|
March 1st, 2008
04:16 pm - Because I'm interested.
Ludology is the study of games as games: It is, if you like, concerned with the 'mechanics' of the game.
Narratology is, as you might expect, the study of narrative. From a gaming point of view, it's concerned with the story the game is trying to tell.
Poll #1147111 Video games
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllDo you feel video games are primarily ludologically stronger or narratologically stronger? When playing video games, do you prefer a more ludological or narratological experience? From a ludological perspective, which of the following is most important to you in video games? And from a narratological perspective?
Of course, you may have other answers that don't fit into the above categories. I'd love to hear them, too.
|
February 25th, 2008
07:42 pm - Top 5 Video Game Soundtracks
YMMV
5 - Deus Ex (2000)
 Unlike many games, and despite the somewhat dodgy graphics, the world of Ion Storm's Deus Ex had a strong level of presence and solidity. This was partly due to the robust feeling of the Unreal Tournament engine, partly due to Warren Spector's spatial-narrative philosophy on level design, and partly due to the soundtrack. Contributors to the latter included Alexander Brandon, Dan Gardopée and Michiel van den Bos (the three of who had previously worked on Unreal and Unreal Tournament) and Reeves Gabrels (best known for his work with David Bowie, also contributing to The Cure's Wrong Number).
The music is gritty and atmospheric, like the rest of the game, incorporating jazz, electronic and classical influences. What's really important about the music -- which, again, is consistent with the overall design of the game -- is the way it manages to evoke the fantasy of future while maintaining a 'real' experience for the player with a crucial quality of familiarity. That and the main theme was just fantastic.
4 - Ecco the Dolphin (1992)
 I was ten years old when Novotrade's Ecco the Dolphin was released. The game was known for its art, the box cover (left) being by renowned fantasy artist Boris Vallejo and the in-game art coming courtesy of the talented Balogh Zsolt. The music, however, created by Magyari Andras, Spencer N. Nilsen and Brian Coburn was my first hint that video game music was important (not counting my now-laughable awe at the realism of the sounds in the original Super Mario Bros.: prior to that, I had heard only the limited pure beeps of the ZX Spectrum in games).
The music was of course written for the Sega Mega Drive's onboard sound chip, the Yamaha YM2612. I recently posted about Yamaha's impressive Vocaloid 2 technology, and the YM2612 was also fairly impressive for its time (although the Sony SPC700, the sound chip in the Super Nintendo ((imagine Nintendo using a Sony chip!)), was arguably superior) but today sounds rather dated. The Genesis only allowed for about 5-note polyphony (6 including sound effects -- the SNES had a luxurious 8). I have great admiration for anyone who can create such wonderful things under such constraints, and wonderful Ecco's music was. The cartridge version (the CD version featured a totally different soundtrack) was essentially new age music with an electronic sensibility, and perfectly matched the themes of Ecco's storyline. This was a soundtrack that made use of the technology it had to work with, rather than being limited by it, eschewing the normal Mega Drive practice of trying in vain to arrange 'real-world' music for the limited chip. That being said, the art of the game as a whole, including the visuals, the music and the playability was a lot better than the technology: the game had many bugs and was prone to crashing, which these days would be unacceptable in a console game.
3 - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004)
 The incidental music for VTMB was neither brilliant nor even particularly memorable, but where its soundtrack was really above those of other games was in its use of licenced music. Of course, it was far from the first game to utilise licenced music, and normal people may hail Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for being better in this regard, but I am not normal. VTMB featured tracks by Tiamat, Ministry, Daniel Ash, AERIAL2012, Chiasm, Genitorturers (who were also featured on the soundtrack of True Crime: Streets of LA, which is about the best that can be said for that game), Darling Violetta and a superb ending song by Lacuna Coil. The game was released pretty much at the end of oWOD, and the songs are a monument to that, exemplifying the themes and the atmosphere in a way that went beyond the digital product into the whole oWOD environment (I can't speak about nWOD simply because I've been out of the loop too long and know nothing about it).
