FPS by degrees

I won't name names, but I've recently played a few shooters with some friends and in every game outperformed them by leaps and bounds. In fact, in Modern Warfare 2, my friends simply couldn't perform well enough to enjoy the game. While I was sniping this player and stabbing that one, my friends were dying and dying some more. At the end of a five-minute match, they had racked up only a few kills each, whereas I had twenty or thirty.

My point is not that I'm that good. At times, other players mop the floor with me, and I'm not playing in the elite matches.

No, my point is that a wide variety of gamers enjoy shooters, but their shorter histories with shooters, lesser skill and different playstyles are rarely acknowledged in gameplay design.

I'm not asking for flag football here. But how about some more games that don't pretend everyone wants to be a pro? Some people just want to blow stuff up and shoot each other in the face.

sex scenes

The thing about sex scenes is they usually don't communicate anything that couldn't have been communicated just as well or better in more subtle ways.

That's not always the case. Sex scenes do make sense sometimes. Ironically, the first example that comes to mind is clothed sex scene in the movie Hot Shots, where Topper Harley cooks breakfast on the woman's sizzling belly. I know that's not a good example.

The sex scenes in A History of Violence are a better example. The story is about a reformed man who is forced to face his thuggish past, and forced to realize that those thuggish inclinations remain a part of him. Both sides of his personality are shown in two very different sex scenes. In the first, he is gentle and giving. In the second, he is brutal and selfish. Since the story as a whole is graphic and adult-oriented, using sex scenes to show this dichotomy makes sense.

On the other hand, consider the movie Big. That film shows Susan unbuttoning her blouse and John putting his hands on tits for the first time, but then camera fades out before even her bra is off. It's a simple, subtle scene that shows little and reveals much. Later, the characters laugh after Susan expresses some anxiety over the relationship. John leaps onto her and the camera cuts away. Sex is again implied, and all that the storytellers wanted to convey is expressed without actually showing the sex.

To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly is another good example of subtlety.

Mystery can be a powerful tool. In horror stories, keeping the monster/ghost/psychopath hidden or mysterious often increases suspense. It allows the audience to interject their own fears and suspicions, thereby personalizing the story... as well as demanding much of the audience's concentration and making them more susceptible to awe and suggestion. Likewise, mystery surrounding sex allows the audience to imagine what they will, allowing for personal expectations. It can also preclude conscious consideration by moving on quickly, thereby encouraging the audience to react with gut instincts.

Not showing sex doesn't reduce its presence or impact on a story. Dracula is a great example. The vampire's habit of biting on the neck is suggestive and provocative. Ever since Stoker's novel, vampires have been associated with sensuality. Stoker wrote more graphic scenes, as have many authors of vampire stories, but it is the neck-biting that most audiences remember.

The increasingly common inclusion of sex scenes and their increasingly graphic nature is more a cultural trend than an artistic one. I've seen almost as many films made before the Sexual Revolution as after, which is rare for someone of my generation. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with many classic works of literature, like Oedipus Rex or The Taming of the Shrew. These stories don't shy from sexual themes, but instead present them in thoughtful, rather than obvious, ways.

As is often the case in art, restraint can inspire. Just think of your daily conversations. Who usually speaks more artfully -- the person trying to be polite and considerate, or the person who accepts no bounds? I cuss quite a bit on occasion, but it's when I'm not cussing that I speak more eloquently. Try to tell a dirty joke in a clean way; you might find that the nuance makes the joke funnier. Restraints are challenges, and challenges feed the imagination.

As I said before, showing sex explicitly certainly makes sense sometimes. But I think trying to present the same themes without obvious presentations often leads to better results.

The same goes for making particular characters sexy -- try to make him or her sexy without any brazen comments, without tight clothes and a lot of bare skin, and you might be surprised at the effect.

the uncanny in sci-fi

Science fiction is fertile ground for the uncanny. As I've explained before, uncanny describes objects and situations which are simultaneously strange and familiar, often disturbingly so. This is typically manifested in a character or object that is familiar in all ways but one.

I thought of this while watching the Skynet infomercials (clever ads for the Terminator: Salvation film).

The characters in this video have an oddness about them. The man seems like just a poor actor. But the woman's head movements, facial expressions, and repeated touching of her earpiece suggest something disturbing about her.

Anyway, while watching that video, I realized that robots become creepy when they resemble creatures that don't move like robots. For example, one wouldn't expect a robot to move like a snake or a fish. The eye-scanning robots in Minority Report were creepy because they moved like spiders.

But if there's not enough familiarity, then it's not disturbing. For example, the cybernetic tree in Too Human is equally like a tree and like a computer, and so it simply looks cool. A cyborg is more unsettling when it is mostly human than when it is only half human.

One could design a good sci-fi horror story by filling the world with uncanny technologies.

Chasing Churchhill

I watched an excellent documentary last night by the granddaughter of Winston Churchhill, called Chasing Churchhill. It avoids retelling all the old stories of Churchhill's brilliant leadership during WWII, and instead focuses on the man as an adventurer and painter. I couldn't find an online gallery quickly, but I highly recommend taking a look at his paintings. They're beautiful and serene. He had a great sense of colors.

