Caram on Games (COG) is an occasional ramble in which I discuss computer gaming, gaming culture and how I perceive them, in an attempt to talk about a medium that I've always been passionate about, or at least enjoyed. Every part is an exploration of thoughts, meaning that it comes together as it is written- so while they may meander for a while, a point will eventually be reached. Maybe. After a lot of words, and sometimes numbers. You have been warned.
Let's start with the basics:
0.
What makes a good game?
This question has as many answers as there are ways to make a game, and most of them are subjective, dependent on how the individual gamer experiences their play, how deeply they are willing to delve into the details surrounding a game and how much time this will take, expectations towards gameplay and stortytelling, the studio and publisher, familiarity with methods of non-linear stories… This answer becomes more complicated from a publication and development perspective, as it includes many business aspects that the individual consumer does not need to consider- and as an individual consumer, I won't, save the consideration that I won't spend money on a game only to discover I need to spend more money to actually finish it.
But I can answer this question for myself, in three parts:
My second answer has a lot to do with the world constructed in a game, and the way its various parts are glued together- am I being presented with a coherent whole? Keeping in mind the first answer, this means that not only do I expect an experience that is specific to me, I also a expect a game world that allows me the freedom to create that experience, or at least tells and shows me what kind of experience I can expect, with enough detail for the experience to become specific to me. This has little to do with graphical hi-fi- a world can be beautifully rendered with all the latest graphical shenanigans, but devoid of depth. Conversely, it can be superficially "ugly"- especially when looking back at game worlds from the last decades, or indie games- but offer a world that is rich in detail, stories to discover, interactions and ways to make it "yours". This goes beyond needing to answer "where does their food come from?"- a question that remained mostly unanswered in Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland, but rectified in later versions of the software.
This means that, within the game's systems, interactions, locations and actions have to follow an internal logic that is upheld throughout, items you find should have some contextual use within the game, even if that use is decorative, or destructive.
An example: a block of 2 in a game 0f 2048; within the game, it takes on the function of the smallest available building block. It can be combined with another 2 to create a 4, two 4's make an 8, two 8's make a 16, ad almost infinitum, as long as it infinitum on an exponential grid. The context of a block changes, depending if it is next to another block of the same value, or whether it is next to one of a different value- it is sometimes a barrier, sometimes a building block. The logic of the game allows it to be both, and applies this throughout. The way an individual game of 2048 will play out is very much dependent on the player and their skill level with the game. Thus: I am free to create a personal, if frustrating experience within a world that moves consistently according to an understandable set of rules. The objects I interact with in that world are subject to those rules and fulfill a contextual role that remains coherent. The experience is specific to the logic of that game and the playthrough is specific to the player. The location of the game- an exponential grid- is constant.
A door is several things, depending on its context: It can be an entrance, an exit, a barrier, a challenge with a lock. It can offer safety, be an avenue to danger or loom ominously, a portent of possibility. It can also be a jar, but that is one of the oldest puns in the book.
Did you know know that it's not possible to knock on doors in Skyrim? Imagine for a moment that you are invited to someone's house. You pass by, only to discover that they are home but have locked the door. A basic assumption your socialisation would lead you to at this point is that it would be good manners to make your presence known to the person expecting you. I doubt- and please do correct me if I'm wrong- that many people would automatically arrive at the conclusion that you now have to pick a lock to enter their house. And yet, on that particular evening in Whiterun, I found myself having to do exactly that to be able to meet someone who wanted my help.
Even accepting that this is a different age, time and place, and that I may not understand the prevalent customs, I found it difficult to reconcile the idea that I would have to perform what the game world deems a criminal act to enter a house I was invited to. Though, as a player, I could work with that, it did not follow the rules, or the etiquette established for the characters living in that world and though my decision to break in was specific to me, I believe that, at that juncture, most others playing the game were forced into a similar decision- and similarly irked by it. This was not a subversion of my expectation towards the way a door works, this broke with the internal logic of the game and- in an admittedly small way- lessened the coherence of the world I was inhabiting, and undermined what it had led me to expect of it so far. On the plus side, you can, most of the time, tell where the food has come from, and you can consistently break into houses, even if you are expected for a visit.
One of the transformative- and oft-cited- moments in gaming history is the first Bioshock's (2K Games, 2007) narrative twist, which throws into question the agency of the character in the game, and all the actions the player has undertaken to reach that point in the story. It works on a narrative level, as it reveals some of the background of the character you are playing, and about the strange, decaying place you find yourself in, though I have issues with the gameplay that follows. If you have never played this, or have somehow managed not to hear about this twist for ten-plus years, and you are still reading this long ramble, thank you- and now I will spoil that twist for you.