VTMB was, of course, another game where the art surpassed the technology, despite the fact that it pushed the boundaries of the at-the-time ground-breaking Source engine. The game was notoriously unfinishable out-of-the-box, a guaranteed crashing bug after the Society of Leopold mission necessitating recourse either to the cheat console or a third-party patch (I've heard reports that the official patch fixed this, but I seem to remember it didn't for me). Developer Troika (like Deus Ex developer Ion Storm) no longer exists, and one has to think that releasing a broken product commercially may have had something to do with that. Which is a shame, because although the game was buggy to the point of brokenness, it was great.
2 - Homeworld (1999)
 Okay, okay, the ending song was written and performed by Yes. And indeed, that is almost reason enough to consign the soundtrack of this game to the shitheap of obscurity, but the rest of the soundtrack makes up for it. Promise. Highlight: the third mission of the game. After successfully testing the warp drive, you return to find the titular homeworld (or is it?! :O) consumed by flames. Apart from your ship's crew, the last few thousand surviving members of that dead planet's population lie in cryogenic storage containers, defenceless and under attack. You have to save them and drive off the genocidal antagonists. Throughout this, the background music is Samuel Barber's Agnus Dei, performed (at a faster tempo than usual) by the Santa Barbara Quire of Voyces, and it has never been more poignant.
The remainder of the soundtrack, composed by Paul Ruskay, is a collection of ambient work which sits well with the game's major themes: Vastness and isolation is taken care of with big synthesiser drones, ethnic percussion takes care of the adrenaline and danger of combat, and at the core of it, as with all good sci-fi, is a very human heart.
The game looks dated now, of course, but it is still beautiful. In Homeworld, Canada's Relic Entertainment created a triumph of art over technology (are you seeing a pattern yet?). I suspect the visuals (and, indeed, perhaps the music, too) had more than a little influence on the beautiful EVE Online.
1 - American McGee's Alice (2000)
 Might as well continue the pattern of art over technology. Alice makes the best of the limited and ugly Quake 3 engine, and does it fairly well. Where the Quake 3 engine may surpass the contemporaneous Unreal engine, however, is in its sound capabilities, particularly the quality of the music it could play (although at the expense of the fancy interactive features of Unreal's MOD-based UMX format). Alice famously made use of this by hiring Chris Vrenna, formerly of Nine Inch Nails, to compose and produce the soundtrack. And there is a reason it's my number one. The subtle industrial-ambient score superbly fits the horror of a decayed Wonderland, as well as the horror of an older, more cynical Alice's fractured psyche.
Tense and disturbing, like the broken, raped and distorted Disney atmosphere of the game itself, the music is what makes playing with the lights off truly terrifying, standout moments including the industry noises, toy instruments, marcato and pizzicato strings and unnatural voices at the Skool. Actually, that's not so much a standout moment, because it's all brilliant, and definitely deserves first place in this hastily-put-together-and-totally-subjective chart.
|
January 2nd, 2008
05:31 am - Interactive narrative
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) imomus just posted an interesting entry titled "Notes on the cultural organisation of narrative space". I started commenting on it, but it seemed to be less of a comment and more something that was suitable for my own livejournal, and so here we are.
This sort of intersects with the main reason I'm so interested in computer games. It seems to me that the unique (though sadly much underused, for both technological and commercial reasons) potential of the medium is to give the player the opportunity of co-authoring the narrative experience, while at the same time virtually inhabiting it.
Given the parallels between that and "real world" narrative, Deus Ex creator Warren Spector's insistence that he wants to "create worlds, not movie sets" is, I think, a fine summation of this principle, as well as the problem with most games which take a far more linear, Hollywood-style view (perhaps exemplifying "Classic narration").
What Spector aims for is where the concept of spatial narrative really comes into its own. It enables a definition of "interactive narrative" which is something more than "a story where you get to press some buttons", or at best the computer-generated equivalent of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book (If you want a more participatory narrative experience, turn to page 59).
