On Sequels, Part 1

If there’s one thing many people are willing to decry with little to no information on it, it’s sequels.  They’re often seen as rushed out attempts to squeeze a few more dollars out of the oppressed masses, but there are some sequels that have done great things with the source material.  Silent Hill 2 is widely regarded as the best of the Silent Hill series, and leaves behind much of the mythology of the first game.  Yet, in the past, we’ve seen fans go ballistic over properties that ignore even a fraction of a beloved mythology.

Of course there are sequels that are seen as wholly awful creations that actually manage to devalue the series (Whatever remains of the series afterward) as a whole.  Highlander II, anyone?  But right now, let’s look at the qualities to successful sequels.  There will probably be spoilers for any games I talk about, fair warning.

First off, let’s look back a little to the beginnings of what would become my gaming world.  Spyro the Dragon.  He’s gone some weird places since his humble beginnings on the Playstation.  Spyro’s first adventure was a 3D platformer with some fairly basic mechanics.  The level design was simple and yet works as a fantastic blueprint for representing the perfect and steadily rising difficulty curve (future article!).

So what did the sequel change, and was it worth it?  Well, the series has gone on for over five games since the first, so I’d say it was a success.  But what did the sequel change?  What did the game do to make the series as enduring as it is?  Well, it began to add characters.  The first game had the player rescuing dragons with varying personalities, but they were only seen once and the writing slid toward the end, reducing the dragons to saying nothing but “Thank you for releasing me.”  But, in Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, we got a more vocal villain, his moronic minions, and a quartet of strange woodland creatures with distinct personalities.   So, adding relationships to varying characters, definitely a good start.  The game also adds some new mechanics, such as swimming, skateboarding, and headbutt slams.  The game didn’t add a whole lot to the gameplay style, adding only a few new toys to vary the play, and the story didn’t suddenly become a complicated web of twists and turns, but it took a previously successful formula and added some special and important pieces, helping to introduce those gamers who started with Spyro to a more mature series of problems and a larger variation of levels than “Lava Land” and “Ice Land.”  Overall, a sequel that began to test the waters, and keep the series alive.

Next off, we can look at two very well known games, Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, and Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Probably the strangest transition in the Zelda series, Majora’s Mask is a polarizing kind of game.  I know of very few people, maybe none now that I think about it, who do not have a strong opinion on Link’s 2^nd N64 outing.  While clearly not as successful as Ocarina, Majora’s Mask was a beautiful sequel, and so I get this out of the way: I enjoy Majora’s Mask more.

But Ocarina of Time was a wonderful transition in the Zelda series to 3D, and the game cemented Zelda as one of the best-loved series of all time.  An epic adventure of a young boy, learning swordsmanship and sacrificing so much of his life to save the world he owes nothing to, while traveling through tons of dungeons, adventuring through a world packed with side quests and extra story.  It was, and remains, a fantastic experience and great introduction to gaming.

And then, Majora’s Mask.  Four dungeons, repeating the same three days over and over, heavy themes of death and hopelessness, watching all of your work undone every time you need to do more, and reuse of almost all the character models from Ocarina of Time.  Some people saw Majora’s Mask as the kind of rushed, lame sequel sent out to cash in on the amazing Zelda craze.  However, the game went for an entirely different emotional turn.  Taking the familiar faces of the Zelda world, and the familiar mechanics and placing them in a world uncanny in its similarity produced a brand new mood for the series, reflected in not only the world design, but also the art style and music.  The game became dark and foreboding, yet still an artistic and critical success.  Here we see that going in a new emotional direction, while relying on the success of the first game, can open players up to whole new worlds of feeling and experience.  Majora’s Mask was a noble endeavor to broaden the horizons of the gaming public.

Lastly, I’d like to talk about the recent success of Dragon Age II.  Bioware decided once again to change the systems of the game, creating a less meticulous and more streamlined method of combat, and changing the in-game dialogue to a more simplified control method.  While this does mean less extended pauses in conversation, it simplified the role-playing aspect the first Dragon Age did so well.  Dragon Age was a story about a grand quest to unite the people of a country under a common banner, regardless of background or race (and racism is, let’s not kid ourselves, a massive overriding theme of Dragon Age).  It was a battle against a great evil, primal and seemingly unending, one that would slowly and surly obliterate the country, if not the world, except for the resolve of your small party.

