To add insult to injury, this sentiment was already firmly established before the publisher’s wishy-washy approach to “The Protector Trials” and “Minerva’s Den” DLC packs, which were originally slated for – and then later announced cancelled, only to move back to production – the PC. 2K community manager Elizabeth Tobey sums up the news in a sentence: “We have resumed development on all three and they will be coming to PC.”

Although the aforementioned – plus an additional patch – are now back in production, the only real response to this whole affair can but resemble this, especially after Irrational Games head honcho Ken Levine jumped to a profanity-laden PR save at Kotaku: “If you want to know the future of gaming, buy a PC. And pay attention. Because above all, that thing on your desk is a crystal ball.” Although Tobey originally cited temporal and technical reasons for the content’s cancellation, the reason was just as much a financial one; in video game development, after all, these factors are all very much intertwined. Tobey explicates:

… we could not resolve these issues to our standards and so could not release to cert. As with all games, however, the dev cycle must end and patches and updates must conclude so that the team can move on to other projects. We hit that deadline without the content being in a state we were satisfied with, so we did not release it.

To be sure, this decision is highly understandable, granted a PC release of this type is easily a zero value venture when measured in budgetary terms; yet what their move to cancel the project was grossly selling short was the amount of goodwill the company would lose in the process. While moving staff off to new projects may have been a natural decision to make, development simply does not appear the same internally and externally – what was simply wrapping up and moving on for the BioShock 2 team sounded and looked like abandonment and broken promises to the player base.

Furthermore, the dissatisfaction and disappointment relating to the perceived lack of support had been brimming ever since the title’s launch, and the dearth of information related to the PC release dates did not help things at all. Tobey’s sudden announcement of the projects’ cancellation, though made in earnest to alleviate speculation and restlessness, simply happened to open the floodgates for a tidal wave of anger that had been building up in the community.

What the team seem to have overlooked was the fact that losing goodwill at this point, late in the game’s shelf life, would be extremely hard to recoup any time soon: BioShock 1 and 2, despite their clear-cut lineage with the System Shock games, are both extremely unique in their treatment of tying various ideologies and philosophies to gameplay as well as sporting a unique, unreplicated aesthetic – both features that make players very loyal to the series. Therefore, the one fact that I believe prompted 2K Games to renegotiate their stance was the sudden realization that BioShock 2 was done, over, finito, and that BioShock: Infinite (which in itself had been receiving some criticism thanks to its premature announcement and faraway release date) was still years and years away from release. There would be no game in the near horizon to recoup this lost excitement.

Another key issue separated the DLC project from its peers: Not only was Minerva’s Den an actual narrative continuation and finale to the BioShock narrative, it also carried with it high artistic and qualitative merit not often seen in conjunction with downloadable content. Therefore, more than anything else, the cancellation would have been a massive waste of potential, something that was even further exacerbated by the runaway success of the DLC: Both its advertising and excellent reviews succeeded very much in developing interest in the BioShock 2 player base, prompting far more fan interest than originally anticipated.

Luckily for us, the company did ultimately come to their senses after a public outcry that ran through the blogging community – as much as 2K Games are surely taking a financial hit for their decision to reopen development on the ports, I’m sure it will be worthwhile simply in recouping some of the already-lost goodwill. After all, our collective memory is really really short, and like the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott illustrated, players are often willing to return once their qualms are adequately and respectfully addressed…

To sum things up, several key points arise:

Firstly, underestimating players’ need for closure and finality, whether it is narrative or gameplay-related, or simply a matter of a final bug-fixing patch (this is why fan patches are so popular; in the case of BioShock 2, the outstanding issue with the Rapture Metro greatly exacerbates this), is surely closely related to our grokking tendency. I don’t think we have adequately addressed our need to understand or perceive narratives in video games in their totality and entirety. What follows, though, is that the more (engaging a) narrative a game has, the more its players will want to see it through.

Second, creating expectations is exactly what PR staff dreams are made of. Yet when things went awry in this particular case, the wave of hype and critical reception that “Minerva’s Den” was riding only worked to amplify and exacerbate the public’s negative reaction to its cancellation. Tough luck for the department especially given how far away from release the next game in the series remains.

Third, we must surmise, 2K Games took very lightly the role of player goodwill. One avenue to looking at the issue at hand could be, for instance, Alfred O. Hirschman’s classic Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), which superficially seems to be highly applicable to consumer behaviour in relation to game development. In any case, gaming journalists should be more inclined to discuss the topic of goodwill overall, if only to ensure that nothing of this sort occurs again. It’s in everybody’s best interests.

Finally, I should think, utterly lost in this shuffle, both in terms of the company’s reputation as well as the game’s public perception, are 2K community manager Elizabeth Tobey’s grassroots attempts at bettering fan interaction at the Cult of Rapture, the company’s fan hub for the BioShock franchise; not only did she spearhead the BioShock 2 ARG “There’s Something in the Sea” and produce podcasts on the website, she has also applied a vastly more hands-on approach to tech support in the 2K forums than is the norm.

Now, thanks to a misguided decision somewhere up the corporate ladder, her attempts were dangerously close to being nullified – or worse still, actually negated: After all, it seems only natural that a portion of players are, thanks to Tobey’s work, so attached to and engaged with the game series that they became vastly more infuriated with 2K’s now-reversed decision not to publish the DLC than they would have without her work.

Where does the designer’s responsibility for making a game fun end, and the player’s begin? Should the player be given full reigns over the available tools or should the designer limit them? Greg Miller at IGN raises this question using a recent example, the detective vision mode in Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum. The mode enhances Batman’s vision, allowing him to use his detective skills and analyse his surroundings. At the touch of a button, a blue visor covers the screen and renders the environment in flat shapes in order to help highlight important details like vent covers and enemies. The mode can be activated at any time and for however long as the player wishes; moreover, it lets the player see through walls and points out key information like whether enemies are armed, if a wall is destructible, and so on. Sounds like a win button, doesn’t it?

The chief complaint with the mode is that it can make the game too easy, but that’s not the only consequence. Miller remarks how he’d forget he even had it on, and would breeze through “12 hours” without even seeing the locations he passed, missing all the intricate work by the texture artists hidden beneath the filter. So it’s a problem that concerns both the developer and the player. Rocksteady dedicated time and resources to ensure the game looks as detailed as it does, and all that hard work is obfuscated by the visor. Should there have been a restriction placed on usage of the detective mode? Miller thinks so. Perhaps a limited battery charge? Would that add to or take away from the “fun” of using it?

I can see how a restriction would introduce new elements to the usage of a game mechanic, enhancing the experience instead of hindering it. One example of such a restriction is the ammo system in BioWare’s Mass Effect series. The first game, an RPG-shooter hybrid, eschews ammo reloading entirely, justifying the absence of ammo in the in-game fiction. Instead, each weapon has a cooldown meter, allowing a few shots before it overheats. Being as it is an RPG, the game features weapon modifications that can effectively eliminate the possibility of overheating, letting you keep your finger pressed on the trigger of an automatic rifle and produce an endless spray of bullets.