The man you believe to be your main antagonist reveals that the character you have been inhabiting for the past hours is under a form of suggestive hypnosis, triggered by certain phrases- in this case "Would you kindly". He then proceeds to order you to kill him, reminding you that "A man chooses, a slave obeys". The player never gets to choose whether to kill Andrew Ryan or not- the character does the deed, wrested from your control in a moment that is as horrifying to watch and frustrating, knowing that there is no way the person in front of the screen can intervene. Your suggested agency as a player is entirely removed and your role as puppeteer undermined entirely by the narrative thrust of the story- it wants you to move in a certain direction, and, save quit, there is very little you can do to change that direction .
This moment makes Rapture- the city you are in- very much yours. Where previously, as a player, you were mostly content to follow directions, trusting established game logic of someone telling you to go Somewhere and do Something, this twist heightens your attention toward the place, imbues you, for the first time, with a sense of being truly lost and makes you distrust its inhabitants- it is as if you see the world with your own eyes for the first time, it becomes personal, in ways it had not been before. You had been a tourist traveling in someone elses's shoes; now you discover how much this place has become a part of you.
The internal workings of the city remain the same, in spite of all this- consistent, reliable, sunk 20 000 leagues under the sea, and sinking. What has changed is your perspective on the place, and the balance of the powers that remain. It feels more sinister, less defined- the goal that drove you to explore this place is dead, the people you thought you could trust are undeserving of confidence and, though the narrative is compelling you forward, you are given time to wonder whether you should give in to this compulsion, or just end it here, leaving the remaining power players to power on. When I first played through this, I recall distrusting the character I was playing after the twist: were they showing me everything they were seeing? Was I ever in control of them, or their actions? When would that control be taken away again? It is very rare that, after spending hours convincing you that this currently you, and these are the shoes you are wearing, a game will blast those shoes off your feet and put such a distance between the player and the player character, at least intentionally. It is even rarer to encounter a world that is so well constructed that, in spite of the activation of critical thinking, the player never loses their sense of immersion in the world.
The reason that I ended up getting back in those shoes was that they happened to be walking a world that had become consistently tangible to me, and that I wanted to help the character find some kind of closure to their mesmeric journey. Rapture beckoned, more so than the end of the story, promising to reveal some of its secrets before this was over, and there was still too much I did not know about it, and hoped to discover with less demands on my attention.
What disappointed me, however, was that after having established itself as an unreliable narrator by combining a great story twist with a very meta layer on top (yum, cherries!), the game returned to the previously established method of guiding the player through the narrative by instruction and, for some reason, expected me to continue doing as told, though with a bit more freedom to move about. Unfortunately, it does not expand the narrative agency of the player, beyond a choice they have been making all along, to include a path that does not lead to the predetermined end of the story you are (re-?)living through. From a linear storytelling point of view- movie storytelling- this is acceptable.
From a gaming point of view, in spite of my great love for the first and second Bioshocks, I cannot help but reflect that an opportunity to mirror the narrative shift in the gameplay would not have hurt it. One cannot, however, fault the world for remaining visually and narratively consistent in the last third of the story, nor the depth it gives the characters it has been developing- in spite of my disappointment at the ending, it is an ending that makes sense to me in the context of the overall narrative I was enduring. Reaching that ending would require a few more hours of gameplay, which I was fine with, too.
Not starving is also a form of gameplay. I never quite understood what brought about the rise of the survival game as a genre unto itself- I have a sneaking suspicion that someone may have looked at Farmville and thought to themselves "how can we turn this grind into an actual game?"**. At the same time, the micromanagement sim has been around for a long time, so in a way, this genre takes a complex systemic simulation and distills the simulation into one character, fighting for survival while attempting to make sense of it all.
Don't Starve*** (Klei Entertainment, 2012) is less noticeable as a game than Skyrim or Bioshock- Klei is an independent studio who have dabbled in a number of genres, and yet their all their games are instantly recognizable due to flat, stylised art that feels hand-drawn, reduced, well-animated. And yes, I do like their games a lot- but more on them later. Point being: Don't Starve, for me, belongs in the category of "games everyone who calls themselves a gamer should have tried at least once", and that it did not receive enough attention on publication to have made a huge impact outside of the niche of survival games.
What keeps drawing me back to this game- apart from the fact that i still haven't played it through to story completion- is the way its systems interconnect. Starting out from what may have been the worst drinking binge this side of Sam Guevene, with a character waking up… somewhere, with a man named Max looming over them. You then set out on a procedurally generated journey to survive as long as you can while exploring as far as you can. During this journey, you discover that a place that is in turns hostile and beautiful can sustain you by interacting with it.
Most games of this type will include three basic metrics that you can gauge your well-being by: Hunger, health and thirst (HHT). Some games will add fatigue, happiness, illness or hope. Don't Starve has HHT, weather, sanity and wetness, which affects many other systems. Wetness directly affects your sanity, your ability to light fires and how cold you get. And sanity… let's just say that staying sane in that game is very beneficial to your perception of the world and its many inhabitants.
