lot of time and better reflexes and the old codgers, in practice it always serves the opposite effect. Having fun with a multiplayer game playing against people who have invested a lot more time and effort is hard enough in the first place, and then you compound the issue by not only giving them the advantage of skill and knowledge but tangibly better in-game equipment.

I realise these are mechanics people enjoy, or at least I assume they are since they keep being crowbarred into every multiplayer game. I realise that what I’m doing is the gaming equivalent of standing on my lawn, shaking my old man stick at some passing youths shouting  “in my day we had to work for our multikills!”. I realise all of these things, but I’m still right. It’s objective bollocks when any game’s developers decide that the mechanical depth provides insufficient skill progression and choose not to fix the problem but instead duck tape an extraneous mechanic over it and hope nobody notices.

If you need to give people who have played hundreds of hours better guns for them to be able to dominate newer players, then you have designed a bad game. If you don’t start with a level playing field you undermine the element of skill. For me, but I guess not for others, that is where the fun of pitting yourself against other humans lies. The only multiplayer genres which seem to have escaped this insufferable tide mostly unscathed are RTS, MOBA, and fighting games. I really wish I could enjoy these types of game, but for whatever reason I simply can’t manage to. These days I tend to avoid multiplayer whenever possible.

Floating Point

Gunpoint, the first game made by Tom Francis, was a favourite of mine. Ever since witnessing The Wrong Trousers for the first time I’d always wanted my own pair of mechanized pantaloons, and Gunpoint delivered this non-sequitur of a fantasy like Van Dyke on a bike. But it turned out that this wasn’t the Tom Francis game that I would spend most time with, turned out that that would be a little game he released for free a couple of months ago on Steam.

Floating Point is a minimalist 2d swinging game. Imagine a Spider Man game that wasn’t Spider Man 2 that was also good. Gameplay is purely mouse driven. Lie back and click, and wherever you shall click is where the grappling hook or whatever shit that you’re using to swing around on will be launched. Then swing into a wall. I love a game with the bare minimum of controls (I’ve made more than one game where you just walk about), and the simple act of mastering these forms the core of the games appeal. Left click attaches you to something, holding left click reels you in, right click detaches you. Easy.

Swinging through infinite randomly generated levels becomes a great meditative experience, in a similar manner to games like Bejeweled or Peggle, but unlike those games which had a fairly low skill cap, Floating Point maintained and continues to maintain interest after tens of hours of play. One day I’ll be able to float through a level like a butterfly with a grappling hook. One day I’ll manage to get over 2,000,000 points. Not today though.

It is the perfect game when listening to a podcast or waiting for an email. A skill to perfect while a small part of your brain focuses on something else. Something you play for ten minutes while drafting the best way to begin a call. A way to divert your attention from an encroaching forest fire. It is the apex distraction game.

When playing a story based game like Red Dead Redemption or The Swapper I sometimes feel like I must experience each moment perfectly. I shouldn’t play this game when I feel crap or stressed, or when I’m drunk or when I’m tired, because I’ll experience a moment for the first time like that. I’ll never be able to experience it for the first time again, and forever the memory of it will be tainted by the imperfection with which I experienced it. It’ll be like when I watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica while really wanting a piss.

I never feel like that with Floating Point. I’m never going to beat my high score when I’m playing it drunk at midnight, but I’ll still have fun. Nothing about this session will have any persistence, any effect on my future time with this game. This aspect of the game is hardly unique, I’ve already mentioned Bejeweled and Peggle, but of course there are games like Threes, Spelunky and Kerbal Space Program that also fulfill this need. But these games walk a fine line. Bejeweled doesn’t grab my attention enough to be a distraction, while Spelunky takes too much and becomes stressful if I’m not willing to devote my entire focus to it. Kerbal requires too much time investment and Threes, well I don’t really like Threes to be honest. I’m not sure why I mentioned it.

Floating Point, at least for me, is the perfect balance between cognitive difficulty and muscle memory. Not requiring too much brain power but not too little either. I may never play it in chunks of more than half an hour, but I’ll fire it up multiple times a day when I need to take my mind off something, when I need to let my subconscious figure something out, or when I need to keep my higher mind busy while listening to an audio-only format.

Sim Life

Once upon a time as a wee lad who couldn’t buy his own game systems, and would save up his allowance every month (my parents paid my allowance in monthly installments, it was something to do with making me responsible or something) to buy video games, value was key. We couldn’t really afford the latest consoles, but I had a computer. Not a great computer, but good enough. I probably spent more time in the demo of Midtown Madness 2 than I have in any game of the past couple of years. There was a copy of one of the Might and Magic games, I’m not sure which one. I don’t think I ever got very far in it but I played that first level a hell of a lot.

