This week I wanted to talk about Ludonarrative games. Games that allow the narrative structure of the game to flow in harmony with the gameplay aspect of a game. In contrast a game that is not ludonarrative but experiencing "ludonarrative dissonance" is for example Uncharted 1, where in the game's story, Nathan Drake is portrayed as a cocky wise-cracking protagonist but gameplay requires you to massacre dozens of goons every five minutes with no emotional effect on his character. This for example is comparable to the Last of Us, where Joel whilst still likeable as a protagonist, is shown in the story of the game to be much darker with his personality providing narrative justification for why he must kill hundreds of NPC humans. However I want to discuss an overlooked genre of video games that is a silentmaster of ludonarrative game design. The humble Point-And-Click Adventure game. Point-And-Click Adventures games took form as some of the first story driven PC games (The first King's Quest) and were largely perfected and pioneered by Lucas Arts Studios (Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones). Point-And-Click Adventure games are often widely drive by the story, the narrative providing scenarios, locations, characters, puzzles and items that they player must interact with and often to progress through the story. Players must participate in branching dialogue paths, and collect items for their inventory trying to figure out how it all fits together to reach the next chapter of the story or character development. These games often provide a really good example of Ludonarrative game design. In Monkey Island 3, the whole game is designed with the aesthetics of a Disney Film, or at least that of a saturday morning cartoon. You play as Guybrush Threepwood walking around gathering items to solver puzzles. The game features very minimal menus and user interfaces. Every action Guybrush commits is the player's choice and fits into the story of the game. Did Guybrush's story immediately unfold with him finding the Chicken with the Pulley in the middle straight away at the International House of Voodoo? Or did it take you an hour of walking around and talking to all the characters? Guybrush's journey as part of the player's actions and choices becomes the player-canon version of the story as every action is part of the game, with the exception of some cutscenes. Items and characters in the game are not just there to interact with or gun down, they each placed as part of a story to interactive with and learn from. Similar another Lucas Art's adventure game, Grim Fandango. In Tim Schafer's audio commentary of the "remastered" edition of Grim Fandango, he talks heavily about how the game was designed to "have no metaphors". Unlike some other point-and-click adventure games that used heavy onscreen action input interfaces due to limited graphics representation, all actions in Grim Fandango are performed within the logic of the game, with no menus or components representing actions in the game world. Even Manny Calavera's inventory system is represented storywise by items he fits into his jacket that you cycle through. His head also tracks objects of interested in the environment, without the game having to highlight them. One final example of a point and click adventure game that follows through with the idea of the narrative in tune with the gameplay is recent 2015 re-imagining of King's Quest. This episodic game is told from the perspective of an aged King Graham (voiced by Christopher LLoyd) who in the game's meta-story recounts tales of his youth that act as the true game's setting and gameplay. As the gameplay is all the story told by the king, the player's actions and route through the multipath gameplay become the canon version of the story that King Graham is telling his granddaughter Gwendolynne. This is interesting because the first episode of King's Quest offers three different methods of progressing through the story based on player choices and action. Depending on path you take gameplay-wise through the story affects the story King Graham tells and that ultimately affects Gwen. If you teach her to use strength to solve puzzles she'll rely on her brawn in the meta story. If you teach her to use her heart, she will show kindness.
In conclusion, when reflecting on what style of gaming I felt best resonated with Ludonarrative games. I couldn't move past the good old school point-and-click genre. It's a great example of how a game's narrative can be portrayed literally without metaphors breaking up the flow of story and gameplay. References: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.389092-Essay-Ludonarrative-Dissonance-Explained-and-Expanded http://v2.razputin.net/index.html@page=razputin%252Ffeatures%252Ftimwords.html Grim Fandango: Remastered Director In-Game Commentary.
