Art/Fart

Now with pictures! Happy now? 🙂

The idea of “games as art” is an over-discussed topic and has been since the days of the later Final Fantasy games, which many regard as one of many points where video games just started to show their potential to tell interesting stories in interesting ways.

So I’m not going to talk about games as art – at least, not “mainstream” games. I want to take a moment to share a few curious experiences I’ve had recently. I hesitate to call all of these examples except one “games” by virtue of the fact that they’re not really traditional “games” as such, more interactive artistic works, and I think that’s fast becoming a genre of its own – something I’m all for.

A few of these games are probably quite well known by the side of the gamer community that is interested in this sort of thing, a couple of others you may not have heard of. So I hope that by the end of this post you might be inspired to check out some things a little bit outside the box. You may well find them pretentious, boring and crap – I’m sure many people do – but like any work of “art”, there are bound to be differing opinions, expectations and feelings about them.

So let’s jump in with probably the most well-known of the titles I’m going to discuss today. There may be spoilarz ahead… and you can click the game titles to visit the sites for them. (If you’re reading this on Facebook, you might not be able to. Click here to read this post properly.)

Braid

Braid is a game by Jonathan Blow that represents, to me, one of the interesting things about the Xbox 360 – the fact that this is a console with such diversity that triple-A “blockbuster” titles like Gears of War 2 and independent “arthouse” (for want of a better term) games like this can happily coexist on the platform quite comfortably. With the recent launch of the NXE and the Community Games project, I think it’s relatively safe to say that Braid will not be the last game of its type that we’ll see.

But what is Braid? Ostensibly it’s a platform game that largely centres around puzzles rather than action. The central game mechanic is an interesting “time rewind” system which has an interesting twist put onto it in each of the game’s worlds. In some worlds, you can simply rewind time if you make a mistake. In others, certain areas or objects are immune to time manipulation, so you can rewind time in the areas around the object and remain unaffected by this. In yet others, time winds forwards while you run to the right and backwards while you run to the left. It’s an interesting mechanic that makes for some absolute brain-benders, and I maintain that I’m far too stupid to ever solve the game without help.

Still, the interesting thing about Braid for me, and the thing which divides opinion the most, is the “meaning” behind it all. Each world is preceded by a series of text interludes, describing the main character’s quest to reach a princess in floaty, dreamy, vague language and tying the central mechanic of each world in with the main character’s conflicting emotions and feelings about time, place, love and loss as he proceeds through the game. It’s a fine line between “emo bullshit” and “existential masterpiece” – and there’s plenty of people on both sides of the debate on this one. One thing is certain though, everyone who has played the game has plenty to say about it, whether it’s good or bad.

Passage and Gravitation

These two “autobiographical” games by Jason Rohrer at first glance appear to be simplistic “retro” style games with eye-catching super low-res pixel art. But look into them a little deeper (or, if you need a little prompting, as I did, read the Creator’s Statement that Rohrer has thoughtfully posted for each game) and you’ll find that each of these two games represent a deeply personal exploration of a certain aspect of “life” to Rohrer – with Passage offering a look at mortality, companionship, ambition, love, loss and the balance between these things and Gravitation looking at the concept of fatherhood, the creative process and again, the balance between these things.

Each is represented very simply with the aforementioned low-resolution pixel art. But it’s the little things about the presentation and the games themselves that carry the deeper meaning. In Passage you start on the left of the screen, with more of the “world” – your life – stretching out ahead of you. Very shortly after the beginning, you have the choice of picking up a companion, who then stays with you until almost the end of the game. This makes you unable to reach some areas of the game, but it’s actually quite difficult to consider leaving her behind. If you’re me, anyway.

As you progress through the game, you gradually move across the screen towards the right side, meaning that at the beginning, you are looking forward to what is ahead, while at the end you are looking back on where you have just been. Shortly before the end, had you chosen to take your companion with you, she dies, leaving you as an old, lonely man left to trudge on towards his own death alone. This moment, although it is represented simply by the companion suddenly turning into a gravestone and the speed of movement of your character suddenly cutting to a quarter of what it was originally, is a hugely touching moment due to how understated it is. For me, it put across the idea that death is unglamorous, is unavoidable, but there is always someone left behind to trudge on without the person who is gone. I found it to be quite a beautiful, thought-provoking sentiment that is all the more poignant when you read Rohrer’s description of the meaning behind the game.