The sequel, leaning more on the shooter side, actually brings back the reloading mechanic – albeit under a different name. Retconned into the game’s fiction are “thermal clips” required for all weapons, functionally identical to conventional ammo clips. Project Director Casey Hudson explains that the mechanic was brought to add tension to combat. So does the introduction of reloading improve the game’s combat? The consensus is that the combat in Mass Effect 2 is, on the whole, much improved over the original game. A number of tweaks have resulted in a much better experience, reloading certainly being one of them. Ammo management complements the cover mechanics, and a new level of tactical thinking is brought to the battles.

Coming back to Batman and his magical goggles, I know Miller has a point. But I don’t agree with him. There’s an argument to be made that a player doesn’t need to be given a safety belt and spoonfed an experience, he is perfectly capable of utilising his freedom of choice in a way that maximises his enjoyment. Batvision making the game too easy for you? Stop using it. If you’re speeding through the game and not noticing what you’re using and what you’re missing, one could argue that you’ve got yourself to blame for not taking it all in and appreciating all the game has to offer. In Arkham Asylum you have a large variety of ways to sneak through a room or tackle thugs, and it is up to you to change things up and keep things fresh in the true spirit of the spontaneous and resourceful dark knight.

There is a kind of player that shapes the game experience around his own preferences, role-playing the main character perhaps, or even going to extremes like with the Ironman challenge popular with dungeon crawl players. One doesn’t have to resort to that of course, it’s entirely possible to immerse yourself in the experience without minmaxing the available options. Just because I can be resurrected without cost every time I die in BioShock, it doesn’t mean that I will take on the Big Daddies with a wrench and whittle away their health over the course of countless lives. It simply isn’t fun to play that way.

I think there’s more to say about this topic, as it touches on larger issues like player handholding, and full freedom versus the crafted experience, so we may return to it in the future. For now I think it suffices to say that some things can be left to the player to decide when and how to use, in order to get the most fun out of a game.

When I play a game at less than maximum settings, there is a nagging feeling I get that is separate from the disappointment in the reduction of graphical fidelity, or the dismay that my PC is getting long in the tooth. I find myself wondering if I’m really experiencing the game as it was intended by its creators. Developers speak more and more about wanting to deliver an experience to gamers, and wanting them to play it just how they envision. I think about the interpretation of what I see, and whether what I’m seeing is ‘canon’. If the object detail is down so low that I can’t tell what a character is wearing, am I missing a crucial point about that character? If I make a certain conclusion about a room that I wouldn’t have if I could only read the writing scrawled upon the walls, is my understanding of what happened ‘non-canon’? It’s a minor point but it’s something I keep thinking of in an age of games that are finally able to tell stories with every kind of narrative device available.

Of course, console gamers don’t face this dilemma at all. A console game plays the same on every unit of that console, and developers have a lot more control on how the game will look and perform without having to think about different hardware combinations and permutations. So I’m just restricting this thought experiment to PC games. There are a number of questions that follow this thought. Does it really matter if the graphics are not at the very max? Would you even be able to glean some higher level meaning or nuance from the details? Are we at the stage in game technology where this would matter, and developers can use this level of detail to add subtle enhancement to a games story and atmosphere? If so, in what games released today would it make a difference? A few games came to my mind immediately, and I’ll restrict my selection to just these few already installed on my hard drive so as not to belabour the hypothesis.

Having run through a few of the games for screenshots, I notice that the most common method of adding things to the world in order to enhance the narrative is to place detail textures in select places. Items like posters, decals and video monitors strewn all over the place are an easy enough way to make the environment seem more real and provide opportunities to convey key ideas to the player. Ultimately I suppose I’m not looking specifically at the term ‘canon’ but more at the ‘intended experience’ and what the player is supposed to see on their journey through the games.

2007 was an eventful year for gaming, and Portal was one of its biggest surprises. Stuffed into the Orange Box compilation amongst other big titles, it would have been overlooked if it weren’t for its refreshing puzzle mechanics and delightful storytelling. Much of the story was unravelled through the use of the environment, with writings scrawled upon the walls by the people that had passed that way before you.

Considering the minimal approach to narrative in Portal, these scribblings have quite a high priority in getting across ideas to the player. As you can see in the screenshots above, though, the words are unreadable at the lowest texture settings. A key theme of the game is the isolation and loneliness of the test subjects, and the two high points in this otherwise dark setting: the weighted companion cube and cake. Someone playing at the lowest settings would miss these details, arguably missable but still enriching flavour.

Another critically acclaimed game that year was BioShock. Hailed for its literary headiness, it too is rich in story and utilises various devices in telling the tale of the failed utopia that is Rapture.

As with Portal, there is a lot of flavour detail in BioShock that just adds to the atmosphere and the overarching story of the world. Posters and billboards advertising plasmids are hung up on the walls throughout the city of Rapture. Every now and then you come across bloody messages painted on the tiles by deranged splicers. Though not essential to understanding the story, they all help the player piece together what happened to bring the once thriving city to its desolate state. As you can see those details are sacrificed in the name of performance, lost in a blurry mess. A player strolling past them without knowing what they say would probably not be able to appreciate the depth of the fiction that fleshes out Rapture and its short history.

However, it seems there are some decals that are deemed too important to be affected by the graphical settings. Early in the game, the player stumbles onto mad surgeon Dr. Steinman’s turf, and his twisted worldview is there for all to see in his crazy writing, low settings or high. It’s clear that the developers wanted to be sure the player understood what kind of person they were up against, a distinctive character with the motivation and means to be considered more than just an overpowered splicer.

Moving right along, I thought I’d stop over briefly on last year’s Left 4 Dead. Valve’s co-operative zombie shooter shares with Portal a minimalist attitude as far as story goes, with the focus on the replayable experience. The player gets to know what’s going on in the zombie-infested world of the game via two main devices, the characters’ dialogue and the … wait for it … writings on the wall.

As is very evident, there isn’t much difference in the overall quality of the game, and certainly not in the decals. The story is easily discernible on the most sluggish of rigs.

Before we conclude I would like to take a slight tangent in the discussion. So far we’ve only been looking at things in games that are simply decoration, that add to a player’s passive understanding of the world. But games have moved on from there, and now rely on these details to not only inform but require the player to engage and interact. Case in point: Batman: Arkham Asylum. We have already voiced our excitement about Arkham Asylum here at the Slowdown, being big fans of all things Bat. When the game finally arrived on the PC it didn’t disappoint, and delivered a fantastic experience like no other Batman game has. One of the things it does best is cram in so many elements into a relatively small area, making it feel like a living and breathing incarnation of the world we know so well. We mentioned the PhysX features in the demo review, and how it adds things like breakable floor tiles and fog particles. I don’t think we need to include this in our discussion, as it’s obvious that losing those things makes no difference to a player’s understanding of the game.

What I want to focus on is an interesting aspect of the game which is the Riddler’s challenge. Throughout Arkham Island are mementos corresponding to the various infamous characters in the rogues gallery – most of whom are not present otherwise – each of which the player is instructed to seek out. They serve the dual purpose of nudge-winks to fans and a source of experience points which players can use to upgrade their gadgets. Hence both story and gameplay are served in one stroke, and the player’s ability to recognise each item is dependent on whether the graphics can present a clear image of the objective. Above are a couple of the very few examples I could find that show a difference between lowest and highest settings. Exhibit A shows the Riddler’s own cell, dotted with his trademark question marks; with the textures turned down the symbols are less sharp but still readable. Exhibit B is a grim scene orchestrated by the sadistic Zsasz, with tally marks to signify his work. While all the objects in the room are reduced to blurry surfaces, the key items are still clear as ever, allowing players to identify the objective.