Sometime after it came out I scammed my parents into paying my subscription of World of Warcraft for me, and my gaming time was swallowed by that endless temporal void. Before that, though, was The Sims. The original, the best. That series has an odd reputation these days. Among the “core”, whatever that means, gamer community opinion is split. The first half would say that it is the original sin of microtransactions and downloadable content, the first game to try to nickel and dime you incessantly after you paid full price for it. The second would say that it was a game “for girls” (or alternatively, “for mums”), apparently unaware that these are the insult of the barbarian. I have more time for the first group, but despite my sympathies I can’t deny that The Sims was one of the most formative, pure gaming experiences of my childhood.

Even today I can’t bring myself to dislike it. I don’t think I played more than a couple of hours each of The Sims 2 and 3, but I bought them nonetheless. What drew me to the series I’m not entirely sure. Partly I think it was engaging in a parody of adult life, a life that every child aspires to. In some part as well it was the narrative. It was emergent, wacky. Little lives living and dying, achieving their dreams, building their house and buying new things. I’ve heard people say that the thing they enjoyed doing in the game was finding ways to kill their Sims - trapping them in swimming pools by deleting the stairs, or in rooms by deleting the doors, or simply setting the house on fire. This was not the way I played The Sims.

Usually my characters would start as some version of me. But, you know, grown up and cool. With facial hair and shit. Then I’d become one of the professions that didn’t make you have to make friends to get promotions. It was all just too much work, you’d have to ring them up and invite them over and have parties and then six months later of never speaking to them they’d stop being your friend. Totally unrealistic. Then I’d get bored of that, buy whatever it was you needed to make gnomes and then just do that and sell them. Turns out, once your Sim gets good at making gnomes, they sell for so much that it is easily the best way to earn money in the game (or at the least the best way I found as a kid).

It was also a really social game. My friends would have characters in my game, and vice versa, and then I’d get to annoy them by marrying their character off to someone when they weren’t there. How we’d laugh. I’m not sure what the argument or point of this article is. Maybe it’s that you shouldn’t be so quick to assume that boys want to play “manly” games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. Maybe it’s about how, as a child, you can learn to love a single thing so great that it rises above cynicism. Maybe I just wanted to write about The Sims, because, fuck yeah The Sims.

Dishonourable Conduct

Warning: Very minor Dishonored spoilers ahead.

There aren’t many narrative-based games I’ve completed more than once. There’s Dragon Age: Origins, there’s Mass Effect 1 and 2, and there’s Dishonored. What these games all have in common is branching narrative paths, where you have to make a decision to go one way but by the end you’ll wonder what would have happened if you went the other. I briefly played Dishonored on my PS3, but I didn’t find the first person movement all that precise with a controller and gave up after the first hour or so. I picked it up again on the PC for about £2 when it was on some ridiculous Steam sale and found that I enjoyed it a whole lot better with a keyboard and mouse.

Dishonored, the first playthrough, is a game about being a really badass assassin; but it’s a game in which you can choose to kill no one. The first time I played through it I did so the “Easy” way, avoiding death wherever I could but not being afraid to throw someone off a bridge before they saw me and assassinating all my targets. It is to this games credit that it can seamlessly switch from stealth to combat without either system feeling inferior to the other, so my wishy-washy try not to kill anyone but be willing to fight your way out of a bad situation playstyle felt very natural. My morality meter, in this game measured in “Chaos”, was about as far into the red as it could be by the end of the game, and the ending I got was so dark that I almost immediately resolved to play through the game again.

Dishonored, the second playthrough, is a game about being a really bad assassin. One who is constantly told to go and kill people but always finds some way to avoid doing his job. I snuck around guards, only knocking them out and shooting them with a sleep dart in extremis (unconscious guards have an unfortunate tendency to fall off of things and die, forcing you to restart the mission). I found ways of “dealing” with my targets without killing them, and all in all I was like a horrifying bastard version of Gandhi. Playing this way was certainly more difficult, but as I had completed the game so recently I still remembered all of the secret paths and hiding places that I had found the hard way in my first playthrough, so it didn’t take too long. I finished the game a second time and, well, almost nothing had changed.

There’s a moment in Dishonored, two missions from the end, which I won’t spoil. I will say that it is very dark and heavily implied to have had something to do with you being a murderous prick in the previous missions. Actually, however, it wasn’t anything to do with my previous behaviour, and will happen regardless of whether you’re prick Gandhi or prick Simo Häyhä. In fact, almost nothing changes across the entire game based on morality. The dialogue of the friendly characters almost never changes, which is something I would have realised if I had noticed that all of their lines never directly refer to killing anybody, and just to “dealing” with them (making them appropriate for both style of playthrough). Occasionally you’ll get a text dump along the lines of “Hey, I’m sending you this note to thank you for not stabbing me”, but that feels fairly token, and sometimes there will be fewer enemies, rats and zombies in an area.

