Ludology.org

The death of Adventure Games

I always liked adventure games. The reason is simple: I always loved good stories, and some adventure games such as ZX Spectrum's Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis or Circle of Blood were able to provide me with compelling settings (if not characters). There are many theories about why adventure games died (are dying). Most of the refer to Myst as the murderer. So, I will just add another theory that, btw, is highly biased with my ideas on simulation. That narrative is the main structure that backbones adventure games is a no-brainer. Adventure games tried, unsuccessfully, to be in somewhere in between simulation and narrative, between the potential and the concrete, between the essence and the particular. It is like trying to create a logo that denotes both the universal idea of "woman" -such as the ones that you see in toilet doors- and the particular "tall, blonde asian girl with a pimple on her left cheek, raised in Toulouse and who is currently playing soccer with a goat head". In other words, narrative is much better and gives better tools for telling the concrete, the particular, while simulation is better suited for explaining mechanisms, how things work. My idea of simulation is closer to "Age of Empires" than "Quake", because the latter is a highly constrained and simplistic dynamic system (move, shoot). Obviously, the strategies that can arise from Quake's simple mechanics can be quite complex. Maybe I am being unfair, since I am more interested in understanding the ancient social mechanics that "Age of Empires" depicts rather than the military strategies that can be learned from games such as "Quake" or "Half Life".
Games are about constrained freedom. Freedom to move and to act, but within a constrained environment that sets a problem that needs to be solved. This balance is the key to good game design. Adventure games generally block any progress within the game until you find the right key. This also happens in "Doom", but because of Doom's simpler mechanics, the algorithm to find a key is generally simpler (kill monsters, try corridors where you never been before). In order to find a key in an adventure game, many strategies are possible (to pixel-hunt for a secret object, to combine alternative objects, to discuss with different characters, to solve other puzzles).
In my opinion, adventure games will know a come-back in the future, but only after certain structural changes. The main goal should not be to find the correct "ending(s)" as envisioned by the author, nor the "right" narrative path. Adventure games should not focus on the plot, but rather on the mechanics of the plot. Adventure games should be story generators, where the pleasure is not find out what would happen in a story if we play around with certain actions or characters. Until now, most story generators have focused on creating "enjoyable" stories with Aristotle's seal of approval. The goal would be to discover what would make Hamlet avenge his father or what would make him run into exile. The actual outcome is not as relevant as understanding the behavioral rules behind the character (even if these rules are not deterministic). Simulation is a game of mirrors that let us take a peek into the mechanics of the character or sequence of actions as "programmed" by the author. The pleasure of simulation is in experimentation, not on watching a predetermined sequence of events. Future adventure games need a good setting and good characters, but not a plot. If there is a plot, it would be there just to be deconstructed and to serve as background reference. A good simulation-adventure would not be based on finding out whodunnit but in playing with the elements to frame the buttler (the store clerk or the detective) and see if we can get away with it. The real adventure is in experimentation. Think of videogames not as narrative but as a storyteller's lab.

Back from the South; back to the South

In spite of my poor little country being falling apart, the trip was nice and the food was good. There's a conference that might interest some of you guys out there. The good thing about it is that it is in Madrid, a place famous for its good food and wine (yes, you are right, food and videogames are my two main research topics ;)

10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1. I'm sooooo gone.

I am on my way to chilly Montevideo. It's the second time I am returning in 4 years in the land of the parking lots (a.k.a. The United States of America). Short stop in Buenos Aires and then a nice boat will take me home. No blogs for a week, though. Don't miss me :)

"It's rather curious or revealing that all the classics...

... of Western game scholarship, let's say from Huizinga and Caillois to Avedon and Sutton-Smith, tried to study games as games without defining them as narratives. So should we believe that suddenly, by the advent of computer games, games turned into narratives overnight? Perhaps something happened in the marketing departments instead. "
Markku Eskelinen, dichtung-digital.

Why videogame-themed movies suck

Long, hot weekend. I spent it coding a new soccer game for my job. I just took one break and went to the movies to watch “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”. While I am not a big fan of the game, I have played it a couple of times and I decided to give the movie a try, even the reviews were not very encouraging.

As I expected, the movie sucked –well, not as much as the Mario Bros. or Street Fight movies did.

In addition to Angelina’s thorax, the movie is about some antique conspiracy. The film ends up by being a quilt of action, videogamish scenes. It was not hard to find different videogame genres represented on the movie, from action, kill’em’all (the scene when Lara is attacked, which is from one of the Tomb Raider games), to one-on-one fighting (Jolie versus the robot) to platform games (the final scene jumping over the orbiting planet’s clock). Needless to say, the plot is despicable.