Most other cases are like Calendar Man’s cell, pictured here, hardly any change at all with the textures sharp and unblemished. So again we have a situation where the important objects in the environment are favoured so that the player can have pretty much the same kind of experience regardless of their system.

I guess my fears are a little unfounded, in this era of HD gaming when even low-range rigs allow us to play games more or less as their makers intended. Obviously my sampling is very limited to be making sweeping judgments like that, but I think it’s safe to assume games are not going to look like a mess of dirty polygons at minimum settings like they did a generation or two back. And as noted before, this is a console-led generation, which dictates the decisions behind the general art direction and quality of art assets. It also means I won’t have to upgrade for some time yet; with the technology bar almost stagnant during this console cycle I can rest assured I am going to be able to play games without my completionist conscience nagging at me to upgrade.

“Michael Thornton is you. He’s been specifically designed as a blank canvas; a host for your own personality and playing style.”

The "Original"

This is avataritis, or, the video game industry’s highly emotional, pandemic response to finding the easiest, most efficient solution to the very unique dilemma presented by its ever-widening player base. Leigh Alexander framed the problem appropriately – though in relation to difficulty – a mere week ago at Gamasutra: “the concept of ‘everything for everyone’ won’t help.”

Now, to offend half the blogosphere offhand: For the purpose of this article, we will consider avatar customization a convenient narrative cop-out. We shall also assume that no mechanisms are in place stopping developers from writing and designing heterogeneous yet fully structured, narrative-based computer games with carefully constructed and immutable, unchangeable characters.

Therefore, the current rat race for the best, most customizable avatar shall thus be perceived an abhorrent one, damaging to the maturing and growth of the narratives in video games. (Obviously, there are occasions wherein the “tabula rasa” scenario is a fully motivated one, either by its ludic or narrative function, but assuming this to be a default state to be aspired to seems ultimately misguided beyond the MMO.)

The remaining half, then, shall also be offended as we sequence into a discussion of the representation of ethnic (and other) minorities. I’m not going to discuss these themes directly, instead drawing attention to how egalitarian, census-oriented game criticism and research sometimes intentionally avoids the more literary functions and realities of video gaming narratives.

An example of the census critique model could be a story from the “self-proclaimed feminist”, Alex Raymond, whose article “Beyond Gender Choice: Mass Effect’s varied inclusiveness” recently discussed the gendered unbalances of Mass Effect. In the same vein, a recent virtual census study conducted by Dmitri Williams sought to reveal how “the mismatch between real-world and videogame populations could be excluding some groups of potential players from games” – another fine example of the sector. Williams has in fact published a great deal of work on the topic, including “Looking for gender (LFG): Gender roles and behaviors among online gamers”.

Proponents of ethnic diversification in video games often nevertheless perceive characterization to be an issue of representations motivated by percentages, ratios, census numbers, customer/player gender and the realities of the marketplace overall, choosing (perhaps rather wisely?) to ignore the narrative realities of the issue. What I mean by the word “wisely” is that obviously, one can’t not be apologetic to their research, and a tremendous discussion is to be had about the extending and diversifying experiential sphere of life of the post-modern gamer.

That being said, I was extremely pleased to discover a view very similar to mine in the brief article, “Facing White America from Minority Country“, in which Juan Letona responds to a Kotaku editorial:

“For Hispanics/Latinos we have a great literature legacy to inspire us, from Cervantes to Borges to Bolano. What they have done for literature a new breed should apply their trade in game development, and I encourage all minorities to do the same.”

In the response, Letona wholly circumvents the aforementioned dilemma by instead choosing to focus on the individual-authorial nature of writing, by selecting examples of writers known for their experiential fiction, authors that chose to write about their personal sphere of life, of their own cities, countries and fellow countrymen. A similar list of mine would perhaps include Dos Passos, DeLillo, the Beats, Spiegelman. Yours may be vastly different, obviously, just like mine is from Letona’s, but the core idea of the approach remains, namely, game fictions are no different from their other fictive counterparts in this manner, and thus inherently informed by their writers’ experiential continuums – whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

My Tabula Rasa character. Highly ironic!

Attempting to separate the author’s experience from the material (à la New Criticism and liberal humanist methodology) is a response to a pre-existing state. Therefore, in our inherent negative knee-jerk reaction to, say, the generic male whiteness of the current gaming landscape, we involuntarily and accidentally deny our current authors of their experiential wealth and resources, ultimately condemning – if not altogether depriving them of – their formative origins. No matter how slanted the picture is (and indeed, it is very slanted!), are we truly willing to risk the authenticity of our future fictions by, realistically speaking, ranking different life experiences by percentages and ratios?

In relation to this issue, Delayed Responsibility’s Alpha Protocol –rooted response to Raymond’s article contained the following quip:

“You can have gruff ladies who are not white! You can have gruff people who prefer not to be called ‘men’ and/or ‘ladies,’ regardless of what you think.”

Utilizing anomalous characters like Ellen Ripley is theoretically a fine avenue for diversifying gaming characters, and the breaking-the-mold approach is indeed in perfect accord with the census approach outlined above; characters that seem improbable and less ordinary do generate an illusion of versatility. No, this article is in no way a defence of ham-fisted stereotypes, but we must acknowledge that Ellen Ripley is just as much a stereotype as her male counterparts – her anti-stereotypy remains, after all, effectively an inverse stereotype.

(An another angle to the issue at hand is, do you have to play Alpha Protocol if you find its experiential range to be in discord with yours? Do games have to be all-inclusive and appeal to the widest possible range of players? I asked this question in my earlier post, “Cherry-Picking Easy Targets“.)

To backtrack considerably, I should mention that only truly since August of last year have I really come to this more dogmatic approach towards the avatar. It all started when Leigh Alexander briefly returned to her GameSetWatch column, The Aberrant Gamer, with an article titled the “Uncanny Valley of the Dolls“. While the article mostly focused on the delightfully frivolous topic of character customization in Soul Calibur IV, it also brought up the concept of the uncanny, or “Das Unheimliche”, originated by Jentsch and later popularized by Freud – a very topical term indeed, thanks to viral videos like Meet Emily or The Normals (Sony’s Heavy Rain also springs to mind).

A great feeling of the uncanny indeed arose within me while reading the following:

“…with the distance graphical sophistication has come, we can practically play God and birth new, lifelike people every day if we so choose.”

Beyond the hyperbole, I found myself perplexed by the very concept: All this time, I had assumed players to perceive character creation an act, a form of role play, also often altogether abandoning both, delegating the process to low-level gameplay functionality. I might have allowed myself to subscribe to the idea of “power fantasy”, but assumed not everyone sought these; a power fantasy, after all, would have to be supported both by the narrative as well as the character creation, ultimately becoming a daunting, harrowing process of guesstimating and trying to min-max a game before it even began. For the developer and the player.