The documentary showed many of Churchhill's paintings. Surprisingly, all of them were pleasant. That impression might just be due to his granddaughter's selection, but I don't think so since she said he rarely painted during the great war. The man endured many conflicts. He experienced bullets whizzing by his head in battles, scenes of a hundred war-torn bodies and groaning men, assassination threats while walking foreign streets, and much more. Yet those experiences are not reflected in his painting. He chose to paint, or was moved to paint, only the pleasantries of life: beauty, hope, light-heartedness, etc.

It got me thinking: How many big, triple-A games are so? How many games are about beauty and joy to the exclusion of all conflict and darkness? I can think of many arcade games and small titles like that, but it seems there are few blockbuster titles of this sort besides sports games.

What do you think? Does the industry for big titles tend to emphasize struggle and strife? Do many games celebrate beauty and the lighter side of human nature? Or is it hard to stay joyful and keep your eyes on beauty while writing code?

keep mood and tone dynamic

A friend suggested that Fallout 3 is "too soulless for its own good". I have to agree. It's a great game, certainly. But the relentless dreariness works against it.

Dynamics in mood and tone are vital for any RPG, and games in general. This is particularly true for visual presentation.

Fallout 3's environmental design is really impressive, particularly due to the scope and level of detail. But it's bleak, almost without exception. That certainly fits the story and the overall tone of the game. However, too much consecutive bleakness ultimately has the same effect it would have in true life -- it drains enthusiasm and motivation.

With a game so big, there are undoubtedly factors at play which differ from player to player. If you initially focus on wandering and sidequests, as I did, then it can be a very long time before you enter Tenpenny Tower or the wooded sanctuary. For perspective, I've spent dozens of hours in the game and explored much of the world, but am hardly beyond Tenpenny in the main questline.

In any case, it's good in any RPG to offer a variety of environments with different color palettes and tones, as well as missions/quests and encounters with a variety of moods. Dynamics provide freshness, which is necessary to maintain momentum and excitement. This is one of the reasons I think color palettes and elegant designs like World of Warcraft uses are the best visual design option for the majority of games.

I still enjoy Fallout 3 (though I haven't played in a while), but the different areas and experiences of the gameworld started to blend together after a while.

dramatic consistency

If you haven't seen Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, you should. It's hilarious.

But after watching the third and last episode, I'm left wondering if the story took too hard a turn at the end. An unhappy ending is one thing, but Whedon seems to have mistaken the tale's serious themes for its heart.

Comedy is its heart. The first scene of the series is comedy, and humor comprises the majority of the story. Even in most of the serious scenes, there are humorous elements (like Dr. Horrible taking the place of the soup server and blindly pouring soup back into the pot while he stares with hatred at Captain Hammer). So to end on such a heavy note, which overshadows the jokes at the end, leaves the audience confused and disappointed.

I don't expect monochromatic narratives. I'm a big fan of mixing many types of drama into one story. But stick to your guns. Make sure you and the reader always have a clear understanding of the story's heart. And don't let any story element or idea distract you.

I get the impression that Whedon mistakenly tried to apply his usual strategy from longer narratives to this short one. The ending might have worked in a TV series with ten or twelve episodes, but there wasn't enough time in this series to gradually shift from comedy to drama. It's like what Whedon did in Firefly and Serenity, with the ending being much more serious than the beginning. The characters were always that story's heart, and the feel of the story changes as the audience gradually sees deeper into those characters.

Anyway, short stories generally must work differently than longer stories.

wandering IPs

This new Saints Row 2 video is a nice summary of the main point I was making in my (admittedly piss-poor) initial impressions review of GTA IV. My argument was that Rockstar has veered so far from the original flavor of the GTA series that now the Saints Row series is more GTA than GTA. That original flavor was wild, free-form gameplay and downright silly shenanigans. The original tone and over-the-top gameplay of the series seems to have been slowly fading, to be replaced by different values.

I absolutely have no problem with developers changing style. People change. Interests change. And GTA IV is certainly a financially successful game that pleases many gamers. Rockstar did well.

But I do believe any series should remain faithful to the expectations of its audience... faithful to the basic style that defined the first product; for ethical reasons as much as marketing reasons. If you're interested in making a new sort of game, don't realize it by changing an established IP. Start a new IP. If you establish your company as a respectable brand (Blizzard, Bioware, etc), then you can use that to about the same effect as a game brand. Command & Conquer is another series that has wandered quite a bit, though at least they eventually divided it into subcategories (Red Alert series, Tiberium series, etc).

In this case, I think the GTA series has wandered too far from its heart. I sold my copy of GTA IV to a friend.

dwelling on darkness

In drama, there is often a tendency to dwell on the darkness and pain. It can be easier to capture an audience with sadness than with joy. We should make a conscious effort to focus some gameplay experiences on events of joy and comfort; not just the resolution of a crisis, the avoidance of catastrophe, but also the discovery of new levels of happiness and fulfillment.

I was just thinking that most upbeat moments in game stories are, if not humor, little more than the end of unhappiness. Joy should take us far beyond mere relief.