Looking At Limbo, Facing Your Fears

A young boy wakes up in the middle of a dark forest. You only know it is a forest because you can make up the vague shapes of trees around you. The young boy is as vague as the forest that surrounds him. He is only, to you, a black shadow with blinking white eyes.

You heard that the boy is looking for his sister in this forest, but the game never really tells you that. It's just a throwaway statement from outside the game. You know this is some kind of platformer. Your physical memory takes over and you proceed to the left -- because salvation in video games is almost always to the left of the world.

You quickly realize that making your way through this forest won't be so easy. You come across some water and try to make your way to the other side. The young boy drowns before you. Damn, you died. This game will kill the young boy a lot too. Each death brings the player two things: information about the world and something new to fear. For now, you learn to fear water.

Not long after, you also learn to fear the giant spider that is stalking you and the "Others", young boys, just like your own avatar you guess, that are stuck in this world, this limbo. But the game makes you fear them, for they will try to kill you. Why do they want to kill you? Is it because you are different -- you have eyes, they don't -- or maybe because they went insane in this grey forest? It does not matter. Each time you will see their black silhouette, fear shall grip you.

Limbo does a great job installing those fears in your head, but it also goes beyond and asks you to face them. Slowly but surely, you will learn how to navigate your environment with your little avatar and how to use those traps you fear so much against your enemies. You will methodically take down all of the spider's legs and use her corpse as a platform (gross), you will kill those lost child with their own devious traps, and you will flood rooms in order to proceed in your journey.

It becomes less of a terrifying walk through a dark world and more of a rite of passage, an initiatory journey through the unknown. The young boy must face his fears and weaknesses to become a man. He must learn how to use what he fears to his own advantage. The boy becomes a man as he learns how to use and master his surrounding. The bear trap isn't a danger anymore; it's a spider-killing weapon.

It is no coincidence then that the young boy makes his way from a forest to a city, or some kind of giant factory. On a mechanical level, this new environment introduces new challenges: electricity, guns, saws and gravity switches for example. Like those in the forest, you will slowly learn how to manipulate them.

On a more abstract level, the passage from the forest to the factory makes a lot of sense if you look at this game as a story about the trials of growing up. The young boy goes from the forest -- playground for the children -- to the factory -- workplace for the adult. Both can be filled with adventures and dangers.

After making his way through the gauntlet, the young boy -- who is now a man -- finds himself back in the wood of his childhood. There, he sees his sister crying. The game then abruptly cuts to black. The young boy never gets to his sister, as if the game was telling us this old morale all over again; the journey is more important than the destination. This old saying is very true in the context of this game. We are never given a reason to care about that sister. The game in itself never even tells us that there is a sister to be found.

The young boy, and the player, is pushed forward to make it through the trials laid down by the game because he feels that the journey is going to be worth it, that there is something on the other side of this monochrome rainbow. Once you are there, you figure out that this sister could as well be an illusion, an oasis of hope for that young boy and for you.

Even if there is nothing on the other side of the rainbow, the boy became and man, and the player held his hand through the journey.

I did a Top 10, How Crazy is That.

So yeah, I did a Top 10 over at Bitmob for a monthly writing challenge. Pretty nice. It was also the first time I did a Top 10 -- I honestly don't really love those things but it was a nice exercise. Had to use 50 words or less for each entries. Makes you get to the point a lot faster.

Didn't want to post the Top 10 here before I had the Go from Micheal Rousseau to put it up on Bitmob. Still not gonna put it up here, just click the link the see it. I'm also gonna write about XBox Live Arcade Summer of Arcade's first born Limbo early this week. There's a generally positive buzz about that game around twitter and the blogoshpere.

Oh and Starcraft 2 comes out on the 27th. Don't expect anything from me till the month of August. My soul will be busy being eaten by this game.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly about Blizzard's RealID

A lot of people out there must feel like they just dodged a bullet. Blizzard, under the pressure of its angry and disapproving fans, decided to back up on its plan for RealID. The system is optional in games but would have been mandatory when posting on the forum, exposing your real identity to other forum users. As of right now, RealID is entirely optional.

Maybe it’s the social scientist in me that is talking, but I'm kind of sad to see Blizzard back up on this one. Could have been a nice social experiment to see if lifting the veil on anonymity that is currently covering every Blizzard forums posters would have changed the posting environment.

