To me League of Legends represents a paradox of conflicting emotions that lie at extreme ends of the gaming experience.

On the one hand, it is an incredibly good video game. Some of my finest mouse-clicking memories have been created in it. It’s addictive, satisfying even when you’re losing and there’s always more to learn. Despite the fact that every game involves fiddling with an everlasting procession of guys that bundle down one of three lanes to their demise, it manages extraordinary depth.

On the other hand… and it’s at this point in the conversation that, were you and I sat opposite one another, I would take a deep swig of my whiskey and fix you with a tired, haunted gaze. On the other hand, some of my most awful experiences in gaming have come from League of Legends.

Now before I go any further let me define awful for you in this context. I’m not talking about the kind of awful experience that comes from, for example, playing Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. That is an awful experience because it is a poor video game. We’ve already established that can’t be true here. No, no this is an entirely different awful. An awful that results, not from any game-play mechanics or developer choices, but from the interactions within it.

I’m talking, of course, about the League of Legends community. The fact that the community of a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) like LoL is generally perceived as hostile is hardly newsworthy, or indeed noteworthy. So accepted is the general atmosphere of vitriol and elitism that even those only passingly familiar with the genre know that signing up for these games is the online equivalent of putting one’s head in the lion’s mouth. However, in LoL’s case that’s not entirely fair. Not entirely.

I’ve played LoL for over a year now and during that time I’ve racked up around 300 ‘Normal’ wins. Normal is LoL’s more “relaxed” PvP mode, entirely distinct from ‘Ranked’ play, where every statistic is tracked and you move up leagues based on your performance. I’ve not tried Ranked yet, and that’s mostly because I hear it’s even worse than Normals in terms of player interaction, and Normals were bad enough for me.

Bearing in mind my win-rate is only a little bit over 50% that means I’ve played near enough 600 ‘Normal’ games, to say nothing of over 800 co-op vs AI battles. With games lasting an average of thirty minutes that’s an alarming amount of time spent playing. It’s likely to be much more than any other single video game I’ve ever played, and I have played a lot of games. Despite all these hours behind me, though, I’m small fry compared to a large percentage of the player-base – some of whom have thousands of victories to their name. In short, I’ve played more than some and less than others, and while a great section of the community would be eager to dismiss my musings as irrelevant (after all, I’ve never even played Ranked!) I do have something to say about my experiences. Or, more accurately, what my experiences started to do to me.

I began with a fairly brave face, and fumbled through my first matches just like anyone else. Now that my brain is marinaded in so much LoL action I’m sure I’d find some of my previous item choices and general actions quite horrifying, but it’s the same for everyone. Back at low level, when everyone just built the items they felt like and played the champions in whatever positions they liked abuse from one’s fellow players was fairly rare. The most you’d get was an earful for “KSing” (kill stealing) from someone. It wasn’t until a bit later on in my career as a Summoner that I encountered the ragers.

A rager, as his or her names suggests, is very very angry indeed. Or at least it would appear that way from the text they type in the game’s chat system. LoL does not have a built-in voice chat functionality and we should probably be grateful for that. Nonetheless, it’s perfectly possible for anyone in the game to type whatever they like, using the usual methods to get around the token profanity filter. And there will be a lot of profanity.

You might be forgiven for thinking that most of the anger would be catapulted at you from the enemy team. After all, the game casts you in an adversarial relationship with them. You must fight and defeat one another in order to win! Oh my sweet child. How wrong you’d be to make such an assumption. While there’s an occasional rager on the enemy team (usually spouting something derogatory about your choice of champion) it’s almost invariably someone on your own team that’s performing the verbal equivalent of friendly fire.

There’s not too much that’s friendly about it though. I don’t wish to engage my own token profanity filter here so I won’t repeat anything verbatim, but if a word is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘vulgar’ then you can be certain it’s been aimed at me in anger at one point or another. Not only that, but I’ve also been the butt of some multicultural discourtesy, with naughty words in both Spanish and Portuguese making an appearance (I play on the North American server). In addition to that, I have been told to uninstall the game. I have been told to commit suicide. I have had cancer wished on me and my family. If an insult has been birthed in the festering bowels of the internet and flung like digital faeces across cyberspace at any point in human history then it’s made an appearance in LoL. In a game that’s so wildly successful, with more than 12 million players per day, you might almost say it’s inevitable.

It’s not just the insults that get to you, though. Oh no. If it was just bad words it would be relatively easy to ignore. No, what really destroys your experience is the players that take it upon themselves to wage all-out psychological warfare on you. Let me give you an example.

I was playing Vladimir, a ‘Blood mage’ who generally sits in one of the ‘solo’ lanes (two of the three lanes usually have one champion from each team assigned to them, and the third lane has two, with the final team member in the ‘jungle’). I was facing Ryze, another solo champion who happens to counter Vladimir quite handily. I was being cautious, playing conservatively and trying not to die too much. The Ryze was able to push the lane to my turret and then leave it to ‘roam’, which basically means going to the other lanes and causing mayhem there. If I’d followed the Ryze out of lane, he would have been able to turn on me and destroy me, so most of the time I simply stayed in lane and pushed to try and cost him his tower.

The top laner on our team, playing a Champion called Shen, did not agree with my chosen strategy. After a couple instances of Ryze coming to the other lanes and picking up kills, he decided that it was entirely my fault and was fairly vocal in explaining that. He began the conversation in the customary way: “This Vlad.” I don’t know where this tradition comes from but in LoL it seems to be that if you want to indicate someone or something is bad the way you do it is say “This X”, where X is the object of your scorn. If you want to make it doubly clear you can of course follow things up, like Shen did.

“This Vlad. So bad. Noob Vlad.”