But if I’m honest, despite being disappointed at first I eventually came to appreciate the couple of little changes they did make. For example, in the second to last mission you go through some sewers. In a killing-everything playthrough, these will be full of zombies. It’s a great moment because you can’t really stealth past them, forcing you to just mindlessly hack your way through this endless stream of bodies. It makes you confront just how far you’ve fallen from when you were the crafty, catlike assassin. In a let’s-not-kill-everything playthrough, the sewers are full of unhostile plague survivors, who let you pass through without issue. They just want to be left alone, and you’re not the kind of character who would hurt them.

The final mission also changes, despite it being set in the same area. At the start of it a very likable character will give you one of two lines depending on whether you’ve been naughty or nice, which can basically be summed up as either “You’re a tosser and I hope I never see you again” or “Hey, you’re a nice guy. Want to grab a drink once you’re finished here?”. The last moments of each of the characters you need to deal with are dark whichever route you take, but certainly far darker if you go down the killing path. The epilogue then changes, either telling you that because you were a git everything was terrible forever and it’s all your fault, or because you were knife-Jesus everything was awesome and your friend bought a pub and you drank in it all the time and everyone was cured of all illness forever.

Games are made with limited resources, and finding the money to record almost-identical dialogue depending on minor choices is probably very difficult. I always find the tricks developers use to make players think they have more influence over events than they actually do to be fascinating, like the Walking Dead decision trees that bulge in the middle but converge on the same point, or how Mass Effect will have multiple dialogue options with the same voiced line which is neutral enough that it can be interpreted in different ways. I was disappointed when I saw behind Dishonored’s façade and realised how set the narrative and dialogue was, but I quickly began to appreciate the things it did do. It doesn’t hide it’s tricks very well, but it does just enough to mix the game up for multiple playthroughs that I’m really glad I gave the game a second shot.

~ [Console: Gaming 1]

One of the advantages that computers hold over dedicated gaming machines is customization. Mods can alter how the game plays, looks or sounds. Settings allow you to make decisions of balancing performance yourself, rather than having them made for you: if you would rather a game run at sixty frames per second than at 1080p then you can turn the resolution down, or if you prefer a sharper looking game running at thirty frames per second you can decide otherwise. Today I want to talk about developer consoles in games.

Developer consoles are optional text interfaces in many PC games that allow you to configure various aspects of the game while it is running. They expose options that are usually only available to developers and are commonly used for things such as spawning enemies and items, fixing bugs or teleporting your character. In most games you’d never bother even looking at the console unless you had a really obscure bug, but in some they can become an integral part of the way you play the game.

I really like dogs. On a list of things I like, dogs would definitely be in the top five, just above David Bowie and just under breathing. Early on in my game of Fallout 3, I came across a dog called Dogmeat, and he followed me around and we conquered the wasteland together. In Fallout: New Vegas, your followers couldn’t die. They could get shot, but as in real life when they’d been shot too much they’d just faint for a bit and then rejoin you at your house sometime later. Quite unrealistically, if your followers in Fallout 3 get shot too much then they’ll just die forever. It’s very inconvenient, and I didn’t like the idea of having to play perfectly in order to keep this dog alive.

So I just typed SetEssential 0006a772 1 into the developer console and never had to worry about it again. Essential characters in Fallout (and any Bethesda game, really) are ones that can’t die. They just faint for a bit then get back up. It didn’t really unbalance the game, since if an enemy did enough damage to Dogmeat he would be knocked out until the end of the fight, it just made the game better for me. I had more fun because I could play it the way I wanted to, bending any rule that I found made the experience less enjoyable to me. In this way it’s very much like playing a board game, letting you make new house rules or ignore those that the designer put in based on personal taste.

I used the console occasionally in Fallout: New Vegas as well. In one mission I had two options, either blow up a base full of people or convince their leader to work with the people who wanted to blow them up. I rather liked the people I was being asked to blow up, so I decided to go for the second option, but since I had previously been part of a coup within this group and helped a different leader take control of it, there was no way I could. Despite the fact that, in my opinion, the new leader would probably have been more receptive to peace than the old one, the dialogue option simply wouldn’t come up if you had decided to oust the previous leader.

So I just typed SetObjectiveDisplayed 00136166 56 1 into the developer console, which skipped the part of the quest where I needed to talk to the leader and get him to agree to peace, and everybody lived happily ever after. Easy. If I had been playing New Vegas on my PS3 I would have been forced to either not do this quest (which, since it was part of the central quest line, would lock me out of a lot of content), or do something I didn’t really feel like my character would ever do.

There have been various other times I’ve used developer consoles for little things. The original Mass Effect has a lighting bug with modern video cards in a couple of levels that makes it nearly unplayable. You can’t turn the lighting off in the settings, but you can with the console, changing a game ending bug into just having to put up with a flatter looking game for twenty minutes. It’s a shame that a lot of games don’t have an easily accessible console, because it’s an excellent safety net that helps players fix problems themselves without having to wait for patches that may never come, or simply enjoy the game in a way the developer never anticipated.