Nonetheless, this whole debate surrounding the discussion, and its retraction some days later, at least brought to light some problems that are plaguing not only Blizzard's forums, but any big gaming forums (or any big non-gaming forums for that matter). Let's take a look at the pros and cons of RealID's use and what this debacle taught us.


*The Good*

I believe this came with the best of intention: toning down the awful trolling taking place on the Blizzard forums. I’m pretty nobody, except trolls, would disagree that this issue needs to be looked after. RealID as a whole would also puts Blizzard on the same level as Facebook. By using their real names, player can integrate all of their social networking needs under one roof, and Blizzard sure hopes it’s theirs you’ll choose as a gamer.

*The Bad*

 The loss of anonymity on the Internet is something a lot of Internet goers are sensible about and I can understand that, especially on a gaming forum. If you are anything else than a white teenage male, the loss of anonymity will leave you open to potential harassment from, let’s say it simply, douchebags. They’ll laugh at you if your name is slightly different from the norm or sound foreign (ironic when you think it’s the World Wide Web) like it’s some kind of high school courtyard. If you are a girl, get prepared to receive a mailbox full of “show me you tits”. That and apparently people will come to your house and punch you.

*The Ugly*

Call me innocent, foolish, or just plain ignorant, but are gaming forums that bad? Why is gaming culture so attracting to unbalanced individuals? It’s pretty scary to think that you cannot have a discussion about a game on a forum without fearing for your life if you dare disagree with xXX_Blazer645_XXx on the best sword because he might use your real name to find your house and kick your ass. At this point, whether he is xXX_Blazer645_XXx or Jim Johnson, you don’t really care. So I’m throwing this almost philosophical question to the world: what would it take to make gaming forums friendlier and safer environments? One where you could say what you want to say, be accountable for what you say, but not fear for your privacy or safety.

Elephant In the Room: Violence and Games

When you look at what was announced during this year’s E3, you can see how much each developers and publishers try to push their next big franchise. Good portions of those new, or returning, franchises are first-person shooters. Halo: Reach, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Killzone 3 and Crysis 2 are making their way toward our consoles and personal computers with their big guns, big (space) boots and their big wars. Those damn commies/aliens/Talibans/ better watch out!

Cool right?

Not always.

 

Look, there is nothing wrong with violence for entertainment, but can we start to wonder why it is the only kind of violence our industry is capable of tackling? Could a video game shock me with its violence not by its amount or gruesomeness (see: Manhunt 2), but by its impact on the characters and the world? Let’s look at an other medium for inspiration.

Gus Van Sant’s movie Elephant is shocking not because the violence is plentiful, quite the opposite. The violence is short and brutal. One second you're alive and enjoying life (or not) and the next you are bleeding to death in a corridor.

Van Sant lets his characters live their life on screen for a short period of time. He gives the viewer time to get to know these people: their dreams, hopes, strength and weaknesses. He does not discriminate between the victims and killers. They both get time to live before they are pulled out of their world in a brutal way. Each death is affecting because Van Sant never lets you forget that the people being killed are not anonymous members of a mass, they are individuals.

What about games?

You kill so many people and get killed so many times in first-person shooters that violence and death start to loose their meaning. Your enemies are plentiful and anonymous; you are often a one-man army blessed by the power of spawning. Violence is the currency and death (yours or theirs) is what’s being traded. You never feel like something is taken out of the game. At worse, death is about as annoying in game as traffic is in real life.

One effective way video games made death matter is by making it permanent. Sadly, there are quite few examples of such uses of death and they are often removed from gameplay and placed within the embedded narrative. The game will kill someone permanently for you but won’t let you kill or get killed in the same fashion. Aeris died not because you didn’t have any potions left, she died because the game decided to remove her from the game to create dramatic tension. Still, games have been getting better at creating permanent deaths that matter because you caused them or are affected by them.

A good example of a first-person shooter that made death and violence matter more than your average war simulator is Far Cry 2. Not so much because of the unlimited number of mercenaries waiting to be shot, set on fire or rolled over but because of your “buddies”. You meet them, do some small talk, and even though they could have been developed a bit more as characters, learn about them. At the exception of one or two sequences in the game, their life or death relies entirely in your hands. Play with fire by accepting their little offer and you will put their life in danger. If you fail to save them, they will die in your arms, and sometimes by your hands. Once they are dead, they’re not coming back.