Gravitation, conversely, does not deal with a subject such as death, but rather the struggle that a creative person has between his art and his family. The game starts with you playing “catch” with a child figure. Each time you bounce the ball back to the child, a little heart appears above their head, but you cannot make any progress in the game itself by doing this. To score “points”, you have to leap up a huge tower, with gravity that is constantly changing, presumably representing varying degrees of motivation (or “mania” as the Rohrer puts it), and collect stars, which fall to the ground and form rocks. Following this, you have to drop back down and push these blocks into a furnace.

The twist is, the more stars that drop, the less able you are to get to your child to play with them, as the rocks that appear form directly in front of your child, blocking your way to her, and this also seems to have an effect on the gravity of the game. So it becomes a balancing act between play with your child and the “work” of pushing the blocks into the furnace.

These two games are two of my favourite examples of this subgenre because of their simplicity of presentation and gameplay, and the amount of “interpretation” that can be had by looking more closely at what is happening. I think it’s also really interesting to see “autobiographical” games, as Rohrer calls them, and he himself points out that this is not something that many developers have done as yet.

The Majesty of Colors

This is another game that chooses to use 8-bit style pixel art as its means of presentation, giving it a distinctive look and character that seems entirely appropriate for the game. I can’t pin down why this is, but I love it. This is also the first of two games hosted on Kongregate, which originally became my favourite Flash games site purely for the presence of Desktop Tower Defense following my brother’s recommendations, but seems to be developing into an interesting community of indie developers, “interesting game enthusiasts” like myself, and illiterate 12 year olds who just want to play stuff with badly-drawn animé-style characters. Fortunately, like the Xbox 360, the groups seem to coexist quite happily, meaning we get titles like this.

In The Majesty of Colors, you play a betentacled sea monster. The game opens in black and white with balloons floating past your face and the “monster’s” inner monologue represented as text across the top of the screen. Grabbing a balloon and bringing it close to the monster’s eyes suddenly brings the world into vibrant colour, and the story itself begins. Essentially, the player can choose to manipulate the humans who appear on the scene either through violence or helping them, and this eventually leads to one of five endings, each of which involves the “monster” (whom, it transpires, is actually a person having a dream) awakening in very different ways.

I kind of don’t want to say anything else about this one, because I believe it’s worth experiencing. It’s a simplistic game with not a lot of “point” to it as a game, but it’s very much an interactive work of art to me.

Coil

The first of two games by Edmund McMillen, Coil is a self-professed game with no instructions that requests you “keep an open mind while playing”. It’s presented in a rather abstract manner, with mouse-driven mini-games interspersed with Braid-style text interludes. The story of the game appears to be deliberately ambiguous to provoke discussion, but the consensus from many people seems to be that it is about a woman who was raped and the feelings she develops towards the child that is the product of that incident.

Like The Majesty of Colors, I believe this is a “game” that’s somewhat open to interpretation, and another that will probably split opinion. The lack of instructions can make it challenging to progress, but it’s worth persevering with the story to see what you think of it.

Aether

Another from McMillen, Aether seems to be a rather personal story about childhood feelings of inadequacy in the eyes of others. Players swing through space atop the back of a curious blob-like monster trying to solve simple puzzles on planets to restore colour to their lives. The game is a somewhat abstract “journey into imagination” that seems to represent an individual’s struggle for validation and acceptance by others. It also has some fabulously hypnotic dynamically remixing music which really helps with the atmosphere.

So there you have them. Pretentious crap or an interesting method of displaying a work of art and telling a deeply personal story? I vote the latter, though I am more than prepared to hear people disagree, which they no doubt will!

‘Tis the season to be miserable

So what’s the deal with winter anyway?

Trite opening I know but it bears some discussion. Exactly what is it about those winter months that makes an already-curmudgeonly old git like myself into a regular Sad Sack? I refuse to believe there’s not an answer beyond “it’s cold” because I’m not the only one it happens to.

Case study number one: my very good friend, who we’ll just call “E” in case she minds being used as a case study, cited the example to me that every bad breakup she’s ever had took place in the month of December, almost without fail. Is this a symptom of the winter blues or just a coincidence? Whatever it is, it’s made her just as distrustful of the month of Our Lord’s birth than I am.