Weather plays a huge role in your choice of survival strategy: A hot summer will set your fields ablaze and will give you heat strokes. Nothing grows in winter, but it does bring out the winter beasties. It rains incessantly in spring, leading to a constant drain on sanity, leading to being more careful when exploring, leading, hopefully to a field of bright, colourful flowers to restore said sanity before building traps to catch rabbits. It is very much a living ecosystem, including predations that can work out to your very great advantage, in which you can interact with almost anything you see on screen and use those things to affect others. Meat can feed you, but it can also make you friends. Many items have multiple combinations. And don't even get me started on the many uses of flowers.
In Skyrim, we were dealing with my expectations towards how a culture would function and how one incongruity affected my perception of the culture I was being presented with in the game, and how the developers expression of one particular interaction lessened my appreciation of that presentation. Bioshock presents a fantastical world that is so congruous that it withstands, and even supports a disconnect between the player and the game. It is (in my opinion) somewhat let down by the accompanying gameplay, but the twist works so well on a (meta-)narrative level, that I am more than happy to be along for that ride.
The difference between Skyrim, Bioshock and Don't Starve is graphical fidelity. Though it is possible to integrate many survival elements into Skyrim through mods, you need a relatively beefy computer to keep it all running smoothly and maintain the illusion that systems affect each other. Don't Starve does not rely on the fidelity of its graphical depiction to immerse you in a world. It presents you with less elaborate graphics, eliminating the need for many processes that have to happen in parallel with the actual gameplay for the world to tick. And through this reduction, it allows for the interconnection of intricate systems that affect each other, allowing a much broader scope of player choices (and discoveries) within the game- it does this very well.
There are many ways to build a coherent, believable world, and maintain that coherence once the world has been built and the new tennants have moved in. Sometimes, it is enough to have a good story to tell. Others want to present a canvas- or paint-by-numbers sheet- for each story in that world to be different. And yet others simply say "Here is a world. It works. Go play with that". In a world in which Goat Simulator (Coffee Stain Studios, 2014) exists, there also exists the narrative hook of "You are Goat. Now go see what you can do". All I'm asking for is for there to be a coherent glue that holds the world together narratively and technologically.
CPU's! Polygons! FPS! FLOPS! Technology Tangent
And this is where things get a bit more technical: Most worlds rendered in 3D can be likened to a cardboard village- a thin sheet of vectors decorated with pixels make up most shapes in those worlds. Over this, a thin veneer of textures colour the world and give it a haptic quality that would be lacking from a cell-shaded game world. To create a consistent world, computer hardware- console or PC- has to calculate the geometry you are currently looking at, texture it, render it and apply whatever post-processing effects are fashionable this year, between 24 (the minimum amount of frames per second the eye will translate into smooth motion) and infinite (I can't even fathom what that would look like) times a second, AKA FPS. It's like a film set, except that every time the camera moves, the set gets rebuilt, redecorated, re-lit and some fancy effects are sloshed on it, and that is when you're standing in one spot. When you are not, you have no-where to go but forward- there is nothing behind you (as far as I can tell*).
I'm fairly sure technology will out-evolve this fairly antique way of rendering worlds at some point, replacing the textures with models of such a high triangle density that a texture is no longer required- already a lot more is done within a layered texture than was possible way back when most monitor resolutions did not exceed 800x600 and the current 16:9 ratio had not yet become the norm. Pixel art was not a design choice in those times, as most computers did not include the hardware to draw, render and move geometries in real time, unless they were simplistic. What changed this was the mathematical co-processor, which later on became the graphics card- this is when computers were mostly sold to serious adults with jobs, hell-bent on using those computers for their jobs. That meant that in stead of the processor handling all the code required to run an OS and on top of that, moving geometries around at speeds that a human eye can perceive as movement, a dedicated processor handled most of the geometry, freeing the CPU up for more processing. Sprites (pixel graphics) are simpler to move around, as they are pre-drawn and do not require as much calculation do display- less geometry.
How (and if) all this drawing works in real life depends on two factors: what kind of hardware you are running the game- a piece of software- on, and how well the game is optimised to deliver the experience. The latter matters more if you do not have high-end hardware- a poorly optimised game will run better on a powerful system, but even a perfectly optimised game will not run smoothly on hardware that doesn't have the computing power to calculate and render in real time while calculating the various processes that make the world come alive.
Moore's Law, while it still holds, dictates that computing power is squared roughly every two years. To run a game that requires a processor with two or four cores running at 3 GHZ, 8 GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics card with 2 GB of RAM in 1996 would have required a very unscientific houseful of hardware, even without taking into account how many hard drives you would need simply to store the game on, and the fans to keep it from overheating.
For a more concrete example, let's take a look at the evolution of Lara Croft: in the first game, launched in 1996, she was made up of 230 polygons. In 1999, 300. In 2003's "Angel Of Darkness" edition, her body was made up of about 4400 Polygons. By 2008, 32000 polygons and several layers of textures. And in 2013's reboot of the franchise, Lara consists of 41245 Polygons, on top of which she wears a full head of hair with ca. 30000 strands. Lara is just one character. Add to that the ground, grass, foilage, trees, rocks, a couple of buildings, clutter, water with simulated flow, the background, environmental effects and a few extra characters and I (blindly) estimate between 200 000- 350 000 triangles on screen at any given moment. As these triangles are made up of dots, let us look at how many dots a processor can calculate per second- and meet a unit called FLOPS.