Another good look at permanent death in this game was the self-imposed “permadeath” challenge Ben Abraham took last December. The constant threat of death makes you appreciate the little details of the world and makes you question the use of violence as an effective approach to every given situation.

What do I want? I’m not even sure. It's not about "banning violent games" like some over-reacting hormones-fuelled gamer might say. It's just about having a balance between entertaining violence and affecting violence. Maybe I just want more developers to think about violence in other terms than number of enemies on screen or cooler explosions. Maybe I just don't want 14 first-person shooters with 14 different ways of showing us how cool their fictional (or non-fictional) war is. Maybe I just want people to be able to talk about violence, games and what is between them without being called an alarmist or worse, being told it’s “just a game”.

It won't cause gamers to go into the streets and shoot people up, but maybe it causes them to be strangely apathetic to such stories. Violence, war and death is not only about sick graphics and kill streaks, it’s about the Human experience.

Immersion and Motion

E3 is behind us and we safely say that this year's convention was dominated by two big elements: 3D and motion control. What is even more amazing is how PR and marketing decided to sell us those two things. The big buzzword was immersion. 3D and motion control will totally immerse you into the gaming experience and the gaming world.


I am not going to linger on 3D here. It's hard to judge something like this based solely on 2D images. Right now, I am more interested in the new motion control craze that is coming with Kinect and Move, but mostly the former. From what we know about our relationship with the current controllers and the Wii, how can we assume that the Kinect is going to help us be more immersed in games? What is more immersive, holding a controller or jumping in front of your television?


Two schools of thought basically go toes-to-toes here; on one side, the controller is a physical object that exists outside the boundaries of the games and it is anchoring you to the real world, but on the other, the controller is a tool that helps you take control of an avatar and puts you directly in control of the fiction. Depending on which side of the fence you are, you will see motion control in different lights.


"Traditional" motion control such as the Wii and the Playstation Move are controllers that also requires, most of the time, extra movement in the "real world" in order to control the game. Games such as Mario Galaxy requires you to waggle the Wiimote to spin Mario, and the Move will probably require that you point at the screen in order to kill something. So either you will see these extra "real world" movements as something that breaks the immersion even more, or something that helps you immerse yourself even more in the game by giving more faithful control over your avatar.


I think you can split immersion in games in two different categories: immersion in the narrative (the kind you could get watching a movie, reading a book, or playing a good narrative-driven game), and immersion in the system (feeling that you have full control over your avatar). What decides the level of immersion in both categories is mostly the game and what is the level of control the player has over his avatar.

A game like Heavy Rain will immerse the player in the narrative by creating interesting situations that will draw you inside the fiction and make you feel scared or happy for the characters. Narrative immersion can also be created by gameplay, although it will mostly capitalize on emergent narrative. A good example of this is Far Cry 2. You become immersed in the adventures of your avatar not because of your search for the Jackal, but because of the perils linked to your trip through a country that does not wants you.


Even though Heavy Rain lets you do a counter-clockwise quarter rotation of the thumb-stick to open a door, this movement has about as much to do with the real world as a counter-clockwise quarter rotation of the thumb-stick to throw a fireball from your fist. System immersion is present mostly in motion-controlled games. You will not be immersed in the narrative track of a Wii Sports boxing match (well, maybe the emergent narrative linked to punching your brother in the face), but you will be immersed in the system, the gameplay, as the movements you make in the real world will be mimicked in the game. You will feel you have full control over your avatar.

With Kinect, the game literally changes. The control is removed and replaced with more faithful body recognition. As they like to say at Microsoft: "Your body becomes the controller". What is the effect on immersion though?


I am not saying that narrative immersion will be impossible with Kinect, but system immersion will certainly be the focus for many game developers. We can now look back and see that with the Wii, games focusing on system immersion, such as party games, became third party developers’ genre of choice. Many of the game shown so far for Kinect also reflect that.


Narrative immersion also becomes harder to maintain when your whole body is the controller. If a plastic controller was anchoring you to the real world, Kinect will certainly do it even more so. In a movie theatre, you get immersed in the narrative because you are in a state of "over-perception and under-mobility"(French: sur-perception et sous-motricité). It basically means that the optimal conditions of a movie theatre will fill your field of vision with images and your ears with sounds but also keep you in your seat. When you play a game with a controller, you are still in a similar situation. You cannot move away from the television or else the action would stop, and your physical movement is limited to the movement of your fingers. Maybe it's not to the level of a movie theatre, but it certainly is close enough to watching a DVD.