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This week we had a discussion of graphics and visual styles in video games. Some games quest for verisimilitude (realistic graphics that give the appearance of being real and true.) Verisimilitude can be great for creating an immerse gaming experience, communicating realistic emotions and reactions from characters and aiding function of game mechanics. However other games intentionally trust their visuals to a more stylised or classic cartoony look, to avoid the uncomfortable sins of the uncanny valley and to help players suspend belief in order to absorb a moment of gameplay, character or landscape that would be impossible in the real world. To explore this topic, I am going to list 4 games. Two games will be an example of Verisimilitude or Stylised graphics done well and two others will be an example of the limitations of the opposed styles. For years, the Metal Gear Solid series was desperately waiting for technology to evolve so that it could exist in the realistic representation of itself that Hideo Kojima (the series' creator imagined). With each game in the series always pushing the generation's graphical limitations, it wasn't until MGS4 and ultimately MGS5 that we finally got to see the Metal Gear world burst to life in true verisimilitude. This game uses the it's realistic visuals very powerfully. MGSV provides lush realistic sandbox environments that you must use to your advantage as if you were infiltrating them in the real world. Realistic cinematic shot in one take is like watching a movie with real people. When exploring the darker themes of the game, this helps generate deeper and more horrific emotions in the player. In fact this game pioneers some heavy facial motion capture technology, and characters such as the previously talkative Snake and the thematically silent character Quiet, were written to express more dialogue through facial animation and twitches then through actual words. The game also incorporates incredible detail to gameplay based on realism such as snipers reflecting in the light to reveal enemy and player locations, the need to shower if coated in too much blood and tranquillized enemies drowning if they land face down in the smallest of puddles. These kind of augmented gameplay elements would not be possible if it wasn't for motion capture and the visual style simulating verisimilitude. Sweet Solaris... Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) is the textbook example of bad game design and how to screw up a successful franchise. But we are only going to focus on one of its many cardinal sins of game design today, that being it's choice to develop the game's aesthetics with realistic verisimilitude. This game was rushed to meet the launch of the Xbox 360 and the exciting new world of HD next-gen graphics. I owned a copy on PS3 and it is still to this day, one of the few PS3 games I actually own that runs in full 1080p. So it is no surprise that Sega fell for the trap to push Sonic the hedgehog into that world. But as they attempted they learned some really inconvenient truths about the world they created. Mainly that you can only make a blue anthropomorphised cartoon hedgehog look so realistic. Whilst some of the environments in Sonic '06 look quite lovely with their real world Europe inspired flair, this game is rife with uncomfortable and uncanny moments. Sonic and all his friends look like freaks of nature standing aside detailed final fantasyesque humans. This is made worse by Dr. Eggman's ugly uncanny redesign and the moment when Princess Elise kisses Sonic the Hedgehog. A lot of things did not gel well in this game, but the visual aesthetic of giant mutant hedgehog making out with a realistic human girl is enough to make any gamer, get out of their chair, take their guns and defend their porch and daughters. Rayman as a series has always been cartoony and whacky and that's one of the reasons the franchise was so successful in the early 2000s. But after Rayman got knocked off of Ubisoft's priorities due to their crippling obsession with raving Rabbids, and the 3D-platformer having sailed, Ubisoft had to think of an inventive way to bring him back. So they decided to throw back to their original cartoon origins with the aptly named Rayman: Origins. This game is built in a powerful new engine Ubisoft invented called the Ubitoon Engine. Which allows for characters to be animated automatically by stretching silhouettes. This meant the whole game was made from stunning handdrawn cartoon animation was was both hilarious and added to the zany quirky and fast flow animation of the hectic 4 player platformer. The world is whacky and zany and perilous with crazy themed lands so the cartoony-style and slap-stick sensibilities with the added in-game ability to literally slap your friends meant that Ubisoft hit stylisation gold with this rebooted approach to Rayman. I seriously hope Ubisoft continue to make games in this engine because all the games they've made with it so far have been gorgeous. This may be a little unfair as the game isn't out yet and we've only seen a small dose of E3 trailers and gameplay footage. But when your announcement trailer has a 90% dislike ratio and a petition for cancellation that reached 7,500 signatures in 24 hours and 20,000 within 2 months, that means people take issue with your game. There are a couple of other reasons that coincided with the dislike, Samus not being the main character, the lack of focus on exploration and the confirmation that a Wii U Metroid game was not in the works left a lot of Metroid fans feeling bitter. But I sincerely think the art style is what disappointed people the most. Next Level Games is handling the Metroid Franchise for the first time and they are capable of some pretty fun aesthetics from their brutal take on the mario universe in Mario Striker's Charged to the delightfully spooky aesthetics of Luigi's Mansion 2. They are a capable studio. But even from this promotional art here, it looks bland uninteresting way too angular and lacking any of the exotic and mysterious sci-fi stylings that usually accompanies the metroid universe. Because the game is on 3DS the visuals have been made very simple and polygonal, with the human characters inside the suits stylised as very "chibi" or super deformed almost Mii-like. The Metroid universe has never been portrayed like this. Even in other GBA hand-held Metroid games, the player was treated to beautiful detailed pixel art. So I believe this over stylisation to make the Metroid universe has actually blown up in Nintendo's face in a rare scenario. They have not picked the visual style that best suits the characters and lore of the Metroidverse. The gameplay may yet to be fun, but Nintendo will have a long uphill battle with this title to get fans to play it, purely on aesthetic alone.
