Anyone who’s got friends in other countries, something which has become more and more likely with the rise of online social networking, will know how difficult it is to do things together sometimes. Different time zones, the fact that you’re not “just around the corner” from one another – all manner of factors conspire to ensure that arranging a friendly game of Modern Warfare or Fat Princess, let alone anything more adventurous, is tricky business.
So what’s the solution? Well, how about if you don’t actually have to be online at the same time as each other to play together? It’s obviously not quite the same as actually being able to talk smack live to each other, but it’s a start. And it’s a gaming trend which is growing.
Many iPhone and iPad owners have been enjoying Words with Friends, a Scrabble clone with a different board layout to avoid difficult copyright negotiations. Words with Friends gets this idea of asynchronous multiplayer just right. Play a move and a pop-up push notification is sent to your opponent that it’s their turn. They can play their turn whenever is convenient to them. Then the notification is sent back to you. There’s also a chat window in game, where messages can be left for the other player. If you want to both stay logged in and play in real-time, there’s nothing stopping you doing that. But if, like most people, time is of the essence and you don’t have a spare hour for a friendly game, you can spread your game over the course of several days, weeks, months as necessary.
Obviously this works great for turn-based games, but what about genres which are traditionally real-time? Take racing games, for example.
Well, here’s a clever solution. The rather literally-titled Async Racing allows players to compete against each other without being logged in at the same time. The way it does this is by recording players’ laps around the game’s tracks and then using these recorded laps as opponents when someone decides to enter a race. Mario Kart Wii did something similar some time back with its Mario Kart Channel functionality, and it proved rather successful for a while, at least among my friends and I.
Then there’s Geometry Wars 2, perhaps the best – and simplest – example of asynchronous multiplayer fun. By posting one of your friends’ scores in the upper-right corner of your screen at all times during gameplay, you’re always competing against someone else. Assuming you actually have some friends, of course.
While asynchronous multiplayer is never going to completely take the place of simultaneous play complete with all the trash-talking that entails, it’s certainly an attractive alternative for those who are either short on time or friends in the same time zone. It’ll be interesting to see how – or indeed if – it will translate to other genres.
One possibility is for it to use the behavioural analysis that Halo: Reach is supposedly going to pioneer for its matchmaking. Imagine being able to party up with an AI team in something like World of Warcraft made up of your friends’ personalities, or have a game of Call of Duty against bots based on behavioural analysis of your buddies. Sure, it’s not a patch on actually being there with your friends, but we’ve established that isn’t always an option for some people.
Games are more fun with friends, whether they can be there with you or not. New opportunities to “play” with people you wouldn’t normally get to should be embraced. Asynchronous play is going to be a big part of the future of gaming, and it’ll be interesting to see who gets it right first.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Anyone who’s got friends in other countries, something which has become more and more likely with the rise of online social networking, will know how difficult it is to do things together sometimes. Different time zones, the fact that you’re not “just around the corner” from one another – all manner of factors conspire to ensure that arranging a friendly game of Modern Warfare or Fat Princess, let alone anything more adventurous, is tricky business.