The top supercomputers in 1996 were capable of 368 GFLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second). If I am reading this correctly, an Intel i7 4790K reaches 44.36 GFLOPS when firing on all cores. When you factor in that there is a second processor dedicated to graphics, a current, albeit powerful, computer sitting under a desk has a significant portion of the processing power of a computer that took up a few rooms and had more custom-built cores than most people will own in a lifetime. So, based only on FLOPS, while you would probably have been able to run the current Tomb Raider on a NASA system (in 1996), running it in the comfort of your own home would have required a new home, and that NASA computer to go with it. And that's at a resolution of 1280x1024, rather than 1920x1080.
The point I am making here is that the player is, in part, responsible for the coherence of their game worlds. Keeping in mind that many 3D games are software simulations of an environment, simulating that environment consistently and believably requires hardware capable of running that simulation. The good news is that you can always simplify the scope and presentation of the simulation, and how many pixels are being pushed around the screen. The bad news is that it won't look like the pictures on the box- if the game even came in a box. 2018, remember? And there is even worse news.
The Even Worse News
You've done your part. You have a system at home capable of running the game at the highest settings, it is not 1996 and you are promised a gorgeous adventure in a fantastic, lush, detailed open world with deep gameplay systems, state-of-the art AI and a map the size of five and two thirds universes. You load up the game. Epic music accompanies your first encounter, god rays illuminate your path to adventure and it looks even better than the box promised on that spanking new system of yours. You take your first steps into this world, to be greeted by a cow that is bouncing on its back off the chimney of the thatched farmhouse. Some of the trees are the same shade of purple as some of the rocks, others look stunning. The grass is moving at strange angles and seems to stretch all the way to infinity. A couple of monsters fall out of the sky. Then you take a few more steps and fall all the way to the dark centre of the earth.
Few things are more frustrating to a gamer than beginning their first playthrough of a game they have been looking forward to for months, or decades, only to discover that what they expected to be an immersive, enjoyable experience is hampered by its technological constraints. Bugs have always been a part of software- inconsistencies, oversights and mistakes in the code that makes the matrix of the game world tick. They come in various flavours, from annoying to downright destructive and add- or subtract- from the overall quality and experience of the game, a reaction dependent on the humour you, as the player in front of the screen, bring to the game. And that is where leniency ends- anyone playing a game will usually have payed for the entertainment product, their enjoyment of which is being impeded by production errors, or an unrealistic development process.
The word production is not one to be glossed over, nor is the commercial nature of the enterprise of making and selling computer games, even if they are, in many cases, labours of passionate individuals who work hard to contribute their part to creating worlds and experiences that are absorbed actively by their target audience. Most of these individuals, and the collectives- companies, mostly- that they form to make their vision an interactive reality, are subject to the same market and time constraints as the rest of this unfortunate race, meaning that they have bills to pay, and in many cases publishers, parent companies or backers to keep happy, and until the game has turned a profit, it is an investment for all involved. This means deadlines, worried people in suits not entirely trusting creative types and a competition for many kinds of limited resources- time, attention, enthusiasm, patience, money, and pressure.
All of the above raise the likelihood of mistakes, even with quality assurance, testing, focus groups, open betas, weekly code reviews and iterations. This is a natural part of any development process. Unlike a film, a game retains many moving parts once it reaches its audience, especially if it promises anything including the words "dynamic", "open", "procedural" or "immersive". As soon as one player can use something in game to affect something else, something can go wrong. The more systems affect each other, the more unpredictable the outcome. Every action results in an equal and opposite reaction, even in code. If the reaction is not equal, or opposite, we can call it a bug, unless there is evidence of intention in the way an unexpected reaction plays out. The delivery of a consistent world that does not break under the interacting scrutiny of its audience is a small miracle to me every time I join the audience. What I cannot forgive, however, are mistakes that undermine the creative intention of a game. Just as a bad performance, or botched edit in a film cannot be unseen, it is impossible to overlook that bug at the end of the game that does not allow you to complete it, or that one vitally important object you cannot access without first deleting some invisible object the developers forgot to disable, or the character with their head on backwards- or missing entirely without reason.
All of these things (right down to moose crashing down into the planet from orbit) occur in games. There is good news and bad news here: none of this is your fault. The bad news is that it has become common practice for games to be published without that last bit of polish that would remove the left-over glaring bugs. Personally, I blame the internet for this: the ability to update software without the need for a physical medium has created a mentality of "we can fix this later", as people can (and frequently do) download patches to fix errors, or bugs, noticed by people who bought what they believed to be a finished product. Some companies have garnered a reputation for releasing games that are so buggy (sometimes to the point of being unfinishable) that communities of patchers look forward to their new releases with the hope that they won't have too much work to do this time
around.