He followed up this series of helpful observation with a number of other insults. The mistake I made was engaging in this conversation, suggesting that he purchase vision wards so that he would know when Ryze was about to arrive, and explaining that my following him out would result in disaster for me.

That was it. The blood was in the water. Shen was now no longer interested in playing the game. After all, it was lost because of this noob Vlad, right? Yes. Better not waste his time trying to win any more. Much better to make this Vlad’s life hell. While making a token effort to stay in is lane, Shen spent most of the rest of the game either sat in a bush (where the enemy is unable to see you) or sat at our base. What was he doing there if not playing the game, you ask? Why, he was typing of course.

“Look at this Vlad. Noob Vlad. Doesn’t know how to use his champion. So bad.” I get caught out and killed. “lol. Good. Die noob Vlad.” The situation was probably further exacerbated by the fact that I was wearing a ‘skin’. LoL is free to play but you can spend money on visual upgrades to your favourite champions, and since I like Vlad I’d splashed out on his ‘Legendary’ Blood Lord skin. Shen was not happy about this.

“Omg noob Vlad with skin. Doesn’t know how to play. Why buy skin when such a noob? Disgusting.” It’s worth noting that there’s no skill or level requirements for purchasing skins, something that seems to be lost on a minority of players. Finally, with the same inevitability as death and taxes, the calls to report me began. Reporting is the method by which LoL is a self-policed society. If you did not like the behaviour of any of your fellow players you can report them at the end of the game. If they accumulate enough reports, they are sent to the Tribunal, a peer review system that can result in anything from warnings, to temporary account suspensions to outright permabans. People asking for reports in the game are usually ragers like the Shen who are using it as a threat in order to make other players feel worse. I had done nothing reportable but in the heat of such moments there’s very little room for thinking rationally.

“Report this Vlad. gg noob vlad. Report noob Vlad,” were the messages flooding the chat in the game’s dying moment. Now on this occasion, I actually had a player both on my team and the enemy team come to my defence. The enemy Ryze turned out to be an unlikely ally, saying that I’d done the best I could against a Ryze. A fellow teammate made several sarcastic comments about Shen. It was a lost cause at that point, though. The damage was done. The game was lost, and I was angry.

I was livid at the vile, needless ignorance of it all. I was fuming because I was not in the wrong, yet I had been browbeaten by this player all game long. I was trying my best, and if our Shen had concentrated more on helping the team and providing words of encouragement, we might have been able to turn a bad situation around. But no. No, he was more interested in proving his superiority at that stage.

I queued up another game. I don’t know why. The red mist had me and I queued up again. I went right in to another game. I shouldn’t have done it. I should have taken some time away from the game, so that I could regain my sense of rationality and proportion and realise that none of it mattered. Instead, I hit Play button. I wanted revenge. Revenge on who? The Shen? Impossible. I’d never see him again, and I was so worked up after the game I’d even forgotten to report him. The game started. I picked Ezrael, and went to the bottom lane. My lane partner was a Shen.

Maybe it’s because it was the same champion that had tormented me the game before. Maybe it’s because he was genuinely playing badly. More than likely I was playing badly because I was frothing with anger. Things didn’t go well. We were losing the lane horribly, and instead of trying to turn things around and play better, I reached for the keyboard and I typed. God help me, I typed.

“This Shen.”

And in that instant, I knew I had become what I feared the most. I looked in the mirror and saw a monster. We lost that game, of course, but worse then that I had lost a degree of self-respect. I had fallen in to the horrid trap that lies in wait for any League of Legends player. I had become the rager.

Fortunately, I was possessed of enough self-awareness and regard for my fellow humans that once I realised I was displaying this behavoir I was able to prevent it immediately. It is the lack of those things in select members of the LoL community that sours the experience for the majority. In a game where every match contains ten players, there’s often an unrepentant rager in there somewhere.

The developers are taking steps to improve player behaviour, and I have noticed things getting better since I started, but it’s still not in a decent state. It’s a great shame that one of the greatest and most successful video games of our time has the capability to turn even a placid and well-reasoned bloke like me in to what he fears the most. Then again, perhaps the problem isn’t League of Legends. Perhaps the problem is that Bloodlord Vlad is right in what he says.

“There is a monster in all of us.”

Please note: The artwork from the beginning of this article is taken from Fantasy Flight’s Elder Sign dice game.

Jake played BioShock Infinite and has now sat down to write most of the things that he could think to say about it. This isn’t a review. There will be spoilers in this article.

The important thing to know about BioShock Infinite is that it is, first and foremost, a shooter. When it comes to what you will be doing over the course of the game – it’s shooting men in their faces. Sometimes with magic electric hands, sometimes with old-timey rifles, but shooting all the same.

So what makes this game different from all the other games where you shoot loads of men? Largely, where you’re doing it, who you’re doing it with and a little bit of why you’re doing it (but only a little bit).

Let’s start with the where. Colombia. Before playing the game I was expecting it to be the star of the show. How could it not be? A floating city in the sky, straight out of a warped 1912 America. And it is an impressive place – it’s bright and colourful and a well-researched reflection of America at that time (especially in terms of what it changes and omits as much as what it includes). It’s a work of art, in itself.

However, as a believable world it falls somewhat flat. It’s all surface. It’s painted scenery. Beautifully painted, sure, but it doesn’t feel alive – it feels like a set, like a series of tableaux vivants. The streets, beaches and plazas of Columbia are filled with people, but they’re only set-dressing. Look closely and you’ll notice that one in three of them has the same face, the same voice. They’re only to be looked at and never touched. The same is true of the rest of the city.

It feels utterly bizarre that the only interaction you ever really have with it is to rifle through its bins for ammo, cash and food. And boy, what a lot of bins there are – it’s as though, stuck for any other ideas for how to make the city feel less two-dimensional, Irrational decided to make everything a container, to stuff it to the gills with old apples, sandwiches, bottles of salt and cash. It detracts somewhat from the experience when you enter a new, beautifully designed and detailed room only to spend five minutes turning the place over as though you’ve lost your passport.