With that in mind, games that would be played with Kinect (and to an extent those which uses the Wiimote and Move more actively) will rather put you in a state of "over-mobility". In that state, you become more self-aware of your presence as a player, as a controller. In that sense, you are fully immersed (Could we even say integrated?) into the system. You are in total control of your avatar. Narrative immersion, in turn, becomes harder to keep. The more complex the movements you have to do to interact with the virtual environment, the more aware you are that this whole thing is a game that you control.


It is not to say that developers who will choose to make full use of the Kinect's features won't be able to write deep, meaningful and interesting stories, it's just that I have an hard time imagining being moved by a story if I have to mimic a fight scene, or scream JASON at my television while walking around my living room. Games truly exist on multiple levels, and motion control integration is just another challenge that game developers will have to work with.

I Once Had a Ranch

Kirk Hamilton wrote recently about Red Dead Redemption’s flawed middle chapters; basically spanning from the annoying Irish to the bloated McDougal, with caricatures of the worst human beings you can have south of the border in the middle, but also its surprisingly well-developed early and final chapters. What’s interesting is that both those sections of the game take place around a certain type of location: a peaceful ranch.

After being shot in the chest, Marston is saved by rancher girl Bonnie McFarlaine and taken back to her father’s ranch. At this point, Marston’s quest for revenge is suspended for a moment. You go around the ranch hunting rabbits with Bonnie, you hurdle some cattle, you patrol the ranch at night and you play a few friendly poker games with the guys after a hard day in the sun. At this point in the game, you can also take on a few missions with Marshall Leigh Johnston in return for information about Williamson. If this game is based on the western genre, why was I more interested and invested in the daily business of running a ranch than the manly cowboy action of shooting the bad guys hidden in a canyon?

Apart from the point Kirk Hamilton makes in his piece; the characters around those missions are much more well written, I think I enjoyed those missions so much because I was free not be violent, not to be a tool in some sociopath hands (I’m looking at you De Santa). The first few missions in McFalaine’s ranch are obliviously tutorials giving you pointers on how to ride your horse, shoot a gun and lasso up horses and bad guys. By breaking those few tutorial mission with some of the Marshall’s mission, all involving shooting bad guys in the head, I found the ranching missions much more innovative. Hurdling cattle may not be the most interesting job in the world, but the mechanics revolving around those missions was novel and interesting enough to keep me hooked and actually enjoy riding behind a group of cows while keeping them in check.

You really get to appreciate those missions once you are at the end of the game. After hours of being a carpet and doing horrible jobs for even more horrible people, you are free to get back to a “normal” life with you family. This is the redemption the game is telling us about, this is the freedom you’ve earned. For a few missions, the game lets Marston, and the player, be something else than a killer. It lets you be a human being who tries to put the pieces of his life together by trying to get his ranch back up. Just like Marston, I didn’t want this part of the game to end. I would have enjoyed just living on this ranch, working everyday to make it better by taking the cattle to the pasture, get some horses to sell them back, get a little garden that the wife would take care of, go hunt with my boy and bond a little, protect my ranch from rustlers and bandits, sell and buy merchandise with towns and other ranches, just put the killing life behind I guess.

Sadly, the cruel world created by this game denies Marston and the player this freedom. It is brutally, but not surprisingly, taken away from you in a moment of violence. Marston’s redemption was short-lived. The civilized world will inevitably kill the old anti-hero of the West; the law does not forgive the criminal turned vigilante. The game completes the circle by giving us control over Jack Marston, John’s son, the boy who lost his chance at a normal life with his family. The son literally becomes the father as the player is given the same control over him and as the game is giving the same options to the player. Jack cannot be a rancher. He can only be the same as his father was during the game, a man who wanders the land in search of someone to help, or someone to shoot.

Who knows, maybe one day Rockstar will release a DLC that will let us be an honest rancher? John wasn’t able to enjoy his redemption but maybe we will be able to lead Jack to his.

A little fan wanking on my part.

So, the IGF Mobile finalists (whose header image is ironically showing a cell phone; a platform that is totally unused by said finalists) have been announced and I'm pretty happy to see one of my favourite game of the year, Spider: The Secret of Bryce manor, is amongst them.

It got both nominated for best mobile game design and best overall game.