Dragon Age II, on the other hand, is a personal story.  No longer about a world-sized threat, the endeavor was to create an identification with the main character and the struggle of their rags-to-riches life.  Combat became more fantastical, less about strategy and more about quick thinking, and the dialogue less about morality and more about personality.

Dragon Age II is a success commercially, there is no doubt about that, but there is debate about whether it is a success as an art.  I would say yes, if only for showing the same world and problem from both a grand perspective and a limited one.  Small things, like your character having a name people can actually refer to, being able to hear your character’s voice, all very important in bringing this more personal touch into play.

To summarize, there are many ways to make a successful sequel, and it lies within an artistic direction.  Sure, Madden games will sell for the next decade, but no one would call them successful artistic creations.  The real achievement lies in understanding the world previously created, and looking at it in a more fully realized manner.  Whether this is adding more personal relationships, creating a dark juxtaposition, or showing the different sides to the world’s conflicts, the ability to create fantastical art does not end after a single story.

On Dragons

Gamers are nerds.  One would think this goes without saying, but the consequences of that are more than most people care to think about.  Lead Writer and Designer of Bioshock Ken Levine said that most gamers have seen one movie and read one book, and those are Star Wars and Lord of the Rings or something similar, and to a degree, he’s correct.  What he was getting at in saying this is that gamers have a tendency to love certain genres and tropes, and that love means we see those genres and tropes played to death in games.

Case in point: Dragons.  The bloody things are everywhere.  There aren’t always lots of them, but I see at least ten games from where I’m sitting that feature them.  And, really, it’s a problem.

Oh, dragons themselves aren’t the issue, nor is thinking they’re great creatures, because let’s face it: they are.  The problem is the overexposure of these mighty winged lizards, and in effect, so much of what is typically geek culture.  Space Marines, orcs and goblins, secret science labs, zombies, etc, ad nausiem.  Again the problem isn’t inherently with these things, the problem is with how often we see them.

This has led to most, if not all of this geek iconography losing much of its initial sting or effect.  Zombies are no longer scary, dragons are not as fearsome, orcs and goblins are just basic canon fodder, and it all seems like no one cares.

This first really hit me when playing Dragon Age: Origins.  This isn’t really a spoiler, considering how early it happens in the game.  You’re told of the Archdemon, the one true and perfect indication that a Blight, the most feared invasion possible, is descending.  Now, something called an Archdemon should be… well, demonic, wouldn’t you say?  A terrifying, bone chilling creature torn from the nightmares of mythology, a horror of…

Oh, it’s a spiky dragon.

Still cool in its own way.

Really?  I mean, I loved Dragon Age, the characters, the storylines, the intrigue… but the Archdemon?  Nothing.  Just nothing.  And I really had to question why.  The problem was, nerds know too much about dragons.  They breath fire, or lightning, or acid, but nothing they’re not surprising.  Almost nothing done with dragons for the past decade has really rekindled the power and fear dragons are supposed to inspire.  The only time anyone worries about a dragon is because they’ve read the stats blocks in D&D.  We only fear them because we’ve been told to fear them.  The dragons themselves no longer inspire fear, they’re just a fallback for when the writer is feeling uninspired.

This needs to change, and I mean big time.  For these icons to properly survive, and I believe they should, they need to adapt to be more than they were.  For instance, let some imaginative designs come forward and take up new titles.  For instance, this is the archetypal demon we know now: (right)

And we could switch it out for something more like this: (below)

Now THAT'S a demon.  Long tail, spiky bits, wings, and six breasts.
I don't even know why there are breasts, it's just weird.