It’s only really in the opening moments of the game when I really got a sense of Columbia as a city in the sky. The verticality of it all was rarely used to its fell extent, nor did it ever really elicit any vertiginous feelings. It felt closest to Dishonored’s Dunwall in terms of size and space.

If Columbia isn’t the star, who is? Elizabeth. She’s a believable and well-acted presence throughout. On the few occasions that she wasn’t by my side, I genuinely missed her. She never got in the way and I didn’t have to worry about protecting her, which immediately makes her one of the best companion characters in any game, ever. She can look after herself.

She also represents one area in which BioShock Infinite really shines. She’s mysterious. She’s mystery incarnate. It’s refreshing to be joined by a character who also has no idea what’s going on, to feel as though we’re solving this thing together. She’s the driving force behind the whole game and to have that riding on one character and to pull it off is a real credit to Irrational.

It’d be easy to forget, with everything that has been said about BioShock Infinte, that it’s a game and therefore has to have something for you to do. Shooting. It’s not enough for a game this big, this eagerly awaited and with this much money behind it for it to be only about walking around, talking to people and exploring a magical world. It comes so close to being a game that I’d be able to show to a non-gamer without being a little bit embarrassed.

I live in a house with three girls. My desk and computer are in the corner of the living room, so people often hang out in there or walk through on the way to the kitchen.

‘Are you playing your new game?’ asks a politely dis-interested house-mate.

‘I am.’

‘That sounds great!’

It does, doesn’t it? But notice how I didn’t answer the question? Because yes, it is a shooting game. It’s a shooting game with very pretty bits and clever talking in between the shooting. But if my house-mate were to play it, all she’d be actually doing would be shooting. Which presumably wouldn’t appeal as much to her as what I described. Hell, it doesn’t appeal as much to me, either.

It’d be more forgivable if the combat in BioShock Infinite were a bit better too, but as it stands, fighting is reduced to incredibly chaotic and contrived ‘arenas’. You know when you’re about to get into a fight because there are suddenly lots of very convenient ‘tears’ all around you for Elizabeth to pull into the world and aid you in your man-shooting. Not to mention that the levels immediately becomes ghost-towns once the shooting starts, with NPCs just disappearing. Not running for cover and hiding behind bars like in a cowboy film, but literally disappearing.

Tactics in these fights are pretty shallow. Enemies are very good shots and attack from all directions, so your best bet is to fire off a ‘vigor’ (your magic hand spells that generally act to stun enemies) shoot as many men as you can, then run away for a bit. Repeat until all the men are dead. That’s about as varied as it gets.

The shooting would also be more forgivable if it had any bearing on the rest of the game. There is a stark disconnection between the world and your actions within that world. In fact, the vast majority of the combat sections could be taken out of the game and it would have no effect on the story at all. Fighting sections are only ever obstacles in the way of more story or more exploring.

Tellingly, the most important acts of violence in the game – Daisy Fitzroy’s death at the hands of Elizabeth, Comstock’s death at the hands of DeWitt, both happen in scripted sections where the player has no control. It seems that meaningful violence can only be handled by the game, while the inconsequential killing is left to the player. The one time that you can choose to enact violence on a main character, it’s presented as a ‘push button X to kill Slate or button Y to spare him’. We’re not even allowed to ‘pull the trigger’ ourselves.

In other words, the core gameplay is entirely separate to the narrative. And if that’s the case, what would happen if we replaced it with another genre of gameplay. Or even stripped it out entirely? Surely the moments where the story results in violence would resonate a whole lot more if there wasn’t a gun floating in the middle of the screen for the whole experience? Would that game sell?

If, like me, you are a desiccated old fossil of a human, limping from one day of bone-creaking agony to another, you’ll no doubt remember both the Commodore C64 and the Commodore Amiga. These were ostensibly some of the first widely available “personal computers” for the average human being, and as such they also inevitably spawned thriving gaming communities.

The Amiga in particular holds a special place in my heart. The games were relatively cheap, and I knew a lot of other kids who had Amigas. Not to mention the relative ease with which Amiga games could be copied, if you were so inclined. Ahem. Thus my friends and I found ourselves almost swallowed up by a tsunami of pixellated joy one summer. I think I may have gone without seeing natural light for a week at one point in that frenzied formative headrush of gaming.

After a while – and certainly in my head now – all the games tended to blur into one indistinguishable blob, punctuated by the occasional Guru Meditation Error and crash to Workbench. But there is one game in particular from that time that is nestled bullet-like in my hippocampus; one game that still makes me pause and savour the images flooding into my head, no matter what I’m doing.

That game was Another World. And it was designed by Eric Chahi.

Débuts

Born in France, and thus making him French, Chahi started programming for software company Loriciels on the now totally forgotten Oric Atmos and Oric-1, which were made by Tangerine Computer Systems. Part of me likes to imagine that these two systems were excreted from the bowels of some terrible sentient mechanical fruit, and thrust still dripping into the hands of terrified gamers. Only a small part of me, though.

During that time, Chahi worked on games such as Frog, Doggy, Carnaval, Le Sceptre d’Anubis and other chilling reminders of gaming’s early history. Yet there were hints as to what was brewing in the mind of the teenage Frenchman.

The first true signs of Chahi’s signature style would be revealed with the release of Infernal Runner for the Amstrad CPC and C64 in 1985. Despite still only having rudimentary graphics by today’s standards, the game was a fairly intense affair epitomised in its dark visuals and tone, setting it aside from other platformers of the time.