Who knows. All I know is that it’s dark in the morning when I go to work, often dark in the evening when I return. The general public are in that irritatingly frenzied state of “panic buying” – because some people still aren’t aware that most shops are shut on Christmas Day after all – and all those little annoyances about the general public that you already notice more than the average man in the street when you work in retail suddenly become ten to fifteen times worse. (I have no scientific basis for quoting that figure, I just thought I’d channel the arseholes who come up with make-up “fake science” adverts for a moment – they’re gone now, don’t worry.)

Last year I had the most miserable Christmas of my life. My wife-to-be had departed for Bolton to spend Christmas with her family (duty calls and all that) and I was scheduled to work.

But I had ‘flu (and don’t even get me started on that “man flu” bollocks that is such an unfunny running joke in this country), so I was confined to bed, unable even to go to work and spend time with the few buddies who were still here. Nope, instead I lay in bed on Christmas Day until about 3pm, only rising to make a Beechams Hot Lemon drink when the banging headaches and joint pains were getting a bit much.

I know there’s people out there who have far more miserable Christmases than that, but this is my rant and god-dammit if I’m not going to be a bit selfish! (I also hate how political correctness dictates the necessity of a paragraph like this one, but that’s another post all of its own)

Anyway. This Christmas is fortunately shaping up to be a lot better, as my now-wife Jane and I are spending our first Christmas on our own as a married couple.

It’s not that I don’t like spending time with people, you understand.

Actually, that’s a lie. It’s EXACTLY that I don’t like spending time with people. Especially stressed-out people which, it often seems to me, is becoming more and more a part of the holiday season. The clue’s in the name, people! A holiday should be a break, not an excuse to panic over a fat-ass turkey and whether or not you’ve got enough bloody vol-au-vents to feed Uncle Boggart.

Breathe.

So, there you have it.

I hope you, if you’re reading this, have a better experience in the wintertime than either I or several of my friends have had or, in some cases, are having.

And if you do have friends who are having a tough winter, give them a hug. Sometimes it’s all you need to let someone know you care, and it immediately makes things feel that much better.

I know, I’m a big girl, but I don’t care.

Merry Christmas.

HUMBUG!!!

On Evil

After completing Fallout 3 recently, I suddenly had a hankering to return to Oblivion, a game I hadn’t played for well over a year. Fallout had tickled my free-roaming Western RPG bone (if there is such a thing, and I don’t invite you to postulate where it might be in the comments) and I wanted more.

Oblivion is one of those RPGs I’ve started at least ten times with different characters to experiment with different things. The thing I’ve really liked about it every time I’ve played it is that each time I emerge from those Imperial sewers I can wander off in a different direction and do something completely different. One time I went straight for the main quest (and didn’t finish it). One time I headed straight for the Arena in the Imperial City to kick some ass (bare-handed on that occasion, that was an entertaining challenge). One time I headed for the Mages’ Guild and took that questline to its conclusion. Yet another time I decided to explore the dungeons scattered around the landscape, simply to acquire as much loot as possible.

But there’s one thing that all these trips into the wilderness had in common – they all involved me being “good”. Not once did I veer towards the dark side, bad Jedi, Renegade, negative reputation, whatever you want to call it. I always do this. In any game that promises “moral choices” I inevitably end up playing the “good guy” because, at heart, despite my grumpy old man persona, I’m a good guy. I even did this in Fallout 3, where it’s kind of “all right” to be a bit of a bastard because, well, everyone else is.

Not this time, though. I decided that this time was going to be the time I went very, very bad in Oblivion.

I started by hunting down the Gray Fox to start the Thieves’ Guild questline, which I promptly made my way through. For those of you unfamiliar with it (and be aware there are spoilers ahead) this sequence of quests takes you from lowly burglar up to an extremely high-profile thief, culminating in you stealing one of the series’ titual Elder Scrolls from the Imperial Palace. By the time you’ve pulled this off, if you’re anything like me, you feel like you’re a badass thief, but you also feel faintly bad for taking advantage of the blind monks you stole it from.

This is nothing – nothing – compared to how sullied you feel after completing the Dark Brotherhood questline, however.

The Dark Brotherhood come to you in your sleep after you commit your first unprovoked murder in the game. In my case, this happened as part of a sidequest I happened to be completing at the time. I had two possible solutions to the quest, which essentially revolved around a captured bandit and his lover having a disagreement. My choices were to either betray the bandit or his lover. I elected to betray his lover, who had put across the impression of being something of a heartless bitch anyway, and after all, honour among thieves and all that.