Of course, the simulation of an entire culture on this basis is limited not only by technology but also by plausibility, but a more localised narrative thread of causality implementing these principles (and while the technology's not quite there, yet, it's moving in that direction) would raise whole new possibilities for the narrative structure (and, by extension, "artistic viability") of the medium.
|
December 7th, 2007
11:38 pm - Shred
What really used to annoy me was looking around youtube for music only to find people's Guitar Hero videos. I was like "I don't care how well you can play!" I never even really understood the allure of the game. I've never actually played Guitar Hero, but Frets On Fire is based on a very similar mechanic. Okay, it's an outright clone and might be better called 'Guitarlatan' if it wasn't so damn good.
Guitar Hero could be played with a gamepad or with a special controller, and I think FoF does support these methods, but it also supports keyboard input in a rather unorthodox manner - you pick up the keyboard and use the F1 to F5 keys as your frets, and the Enter key to pick (I've heard of people playing it on a laptop - how? Jeff Healy style?!).This seems rather unwieldy at first. And perhaps it is, but I (who sucks) have got fairly respectable scores within an hour of starting, so perhaps it's not so bad, given that in any game you multiply my score by two to get the average, and in anything to do with rhythm you multiply my accuracy by ten to get someone half-decent. I suspect the keyboard may be a bad choice for prolonged sessions, though.
Like I said, I'd never played Guitar Hero before, but I feel like I can finally understand the allure of it. This shit is fun. The four songs included may not keep you going for very long, but there are community sites where you can get others... or if you happen to own either of the Guitar Hero games, you can import the songs from them, too. Or you can make your own.
The game and its source code are freely available for Windows and Linux (I used the Linux version). A Mac version is also available, but it's tagged as experimental.
The one caveat about the game is that it can be a bit more demanding on your hardware than it needs to be. Because the devs are crazy and decided to write the damn thing in Python. Now, I have a healthy respect for Python and I think it has its place (even if the stylistic things such as whitespaces actually having meaning bug me) but... Writing a game. That relies on timing. In an interpreted language?! The Computing Science student side of me cries at the thought, but for all that it does work a lot better than I'd expect.
|
November 23rd, 2007
01:04 pm - A watershed
 Someone here was reading an article about the game Scorched Earth, released in 1991. It patronizingly said "younger gamers will remember Worms with its amusing sound effects."
Elsewhere, people try to be all geekier-than-thou by pointing out that Scorched Earth was in fact inspired by Tank Wars, which was released in 1990. Ha, take that, Scorched Earth supporters!
 Or not, because these people, so smug in their superior gaming knowledge are kind of missing one vital point. I mean, it's not like both games didn't bear more than a passing resemblance to Amoeba's Tank Trax, RELEASED IN 1985 BITCHES!
Now who's geekier-than-thou?
I'm fairly certain someone will reply to this in a comment pointing out an even earlier game on which Tank Trax was based, so I'm not going to get all full-of-myself just yet.
|
November 20th, 2007
November 7th, 2007
10:56 pm - Anyway, this cake is great
I haven't had a chance to play games non-stop, so that's why I've only just now finished Portal. Fantastic game, great ending which, just in case I'm not the last person to finish it, I won't say too much about. And I'm completely addicted to the ending song. I had to download GCFScape just so I could extract it from the game data. I wonder if the song seems a lot better because I had to work (well, play) for it...
|
September 1st, 2007
01:29 pm - Video game violence: the crazies go crazier
 Two days ago, the Virginia Tech Review Panel's final report conclusively stated that Seung Hui Cho was not an avid gamer; that the only game he liked to play was Sonic the Hedgehog (left, with, er, a gun), and that video games were in all likelihood not linked to (let alone responsible for) the Virginia Tech shootings.
It was less than one day, people, before Jack-Thompson-wannabe Lyndon LaRouche (right) claimed that the findings of the VA Tech Review Panel's report were the result of an industry conspiracy. Yeah, that's right. If the evidence is against you, it must be a conspiracy, right?