Two years later, he had left Loriciels to take up a position at Chip, producing three titles in his time there: Danger Street, Voyage au Centre de la Terre and Jeanne d’Arc. However, it was his next place of employment that would allow Chahi to truly flex his creative muscles, though no one probably had any idea as to the extent of the flexing that would occur. In fact, had any more flexing taken place, it’s likely that Chahi would have snapped in two, like some kind of ghastly French man-pretzel.

Un Autre Monde

Joining Delphine Software International in 1989, the first game that Chahi would work on was Future Wars. The game told the story of a window cleaner, only identified throughout by the name “Hero” whenever the player moused-over the sprite. On a basic gameplay level, it was what we’d now call a point-and-click. You interacted with the game world by moving your mouse about, and squashing the buttons when you wanted to do stuff. It was also punishingly difficult and totally unforgiving of poor attention span on the part of the player. But it was the world in which the player existed that was the special part.

Future Wars was quite beautiful for its day. From the opening scenes where the player is suspended on a window cleaning platform on the side of a skyscraper with other buildings reflected in the glass, to the contrasting historical and future worlds that the player travels to, Chahi’s style was finally given the computing power it so desperately needed to express itself fully. Ultimately, the game was well received and Delphine started to garner some well-earned attention.

A year passed. In that time, Chahi had been beavering away in his chateau, consuming massive amounts of red wine, smoking pack after pack of Gitanes and shrugging constantly. Possibly. But what’s quite apparent with the benefit of hindsight is that Chahi had been possessed by an incredible vision that would end up having a truly lasting impact on video games to come.

Another World is Eric Chahi’s magnum opus. Created almost entirely on his own (“from the story to the box cover,” so states Wikipedia), the game was a breathtaking foray into uncharted territory for visual design in video games. Extremely minimalist, yet with incredibly lush colorisation and hand-crafted artwork, like all great art Another World had the power to completely change the atmosphere in a room. If you started playing it with your friends around, all chit chat would stop. Eyes would become locked on your monitor, ears pricked up to hear the sparse sounds emerging from the speakers.

Without wanting to bully the point too much, it was literally a game changer, influencing those who would later go on to become some of the most important people in the history of the industry. To name but a few, Fumito Ueda has cited it as an inspiration for his creation of Ico. Hideo Kojima has gone on record as saying that it was “one of the five games that influenced him the most.” Goichi Suda even went so far as to call it his “favourite game.”

Another World imprinted deeply upon my (fairly) young brain when I first played it. I can still remember the absolute nerve-shredding horror of realising that the giant, unknown beast in the background of the first scene had noticed me with its piercing red eyes, and then silently sidled off the side of the screen. I knew it was waiting for me somewhere, but I had no idea where.

The truly alien feel of the world that Chahi had created transported me right into the heart of the game, completely immersing me in protagonist Lester’s efforts to find out what had just happened and get himself to safety. It is a testament to the talent of Eric Chahi that players could relate to and be affected by such an abstract gaming world.

The rather excellent Wikipedia article on the game states that “Chahi worked at the game at a linear pace, developing each section of the game in the chronological order and influenced by his own personal feelings and attitude at the time. For example, as Chahi recognized he was trying to create a game on his own, the first portions of the game evoke loneliness and isolation, reflecting Chahi’s mood at the time.”

You can see the influence of Another World in games as varied as the Oddworld series and Half Life (specifically the Xen chapter), where bizarre worlds full of strange flora and fauna are brought to life using styles reminiscent of Chahi’s hallucinatory visuals. Parallels can of course be found with contemporary artists who were working at the same time as Chahi. Dan Seagrave in particular manages to produce the same feelings of creeping dread and fascination with his album art throughout the 1990s.

But no one allowed to you actually inhabit that world like Eric Chahi did with Another World.

De la Poussière

After Another World, no one could have blamed Chahi if he’d decided he wanted to call it a day, having achieved his vision so perfectly. Yet he continued making games, and still does – Heart of Darkness, the “spiritual successor” to Another World, was released in 1998, while his most recent work was From Dust, published by Ubisoft in 2011.

You can tell immediately that From Dust is an Eric Chahi game. The visuals simply drip with that signature style that enraptured gamers so completely over twenty years ago. Like Another World, it was well-received by critics upon its release.

Yet at the back of my mind, I can’t help but think of those haunting alien landscapes and still marvel at that first time, long ago, when video games and art were very briefly indistinguishable.

“A moins de faire un jeu vidéo totalement abstrait, la matière interactive qui le compose utilise des symboles, des codes, des comportements, des règles, des perspectives, des points de vue, des émotions, s’appuyant sur notre expérience hors du jeu vidéo.”
- Eric Chahi

What exactly is Little Inferno? Is it a fourth-wall-breaking analysis of modern throwaway consumerism, set against the all too familiar backdrop of a tempestuous environmental mutation? Perhaps it’s an existential commentary, an experiment laboured with the task of projecting the developer’s qualms regarding a detached and insular society onto an increasingly distant audience? Maybe it’s an attempt by Tomorrow Corporation to redefine meta-gaming as we know it into something tangential, something more self-aware, cynical and utterly satirical.

It’s certainly about burning things.

Everything’s Got to Burn

Discussing Little Inferno without completely ruining it is difficult, but necessary. The central mechanical concept is a case of introducing shop-bought objects, ordered from sequentially unlocked catalogues, into the eponymous fireplace and setting fire to them. Combinations of certain objects cause various effects and reward the user with money and stamps (used to speed up the delivery of purchased items). The names of combos are listed in their own specific tab, and whilst some are insultingly apparent many are infuriatingly obtuse. A set number of combos are required to progress on to the next catalogue, but the prerequisite numbers are small enough to ensure the more difficult ones are never a barrier to progress. That would defeat the point because, make no mistake, Little Inferno is not a game. It quite literally declares this from the off and without any degree of irony. Mechanically, it’s a toy (succinct analogy provided courtesy of Jake). Conceptually it’s an experience.

