DavidGoodman.Net

256-colour Love Interest

I think attempts to broaden the appeal of gaming through story will likely run up against the same obstacles encountered when broader society looks at genre fiction, especially fantastical genres like SF, fantasy and horror. In the wider public imagination, books, films and tv shows set in these genres couldn’t possibly contain depth or real human emotion - it’s all just wizards, pixies, rayguns and aliens, right? Just like Grand Theft Auto, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty couldn’t contain anything truly emotive. Right? Right?

My wife was reluctant to watch Battlestar, but is now a hardcore convert. But she only took the chance on it at my (frequent) urging. I’m going to try a similar thing with Portal, a triumph of storytelling linked to a fantastic gameplay device that makes playing it both fun and emotionally engaging. I’m already halfway there because she loves to watch me play Bioshock - the setting, implicit narratives and dialogue fascinate her.

I’m not sure what the broader point in the GWJ article is about casual gaming - how much emotional depth and storyline can you really get in a Flash game? Most of the time, the ’storylines’ in these games remind me of the incredibly simplistic writing and ideas of old-school Commodore 64 and NES games - they’re there as MacGuffins, simply to advance the action, and don’t mean anything in and of themselves.

I remember the first time I got emotionally invested in a game - it was playing the original PC version of Dune, when I got to the kiss scene with the female lead character. As an archetypal geeky kid, the fact that I had been successful with a girl in this 16-bit, 256 colour 2-D sunset kiss scene came as an unexpected and quite powerful punch in the gut (a good one). I became more open to narrative as an attraction in itself, not just a framework to hang the game off, coincidentally around the time that point n’ click adventures were just getting popular (Grim Fandango took this to whole new levels). I think the key is not necessarily web-based or simplistic casual games, but simply a low barrier to entry for novice players. Someone new to RPGs or FPSs (or RTS or any other type of complex game) can often be overwhelmed by the numerous controls, bad guys coming from all directions or, in some more complex games, lack of a clear initial goal.

Perhaps the answer is some kind of ‘newbie’ mode, something that goes beyond the near-universal ‘Easy’ setting towards real (turn-offable) hand-holding. When we combine that with good writing (and here I agree with Michael Zenke, games writing needs to take a similar approach to pushing storytelling boundaries and more directly reflecting the real world if it is to have a broader appeal), we may well get a ‘Battlestar Galactica’ of gaming - a game that you can discuss down the office, at the pub or with your Auntie.

Some generic Space Marines, yesterday

Yes, yes, I know, old hat, but they’re new to me. The funny thing is, a lot of them, including Gears of War in particular, don’t feel new to me because they’ve been so heavily referenced by pretty much every gaming magazine and site I read. Gears had been built up in my mind to be this incredible, frenetic shooter, heavily based around a single-button cover system that made combat fast, fluid and lots of fun. All tied up in an aces Space Marines-esque battle with sinister aliens. Brilliant.

What I got instead was, well, dull. I’m one of those kids who dabbled in tabletop wargaming as a young ‘un, and hence have an entire mid-adolescent head full of pulp SF military hardware and mythos stored away at the back of my brain. Gears of War is a bad pastiche of the genre, with naff dialogue, stock characters and a largely spurious plot.

It’s pretty, at a certain level, but when most of that prettyness is immovable skybox background that you never get to actually touch or move around in, and the colour scheme is a load of tiny variations on grey, gunmetal blue and brown, prettiness doesn’t account for much. At its core, the environment is a series of corridors scattered with crates, like, oh, pretty much every shooter since Doom, except here the crates are disguised as chunks of mouldering concrete and low walls.

The much-heralded cover system is nifty, and has become something of a trend in over-the-shoulder shooters, but quite honestly it gets very dull, very quickly. I’ve heard it called ’stop and pop’ and indeed that’s what it boils down to, stop, pop, run, stop, pop. Blah. With weirdly-spaced checkpoints in the first third of the game, it quickly becomes a pretty uninteresting grind. I’ve heard that it’s a lot more fun playing co-op with a friend, but I played a few games of multiplayer and found it as dull as the single-player.

All in all, so much more could have been done with this. If the single-player game had bigger environments, more varied cover, decent AI on your teammates (who go down like bowling pins the moment the enemy so much as coughs) and better paced save points, it would be a lot less frustrating and more enjoyable. As it stands though, it’s a below-par shooter that I feel squandered a lot of very cool visuals, a potentially deep backstory and an interesting gameplay mechanic. It could have been so much better.

Compare and contrast to Call of Duty 4, which I’ve been playing non-stop for a month now. Hell, I’ve been writing this article in the gaps between multiplayer deathmatch games. Sweet. Stay tuned.

So, whoo, oops. Three months without an update. Yeah, it happens. Me, I was painting my flat, mainly. Anyway. After renewing for another couple of years, I’ve decided to make my site actually useful to me, beyond simply being a repository for stuff I wrote two years ago. Casting around for things I’m passionate enough to actually write regularly about, and perhaps maybe even want to write professionally on in a few years, I’ve come across the excellent Gamers With Jobs, which has great writing, a strong forum community and a brilliant weekly podcast. I’ve never done any serious critical/subject journalism before, short of a few CD reviews in my university newspaper, so this is a bit of a departure for me, but it’s something I’ve been nursing an ambition to do for a while, so I figured, hell, this is a good place to start.

So, starting today, DavidGoodman.Net will be featuring regular game reviews, longer feature articles and so on. Once I’ve written a decent portfolio of stuff it’ll be on to harassing Gamers With Jobs and other sites to let me write for them, and then, the WORLD. Muhahaha.

There will, of course, be writing on other topics, like things I’m doing (currently learning Norwegian and to play guitar, though not simultaneously), civil liberties, the odd techie thang and thoughts about writing (tending toward non-fiction article writing/freelancing as I explore my way around it).

So, seriously, stay tuned. Especially if you like games.