 What does the industry stand to gain by such a conspiracy? Well, it might get wingnuts like Jack Thompson off their backs, but everyone knows Jack Thompson's crazy. (How many lawyers in history were ever successfully banned from filing a suit against a given company ever again, as Jack Thompson was with Take Two Interactive, owner of Rockstar Games?) I really don't think the industry is against highlighting that there are some very mentally unstable people out there who might be affected by video games and definitely shouldn't have access to them; but I'm sure they'd (rightfully) deny that it's their responsibility to pander to that minority.
It just doesn't make sense: there's nothing that the industry can gain from such a conspiracy, except for the lulz at watching Thompson, LaRouche et al start frothing at the mouth. They're not that juvenile. Are they?
ETA: Looking closer at LaRouche's history, he seems to have a bit of a reputation as a conspiracy theorist. Oh, and an anti-semite. I'm not sure how valid the latter accusation is, but the former certainly seems evident here.
|
August 15th, 2007
05:22 pm - New Study Dispels Asocial Online Gamer Myth
Apparently, people who play inherently social games are not asocial. No shit!
A new study conducted by researchers at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, and published in U.S. journal CyberPsychology and Behavior, has found that three quarters of online role-playing gamers make good friends with the people they meet in their virtual worlds, with almost half meeting in real-life situations and one in ten going on to develop physical relationships.
Other findings from the study, entitled “Social Interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Gamers” indicate that more than 30 percent of participants found themselves attracted to another player and 40 percent chose to discuss sensitive issues with online friends rather than their real-life friends.
One in five participants believed that massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs) had a negative effect on their relationships if their partner was not a player, while more than two-thirds felt they had a positive effect on their relationships with those who did play.
Women were significantly more likely than men to be attracted to other players and were far more likely to go on to date them. Most women gave “therapeutic refreshment” as their main reason for playing, whereas most men stated “curiosity, astonishment and interest” as their reasons. Around a third of gamers suggested they could be more themselves in the game than in real life.
The study interviewed almost 1,000 online gamers from across the world and found that the average number of hours played per week was 22.85. The most popular MMORPG in the study was World of WarCraft, with almost half of participants naming it their favorite game.
Professor Mark Griffiths, from Nottingham Trent University’s School of Social Sciences, said: “This study has revealed many aspects of MMORPGs that were not known before. Previous research has suggested that gamers are socially inactive, but MMORPGs are actually extremely social games, with high percentages of gamers making life-long friends and even partners.”
“As well as making good friends online, 81% of gamers play with real-life friends and family, suggesting MMORPGs are by no means an asocial activity, nor are the players socially introverted,” he added. “The virtual world that these games offer, allow players to express themselves in ways they may not feel comfortable doing in real life because of their appearance, gender, sexuality, age, or other factors.”
Some of this I think is probably a bit behind the times; the gender assessment wasn't exactly 'previously unknown' - the only new thing here is that it's been subject to a formal study.
The same goes for the fact that MMOs are a social activity. I'm surprised, actually, that a games industry site would make such a big deal out of that: MMOSGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Social Games) have been around almost as long as MMORPGs. There is debate as to whether or not they actually count as games, and have instead recently have turned to branding themselves 'virtual worlds', but the idea of a 'game-world' where there isn't any precise goal other than socialising is not by any means new; and these are often as popular if not more so than their MMORPG counterparts.
Personally I prefer the 'non-game' version. The 'game' part of MMORPGs is often the dreaded grind; repetitive actions only undertaken to farm levels. The social aspect has always been far more interesting.
Anyway, the thing I found most interesting about this article was: "Around a third of gamers suggested they could be more themselves in the game than in real life." I'm not so sure that's true, but I can see the direction it's going. I can quite easily be myself in real life, and can also quite easily be myself ingame or online, but 'myself' as a variable doesn't refer to the same thing in both situations. As I've said before, I have a problem with the idea that anything that's on the internet is somehow 'not real', but most opinions I've seen on the matter suggest either that it's real or that it's not real. I think that's a totally false dichotomy: I think they're both real, but not the same.
My identity online is different to my identity offline, but they are both my identity, or at least different aspects thereof. The online world, to me, is an extension of reality. It may have different rules and attributes to the rest of reality, but those are special-case rules and attributes, not individuating rules and attributes.