The Things We Lost in the Fire

That description hardly does justice to the sheer emotional wonder that the simulation provides. There is much more to the product of course, including a story. Whilst going about the unsettling business of burning objects, the player receives communique from a variety of sources. Sometimes it’ll be the creator of the in-universe Little Inferno, sometimes a neighbour who’s as much Carl Sagan as incineration enthusiast. Starting as fairly inane banter, the atmosphere builds to a crescendo of Murakami-esque proportions. It’s difficult not to get absorbed; the emotional response to the narrative metamorphosis that occurs in the title’s swan song is equal parts gut-punch and elation. The superb music that accompanies throughout acts as a faithful companion, adding to the curiousness that so duly rewards players that persist to the final act.

Ultimately, Little Inferno offers warmth to a market that can appear vacuous in way of originality. Granted it should feel more repetitive than it actually does. The incentive to play again is minimal too, offering little more than asteismus to an initial playthrough, and doing so only risks irrevocably contaminating the previous journey. But after the curtain falls the realisation dawns on the player that, actually, Little Inferno is about a great deal many things. Burning things is at the bottom of that list.

Kentucky Route Zero, an unsettling point-and-click-plus-text-adventure starts with a wide shot, Edward Hopper style, of an old American gas station complete with a man-sitting-watching-world-go-by gatekeeper. It’s an unmistakably American scene, and a strangely constructed-feeling one. But we’ll come back to that…

The good

The game, being released episodically as five Acts, features Conway, a man with Elvis quiff and a vague association with truck deliveries; Shannon, the cousin of a lady called Weaver who runs into Conway after he is sent to a delivery there; and a straw hat-wearing dog (which you name yourself, from a few options) that I chose to call Homer.

Its story unfolds in: traditional point-and-click scenes, where the graphics combine with gorgeous audio to paint fantastic scenes of a type of southern American life; but it also occurs over a top-down map of roads, which Conway drives; and in text vignettes, which are played like Twine games are, in text adventure .

This alone makes Kentucky Route Zero really interesting. It doesn’t make it so because of the novelty of these different approaches, though; the game has different approaches to better achieve its desired atmosphere, integral to its quality and made more effective by attention to different narrative approaches.

In other words: its theme has certain aspects to it which are more powerful using one method than another: and the game realises that, and runs with it, rather than confining the theme to form. If Kentucky Route Zero is a point-and-click, and if it is also a text adventure, it’s because it wants to express its story through an atmosphere; and if it uses both of these it is because it betters that story, that atmosphere.

The game

But it doesn’t really give me choice. Jake wrote in 2012 about why violence, not narrative, represents greater choice in games – and maybe he’s right, as Kentucky Route Zero evidences. Like many games, Kentucky offers text (description and dialogue) and then a choice of dialogue options from which to move things on. It also (both when driving Conway’s truck around the map and when in point-and-click sections) offers you different routes – but, always, only one route really offers advancement.

For example, in scene IV of this first act, Conway and Shannon enter a mine. They sit on a tram, which the player moves along the mine shafts by clicking in the relevant directions; and depending on which shafts you take, you learn new and interesting things about the central story (not to mention some very creepy music and disconcerting imagery). About half-way down the first shaft is a turntable  which presents new routes — bearing in mind that you must eventually escape this mine — for Conway and Shannon to navigate.

The 2D scene offers 4 new routes (2 on each rotation of the turntable) and each has its own merits (atmosphere, increasing context for the mystery behind this central story, lush settings) but does not lead to the exit for the mine.

Guess which does? The original mine shaft, before you took the turntable options. You entered by one route, and to get out, all you had to do was keep going right. This means that the other shafts, which improve the overall ‘feel’ of the game (and this game is about feel, for sure) are incidental, in theory – nothing to do with the move from scene to scene and the eventual completion of the act.

The dupe

This is the Kentucky Route Zero deceit, and it’s very clever. It makes you feel like you’ve explored a quite organic world, simply by playing on the expectation that, given the option to try a new route by using the turntable, 9/10 players will never continue down the first shaft, to the exit. What Kentucky Route Zero does here is give you the feeling that you’re a frontiersmen, an explorer, penetrating possibly endless shafts with all kinds of options (in reality each is very short and offers a single set piece) simply by playing the odds; by assuming that the video game convention (how could it be the first way?) will lure you into a feeling of choice, or indeterminacy.

It does this with dialogue scenes, too. Before entering the mine, for example (and this is one of the most emotionally affecting little snippets I’ve seen in a video game) Shannon asks Conway to speak into a microphone which is connected to a PA that blasts down the entrance to the mines.

The pretense for this is that it will tell us how deep and sprawling the mines are. But it also gives the player a chance to understand, but also feel like they’re shaping, Conway’s narrative. Shannon asks him to tell a story: you are given the option of explaining your first delivery of the day, or your breakfast with Lisette.

All of these choices (at least for the purposes of the first Act) seem incidental, but they give the player a valuable feeling: that they are contributing something that could happen later. In his interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, co-creator Jake Elliott put it this way:

We’re thinking of it like the way that an actor chooses… They don’t necessarily choose the dialogue or the plot, but they choose how to inflect it and how to think about, depending on their method of acting, the inner life of the character. There’s a lot of construction that happens, creative construction that happens at the level of the actor in a play. We’re trying to put the player in that role.

Theatre has influenced more than just the dialogue. Walls of buildings fade away to reveal the interiors, much like the set of a play. In one memorable point, the camera zooms out slightly to reveal a new frame around the scene, with a band playing some melancholy bluegrass in the corner – to put you in the mind of a theatrical Chorus, perhaps.