After some considerable thought, then, I found my issue to be with Alexander’s use of the verb “birth”. I do fully understand the extended semantic transfer from the word “create”, which is indeed rather commonly used to describe the interface, over to the the verb “birth”. While we may commonly use the term “character creation” for the feature set of the aforementioned process, be as it may, these terms may not be the most appropriate ones: Yes, the act does resemble that of “creation” in that players apply their imagination to a restricted set of tools, much in the same way one would other forms of art, but a process of “birthing”, like Alexander calls it, it is not.

After all, the word “birth” is far removed from the tangible actuality of the interfaces to which our creativity is ultimately tied to. What’s more, the process is almost always transformative, not an originative one (here one might mention “monster” generators such as Spore, but I find them not at all applicable in terms of their narrative content).

Saints Row 2: The Avatar to End All Avatars

My point is this: On the character creation screen of a character-based game, we do not give “birth” to a character much like a mother does not become her infant baby. In video games, then, we do become one with our character – at least as much as acting out a role in a play allows us to vicariously experience being an another being. This difference is both minuscule and semantic, but important nevertheless. Interestingly enough, a rare intransitive use of the verb, meaning “to have birth, be born” also exists. Had this archaic form entered daily use and survived to this day, Alexander’s use would not have puzzled me whatsoever!

So far, then, I have attempted to uncover troubling connotations in the terminology and methodology currently used for describing and discussing the generative processes of avatar customization – words like birth and create over adapt, or customize. I have also spent considerable effort on extolling the value of the experiential worth of a writer’s particular life sphere over the levelling of the authorial voice. But what does this all mean, for games, designers, players? Alexander’s article succeeds in vocalizing the phenomenon:

…audiences often demand protagonists to whom they can relate, whom they admire, to motivate gameplay and enhance immersion – so isn’t the best way to “get it right” to allow players to build their own.

For designers, writers and ultimately companies to seek to “get it right” in this manner, from my narrative-obsessed standpoint, is what I mean by avataritis. As you probably have noticed, my decision to characterize the issue at hand with a pathological suffix stems from its contagiosity: The primary underlying problem is a simple yet distorted view concerning the level and capability of our understanding of human-like motivation. What follows is that in the current public discourse of avatars and non-player characters, there exists an insistent perception, a persistent need to equate understandable motivation and action with relatability.

Breaking this dichotomy down, relatability and understandability are, though conjoined phenomena in practice, two different features and processes. Successful exposition, suspension of disbelief and immersion therefore truly only require the latter. Features like the colour of one’s skin, facial features, speech and language, body shape and language, clothing – these are all concepts that help us to identify and relate depending on the degree of our experiential knowledge.

Yet the aforementioned aspects are externalized go-to signifiers, symbols, messages and markers. The profound mistake currently being made in the popular media – movies, TV series, games – is that it’s often more than enough to merely rely on these signals; once a shared, common terminology of relatability has been discovered, reaching beyond the surface is no longer needed or even preferred. What about Cervantes, Borges and Bolano? Surely their literary merits lie not in the externals, but the internals; yet their literature remains understandable to those not part of the Hispanic community.

NetHack

We don’t have to be, want to be, or know how to be the characters we see on screen. All we need is characters that perform understandable actions and reactions. Relations. Emotions. Desires. Wants. Wishes, drives and urges. None of these ultimately have to do with ethnicity, gender, looks or otherwise. This is the dualistic fallacy of the avatar: Customization may seem to offer developers and players alike a chance to mask, to separate an avatar from its perfunctory position and move it closer to the player, bridging the gap between various players of different origins, but due to the avatar’s function as a literary element, a character never does become perfectly liberated from its original environs and place of creation.

Now; the confusion of these two features of understanding human action, relatability and understability, stems from this misconception being both widely promulgated and accepted. For instance, in response to Raymond’s previously mentioned article, Mass Effect writer Patrick Weekes chooses to corroborate this perception:

“We are unapologetically aiming for a wide audience — summer blockbuster, not art house movie. As a result, our men are usually going to be attractive or ugly-but-rugged, and our women are going to be attractive or distinguished. That’s what most people want.”

Pay close attention to Weekes’ use of the word “want”; have not the critics mentioned above established, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the fallacy of this very statement – that a diverse horizon of expectations exists, and that the current landscape of game avatars is both slanted and distorted? Furthermore, in purporting the erroneous view, he also fails to take into account the very real dangers of the issue. Compare his view to last year’s “The Dark Knight”, or more importantly, one of its characters: The Joker. Is he like you or me in terms of his (psychological) make-up? Not very much so… Is he likable? I hope not! Is he nevertheless… understandable? Much of the power of the film indeed lies within the fact that the Joker’s position as a decidedly, utterly chaotic entity is made visible and clarified to the viewer throughout the film.

Finally. In summing up, this post has been an attempt to give a name to the distinct voices discussing the concept of the avatar as well as the actual issue at hand.

First, I attempted to illustrate how requesting diversification of characters based on a reality-based quota and stock does not always properly take into account the creative processes of writing a narrative-based video game. Until the ethnic make-up of the whole industry changes, we should not confine our writers to statistical rules for the sake of diversification – at least, not unless there is a clearly motivated narrative requirement for it.

Second, I wished to explain semantically the mistaken and clouded terminology currently used for describing the avatar and its related processes.

Third, I sought to explain how offering players avatar-based customization can lead to beautification, stereotyping, archetyping and the ongoing perpetration of an established discourse of the avatar that allows companies to purport and rely on the assumption that players (or viewers) only want to relate, desire, admire or be themselves. This common terminology of relatability subsequently results in a superficial set of markers, never producing the need for more in-depth exposition of human interaction in video game narratives.

…in short, when players can look at an avatar and say, “that’s me,” they can care about that digital self’s well-being enough that they want to stick around, see their creation strive, grow and thrive.

Now, as much time as we spent on discussing the difference between birthing, creating and becoming a character earlier in this article, the exclamation point remains outside semantics, that player avatars in gaming narratives should have nothing whatsoever to do with players’ surficial relationships and expectation horizons with what avatars should be like. I beg us to disconnect the avatar from each of the aforementioned discourses, from whatever purported expectations and ultimately make sure that there will be no constricting rule sets for future writers of narratives in video games.

Weekes’ quote reveals to us the danger of allowing the muddled avatar discourse to go on. As long as the avatar is confined to the current customization-based framework, our narratives will remain superficial and designed for everyone and no-one instead of enriching us, on far more personal level, with the multitudinous continuum of human interaction that is not at all beyond our abilities as writers, designers and players.

Steam Ad for Jedi Knight Collection

This is a rather shocking turn of events after a wildly successful reintroduction of the classic LucasArts back catalogue to audiences old and new, and indeed strikingly qualitatively different from the previous batch of releases, especially so when taking into account that fixes to some of the aforementioned issues are in fact readily available! For instance, players who already own the games on CD can simply extract the original wave audio for their background music to work (thanks Richard!).

It is only natural, however, to find the company trying to think up ways to maintain the newfound revenue flow and subsequently benefit from the excitement caused by these re-releases. Therefore, it’s also all the more disappointing that oversights such as the aforementioned might considerably affect the public perception of the company’s current endeavours.

Macintosh version of Dark Forces

There may also be a specific, underlying reason as to why such a difference in-between the apparent quality of the re-release treatment exists: Earlier this year, the wonderful industry veteran and MAME developer Aaron Giles revealed that he had been commissioned to work on a few titles from the company’s back catalogue. Perhaps LucasArts have Giles, the self-described “completist”, to thank for laying out the conversion groundwork? Perhaps the digital launch for the SCUMM titles was as successful as it was because of heartfelt attention that Giles offered?