The reason why videogame-themed movies suck is very simple, indeed. The Tomb Raider movie tries hard to be a movie while keeping some recognizable videogamish flavor, as in the scenes that I previously listed. The problem is that, actually, the Tomb Raider game tries hard to be like a good movie -an Indiana-Jonesque action movie- while keeping its videogame characteristics. What we have here is a movie trying to be like a game that is trying to be like a good movie. What Tomb Raider (the film) needed was not to reference the game, but actually to reference what the game was referencing. In order to get closer to the spirit of the game, the film needed to get closer to what the game was trying to reach: not a game, but a good action movie. In order to succeed, videogame-themed movies have to forget that they are being based on a game and should try to become the kind of movie that would have had that game as a spin-off. Until they figure this out, Hollywood will keep pouring millions into the garbage bin. Well, unless they have a main character with a très jolie pair of bosoms.

Woke up at the wee hours today

Pilgrimage to the local computer store. Got one of the two last Game Boy Advance in stock. Got Rayman (a lot of eye candy, but good platform game). Everybody is saying that Castlevania is great, but I was not in the mood for vampires.
The thing is amazingly light (just 2AA batteries). It's supposed to work with the Gamecube and with cellphones. However, Nintendo phone strategy is not clear. Probably it will get limited to email, SMS and, of course, online gaming. It would be cool if it had a flash enabled browser but that is extremely unlikely: Nintendo wants you to spend the big bucks on their games and not on some cheesy free Flash game.
Nintendo was in the position to design this device with total freedom. Therefore, they did not go for performance (it's decent, but no 3D support) nor fancy features. According to their Gamecube strategy they do "games and nothing but games". Definitively, they know about games. While a fancy PDA like the iPaq can emulate SuperNintendo, ZX Spectrum and even Doom and Quake, it was not designed with gaming in mind (some games are simply impossible to play). I have another PocketPC PDA (the HP Jornada) which has some HP software that allows you to set the buttons as game key: the thing still sucks (and it is too slow compared to the iPaq).
The Game Boy Advance is a very nice piece of portable. Still, too bad it doesn't have a calendar -- I would throw my Palm away if it did! Any kid in the world will want one (with the exception of those who starve, or are walking over landmines or those who will be trialed as adults with the agreement of $#@!$#@$#@$@#$#@$!@!#@!#@ Bush's United States Attorney General).

For all you guys out there that are dying...

... to have a Michel Foucault action figure, your dreams became reality, thanks to www.theory.org.uk . They also have a cool collection of downloadable trading cards. Forget Pokemon! This is way cooler... ;)

Remeber Horatio

There are more things in heaven and Earth than are found in Google

"_Don't play with fire!"

Our civilization has been telling this to us during millennia. You are not supposed to play with "serious" stuff. The basic assumption is that if you are playing with something, you are not taking it seriously. But there is also a component of what anthropology calls "magical thinking": the irrational belief that an event may happen just by pretending to perform it. This is nothing but good old fear of representation, that is in very good health all over the world, including countries like Afghanistan (where the Taliban destroys ancient Buddha statues) or the USA ( where Americans are so afraid of using the "f" word). However, the fear of simulation is different from the fear of representation. Unlike a statue, that simply represents, a game simulates an event and so it makes players to actually perform an action. It doesn't matter if the action is pure make-belief: to perform an action is even more "transparent" (closer to the "real" thing) than representation.

In addition to this fear of make-belief performance, there is also the fear of anything that is non-narrative. What do I mean by this? Since the beginning of time, our culture has been using representation and narrative (understood as representations that follows a certain structure) for making statements. This is why interpretation is so important, because it allows us to get a "message". Simulation works in a very different way. Simulation is not about the representation of events, but about the representation of behavior (potential events). Therefore, a simulation is not an artifact that can be interpreted as narrative. A videogame will produce different meaning depending on the performance of the player. A videogame about Anne Frank would be immoral because it would not be narrative. If Anne Frank died in one game session but survived on the next, we would perceive the game as plain wrong, because it would be trivializing the value of human life. Narrative is perfect for describing Anne Frank's story, because since it can not be changed, it can be used to make an statement. On the other hand, simulation is not about statements, but about change. Simulation is about exploration and experimentation. Simulation is about taking chances, even if sometimes the results may not be accepted as such by our values.

The fear of simulation is due to the fact that is a representational form that goes against the status-quo. Simulation is vague; it is always provisory. Simulation can empower humans because it carries an extremely revolutionary message: change is possible. Narrative is static, simulation is dynamic. And this is exactly why playing with serious stuff has been taboo. Now that we have the tools for creating compelling simulations, the taboo is likely to become even stronger. This is not Marxist babble from the sixties: I am arguing that simulation can really contribute to social change, because for the first time in history we can now simulate complex systems such as social groups (and in the next future, it is likely that we will be able to do the same with human relationships). Can simulation change the world (peace and love, peace and love!)? Of course not, you dumb-ass! Simulation can only contribute to change our static vision of reality.

In the next future, do expect a LOT of opposition against simulation. We will soon learn at which temperature simulations burn (my guess is that it will be even hotter than Fahrenheit 451).

cast01. A new conference, in Germany

Learn more about it here. Deadline for submissions is now June 15th.