Actually, “betray” doesn’t quite sum up what I did to her. I broke back into her house while she was sleeping and shot her in the head with a magic arrow, which exploded and sent her flying, smacking straight into her ceiling before collapsing in a crumpled heap in front of her fireplace. This spectacle was faintly amusing, as ragdoll physics deaths are often wont to be, but the ominous words across the top of the screen “Your murder has been witnessed by forces unknown…” sent a slight chill down my spine. Sure, I’d stolen stuff before, but the Thieves’ Guild questline had felt faintly “Robin Hood”-ish. This was getting into full-on evil territory now, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

I also wasn’t sure I liked it when a mysterious robed gentleman visited me while I was sleeping off a level gain and offering me membership in the Dark Brotherhood conditional on my murdering an old, helpless man named Rufio.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I killed Rufio and thus began my run through what many believe to be Oblivion’s best questline. The Dark Brotherhood storyline is a tale of murder, betrayal and vengeance filled with a lot of violence and some excellent plot twists, some of which are left for the player to interpret themselves, which is a touch I really liked. For example, one late quest in the sequence has you picking up a series of “dead drop” orders containing the names and locations of people for you to assassinate. Now, you can blindly continue through this sequence of assassinations by simply following your quest log’s instructions – but if you actually look at the dead drop items in your inventory, you may spot that at a certain point, the “handwriting” that the notes are written in changes. At the time, I simply figured this to be some variation or inconsistency in the presentation but it actually turned out to be an extremely pertinent piece of information.

I had a massive amount of fun with the Dark Brotherhood questline but, as I say, it left me feeling faintly soiled. The experience I had, though, plus the fact that it had an actual emotional impact on me – arguably a more powerful emotional impact than a “good” questline – makes me more inclined to check out more “evil” options in other games from the outset. I know I’m certainly keen to try Fallout again as a more “evil” character in the future, if only because Fallout makes a big deal of the fact that your choices are supposed to have pretty major consequences later in the game. I’m yet to see if this actually is the case, but I’m certainly interested to find out.

Now, of course, my Oblivion character is on a quest for redemption. Wish her luck.

Board Gamery

Happy December, everybody, and I hope all you vidyagames fans out there survived the November onslaught of awesomeness. I plumped for Fallout 3 and played it from beginning to end, loving every minute… but more on that another day. There have been plenty of “November games” blog posts all over the place so I thought I’d take a step back and blog about something different for a change.

I’ve mentioned board gaming before but I think it’s time we had a full-on post devoted to it. So here goes.

I’ve been a fan of tabletop gaming for many years, ever since my then-teenaged brother’s then-girlfriend introduced me to Hero Quest and Space Crusade, games which captivated me not only with their cool, super-detailed little Citadel Miniatures pieces but the fact that they told a story and did something far beyond games that I had played in the past had done. They had interesting mechanics that went beyond “roll and move”, they had an interesting twist on the traditionally competitive nature of other board games by pitting up to three players (the Heroes or the Marines, depending on if you’re talking about Hero Quest or Space Crusade) against one more powerful player (the Dungeon Master or the Alien).

I was so captivated by Hero Quest and Space Crusade that I managed to convince my folks to get me a copy of Advanced Heroquest for one Christmas/birthday/present-receiving opportunity – this despite the fact that I didn’t really have anyone to play with on a regular basis. AHQ took Hero Quest and took it to the next level, with a more “RPG” style system involving character statistics, equipment, hit rolls and all sorts of other interesting rules. More intriguingly, it featured both random dungeon generation, meaning a different experience every time, plus a comprehensive set of rules for solo play, so that my lack of gaming friends living nearby wasn’t an issue.

Fast forward a few years and we reach the present. At some point last year, my buddies Sam and Tom and I decided to sit down and play some board games. We started with Risk and then, following some lucky victories on eBay, we dug out Hero Quest and Space Crusade.