** Survival games and the rise of the Paleo diet. Discuss.
*** I played the base game, and later the "Reign of Giants" expansion
**** Now I want a Goat Mode for Skyrim.
Let's start with the basics:
0.
What makes a good game?
This question has as many answers as there are ways to make a game, and most of them are subjective, dependent on how the individual gamer experiences their play, how deeply they are willing to delve into the details surrounding a game and how much time this will take, expectations towards gameplay and stortytelling, the studio and publisher, familiarity with methods of non-linear stories… This answer becomes more complicated from a publication and development perspective, as it includes many business aspects that the individual consumer does not need to consider- and as an individual consumer, I won't, save the consideration that I won't spend money on a game only to discover I need to spend more money to actually finish it.
But I can answer this question for myself, in three parts:
01. But Can You Actually Eat That Sweetroll
02. Would you Kindly Knock?
This means that, within the game's systems, interactions, locations and actions have to follow an internal logic that is upheld throughout, items you find should have some contextual use within the game, even if that use is decorative, or destructive.
An example: a block of 2 in a game 0f 2048; within the game, it takes on the function of the smallest available building block. It can be combined with another 2 to create a 4, two 4's make an 8, two 8's make a 16, ad almost infinitum, as long as it infinitum on an exponential grid. The context of a block changes, depending if it is next to another block of the same value, or whether it is next to one of a different value- it is sometimes a barrier, sometimes a building block. The logic of the game allows it to be both, and applies this throughout. The way an individual game of 2048 will play out is very much dependent on the player and their skill level with the game. Thus: I am free to create a personal, if frustrating experience within a world that moves consistently according to an understandable set of rules. The objects I interact with in that world are subject to those rules and fulfill a contextual role that remains coherent. The experience is specific to the logic of that game and the playthrough is specific to the player. The location of the game- an exponential grid- is constant.
A door is several things, depending on its context: It can be an entrance, an exit, a barrier, a challenge with a lock. It can offer safety, be an avenue to danger or loom ominously, a portent of possibility. It can also be a jar, but that is one of the oldest puns in the book.
Did you know know that it's not possible to knock on doors in Skyrim? Imagine for a moment that you are invited to someone's house. You pass by, only to discover that they are home but have locked the door. A basic assumption your socialisation would lead you to at this point is that it would be good manners to make your presence known to the person expecting you. I doubt- and please do correct me if I'm wrong- that many people would automatically arrive at the conclusion that you now have to pick a lock to enter their house. And yet, on that particular evening in Whiterun, I found myself having to do exactly that to be able to meet someone who wanted my help.
Even accepting that this is a different age, time and place, and that I may not understand the prevalent customs, I found it difficult to reconcile the idea that I would have to perform what the game world deems a criminal act to enter a house I was invited to. Though, as a player, I could work with that, it did not follow the rules, or the etiquette established for the characters living in that world and though my decision to break in was specific to me, I believe that, at that juncture, most others playing the game were forced into a similar decision- and similarly irked by it. This was not a subversion of my expectation towards the way a door works, this broke with the internal logic of the game and- in an admittedly small way- lessened the coherence of the world I was inhabiting, and undermined what it had led me to expect of it so far. On the plus side, you can, most of the time, tell where the food has come from, and you can consistently break into houses, even if you are expected for a visit.
One of the transformative- and oft-cited- moments in gaming history is the first Bioshock's (2K Games, 2007) narrative twist, which throws into question the agency of the character in the game, and all the actions the player has undertaken to reach that point in the story. It works on a narrative level, as it reveals some of the background of the character you are playing, and about the strange, decaying place you find yourself in, though I have issues with the gameplay that follows. If you have never played this, or have somehow managed not to hear about this twist for ten-plus years, and you are still reading this long ramble, thank you- and now I will spoil that twist for you.
The man you believe to be your main antagonist reveals that the character you have been inhabiting for the past hours is under a form of suggestive hypnosis, triggered by certain phrases- in this case "Would you kindly". He then proceeds to order you to kill him, reminding you that "A man chooses, a slave obeys". The player never gets to choose whether to kill Andrew Ryan or not- the character does the deed, wrested from your control in a moment that is as horrifying to watch and frustrating, knowing that there is no way the person in front of the screen can intervene. Your suggested agency as a player is entirely removed and your role as puppeteer undermined entirely by the narrative thrust of the story- it wants you to move in a certain direction, and, save quit, there is very little you can do to change that direction .
This moment makes Rapture- the city you are in- very much yours. Where previously, as a player, you were mostly content to follow directions, trusting established game logic of someone telling you to go Somewhere and do Something, this twist heightens your attention toward the place, imbues you, for the first time, with a sense of being truly lost and makes you distrust its inhabitants- it is as if you see the world with your own eyes for the first time, it becomes personal, in ways it had not been before. You had been a tourist traveling in someone elses's shoes; now you discover how much this place has become a part of you.