References: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/10/17/microsoft-office-2016-review/ http://www.leagueofgamemakers.com/reality-check-verisimilitude-in-game-design/
Sometimes journalism tries to pit gamers against each other in a debate of which is better 3D gaming or 2D gaming. Perhaps this extends out of generational gaps as gaming now expands into abundant richness where we have a generation that only play 2D games, a generation like myself that grew up in the transition between mediums and a generation that has mostly known 3D games as the industry standard. One game franchise that often gets caught up in the middle of this debate is the Legend of Zelda series. You will hear nearly every gamer who has played their game voice their opinion passionately about which one is their favourite. Some love the traditional 2D Zelda style of gameplay expressed best in Link to the Past, which focuses heavily on world exploration and simple combat. Whilst other praise Zelda's successful jump into the 3D realm with Ocarina of Time being the flagship of the series, many Zelda fans sail by. A perfect example of this debate is captured quite humorously by Animator/Voice Actor/Entertainer Arin Hanson in his seqelitis series:
So that's why this question is sometimes a big deal. Which style of gameplay is actually better? 2D or 3D?
Honestly my personal answer, is both. I am a big believer that the style of gameplay you choose at the initial stage of design should be chosen in order to best reflect the gameplay mechanics. One isn't necessarily better then other, you have to assess what works best for the gameplay experimentation. I can give you a list of tonnes of games that in the late '90s failed to make the jump between 2D and 3D. (Bubsy 3D I am looking at you.) Adding the Z-axis radically altered and broke a lot of classic SNES era games. Even games that were considered commercial success like Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 failed to necessarily contain the same polish their 2D predecessors used to have. To swing our sword back to Zelda for a second, Link to the Past works great because they used the best spiriting power on the SNES to tell a story set in two very open worlds told from a traditional RPG top down view. Ocarina of Time works great because Nintendo knew they had to radically alter the game to make use of new depth. We got a lot more personal control of Link as we guided him through new terrain, hit switches and solved camera related puzzles more realistically and this all helped to immerse us and create a cinematic feel more so then top-down sprites ever could. Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages great Gameboy Colour Zelda games because they push the gameboy's limited graphics to allow us to explore a really big 2D world involving time travel, colours changing and the continuing of an epic story via the Gameboy link cables. And as my final example, I want to talk about Link Between Worlds, the psuedo-spiritual sequel to Link to the Past. This game is 2D Zelda gameplay in terms that it is top down and emulates a lot of Link to the Past's mechanics. But it makes total use of the 3D camera to enhance gameplay. Not only do enemies use 3D depth to attack and to increase the difficulty of puzzles and locations, the game also introduces a seamless mechanic that allows Link to turn into a 2D image embedded on a wall and explore linear walls radically changing how you move through the world. This kind of genius demonstrates that Nintendo aren't concerned which Zelda style is better. As game developers and Zelda's creators, they love them both and will pick the style that best enhances the mechanics they want the gamer to experience. I think this is ultimately the best approach. There are so many different styles and genres of games and gamers, it seems petty to lock video games into a non-existant war on 2D vs 3D. Instead I think you can enjoy all sorts of games. As long as game developers continue to be creative with genres like Super Paper Mario, Rayman: Origins or Terraway there are infinite possibilities for hybrid combinations of visual perception and gameplay mechanics. Reference: 1.https://youtu.be/XOC3vixnj_0 2.http://www.screwattack.com/news/2d-vs-3d-which-better |
AuthorBen Spanos is currently playing Undertale, Uncharted: Among Thieves and Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes. Archives
March 2018
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