Speculation aside, I would like us to sequence into the concept of goodwill. The OED defines the term broadly into two distinct forms of usage: Commercial, or “the possession of a ready-formed ‘connexion’ of customers, considered as an element in the saleable value of a business, additional to the value of the plant, stock-in-trade, book-debts, etc” and attributive, or “favourable or kindly regard; favour, benevolence”.

In terms of the current model for gaming business, these two descriptions obviously go hand-in-hand – the question is, how, exactly? Beyond developing and shipping quality products, can a company accumulate goodwill via a string of genre-defining releases? Can goodwill be lost via the cancellation of announced titles, overall poor effort, rehashing or even selling out?  And finally, can goodwill be potentially regained via rehabilitation? Do temporal and/or intentional factors count?

Rogue Leaders - The Story of LucasArts

After all, LucasArts – or rather, LucasFilm Games and LucasArts Entertainment Company – were originally, as illustrated in Rob Smith’s book, “Rogue Leaders”, a trailblazer and an industry leader, both technically and artistically. The company pioneered the use of fractal graphics with Rescue on Fractalus! and Ballblazer, also both originating and popularizing the point-and-click adventure gameplay with Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. They even created the forefather of the online community, Habitat.

Sadly, the book also encapsulates the LucasArts days of Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Hal Barwood, David Grossman, Steve Purcell, Aric Wilmunder, Noah Falstein, Larry Ahern, Michael Z. Land, Peter Chan, Peter McConnell, Clint Bajakian, Sean Clark and Bill Tiller. In a tragicomic display, the entire second half of “Rogue Leaders” is almost entirely dedicated to Star Wars, effectively drawing down the curtains on LucasArts as we knew it, both metaphorically and physically.

Reaching the end of the book can be a disappointing experience; after all, since the release of Tim Schafer’s gloriously creative Grim Fandango eleven years ago, the company’s output has bordered on the disenchanted. Previous LucasArts CEO Jim Ward’s tenure from 2004 to 2008 was especially formative in terms of our current understanding of the company: After all, Ward’s focus was always, first and foremost, on fiscal responsibility, performance and profit. No matter how much the public perception of adventure games as commercially unviable was the result of spin doctoring, stereotyping and the constant propagation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, they simply did not seem to fit in the equation.

In a leaked internal memo from July 2004, for instance, Ward dismisses, in illustrative fashion, the company’s yearly bonuses after a mere eight weeks on the job:

Our performance, qualitatively, strategically and financially, just isn’t there. One of the primary consequences of this lack of performance is that we have to make some tough decisions, like this one, to get back on track.

In a June 2006 interview with MCV, Ward chose to focus on the importance of competitive strategy:

“We’ve adopted new philosophies at LucasArts which, frankly, the whole industry should adopt. We make kick-ass games, but on time and on budget. Failure on any one of those three points is failure for the project.” “We are very serious about that strategy and we’re able to deliver on it. As a result we’re successful on a revenue and a bottom line basis.”

Even in leaving his post, Ward underlined performative factors:

“Together we’ve rebooted the company and set LucasArts on a path to even greater success. This is a fantastic team and they are positioned for their best year ever.”

Monkey Island Special Edition

After an ill-fated string of attempts to revive old franchises (Full Throttle: Payback, Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, Sam & Max: Freelance Police and Indiana Jones & The Staff of Kings, respectively) resulted in a devastating PR fallout during Ward’s reign, antagonistic reactions to the company’s apparent misdirection reached an all-time high. A 2004 SCUMM Bar “Open Letter to LucasArts” rather candidly encapsulates the fears and worries that many adventure enthusiasts wore on their sleeves. With LucasArts’ reservoir of goodwill trickling thin in the form of lawsuits and cease & desist letters against innocuous fangames, even a website solely dedicated to LucasArts bashing appeared.

In light of these past years, then, should we perchance be alarmed by this recent misfire with the Jedi Knight collection? Let’s admit it: Lending out Guybrush over to Telltale Games makes complete sense now, but who in their right mind would have expected LucasArts to part with him just a year ago? No way, Jose. No way. I wouldn’t oppose in the least if we all were to agree that LucasArts, as a corporate entity, simply painted itself in the corner, and ultimately had no other possibility but to change – or wither away.

Nevertheless, I would not be opposed to perceiving the recent changes in management as a natural culmination of the company’s know-how, perseverance and heritage, either. After so many years, who’s to say? Either way, the company seems focused, perhaps more so than in over a decade, on attempting to carve out an all-new new identity after being creatively lost for so long in a galaxy far far away. Certainly, the SCUMM re-releases, the Monkey Island Special Edition, and their latest title, Lucidity, all seem to point towards the latter. The new LucasArts CEO, Darrell Rodriguez, certainly echoes this sentiment in an interview with Develop:

“We’ve also been able to put an IP pipeline in the works with a team dedicated to creating new IP and new ways to reinvigorate some of our favorite heritage products such as the recently announced Monkey Island franchise.”

Changed, changed, changed utterly. Let us go back in time for a moment, back to the year 2003, and seek to recall the scenes that made the most sense, made the most out of its thematic elements in the second instalment, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne: What about the part where Max escapes his sealed apartment block with the aid of some of its colourful inhabitants – or the lock-up bust, with Mona contained at the police station? Or the very beginning of the game, with Max waking up in the hospital, when you come face to face with the doctors and nurses?

More than any other publisher, Rockstar’s games depend on a real sense of place and culture.

These fleeting yet important stretches of human-scale interaction in Max Payne 2, with unnecessary bystanders, extraneous casualties, even enemies – fully rounded or not – made the series feel that much more real, more tangible. My concern, at this juncture, is not at all that Max Payne 3 will be a poor quality game, but that it will fail to properly exhibit the internal, halcyon, subdued side of the “film noir” experience:

Bouts of solitary soul-searching. Moments of truth. Moments of half-truth. Gaps in the fabric of reality (not caused by drugs, sigh). Painful silence. Convincing lies. Introspection. Love. The loss of love.

Since leaving the NYPD and New York itself behind, Max has drifted from bad to worse. Double-crossed and a long way from home, Max is now trapped in a city full of violence and bloodshed, using his weapons and instincts in a desperate search for the truth and a way out.

In the much-talked Game Informer article, Jeronimo Barrera explains Rockstar’s motives: “But noir is a style… It’s looking at a world in a bleak way. … That’s what we’re doing. It’s more contemporary.”. Indeed, are not the Brazilian favelas currently some of the bleakest, most fiendishly (in)human locations to live in, completely controlled by drug lords and gangs, by manipulation and violence?

Can Rockstar not offer Max a modicum of solace, of humanity? After all, Max Payne’s downward spiral was never like that of Nico Bellic’s, for example; In Grand Theft Auto IV, nobody is truly on the good side. Nico’s morals were that of a criminal, based on power relationships alone; Max was a man of integrity in betrayal. The difference in-between these lines is larger than (a) life.