The internal workings of the city remain the same, in spite of all this- consistent, reliable, sunk 20 000 leagues under the sea, and sinking. What has changed is your perspective on the place, and the balance of the powers that remain. It feels more sinister, less defined- the goal that drove you to explore this place is dead, the people you thought you could trust are undeserving of confidence and, though the narrative is compelling you forward, you are given time to wonder whether you should give in to this compulsion, or just end it here, leaving the remaining power players to power on. When I first played through this, I recall distrusting the character I was playing after the twist: were they showing me everything they were seeing? Was I ever in control of them, or their actions? When would that control be taken away again? It is very rare that, after spending hours convincing you that this currently you, and these are the shoes you are wearing, a game will blast those shoes off your feet and put such a distance between the player and the player character, at least intentionally. It is even rarer to encounter a world that is so well constructed that, in spite of the activation of critical thinking, the player never loses their sense of immersion in the world.
The reason that I ended up getting back in those shoes was that they happened to be walking a world that had become consistently tangible to me, and that I wanted to help the character find some kind of closure to their mesmeric journey. Rapture beckoned, more so than the end of the story, promising to reveal some of its secrets before this was over, and there was still too much I did not know about it, and hoped to discover with less demands on my attention.
What disappointed me, however, was that after having established itself as an unreliable narrator by combining a great story twist with a very meta layer on top (yum, cherries!), the game returned to the previously established method of guiding the player through the narrative by instruction and, for some reason, expected me to continue doing as told, though with a bit more freedom to move about. Unfortunately, it does not expand the narrative agency of the player, beyond a choice they have been making all along, to include a path that does not lead to the predetermined end of the story you are (re-?)living through. From a linear storytelling point of view- movie storytelling- this is acceptable.
From a gaming point of view, in spite of my great love for the first and second Bioshocks, I cannot help but reflect that an opportunity to mirror the narrative shift in the gameplay would not have hurt it. One cannot, however, fault the world for remaining visually and narratively consistent in the last third of the story, nor the depth it gives the characters it has been developing- in spite of my disappointment at the ending, it is an ending that makes sense to me in the context of the overall narrative I was enduring. Reaching that ending would require a few more hours of gameplay, which I was fine with, too.
Not starving is also a form of gameplay. I never quite understood what brought about the rise of the survival game as a genre unto itself- I have a sneaking suspicion that someone may have looked at Farmville and thought to themselves "how can we turn this grind into an actual game?"**. At the same time, the micromanagement sim has been around for a long time, so in a way, this genre takes a complex systemic simulation and distills the simulation into one character, fighting for survival while attempting to make sense of it all.
Don't Starve*** (Klei Entertainment, 2012) is less noticeable as a game than Skyrim or Bioshock- Klei is an independent studio who have dabbled in a number of genres, and yet their all their games are instantly recognizable due to flat, stylised art that feels hand-drawn, reduced, well-animated. And yes, I do like their games a lot- but more on them later. Point being: Don't Starve, for me, belongs in the category of "games everyone who calls themselves a gamer should have tried at least once", and that it did not receive enough attention on publication to have made a huge impact outside of the niche of survival games.
What keeps drawing me back to this game- apart from the fact that i still haven't played it through to story completion- is the way its systems interconnect. Starting out from what may have been the worst drinking binge this side of Sam Guevene, with a character waking up… somewhere, with a man named Max looming over them. You then set out on a procedurally generated journey to survive as long as you can while exploring as far as you can. During this journey, you discover that a place that is in turns hostile and beautiful can sustain you by interacting with it.
Weather plays a huge role in your choice of survival strategy: A hot summer will set your fields ablaze and will give you heat strokes. Nothing grows in winter, but it does bring out the winter beasties. It rains incessantly in spring, leading to a constant drain on sanity, leading to being more careful when exploring, leading, hopefully to a field of bright, colourful flowers to restore said sanity before building traps to catch rabbits. It is very much a living ecosystem, including predations that can work out to your very great advantage, in which you can interact with almost anything you see on screen and use those things to affect others. Meat can feed you, but it can also make you friends. Many items have multiple combinations. And don't even get me started on the many uses of flowers.
In Skyrim, we were dealing with my expectations towards how a culture would function and how one incongruity affected my perception of the culture I was being presented with in the game, and how the developers expression of one particular interaction lessened my appreciation of that presentation. Bioshock presents a fantastical world that is so congruous that it withstands, and even supports a disconnect between the player and the game. It is (in my opinion) somewhat let down by the accompanying gameplay, but the twist works so well on a (meta-)narrative level, that I am more than happy to be along for that ride.