Going back to my starting point, gamers are free to love what they love.  Science fiction and fantasy are genres full of great concepts and creatures, but when the love of something gets as great as it has, it can get old fast.  For those of you who love your science fiction, take a look at the last few great science fiction concepts you’ve come across.  How many of them are new, or make you contemplate the universe and its components in a different way?  I’d bet few to none.  It seems like we’ve moved away from fictional science and more into the realm of “Syfy.” (You’ll never convince me that spelling was a good idea).  That is to say, the Science is no longer the focus of science fiction, just as the fantasy is no longer the focus of the fantasy genre.

To look back, take concepts like those in Dune, the idea of “Folding space” or “Psychohistory” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.  These were the concepts of science that not only helped make science fiction amazing, but pushed real-world scientists to study and look for similar methods with real-world use.  Similarly, dragons, dwarves, elves, halflings (hobbits, bobbits, whatever), were great for creating Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but there are more things out there.

I’ll more than happily say that we should move away from what Tolkien taught us.  Sure, it’s great to have some familiarity in our books, our movies, our games, but really, we need to expand our horizons.  There’s a reason Fantasy and Science Fiction don’t receive equal appreciation and criticism in the “serious” world of arts, and it’s because of the mountain of drivel that quite unfortunately surrounds those few glittering gems we see in things like Inception or…  wow, I actually can’t think of an even moderately recent fantasy creation that made me think about the world it portrayed.  I suppose the closest is all the creatures in Persona 4, but the creature weren’t enough of a focus to really bring that across.

Well, I apologize, that was more of a rant than I intended.  But I stand by it.  The realm of mythical creatures, or mysterious forces, of space and aliens, of fantastical science and scientific impossibilities, of magic and many worlds, has become bland, and the task we now face is to revitalize, to reinvigorate that world with challenging concepts for our future, allegories for our own world as well as our possibilities.  I want to ride on a mythical creature, and this time, I don’t want it to just be a normal creature with some wings pasted on.

On Writing for One or Many

Being a fairly solitary kid, I never owned many multiplayer games, and those that I did own had the multiplayer as an attachment, and very rarely as a focus.  For instance, the multiplayer in Goldeneye was well loved, but the game was primarily a single player shooter, whereas Super Smash Bros. was about the multiplayer much more than the single player modes.

Multiplayer, especially online multiplayer, is becoming extremely popular as a way to squeeze longevity out of games with little on their own.  Writing a multiplayer game needn’t be terribly difficult either, utilizing options like the secondary character otherwise being computer controlled (Gears of War), or by making the other character only there in terms of gameplay (Halo), or writing an entirely different series of events based on the multiplayer option (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory).  However, the best multiplayer tends to be human VS human, because facing down a computer with limited thought is one thing, but trying to kill an actively thinking human is another.

Can you feel her adorable scorn?

 That leads us to the problem of whether a game with multiplayer should have a single player mode with just as much effort put in, or as Yahtzee Croshaw puts it, “Every game should be able to stand up on single player alone.”  I like saying that, but again, it’s because I don’t have many friends, and when you start saying what art should and shouldn’t do then you’re going to get a lot of unkind glances from behind sunglasses and under berets.  However, the question of how to write a human VS human multiplayer game is an interesting one.

An article on The Escapist first brought this to mind, from an interview with Brink’s head writer, Edward Stern.  Brink is a shooter game coming May 17, set in 2045, when the icecaps have melted and the seas have risen, where mankind survives on isolated artificial islands.  Different factions vie for control and blah blah blah.  What is interesting is having the storyline play out for players who must choose different sides in this world.  I’m going to quote the interview directly:

"If you play the Security storyline, we've got credible intel that there is a bio-weapon lab. So you go, 'That's what that map is about,'" Stern said. "You play that [same map] from the Resistance side and they say, 'They're stealing our vaccine.'" Once you realize that vaccines are made from viruses, which could be used as bio-weapons, a simple mission suddenly has a lot of grey area morality that will hopefully engage players."