In the earlier Paynes, good and evil were always blurred, but never so unclear as to dissemble the distinction; Max, still a member of society, certainly never knew for sure who had good intentions, who sought to bring evil, or who was in constant motion in-between the two. Of utmost importance was the fact that Max simply did not know. Against this backdrop, looking at the latest batch of screenshots (see above), for instance, nearly all of the favelas’ bandits seem to be veiled in masks or hoods, as markers of their simplified enmity and their class and primary function as antagonists, also further dehumanizing and demonizing them by stripping them of their facial features.

Compare this scenario with that of Max Payne 2’s first playable level: When entering an industrial warehouse, we meet a whistling, solitary cleaner clad in overalls – ready and willing to help you with your ongoing investigation: A drastic difference in-between the marking and defining of character class. Here, I can’t help but think of thechineseroom’s Korsakovia, which attempts to answer the question, “what happens if you turn off the visual representation of agents, the normal cues players use to predict behaviour and motive?”

While Max Payne may have been an extremely competent and visceral third-person action game, its true charms, for me, lay in character inter-action, not action alone. The little we have seen of Max Payne 3 so far has offered no apparent rationale for the game to be titled Max Payne 3; The game that I have seen, so far, could have been Kane & Lynch 2, or Hitman 5. It could have been Just Cause 3. It could have even been Uncharted 2 or Resident Evil 5, like Joystiq’s Randy Nelson implies. Barrera, as if in agreement, told Game Informer, “…but Max has moved on.” Popmatters’ G. Christopher Williams, too, infers in his article that

…having complicated characters that can age may indicate that video game narratives could be growing up a bit themselves.

But does moving on, giving up and growing old mean growing up? And more importantly, are we ready to do the same?

The key to successful gameplay exhibition, after all, is authentic exposition. While the generic idea of the trailer is to lure the player in, convince him or her of the game’s meritorious mechanisms, gameplay trailers are not as disconnected from actual gameplay as it would seem on the outset; Think of competitive play, for example, wherein even the most infinitesimal intricacies matter: DPI, polling rate, sensitivity, inversion, crosshairs, macros, bindings, et cetera et cetera. My primary question is, then, why are we not seeing these features in trailers?

A very recent example – one I’m sure most of you have seen by now – can be found in the form of the latest BioShock 2 multiplayer trailer, found below:

The footage above has been clearly recorded with the questionable aid of the gamepad: The first-person camera movement looks imprecise and tardy; most of the third-person action on display, then, consists of arrow-straight movement, sluggish posturing and general standing-about. Two more gameplay video analyses, of Resistance 2 and Singularity, after the jump.

Ultimately, finding issues such as the aforementioned in videos really does reflect rather poorly on my general understanding of the pacing, playability and the controls of a particular game. Should I perchance blame the video’s gameplay co-ordinator, its actors, the general unsuitability of the gamepad (blasphemous!) – or even the actual controls of the game?

An early Resistance 2 gameplay trailer, then, sought to illustrate the magnitude of the scenery and the Leviathan, but when I thought about it in context of this post, the only discernible feature of the trailer that I recalled – apart from its reliance on scripted sequences – was how more than half of the video consists of the demonstrator trying to awkwardly climb up and down several flights of stairs. See for yourself:

How is the player having a hard time with controls not adversary to both the video’s overall success and players’ overall expectations of the game? Is my bar simply set too high?

My final example is also the straw that broke the camel’s back: The latest Singularity walkthrough, which is presented in the form of the dreaded amusement park ghost train experience. Its first-person camera behaves as if scripted and running on rails, subsequently resulting in the demonstrator failing to elicit neither realistic action nor reaction such as taking cover, scanning the environment for vantage points, searching for pickups or objects, ultimately offering to us an unnaturally smooth gaming experience:

Why am I so gawrshdarnd allergic to this particular phenomenon, then? As much as I feel I’m making much ado about nothing, I really quite honestly can’t stand these pad videos. This is my attempt at explaining why: While viewing a gameplay demonstration, I would much rather be fully submerged into the environs and the gameplay, in the exact way I would were I playing the game myself. After all, as much as the gameplay demo is an advertisement, it also functions as a viable channel for us potential players to experience the act of playing a game well before its actual date of release.

Therefore, when a gameplay video fails to successfully illustrate the full range of motion normally presented to me via mouse controls, or display a certain pace or a tempo of movement I’ve long since grown used to having on the PC platform, the video becomes mechanistic and monotonous, as if the game was merely going through the motions. My suspension of disbelief – instantaneously damaged.

Revision Comparison

Some players might have missed the debacle altogether. Me? In response to the news, I envisioned a future scenario wherein Beyoncé models for a revised Alyx in Half-Life 2 EP3. I was desperate to commentate on the topic right there and then, but ultimately decided against it. Phew. Now, despite the fact that Left 4 Dead 2’s characters have barely been cast out to light, however, I am bold enough to suggest that an intriguing pattern has emerged, that a trajectory of design can be seen in the way Valve and Turtle Rock Studios have designed the various characters of the Left 4 Dead series.

In this text – which is just as much a history of the games’ development cycle as it is an analysis of the concept of “character” in the gaming medium – I will first navigate us through a series of dates, occurrences and currents that ultimately affected the make-up of the casts of both games. I will also attempt to explain and pinpoint decisions related to the series’ art direction. Since we’re broadly three months removed from Left 4 Dead 2 release date of November 17th, you’ll have just about enough time to read through my admittedly thorough assessment. Thanks for reading!

GameSetWatch’s Thomas Cross in fact previously touched upon the characterization of the Left 4 Dead cast last January, albeit from a slightly different vantage point: In his article, “Making Storytelling Look Natural”, he concludes that “Each [Left 4 Dead] character has a recognizable personality, if you take the time to learn them”, adding, “And yet these are still horror movie archetypes, it’s just that they’ve been given a slightly different stage this time round.” While I do wholly agree with his assessments, the focal point of Cross’ article is decidedly on the “hows” than the “whys” and the “whats”, which I rather choose to focus on in this article instead.

Since there exists a bidirectional relationship between characters and the narrative (or “stage”, as Cross calls it) encompassing them, if these characters are not instantaneously classifiable, positionable and relatable (as per our pre-existing societal knowledge), players can have difficulty in properly perceiving the story as a whole. This is especially true of the gaming medium, where avatar readability has been a chief priority for designers and artists – and justly so. For obvious reasons, it is preferred and encouraged that players reflect and transport their own personalities onto avatars as successfully as possible. Rather than fleshing out our avatars, though, there is a common, shared tendency to either aim for instant audiovisual accessibility and/or customizability. If developers chose to, of course, they could also attempt to round out characters in games’ narratives.

This, however, was not originally meant to happen in Left 4 Dead.

Old Characters

Valve employees have let out that Turtle Rock Studios, the original developer of the series, were not “…thinking in the same story-based way that Valve thinks”. Though Turtle Rock Studios ended up being fully assimilated into Valve in January 2008, it’s nevertheless more than probable that the creative intention to include a narrative as well as more storytelling sprang up relatively early in development, definitely before the actual acquisition took place. After all, as early as May of 2007, Michael Booth described Turtle Rock Studios’ relationship with Valve as going “far beyond being an engine licensee or distribution partner. … Valve would say the same thing.” On August 4, 2008, Doug Lombardi characterized the acquisition as “a piece of paper that makes things official.”