Sorry about the rambling post...
|
April 5th, 2007
12:49 pm - Virtual violence and accountability
I was wandering around on the internet looking for things about Second Life, and came across this blog entry. It's about a psychological experiment which echoes the classic Milgram obedience experiment with the difference that in this case the electric shocks were virtual in nature and delivered to a virtual human:-
The main conclusion of our study is that humans tend to respond realistically at subjective, physiological, and behavioural levels in interaction with virtual characters notwithstanding their cognitive certainty that they are not real. The specific conclusion of this study is that within the context of the particular experimental conditions described participants became stressed as a result of giving ‘electric shocks’ to the virtual Learner. It could even be said that many showed care for the well-being of the virtual Learner – demonstrated, for example, by their delay in administering the shocks after her failure to answer towards the end of the experiment.
The tone of the blog entry, and in particular the comments that followed it, seemed to suggest that people would consider it 'ok' do evil things in Second Life, knowing that it isn't real, and then eventually that would leak out into the real world.
Seems to me that's the opposite of the message of the conclusion Nicholas Carr, in that entry, quoted (the same conclusion I quoted above). Maybe I need to brush up on my reading comprehension.
Regardless of that, it also leads me back onto the line of thought of accountability. Remember two years ago, when Grand Theft Auto 'made' a teenager go on a killing spree? That CBS article is lovely because, in fact, it contradicts itself. "This game made this one person kill three police officers," it claims, later claiming "millions of people play this game". So why didn't millions of people go out and kill police officers? The state of the media now is that rational-minded human beings are having trouble convincing people that correlation does not imply causation, but what about when there isn't even any correlation? Can you prove causation by the results of one isolated case from a population of millions? Simply: no.
Of course, before video games, it was rock music (the real fun twist to that is that the very same type of person who accused rock music of turning a generation of youths into violent, uncontrolled monsters later, in the mid-90's, accused the video-game industry of "killing rock music"). In the mid-18th century, it was romantic novels. Before that it was probably something else. People have always looked for scapegoats, and have never learned that these things aren't as harmful as they seem provided responsibility is taken up by the people with whom it should rest. This can be the parents, in the case of a child, or -- and here's a novel idea -- with the individual in question.
The video-game industry is not without responsibility, however. They have a responsibility to classify games as suitable for a certain age-group, and to give some indication of what types of content the game involves. Which they already do, at least in Europe, and in many European countries, these 'recommendations' have legal bearing - which also puts some responsibility on governments to make sure that this is the case. (At the last minute, when I was looking for the PEGI link, I found the ISFE's website, which contains links to several articles, some of them research reports from recognised and respected universities, which 'prove' ((in inverted commas because I haven't read them, yet)) that violent video-games do not, in fact, cause real-life violence.)
The whole argument, in fact, has always seemed to me somewhat self-contradictory, tending to run along the lines of:-
Rational Interviewer: So, why did you buy a violent video-game for your child?
Irate Conservative Parent: Well, it's only a game.
RI: Then what's the problem?
ICP: This product made my child violent!
RI: I thought you said it was only a game.
ICP: It's not only a game! It trains children to be violent!
RI: So, why did you buy a violent video-game for your child?
ICP: Well, it's only a game.
Maybe the parent didn't directly buy the game. Maybe someone else did. The point still stands that if a parent is not fulfilling their obligations of responsibility to their child's welfare, they really have no cause to start pointing fingers.
Which brings us back to the original blog post. Suggesting that there's something wrong with violence in a virtual environment based on a study which shows that people's behaviour in a virtual environment mirrors their behaviour in the real world (and not the other way round), with the results of this experiment being markedly similar to the results of Milgram's experiment, is one of the best examples of misplaced blame I can think of, right now.
|
August 28th, 2006
July 9th, 2005
11:36 pm - Hmmm...
jimsin's entry reminded me of ( this rant. )Taken from the article 'Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! II' (a list of poor design and common design flaws in video games) written by Ernest Adams and found on www.gamasutra.com
Current Mood: amused
|
|
1 (50.0%)