The difference between Skyrim, Bioshock and Don't Starve is graphical fidelity. Though it is possible to integrate many survival elements into Skyrim through mods, you need a relatively beefy computer to keep it all running smoothly and maintain the illusion that systems affect each other. Don't Starve does not rely on the fidelity of its graphical depiction to immerse you in a world. It presents you with less elaborate graphics, eliminating the need for many processes that have to happen in parallel with the actual gameplay for the world to tick. And through this reduction, it allows for the interconnection of intricate systems that affect each other, allowing a much broader scope of player choices (and discoveries) within the game- it does this very well.
There are many ways to build a coherent, believable world, and maintain that coherence once the world has been built and the new tennants have moved in. Sometimes, it is enough to have a good story to tell. Others want to present a canvas- or paint-by-numbers sheet- for each story in that world to be different. And yet others simply say "Here is a world. It works. Go play with that". In a world in which Goat Simulator (Coffee Stain Studios, 2014) exists, there also exists the narrative hook of "You are Goat. Now go see what you can do". All I'm asking for is for there to be a coherent glue that holds the world together narratively and technologically.
CPU's! Polygons! FPS! FLOPS! Technology Tangent
And this is where things get a bit more technical: Most worlds rendered in 3D can be likened to a cardboard village- a thin sheet of vectors decorated with pixels make up most shapes in those worlds. Over this, a thin veneer of textures colour the world and give it a haptic quality that would be lacking from a cell-shaded game world. To create a consistent world, computer hardware- console or PC- has to calculate the geometry you are currently looking at, texture it, render it and apply whatever post-processing effects are fashionable this year, between 24 (the minimum amount of frames per second the eye will translate into smooth motion) and infinite (I can't even fathom what that would look like) times a second, AKA FPS. It's like a film set, except that every time the camera moves, the set gets rebuilt, redecorated, re-lit and some fancy effects are sloshed on it, and that is when you're standing in one spot. When you are not, you have no-where to go but forward- there is nothing behind you (as far as I can tell*).
I'm fairly sure technology will out-evolve this fairly antique way of rendering worlds at some point, replacing the textures with models of such a high triangle density that a texture is no longer required- already a lot more is done within a layered texture than was possible way back when most monitor resolutions did not exceed 800x600 and the current 16:9 ratio had not yet become the norm. Pixel art was not a design choice in those times, as most computers did not include the hardware to draw, render and move geometries in real time, unless they were simplistic. What changed this was the mathematical co-processor, which later on became the graphics card- this is when computers were mostly sold to serious adults with jobs, hell-bent on using those computers for their jobs. That meant that in stead of the processor handling all the code required to run an OS and on top of that, moving geometries around at speeds that a human eye can perceive as movement, a dedicated processor handled most of the geometry, freeing the CPU up for more processing. Sprites (pixel graphics) are simpler to move around, as they are pre-drawn and do not require as much calculation do display- less geometry.
Moore's Law, while it still holds, dictates that computing power is squared roughly every two years. To run a game that requires a processor with two or four cores running at 3 GHZ, 8 GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics card with 2 GB of RAM in 1996 would have required a very unscientific houseful of hardware, even without taking into account how many hard drives you would need simply to store the game on, and the fans to keep it from overheating.
For a more concrete example, let's take a look at the evolution of Lara Croft: in the first game, launched in 1996, she was made up of 230 polygons. In 1999, 300. In 2003's "Angel Of Darkness" edition, her body was made up of about 4400 Polygons. By 2008, 32000 polygons and several layers of textures. And in 2013's reboot of the franchise, Lara consists of 41245 Polygons, on top of which she wears a full head of hair with ca. 30000 strands. Lara is just one character. Add to that the ground, grass, foilage, trees, rocks, a couple of buildings, clutter, water with simulated flow, the background, environmental effects and a few extra characters and I (blindly) estimate between 200 000- 350 000 triangles on screen at any given moment. As these triangles are made up of dots, let us look at how many dots a processor can calculate per second- and meet a unit called FLOPS.
The top supercomputers in 1996 were capable of 368 GFLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second). If I am reading this correctly, an Intel i7 4790K reaches 44.36 GFLOPS when firing on all cores. When you factor in that there is a second processor dedicated to graphics, a current, albeit powerful, computer sitting under a desk has a significant portion of the processing power of a computer that took up a few rooms and had more custom-built cores than most people will own in a lifetime. So, based only on FLOPS, while you would probably have been able to run the current Tomb Raider on a NASA system (in 1996), running it in the comfort of your own home would have required a new home, and that NASA computer to go with it. And that's at a resolution of 1280x1024, rather than 1920x1080.
The point I am making here is that the player is, in part, responsible for the coherence of their game worlds. Keeping in mind that many 3D games are software simulations of an environment, simulating that environment consistently and believably requires hardware capable of running that simulation. The good news is that you can always simplify the scope and presentation of the simulation, and how many pixels are being pushed around the screen. The bad news is that it won't look like the pictures on the box- if the game even came in a box. 2018, remember? And there is even worse news.