The drug

What makes all this so arresting is this: Kentucky Route Zero has chosen its material superbly for its intentions. This is like playing a piece of theatre, with a sense of mystery and agency that makes it so wonderful in the way that (for example) the long, rambling cut-scenes in a Metal Gear Solid game — which is like watching a film in between playing a game — does not have.

At no point do you think “Well, this is all just prescribed to me” because it constantly performs these sleights of hand which mask that linear, game-like reality.

You never think “I have no power here: why would I bother?”. It’s too beautiful for you to notice.

The agency

Most importantly, though: while the choices you make don’t matter in terms of the action, and perhaps don’t even matter in terms of the text options you see later, they do matter. Also like a good book (or a good film: Kentucky feels much like both, or a halfway house between), the game brings choices from you, the player, and asks you to think; and while this might not affect what the characters on screen do or think, in terms of the options they are next presented with, it makes them as characters.

In the opening shots, when you are asked to log-in to a computer and give a password, Conway is asked to pick three lines of poetry, three times: and whatever you choose, the password is accepted. Some might call that prescriptive. But, won’t my Conway be a different person from your Conway, depending on the poem that you get him to answer?

Maybe Kentucky Route Zero is also a bit like a great poem in that, in its combination of mystery, story, atmosphere and sound, it goes some way towards poesis.

]]> http://www.scriptedsequence.com/2013/01/24/kentucky-route-zero-a-game-a-play-a-poem/feed/ 0 http://www.scriptedsequence.com/2013/01/16/linear-is-not-a-dirty-word/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=linear-is-not-a-dirty-word http://www.scriptedsequence.com/2013/01/16/linear-is-not-a-dirty-word/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2013 09:47:46 +0000 Jake http://www.scriptedsequence.com/?p=908

I was watching one of those popular YouTube commentators the other day, playing through a game that he was reviewing and he said something that struck me. He described a game as “sickeningly linear” and wrote it off there and then as a “Bad Game” because of this.

But I say no! Too long have linear games been vilified and derided. So let’s look at why some people like to poo all over them, while others like to give them cuddles (keep these two activities separate).

When I say ‘linear,’ it really comes down to two main factors. The first being gameplay, wherein I guess we’re talking about linear paths through environments and the wider world – the worst offender, of course, being the Modern Warfare games, which are so scripted that we’re often told where to look, when to shoot and when we can and can’t open doors for ourselves. There is absolutely no room for player-driven experience, down to how you approach simple combat. Want to be stealthy? Sorry, you’ll have to wait for the designated stealth mission. Want to flank someone? Nope, you can’t hop over that waist high wall.

So yeah, those games are rubbish at player freedom. The one thing that they do exceptionally well, however, is create a big spectacle for you to run through, full of shooting Russians with assault rifles and blowing up brown people with extreme prejudice. They aim to tell very specific stories in a very specific way and as such, a loss of player freedom is the price for such a rigidly structured experience. And it’s not always bad. Remember ‘All Ghillied Up‘ from the first Modern Warfare? Yes, it was tightly scripted and linear, but it was also an incredibly tense, perfectly paced experience.

It’s really best to think of the Call of Duty games as existing on the same plane as Michael Bay films. Shut up, sit down and gawp at it.

That’s not to say that all games with linear gameplay are mindless gawpers. Probably one of the best examples is to be found in the Halo series, which while very linear, is crafted to allow for a massive degree of freedom when it comes to combat. They’re more of a series of events in big, sandbox battle arenas in which you’re free to complete the linear objective however you want.

But what about those games that strive for non-linearity in terms of their story? These were held as the pinnacle of narrative in video games for quite some time, largely because they do something that no other medium can do – they offer player choice and stories that adapt to it. Which is pretty neat. The problem is though, that they can only offer choice and different narrative outcomes up to a point.

These outcomes will already be predetermined meaning that it’s pretty easy to peek behind the curtain and see all the gears at work, calculating which outcome your actions are driving you towards. Moreso when a game works this into its mechanics, whether its with ‘paragon/renegade’ points or whatever else. Sure, there’s freedom to choose between different conversation options or which character dies and which one lives, but because the outcomes are so telegraphed, this freedom often feels incredibly unsatisfying.

Take a game like Dragon Age. There’s freedom in these games to choose who you want to have sex with at certain points, even up to being able to choose which gender you’d like to knock boots with. Which is laudable. But it can also be a disservice to the player’s sense of character – it seems like a token effort to be inclusive – with the only way for a character to express their sexuality in this game being through sexual acts, rather than any other kind of real character development. Surely to really experience and get the most of playing as a queer character, it would work better to play a character who has actually been written as queer.

Part of the problem is that games which promote player choice often need their characters to start as a blank canvas, onto which players can pour the choices and experiences. It’s why your identikit character in Dragon Age or Skyrim, or even Commander Shepherd, are pretty devoid of personality and will never be as fully realised a character as April Ryan or Eva and Neil from To The Moon.

The point being that to tell a really good story the player has to relinquish some control. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes, games are capable of other things, but that shouldn’t take away from the joy of experiencing a great narrative.

We are starting to see something of a change when it comes to linearity in narrative. Last year’s The Walking Dead handled it by using a linear narrative on a large scale – the overall arc of the story is relatively set in stone, which allows for rich, fully-realised characters and story. It also, however, used player choice for individual scenes throughout that larger story. The ending and overall effect that the player has on the story is pretty much immutable, but the way that each player feels about their character will be very different, depending on the decisions that they made and how they treated other characters. In a very welcome decision, it also eschews the Bioware-style ‘light side/dark side’ points system, which reduces the jarring and obvious ‘good choice’ versus ‘evil choice’.