This was the beginning of things – that and discovering Board Game Geek, a site with a big, lively community that discusses board games in great detail and offers excellent, articulate community reviews. (Board gamers seem to be typically rather more articulate than many video gamers, I’ve noticed.) Over time, we started to amass a collection of interesting and out-of-the-ordinary board games. I’d like to share my thoughts on a couple of them with you now.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a peculiar game from the off in that it’s not competitive at all. It pits two to four players against the game itself. The premise is that the players are all members of an elite disease-fighting organisation and have been tasked with curing four deadly diseases that are sweeping the planet. Each player has a unique “role” which gives them a special ability – the Medic, for example, is better at “cleaning” a city of disease, the Scientist discovers cures easier than the other characters, the Dispatcher can move other players on their turn to put them into a strategically advantageous position, the Researcher can exchange information (coloured cards that have to be collected as a set to discover a cure) with other players easier than the others and the Operations Expert can build a Research Facility (a location where cures can be discovered, and also a means of “fast traveling” between locations) anywhere at no cost.

It’s the balance between these roles and the strategy which you have to develop that makes this game so interesting… and it’s the random element thrown up by the fact that the diseases spread a certain amount each turn that makes it exciting and difficult. It often seems relatively easy to get to the “halfway” point with two of the four diseases cured before an epidemic sweeps through an area which had looked somewhat “quiet” before, leading to a situation difficult or even impossible to recover from.

Pandemic is simple to learn and encourages a huge amount of communication and strategising between players. I really like it, even though the “Heroic” game we’ve been playing recently (which makes the game more challenging by throwing more “Epidemic” cards into the mix) kicks our ass every time we play it. It’s the kind of game where you think “well, next time if we do this…” every time.

Our worst game lasted two turns. That’s two players’ turns, not two rounds of the table.

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

Agricola

I mentioned this on the recent Squadron of Shame podcast (see links to the right if you want to listen or subscribe) but it’s worth mentioning again. Agricola is currently one of the Geek’s top-rated board games. Players take on the role of a 16th-century German farmer struggling to get by in difficult times. Throughout the course of the game, you have to try and feed your family, grow your family (more family members means more actions per turn), plough fields, sow crops, breed animals and ensure that your farmyard is as full as possible.

The difficulty comes in the fact that all this has to be done in the space of 14 turns, which never seems to be quite enough time.

Each turn, players use one of their “family members” to take an action from the “action spaces” on the board in the middle of the table. This could be anything from taking resources, required for building pretty much everything, to actually building said structures, to baking bread to produce food. The interesting way the game works is that as it progresses, more and more action spaces become available so it gradually increases in complexity as time goes on – that and the fact that once one person has taken an action, no-one else can on that turn.

I am shit at Agricola. I’m not sure what it is – perhaps it’s an inability to look as far ahead as my buddies – but I enjoy it nonetheless as it’s satisfying to put together your farm, however feeble it ends up looking at the end of the game!

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

Mystery of the Abbey

Describe Mystery of the Abbey to someone and the first thing everyone says is “Oh, that sounds like Clue(do)“. Try it – here’s a description.

There’s been a murder at the Abbey. The players have to discover the identity of the culprit by gathering information, eliminating suspects through questioning and deduction before finally revealing the identity of the perpetrator.

It’s more interesting and thought-provoking than Clue, though, in that it requires you to spend a little time formulating your questions. Rather than simply “calling Colonel Mustard into the library with the candlestick”, you have to actually ask your fellow players questions, being careful to phrase them in such a way that reveals information to you and not to others. Players that you question can either take a vow of silence, in which case no information is exchanged, or answer your question, which gives them the automatic right to hurl a question straight back at you.

The Abbey setting provides scope for a number of interesting rules, too. Every four rounds, the investigative monks have to tromp back to the Ecclesia to take Mass. At Mass, as everyone knows, monks gossip, so players have to pass a particular number of cards (each card representing a monk who DIDN’T commit the crime) to the next player on the table. In this way, it becomes another challenge to conceal certain innocent monks from the other players for as long as possible.

Then there’s the Penance rules. These are some vaguely-defined but incredibly harsh rules that punish not following the way of the Abbey. If a player moves out of turn, or breaks a rule, or forgets to move the little bell that marks progress towards the next Mass, then the other players can call “Penance!” (by common agreement) and send the monk back to the Ecclesia to miss a turn atoning for their sins. The Penance rules are particularly harsh, especially given the fairly mild-natured manner of the rest of the game, but it gives the whole thing a slight air of tension which is enormously entertaining.

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

So there you have it. Three great games that I highly recommend you check out if you’re the slightest bit interested in going beyond what more “traditional” games like Monopoly can offer.