While this does have something to it, I found myself underwhelmed.  I thought perhaps this would be something marvelous, some method of letting players interact with each other and still create an advancing, interesting story.  It would be difficult, but it can be done.  I think we can actually look to Guild Wars II for some inspiration.  The game’s not out yet, so I’ll be going by what’s been said in interviews and press releases.  The basic idea is that the designers didn’t want the players to feel like they weren’t having an affect on the world.  Usually in an MMO, player hear of a farmer besieged by wolves, and must kill a specific number that are simply lounging about in a certain area.  But in Guild Wars II, the wolves would actually be attacking the farmer’s land, and the quest could be failed and the land destroyed, or the wolves driven back and the farm saved.

It is here that we see the potential.  If the different factions of a multiplayer game are entirely human, and can actually affect the game world, it can greatly improve players’ investment.  Separating the whole battle with an ethical question can make the fight all the more fierce, and leads not only to continued interest as the issue is quite literally battled out, but to some possibly beautiful poetic moments as players are locked in firefights and shouting back and forth through their headsets, not with a constant stream of swear and pseudo-slurs, but with intelligent rhetoric.

Like this, but with more assault rifles.

That’s… probably not going to happen, at least not to that extent, and I can already think up problems with that kind of system, like players only choosing one side, or mostly choosing that, making the game incredibly unbalanced.

But now, would this hypothetical game have a single player campaign to match its multiplayer?  Would any of its hypothetical budget even be allotted to the single player department?  Should it?  This is a dilemma impossible to equate with other media, since there really are no multiplayer movies or music.  Unlike the writing concerns of games, there’s really no place to look for even a starting suggestion.

I see no problem with games being solely multiplayer affairs, since the social gaming movement has proved that the methods can be used to great effect.  Extra Credits boasts that the free in-browser game Echo Bazaar accomplishes this quite well, if you’re interested.  I haven’t had time yet to give it a whirl, but I plan to at some point, if for no other reason than it’s steampunk themed.

But how to write a story for one player or many?  In games, especially MMOs, this could be akin to the Holy Grail.  I think the key is not, in fact, to try to make each character stand out.  In these situations, the player must be part of something larger, with the potential to be important.  Players, like all people, need a goal, some method to succeed not only in the society they’re placed, but something by which the can measure their own improvement.  For instance, players’ ranks could be not only determined by their prowess in combat, but votes from other members of factions.  Players less able at combat become medics or tacticians, to round out the entire force.  Team Fortress 2 is a blueprint for great design ideas.

So, not an entirely feasible idea right now, even with game budgets as bloated as they are.  The key to take away is the transfer of importance between single and multiplayer games.  Making the world feel affected by the actions of how ever many players there are keeps those players interested, keeps them wanting to do more.  It’s all fun and such to ricochet a sniper bullet eight times and take down a man around several corners, but the real meat of experience, in achievement, is change.

On Interactive Sex

Sex has been a great point of controversy in games, for what is basically their entire existence.  Naturally, it has been the point of controversy in other media as well, but those seem to have gotten past it.  Music, TV, movies, books, have all had their turn in the hot seat.  Right now, it’s gaming’s turn, and so far the general output of sexualized content in games has been mostly unhelpful.

How did we ever think THIS was a bad idea?

The trouble first really started in 1982, with a game many of you may have heard about, Custer’s Revenge.  For those of you with too good of taste to have ever looked to deeply into this thing, you play a crudely rendered General Custer who must make his way across a field bombarded by arrows so he could rape a Native woman tied to a cactus.  The Angry Video Game Nerd has done a review of older sex games, which is equal parts funny and educational, so I encourage you to check it out.

Since Custer’s Revenge though, games have endeavored to show sex in a more enlightened fashion.  There are, in fact, a large number of games with sex in them, such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Heavy Rain, God of War, etc.  These are all mainstream titles, and they all depict sexual activities, but only one was ever really called out for it, Mass Effect.  People complained about it being a porn simulator, but of course never saw what happened, or what the scene consisted of.  God of War was much more terse with its lone sex scene, and it was primarily there for a bit of extra experience and a re-tutorial on the Quick Time Events.

Before I get into the real discussion (strap in, this may be a long one), I want to pull a quote from Extra Credits, done by Daniel Floyd, James Portnow, and Alison Theis.  You can find a link to their videos on the left.  Specifically, I’m pulling this from their “Sex in Games” episode.