In the right hands, the linear story can be a very powerful tool. There’s definitely something to be said for not having a choice in how a story plays out. Can you imagine the game of Romeo & Juliet where the double suicide ending is seen as the bad ending, where if you choose the right options in the right cut scenes the whole thing can be avoided?

Here’s (probably) our last post about our favourite games of 2012. Unless you want to write one. Seriously, go on. What did you play this year? Click the ‘contribute and contact’ button up there on the right.

It’s a common criticism of games that they’re not very good at evoking real emotion. Or perhaps emotions other than frustration or anger. But one game this year has done more, for me at least, than any other in getting feelings like awe and wonder out of me.

I’m not sure whether I’m allowed to call Proteus my game of the year, since it’s technically still in beta for just a month or so more. I’m going to anyway though, because you’re not my real mum and can’t tell me what to do. Also because apparently the finished game isn’t going to be that different from it’s current state.

While Proteus may not be the game that I’ve played the most this year (that honour probably goes to XCOM), it is the game that I’ve told people about the most – because it’s interesting and new and wonderful.

It’s a hard game to nail down, really. The best description of it that I can come up with is a first person exploration game, with dynamic music elements. Think of maybe Journey, but with lo-fi graphics and added sounds.

Perhaps at first, you might feel a little bewildered. Waking up just off shore of an island, you’ll find yourself walking up the beach wondering what exactly you’re supposed to be doing. But then – “What’s that sound?”… “Ooh, a frog! Come here, froggy!” And Proteus has you.

That’s because it’s a game that isn’t at all afraid to let players discover everything for themselves. The only instructions provided are WASD for control and screenshot button, a button that you’ll feel compelled to use a lot. There are signposts for progression, but you might not recognise them as such at first – rather, the curiosity that the game naturally encourages will gently push you towards discovering them. It’s a refreshing change from the likes of Far Cry 3 or Skyrim – the former with its constant pop-ups insisting that you follow the main quest and the latter waypointing you all the way through the game.

This sense of curiosity and the compulsion to explore is heightened by that use of music and sound. Each ‘season’ has it’s own musical tone and background beat, while each individual item makes it’s own sound – a sound that changes based on the player’s proximity to it. The combination of sound and visuals working in harmony create a sense of wonder that would be impossible to achieve with either working in isolation. I know there’s something special about these rocks because they make a beautiful resonant ‘Thungggg!’ when I pass them just so.

Rather than make a game about something that we’ll never experience – being a space marine or a gangster or whatever, Ed Key and David Kanaga have captured the essence of something that we can all experience in the real world. It’s not often that you’ll see a developer adding a line in the patch-notes about movement speed being increased when going downhill because it more closely capture the feeling of running down a hill for the pure joy of it.

So Proteus. My game of the year that’s actually out next year.

Proteus will be released at the beginning of 2013, but if you like the sound of it I strongly encourage getting the beta for $7.50, which includes all future updates.

A lot of great things, and video games are no different, leave space for something other than themselves. You could call it activity, or imagination – it’s hard to pinpoint – but, essentially, great things say: “We’ve done our part. Over to you.”

NEO Scavenger, produced by Daniel Fedor of BioWare fame, does exactly that. Released through his company, Blue Bottle Games, NEO Scavenger is a simple-looking, turn-based survival game that asks players to put their own spin on the minimal narrative the game provides.

You choose four basic skills (‘melee’, ‘medic’, ‘botany’, ‘hiding’, ‘tough’, to name a few) as well as any weaknesses – you could make your survivor ‘feeble’, for example in order to gain an extra skill, and have five. Then, quite at your own leisure if you like, you wander a large hex grid, scavenging for food and water, and warding off bandits – and sometimes worse.

NEO Scavenger doesn’t need to go further than that, really. Sometimes you start a game and, because of the random generation of the map, find that you’re soon starving. Other times, you might reach some of the game’s non-randomised points.

You really can be the scavenger you want to be. There are better looking games than NEO Scavenger, for sure; and there are better games, too. But what makes it one of the best games I’ve played this year is that it’s so free, and so easy to dip in and out of.

For months, in fact, when it first came out, I played it at work, in my browser. Sometimes I’d last 10 minutes while I (in the game) died of a disease picked up from bad water; other times I ranged the map for hours. And all at a time when I could just switch tabs and look at pointless spreadsheets and seem like I was working, if I wanted.

But for me, I love NEO Scavenger because it lets me pour something in: it asks me to narrate. I can tell you several stories of my time on the NEO Scavenger map, and what was going through my scavenger’s head during each play; I could tell you why he was feeble and not tough, or why he had myopia and couldn’t see very far but, usefully, knew how to lock-pick.

It’s a game that really does ask for something from you. And if you don’t believe me, just see how easy it was for Jake to tell a story about one of his plays. NEO Scavenger might not be the flashiest of games, but it has something else: freedom.

The year continues to almost be over! In the second part of our best-of-the-best-or-just-what-people-enjoyed 2012 round-up series, the mercurial Simon pries open our third eyes (steady on!) with what he’s enjoyed over the past twelve months or so. Crivens!

Simon Played and Enjoyed

“You! You’re the hero of Romford; the saviour of this fractured, broken land! Evil’s bane stands before me on this blessed day! Pray, lend me your ear. I require ten scoops of mulch, cleft from the Mud-Goblins of Lake Nihil Ad Rem, for my famous mulch-pie. Do this for me and you’ll receive these Obsolescent Pauldrons of Patience. A fair deal, you’ll surely agree.”