Old Louis

Nevertheless, even later in the production, it also became apparent that dialogue-oriented cutbacks would have to be made. There has been mention of considerable omissions – after all, it has been confirmed that a full storyline for the game exists (and can be found hypothesized in the Steam Forums), including a “…dictionary with different terms for areas and infected that describe how the Director will handle things in [a particular] area.” In an interview with Eurogamer, Doug Lombardi further clarified the reasons for these cuts, stating that “[Valve] saw a number of reasons to pull back with the first game, primarily because the replayability suffers with a scripted sequence” and that they had “much more dialogue amongst the characters originally, and that was really getting in the way of people understanding the co-op nature”.

The forthcoming Left 4 Dead 2, on the other hand, is to delve deeper into establishing visible narrative progression, unlike the first game, where most storytelling is relayed by the spray-filled walls of the game’s safe houses. Though an ingenious way of sending information transparently to players, the downside to these sprays is their inherent disconnection from the members of the cast as well as their personalities, rendering the sprays largely unsuited for character growth. In relation to this, Lombardi has promised that Valve will “bring more story to [Left 4 Dead 2] in terms of the players’ dialogue” instead.

“Not only are we telling the story of these characters, but we’re telling the story of this world, we’re seeing how things fall apart, and a new way of interacting with the infection” – Chet Faliszek

Old Zoey & Francis

This admittedly long-winded history lesson serves to clarify to us three major points present in the Left 4 Dead development timeline: First, the original Turtle Rock design of Left 4 Dead did not contain as much story as it does now. Second, relatively early on, Valve’s influence on the game nevertheless resulted in a proper storyline being implemented. Third, late in the development, playtests indicated that players reacted disappointingly to a more fully fleshed narrative, and some upgrades to these elements were thus once again scaled back. A fourth point, if we were to discuss the future now and not later on in the article, would be the return of the deeper storyline in the forthcoming sequel.

All these stages ended up influencing the characters’ make-up, and in this light, it’s perhaps easier for us to see the motivations that drove Valve to brusquely revise important player models so late. Above all, the changes can be seen to be a direct response to the needs and requirements of the arising situation: When storytelling was to be omitted, the team sought to find a way to keep the cast accessible and understandable to players of the game. With less story to round and flesh out the characters, something else had to be done to maintain this relationship. As a result, the revised survivors could be seen to be intentionally designed to be more easily identifiable and recognizable out of the box.

Old Francis

In this sense, the revision is closely connected to the characters’ primary function as players’ avatars: The now erased, first cast of characters was, for the lack of better description, damaged goods (Take a look at how adorable Francis looks on the left); Without the cut storyline elements functioning as padding, this type of character conceptualization ultimately made the less iconic cast harder for players to quickly define, classify and relate to. After all, storytelling in games still primarily relies upon a foundation laid down by other media: Literature, theatre, the movies.

In the classic arts, “actors” are used to play “roles” that in turn represent “characters”, by displaying personality through movement and action, and by emphasizing traits: Outwardly looks, responses, use of language (both bodily and verbal). The concept of the (Jungian) archetype, especially in the extended meaning found in literary criticism as referring to recurring generic motifs, is very useful here. In the realm of literature and theatre, the role of the archetype principally as a narrative method is relatively clear-cut, but in the gaming medium, the archetype-as-avatar relationship causes additional factors to consider: In designing avatars, developers have to take into account functions beyond the aforementioned types of characterization.

This is because characters in video games have functions in the programmatic rules of the game, especially so if we perceive games to be “limited formal systems”. In this case, the characters’ role as agents for narrative exposition of the overarching storyline is secondary to their primary function as player avatar, as vessels for player interaction inside the “game world”. Valve, in turn, have displayed a very deep commitment to primarily function-based avatar art direction that takes into account shape, form and lighting – right down to codified principles. They are effecting visual design that is philosophically oriented toward maximum functionalism: Portal, for instance, had a distinct, stylized aesthetic informed by playtesting and feedback; To quote Lombardi again, “the first iteration [of Portal] was much more lush in terms of graphics…and people were having trouble identifying the pathways… We had to make it this sparse environment to get to the gameplay.”

Valve designer Jason Mitchell’s paper, “Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2”, was an astonishing explanation of the multitudinous rendering processes that went into the graphical design of Team Fortress 2. (For a concise explanation of “illustrative rendering”, a video was released). Similarly, it is no accident that Valve are planning on publishing a comic book adaptation of Team Fortress 2: The primary source of inspiration for the graphical look of TF2 was early 20th century commercial illustrators – Cornwell, Leyendecker, Rockwell. Advertisements are, at least in theory (so diluted, the postmodern TV spot!), designed to convey as much information as possible in the least amount of space and time. This idea, of maximum potential identification, heavily factored into the art design of Team Fortress 2. Elaborate techniques were applied “so that players are able to easily identify other players in the game, and assess the possible threat”; Characters were designed to possess “…distinct silhouettes that can be easily identified”.

New Concepts

During the aforementioned 2008 E3 reveal of the new survivors, Gabe Newell’s presentation briefly read: “Taking the lessons learned from Team Fortress 2 about read hierarchy and providing useful and immediate information via character design.” This is where the team’s specific focus on readability, identification and distinction bled into the final stages of Left 4 Dead development, and had as much effect on the characters as did the process of cutting down the storyline. This is not at all surprising considering Valve’s “cabal” development model that puts great weight on spreading, sharing and mobilizing innovations as well as individuals. When this particular methodology of design, of visual distinction and identification, was applied to the Left 4 Dead cast in the form of the revision, a distinct collision of the role and function of “character” arose, causing the upheaval I referenced at the very beginning of this article.

From an avatar-, character-oriented point of view, after all, there are obvious differences in-between the two games: Firstly, each character in Team Fortress 2 is a distinct base-level representation of abstract class (or “role”, rather, should we get into a semantic discussion); It’s acceptable and even desired for these avatars to be visually generic, exaggerated and archetypal because the very meaning of the word “class” is the same as the word “genus”. Left 4 Dead’s characters, however, are derived from a less programmatic register, from everyday society: Instead of being absolute base-level manifestations, the four survivors are slightly higher-level: We have Bill, a Vietnam veteran; Louis, an assistant manager at a retail electronics store; Zoey, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family, and Francis, a tattooed biker. Intriguingly, as stereotypical as the characters are, it is nevertheless possible to further compress, if you will, the characters into lower-level archetypes.

I would personally affix the characters the following tags: The Wise Man (in Jungian terms, again…), the white-collar everyman, the newbie and the lonely ranger. (Feel free to correct me in the comments!)

As We Know Them

Now, as a distinct look and feel had already been established for the characters, some players had already identified (with) the characters. Semantically speaking, the revised cast of characters no longer represented the exact same “person”. Yes, one could potentially argue that all Francis did was lose a few pounds and shave, and that Louis got a hot TV makeover, but what about Zoey? Herein lies a perfect collision of the two aforementioned types of character function, of character-as-narrative-vehicle and character-as-avatar-as-game-mechanic.

All in all, we can conclude that the revised cast of Left 4 Dead 1 fulfilled two separate design-related needs: On the one hand, the developers had to find a way to narrow the narrative gap now present between players and the characters due to cutbacks being exacted on the game. On the other hand, Valve’s general, company-wide art direction had been simultaneously moving towards a more functional implementation. These two sides melded, blending appeal with function, ultimately creating a slightly more iconic set.