“… actually playing a sex scene will almost always feel gratuitous, the simulacra of that act just naturally destroys immersion.”

I think I understand where they’re coming from on this issue, but I don’t think the quest for making immersive, interactive sex is a wasted endeavor.  The first time we see sex in a movie is awkward and throws one from the experience, as is the first sex scene we read in a book.  However, all other media have managed to get past that first hurdle.  It could be that gaming, and the necessity of interaction, are what make it difficult, but I believe it can be pulled off.

The game I’ve played that got the closest to an interactive sex scene is Heavy Rain.  I know some people are loathe to call it a game, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

Makes me want to write an article
about the Uncanny Valley.

Heavy Rain plays out with a control scheme specific to each situation the player is in.  There are various prompts that appear and the player chooses one to perform the movements of.  There is a scene about three quarters through the game where two of characters make out and enter a sex scene.  Or can, I haven’t seen it not happen.  You control your character right up to the point where they actually begin having sex.  For all its faults, this game is wonderfully immersive, and I think the control scheme is one of the better methods by which we could experience interactive sex.

I’m sure there are some people who are now asking the question of why we’d want to experience sex like this.  As I never stop saying, video games are about experiences, and should endeavor to bring the gaming audience the widest variety of experiences they can.  Sex is an emotional, primal, and fundamental part of human existence.  To deny its translation as a gaming experience would be, I believe, a profound loss for the art.

As for the place of sex in stories, it’s been on my mind a lot lately.  When a character has sex, that says a lot about them.  The why, the when, the how, that’s important to them.  Do they get emotionally involved?  Do they avoid relationships as much as possible?  These are more than questions about sex, these are questions about relationships. 

These questions help define a character, and the way they interact with others.  Often, it reveals a side of a character others do not often get to see.  For instance, in Dragon Age Origins, you can get a character in your party named Zevran, a very sexual character, and provides a sexual partner whether your character is male or female.  Zevran is a man who takes a very casual approach to sex, and often hits on the protagonist, leading the player to believe that having sex with Zevran will be consequence-free.  Later, the player find out that there is more depth to Zevran’s character.  He actually does become fairly attached to the protagonist, and will take it quite hard if the protagonist decides to end their relationship.  When this happens, he seems genuinely betrayed and seems, if only for a moment, to regret his choices regarding his sexual lifestyle.

Another point that I’ve found to be very effective is the implication of sex.  For instance, in Persona 3 and 4 there is the heavy implications of sex when the player completes that character’s Social Link.  Chie, happy together,” along with a voice over from that character.  I find, though I’m sure other people don’t, that this implies sexual intimacy between the characters, and makes their relationship so much more affecting.

Are you that shocked?
This is a game in which you can buy babies.

Alright, the last thing I want to talk about is the interactive sex that already exists between players.  For instance, playing the Sims online, or in Second Life are able to have their characters perform sexual acts with other characters.  In Second Life especially, they are able to even create specialized areas the are Sadomasochist dungeons, where players will go to role-play less conventional sex.  This is at least a step in the right direction, as it does acknowledge that sex is possible in games.  The sexual acts performed may not be perfect, or necessarily look realistic, but it’s clearly enough for the hundreds and hundreds that already play.  There are lots of things to learn from online games and the relationships people naturally develop in other settings, even one with few real consequences.

It is from the relationships of real people that we can create believable and real relationships in games, and I believe that those relationships will be able to go as far as any real one.  It may take some time, and it will take endurance on the part of the audience, the want to last through the first awkward shambling steps we take.  But if we can take our time, and give the first attempts the constructive criticism they need, we make it through the controversy that arises, and come out the other side with a vastly matured medium.

On Playing

Oh Lego, is there anything you can't do?

A popular mantra in writing, whether screenwriting, novels, comics, or poetry, is “Show, don’t tell.”  This is a simple idea, though very hard to pull off in an effective manner.  Often evoking emotions is much more effective when some of the most important things are left unsaid, but implied through character action.  It also serves to keep the story interesting.  Action and conflict keep people reading, or watching, or whatever, and not just ramping a burning car off the roof of a building rigged to explode, either.  Action can be two people sitting across a table trying to calmly eat dinner.