The Even Worse News
You've done your part. You have a system at home capable of running the game at the highest settings, it is not 1996 and you are promised a gorgeous adventure in a fantastic, lush, detailed open world with deep gameplay systems, state-of-the art AI and a map the size of five and two thirds universes. You load up the game. Epic music accompanies your first encounter, god rays illuminate your path to adventure and it looks even better than the box promised on that spanking new system of yours. You take your first steps into this world, to be greeted by a cow that is bouncing on its back off the chimney of the thatched farmhouse. Some of the trees are the same shade of purple as some of the rocks, others look stunning. The grass is moving at strange angles and seems to stretch all the way to infinity. A couple of monsters fall out of the sky. Then you take a few more steps and fall all the way to the dark centre of the earth.
Few things are more frustrating to a gamer than beginning their first playthrough of a game they have been looking forward to for months, or decades, only to discover that what they expected to be an immersive, enjoyable experience is hampered by its technological constraints. Bugs have always been a part of software- inconsistencies, oversights and mistakes in the code that makes the matrix of the game world tick. They come in various flavours, from annoying to downright destructive and add- or subtract- from the overall quality and experience of the game, a reaction dependent on the humour you, as the player in front of the screen, bring to the game. And that is where leniency ends- anyone playing a game will usually have payed for the entertainment product, their enjoyment of which is being impeded by production errors, or an unrealistic development process.
The word production is not one to be glossed over, nor is the commercial nature of the enterprise of making and selling computer games, even if they are, in many cases, labours of passionate individuals who work hard to contribute their part to creating worlds and experiences that are absorbed actively by their target audience. Most of these individuals, and the collectives- companies, mostly- that they form to make their vision an interactive reality, are subject to the same market and time constraints as the rest of this unfortunate race, meaning that they have bills to pay, and in many cases publishers, parent companies or backers to keep happy, and until the game has turned a profit, it is an investment for all involved. This means deadlines, worried people in suits not entirely trusting creative types and a competition for many kinds of limited resources- time, attention, enthusiasm, patience, money, and pressure.
All of the above raise the likelihood of mistakes, even with quality assurance, testing, focus groups, open betas, weekly code reviews and iterations. This is a natural part of any development process. Unlike a film, a game retains many moving parts once it reaches its audience, especially if it promises anything including the words "dynamic", "open", "procedural" or "immersive". As soon as one player can use something in game to affect something else, something can go wrong. The more systems affect each other, the more unpredictable the outcome. Every action results in an equal and opposite reaction, even in code. If the reaction is not equal, or opposite, we can call it a bug, unless there is evidence of intention in the way an unexpected reaction plays out. The delivery of a consistent world that does not break under the interacting scrutiny of its audience is a small miracle to me every time I join the audience. What I cannot forgive, however, are mistakes that undermine the creative intention of a game. Just as a bad performance, or botched edit in a film cannot be unseen, it is impossible to overlook that bug at the end of the game that does not allow you to complete it, or that one vitally important object you cannot access without first deleting some invisible object the developers forgot to disable, or the character with their head on backwards- or missing entirely without reason.
All of these things (right down to moose crashing down into the planet from orbit) occur in games. There is good news and bad news here: none of this is your fault. The bad news is that it has become common practice for games to be published without that last bit of polish that would remove the left-over glaring bugs. Personally, I blame the internet for this: the ability to update software without the need for a physical medium has created a mentality of "we can fix this later", as people can (and frequently do) download patches to fix errors, or bugs, noticed by people who bought what they believed to be a finished product. Some companies have garnered a reputation for releasing games that are so buggy (sometimes to the point of being unfinishable) that communities of patchers look forward to their new releases with the hope that they won't have too much work to do this time
around.
3. In-game-novation. Kind of.
Here
Notes & Links:
Video:
Noclip: The Doom Series on how Doom was rebuilt for 2016
Noah Caldwell-Gervais: From Shock to Awe: System Shock, Bioshock and Infinite
LGR is a channel focused mostly on gaming soft-and hardware that is… old? Included for overview purposes.
Gopher: I don't like Save Stations on methods of saving in game. Included because it makes me smile every time and how game mechanics can affect your immersion and actions in a game world.
Mod
How to knock in Skyrim- a mod by Chesko
*It doesn't make a lot of sense to waste processing power drawing what is out of the players field of view. It does make sense to cache the textures so that they can be mapped onto the geometryNotes & Links:
Video:
Noclip: The Doom Series on how Doom was rebuilt for 2016
Noah Caldwell-Gervais: From Shock to Awe: System Shock, Bioshock and Infinite
LGR is a channel focused mostly on gaming soft-and hardware that is… old? Included for overview purposes.
Gopher: I don't like Save Stations on methods of saving in game. Included because it makes me smile every time and how game mechanics can affect your immersion and actions in a game world.
Mod
How to knock in Skyrim- a mod by Chesko
** Survival games and the rise of the Paleo diet. Discuss.
*** I played the base game, and later the "Reign of Giants" expansion
**** Now I want a Goat Mode for Skyrim.
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