Teaser Cast

Finally, to steamroll the entire article into Left 4 Dead 2. Beyond promises of more dialogue and narrative exposition, we can already see for ourselves how the cast, this time, is decidedly less archetypal and consists of higher-level stereotypes; The mere existence of Coach’s religious leanings and Rochelle’s taste in music tell us this much! There also exist early indications of interpersonal schism (not in small part due to the inclusion of Nick), which obviously means that the characters’ position and function as avatars is no longer as strictly dictated by player identification alone. To briefly reiterate, the reasons for this are the following: Firstly, Left 4 Dead is now an established brand. Secondly, players are aware of the gameplay mechanisms and no longer need to be introduced to it. Thirdly, Valve have artistic ambitions to produce more storytelling.

L4D2 Posters

As briefly illustrated in my earlier post on the topic, the posters of the sequel’s campaigns already exhibit a larger degree of interpersonal relationships and personality. It is also evident that the roles affixed to Coach, Rochelle, Ellis and Nick are higher-level than those assigned to Zoey et al: A high-school football coach, a news reporter, a mechanic and a conman. As we did with the first game, here too we can assign a compressed, lower-level set of stereo-/archetypes to match the four. They might be, for instance, the teacher, the heroine, the kid and the cynic. The very fact that I am struggling to distil the characters into lower-level stereotypes tells us that Left 4 Dead 2’s characters are going to be more fully rounded than those of Left 4 Dead.

What you’ve just read is an interpretation of the overarching processes and phenomena – the whats and the whys – that had an effect on how each these three casts ultimately turned out visually, narratively and functionally. At this juncture, I do want to emphasise how great a share of things outlined here are nothing new in itself, as it is only natural for us to expect many of the aforementioned upgrades and improvements from a video game sequel – these are the very things that we expect sequels to be and to do. Despite these facts, it remains nevertheless both intriguing and therapeutic to attempt to map out the various processes and mechanisms that go into game development in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the functions and features of the characters we play as.

In closing, I offer a thought: I always play as Francis, for deep down he loves life, the hating just a façade; how else could he smile so, in the face of a zombie apocalypse?

At first sight, this statement might not sound neither all that unexpected nor meaningful, but let us take a step back into the year 1998, when Half-Life 1 was released. With it, the complexion of the internet gaming community was forever changed (arguably – let us forget the original Team Fortress and Action Quake 2 for now!) as we experienced the first full-on bloom of the modification. For those ends, HalfLife.net was, for a fleeting moment, the premier source of GoldSource-based news.

It was also hastily bought out by the 3D Portal Network in 1999, though as early as May 2001, 3DPN’s Brad Wernicke announced that GameSpy Industries had bought out 3D Portal Network. Three of 3D Portal Network’s websites, HalfLife.net, DukeWorld and UTWorld were merged into their respective “Planet” websites, while others – Gunman Central, Wangsdojo and FAKK2.net for example – were altogether abandoned.

In late 2003, IGN acquires GameSpy (along with 3D Gamers and TeamXbox in early 2004). Finally, in 2005, IGN is bought out by none other than News Corporation.

Back to today. With their storied history, Planet Half-Life, Planet Unreal and Planet Quake are each beyond historical archives of the modding community: Not only do they contain a dazzling array of present projects, they also – in a sense – contain the entire lineage of communities that once were. In my mind, the PHL of today can be traced right back into the HalfLife.net of 1998.

Let’s get back to the original statement, then, of which the effects are potentially staggering: The amounts of websites currently residing in the hosting directories, of the more prominent “Planet”s, are the following:

Planet Half-Life: 139
Planet Quake: 413
Planet Unreal: 148

This adds neatly up to the number 700. Seven hundred projects. Of course, not each and every hosted website will perish in this event – some are still up and running, with active webmasters able to move and migrate – and there are bound to be individuals willing to mirror some (if not all) of the content available, but one single incontestable fact remains: The Planet sites are, though now far less prominent than they were five years ago, still the archive.org of the modification community.

The one facet that does worry me in all this is how we gravitated towards such portals; for the last ten years, it seemed as though there was a build-up, a functional shift, a process towards better availability, cohesion and structure (case in point: ModDB) of community-driven content. After the Planet site directories are gone, whether the content is mirrored and websites move elsewhere, we are nevertheless reverted back to a far more splintered state of being.

For a discussion on archiving the existing content, you could check a discussion thread on celephais.net.

Braid was a long time coming, and when it came, it was nothing short of veni, vidi and vici – Braid delivered. But even the best of games sometimes receive an ounce of backlash – remember the Gears of War commentary from Mike Capps or Alain Tascan? – It’s as though all memetic excellent games receive a hint of backlash sooner or later, just like all good memes turn sour with overexposure, and begs, in my mind, to be presented by applying Leigh Alexander’s (of Sexy Videogameland and Gamasutra) four-month bell curve: “fever-backlash-bottom-out”. The timeframe remains to be seen and discovered, of course…

If you’re interested in analysis on the design of the game, you could take a gander at a very thoughtfully analytic discussion over at The Brainy Gamer. But what about the merits of the game – outside the box?Before I go any further, I would like to say that although we would love to play the game right now, sadly none of us here at the Slowdown – including Mr. Scary and Mr. Burney – have access to a 360 and the XBLA, so theoretically you are absolutely free to cry “hypocrite” or some such thing as you please in the comments box.

Nevertheless, I would like to mention a few things in this short (and compulsory) message about Braid; Not of Braid the game, but of Braid the phenomenon. Is that acceptable? – - I’ll go ahead anyway. What would you think if I said that Braid – despite being heralded as the best thing since sliced bread – is actually not the solution, but part of the problem?

“But you haven’t even played the game!” I hear you all cry collectively. Yes, I’m yet to play the game, and believe you me, there’s little doubt in my mind that the game would not be worthy of the praise. That is a factor that simply does not even come to play.

Let me expound.

Braid is breakwater. Braid is a diversion. The game has firmly maintained its revered position in the utter whole of the indie scene since its first appearance back in 2005. Its developer Jonathan Blow is an authority, a figurehead. But let me ask you this, what will Braid do to our beloved indie gaming? This is the tip, the point: I fear it will do absolutely, absolutely nothing. On the contrary, I fear Braid is hazardous instead of healing.

Braid’s success – at the amazingly high, obnoxious budget of $180,000 that nearly bankrupted Blow – will not come to aid one single indie game at XBLA. With Microsoft’s machine firmly behind Braid, it will find its players. Other such games that might have been minor successes without Braid will now be hopelessly compared to it in unfavourable terms, and in the space where we could have discussed other games, we only spoke of Braid.

How many pages, exactly, has the Brainy Gamer dedicated to Braid? How many articles did mainstream press write on the game? How many times we laughed at the overexposure? Ten other articles – probably just as interesting – could have been written in their stead, another game given a short time in the limelight… sometimes a game or a movie (The Dark Knight anyone?) will capture the minds of a generation, and though Braid is still a long way to go in terms of exposition, I feel Braid will ultimately give to us too little and take away too much.

It may be the best platformer since Super Mario Galaxy, but I’ll be damned if it helps someone get their indie art game published!