Anyway, games need a different mantra.  While “Show, don’t tell,” is still a good practice, especially in cutscenes or situations of exposition, but games are active.  You cannot show a game to someone and have him or her experience it as a game.  That’s why a better mantra for games is “Play, don’t show.”

This core concept may seem easy to comprehend, but for budding designers, and for writers especially, we’ve learned to tell stories that can be told or shown to our intended audience.  This is a linear approach to storytelling, and while gaming can and has taken that route for quite some time, there are greater possibilities unique to the medium.

If you’d be so kind as to let me indulge my inner over-analyzing English-major self for a second, I’d like to go back to a game I mentioned last week, The Path.  The Path sets up a purely linear objective (Get to Grandma’s house and stay on the path), but that is not how to finish the game.  The player must go off the path and deliberately stray from the linear narrative into a world without directions, without a Path.  They must find their own story, and explore a world in motion.  The game itself is a beautiful representation of a story that could only be told in a video game, and it’s even an adaptation of a story hundreds of years old.

This is the foundation to the advancement of gaming as an art form.  Gaming is far more accepted in this way now, but it has yet to produce the truly amazing cultural touchstones that lie in other media.  Which is not to say it can’t or won’t.  Obviously, I wouldn’t write a blog or talk so much about something I didn’t truly believe was capable of advancing not only art, but culture.  Interactivity is not viable in other media, and that means there are few with enough practice and time to truly utilize the tools games have at their disposal.

This came to me as I was reading through The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing And Design, and I was wondering how to show through play that the main character I am working with likes to vandalize billboards by painting over them.  How could I deliver this mission to the player without blatantly having anyone say “Go paint stuff on that billboard”?  I’ve been struggling with this idea for weeks, trying to figure out the best way to go about this.  Then I realized that I don’t have to tell or show the player what to do.  I can let them do it.  I can designer levels so they end up going where I want them to, I can have a prompt come up asking them to interact with the billboard when they near it.  I can let them create a pretty picture, and I can let them do it again.  This is what will start the game’s story.  I don’t want it to be a cutscene; I don’t want it to be a Tutorial.  If the game is made right, no one will ever notice the tutorial was there.

Now, onto dissecting the words of another famous game developer, David Jaffe.  You may recognize the name as the creator of God of War and the Twisted Metal games.  I remember when my interest in game design was just beginning to bloom, I watched the creator commentary videos for God of War (unlocked after beating the game).  Jaffe was focused, in a way I didn’t expect.  He knew what his character needed to be, and how to make him that, not only to characterize, but also to create enjoyment for the player.

I actually think I like him better in blue...

Jaffe, in a recent blog post entitled Shit or Get Off the Pot... called out “artsy” games as using “smoke and mirrors bullshit” to garner praise and adoration from not only the gaming public, but journalists as well.  His blog post is quite relevant to what I was just saying.  Jaffe points out that art does not need to loudly declare itself art.  I believe he’s right, but I understand the situation.  This is something that the Internet, and therefore a large quantity of the gaming community, has trouble with.  The Internet is well known for not being a place of subtle wit and high-minded, equal-opportunity debate.  It is a place where many people stick to their beliefs as strongly as possible, and that unfortunately manifests as those beliefs being shoved in your face.  As in everything else, we need to play this whole thing cool.

If we really want the world at large to accept games as an art form, then we need to let it be that art form.  We don’t need to talk about how games are like other media, how they have comparable stories to Kill Bill (my favourite movie) or Atlas Shrugged (a book I’ll probably never read).  What works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, which doesn’t work for a game.  The individuality of the medium has to be the focus of what makes that media great.  Watch a movie, make notes about how things done there could be done in a book, or compare a comic and movie, or comic and book.  Then take all of those media, and try to figure out how to translate gameplay into them.

We can tell people about games all we want, we can show people games all we want, but that isn’t gaming.  Until we have them playing, they cannot understand the medium, and cannot believe in it like so many of us already do.