This parlance is undoubtedly familiar to any who have ventured into a fantasy MMORPG within the last decade. Many a game employs the ‘multiple arbitrary items’ approach to progression, with the success of implementation varying wildly. ArenaNet’s highly-anticipated and wildly ambitious Guild Wars 2 sought to smash this mould (granted, not being the first to try to do so) with traditional linear questing gone in favour of unfolding events the player happens upon out in the world. In actuality it offers something of a middle-ground, but without the visible taint of compromise. And in doing so the game becomes so much more. With this in mind, and being a huge proponent of massively multiplayer gaming, Guild Wars 2 is my favourite game of 2012.

The promise and delivery of Guild Wars 2′s dynamic events reveal a dichotomy. Let’s say whilst wandering the world you uncover a village being overrun by bandits, just one example of events that occur all over the vast land of Tyria on any given day. There are other players already engaged and fending off the invaders. You lend whatever skills you have to your comrades and get stuck in, stemming the thieves’ onslaught and eventually driving them away. These types of tasks ultimately boil-down to defeating a certain number of foes. Grinding, then. But credit to ArenaNet for ensuring the player never cares about this.

What’s their secret? How do they immerse the player so readily that the inherent triviality takes a back seat?

Perhaps it’s the fact that the game is socially generous. Good deeds are often rewarded in kind. If you see a lone player struggling, there’s no punishment for helping them out. There’s little in the way of griefing because there’s little potential for it. That’s how it should be.

It could be that every player can feel – and, more importantly, be – useful in any given situation. Level scaling, and unique and versatile character crafting combine to ensure that everybody has something unique to offer a group.

Maybe it’s that ArenaNet has made a world worth grinding for; a world worth exploring, and sharing, discussing and enjoying. Beautiful visuals, a haunting musical score, and the fact that plenty of secrets await the curious all mean that completionists have an obscene amount of fun to be had whilst striving for that 100%.

I believe it’s a combination of all of the above that makes the game special. But what do I love about Guild Wars 2 the most? From an immersion standpoint, instead of unreal heroes setting out on the most unbelievable tasks, out and about in Tyria it’s a case of people working together to complete believable, enjoyable deeds and occasionally, and only occasionally, save the world. All of this without paying a monthly fee for the privilege.

And, most importantly, no mulch in sight.

The year is over! Almost! What has this year wrought? Men jumping out of balloons, men and women jumping over things in London, one woman with a crown had a party and I got two cats. But there were also games this year. Lots of games that we played! So it only seems right that I ask all our contributors what games they played this year that they thought were good and should be played. Here we go!

Dave Played and Enjoyed

My favourite game that I played this year was Black Mesa, the remake of Half Life that was aeons in the making. So perhaps it shouldn’t strictly go into an end of year ‘best of’ wrap-up as, at its core, the game is 14 years old. But I’m mentioning it anyway and you can’t stop me.

Half Life 2 was fun and all, but it just didn’t grab me like Half Life did. I can remember the hours I spent poring over the video footage from the alpha version that was included on a PC Gamer cover-disk (remember those?) back when I was a much smaller digital sledgehammer – a digital rock hammer, if you will. I was mildly obsessed with it, and when the full game was released, I became even more obsessed. Time passed. Deus Ex was released. I got older. But I never forgot about Half Life.

It goes without saying, then, that I’d been looking forward to Black Mesa since it was first announced. How could I not be positively quivering with joy that some enterprising young tyros (or just massive nerds – I don’t know, I’ve never met them) had decided to remake Half Life using the Source engine?

Of course, it missed its first release date. And the second. And the third. And all of them, I think, until September 14th 2012. I could hardly believe it, and in fact did not believe it until I was actually downloading and installing the files. It was, obviously, going to be a massive let down, even though it was actually real.

But it wasn’t. Black Mesa is simply an inspiring achievement, and worth every second that it spent in development over the years. It is faithful to the original, yet so much more at the same time. The lush graphical overhaul complements the near-identical gameplay. But why would you want to change the gameplay of arguably one of the best games ever made? It simply tweaks and polishes and lovingly enhances the original’s incredibly immersive journey through the Black Mesa facility. Everything you remember from the original is there, but somehow better. Plus it didn’t bother including Xen (yet).

It’s like having an encounter with an old friend you haven’t seen in years, but instead of it being an awkward moment, your friend has become somehow better than you remembered him being. It’s like your friend has gone from being a pretty awesome dude to being a combination of Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela and the guy who invented bacon, and he won’t stop giving you £20 notes.

So yes, I loved Black Mesa. It wasn’t just nostalgia; it was more than that. It proved that class is definitely permanent, and that even a game that is 14 years old can still knock the stuffing out of almost every other FPS game released this year. If that’s not a damning indictment of modern mainstream game development, then I don’t know what is.

In the meantime, I’ll be playing Black Mesa if you need me.

Hannah Played and Enjoyed

I’ve played every LEGO game there is, many of them this year. I could debate the merits of one over the other with you pretty much all day. Ah yes! The tiptoe motion for precise platforming levels as introduced in LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean was a pure confection – but what of the piquancy of the object combinations in LEGO The Lord of the Rings? It is the very height! They have made some pretty weird choices of late – not least allowing characters to talk for the first time in LEGO Batman 2: DC Superheroes – but they are always serious fun. To me, a new LEGO game represents 30+ hours of chatting, laughing, cheering, cursing and falling off a beanbag with my P2. In a wider sense, LEGO hangs around my life (and my house) in a way that I really like.

I like when things are scaled up or down for effect (hello giant pencils from seaside destinations), and it’s been really interesting to see the ways that they have scaled up the humble LEGO block this year. I’ve always been a sucker for Minifigs and I have a LEGO Harry Potter on my keychain, but you can now also get giant LEGO storeage crates and lunchboxes. Or a giant LEGO head to store things in. I love the playful element that LEGO brings to regular old boring adult life. So it looks like I have a few last-minute things to add to my Christmas list…

And those were the games that those two people liked this year. Stay tuned for more in a couple of days.