I finished Half-Life 2 about a month ago and thought about writing a review. But every time I started the first sentence was “Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter, but I thought it had too much shooting. Also the first-person perspective was over-used.” So I am a uncomfortable writing a review: FPS is not a genre I like and my review might turn into a rant about a genre I don’t like. Not that other reviews turn into rants about genres I *do* like (see: my reviews of FFX and DQ4).

So I’ll just say that Half-Life 2 is the game realisation of every nightmare I’ve had. Except for the one with spiders oh wait they got that too.

Well, if you have a Theory of Everything, it should provide some useful explanatory power, right? The advantage is that you can now analyse a game, see where it falls in this space and how much area it covers. That gives you a handle on how well or badly it covers the space compared to nearby games. You won’t compare Portal and TF2 by mistake, for example. Since Mitch Krpata looked at Rock Band, Metroid Prime 3 and Portal, I’ll do the same.

To help you remember, here are the names I’ve come up with for the corners of the space:

Metroid Prime 3

Metroid Prime 3 is clearly a narrative heavy game—you do so much exploration, always pursuing the next objective. The gameplay is there, but it doesn’t change much over the course of the game. So on the procedural side of things, it leans toward procedural mastery, although it’s still not very hard. Maybe harder than a lot of Western games these days. So, Metroid Prime 3 stretches diagonally from the narrative corner toward mastery. It doesn’t try to be a social game and it doesn’t introduce too many new mechanics, so it’s a relatively thin strip.

Well, wait. That’s not really true. It’s constantly introducing new mechanics as you get new equipment. It’s just that I’ve played too many Metroids—I’ve seen it all before. So I have to change my analysis. Metroid Prime 3, as analysed separately from the other Metroids, covers both procedure learning and mastery pretty well. You get a new weapon, learn to use it, use it for a while, then fight a boss with it. And the boss is usually kind of hard.

It’s nothing like the Old Days where you’d get new weapons only when an enemy dropped a powerup. And bosses were Basically Impossible. But it was the early Metroids that helped put the Old Days behind us in the first place. It just seems heavy on the mastery side by comparison to Western games, I think.

Note that there’s a clear difference between Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime in the emphasis on story versus exploration. My coordinate system doesn’t capture that difference, pushing both toward the narrative/exploration corner. Hmm.

Portal

Portal is clearly a procedure learning game for the first half, and very little else. In contrast, the second half doesn’t introduce any new mechanics. It shifts focus to procedure mastery and narrative: you pay a lot more attention to GlaDOS after the furnace stunt, that’s for sure. But it’s not a very good procedure mastery game: the second half’s puzzles are too easy for a true puzzle aficionado. (I can tell, because they’re just about right for me.) So it seems like the game really wants you to finish the story.

Hmm. That was surprisingly easy. I probably missed something. Yell at me in the comments.

Rock Band

Rock Band is basically a procedure mastery game. You hit the right notes at the right time, or you lose. No story, no learning, no social interaction. Although Mitch points out that the Tourist will play Rock Band, realistically, its stickiness for these gamers is only a strong as the quality of the track list. It’s still basically Tetris with the added draw of familiar music. If it had no recognisable songs, most people would give it about 15 minutes.

Note that compared to the original Guitar Hero, Rock Band covers more space: it adds more narrative in the form of a more coherent progression of sets and locations. And guitar games have always had some procedure learning as you progress toward Expert, but it’s minimal; I understand pretty much everything my friends do on Expert. I just can’t DO it.

Well, um, ok. I’m either tired of writing or else it’s so easy to classify games in this space that I only need one paragraph per game. Probably the former. Maybe it’s that I don’t know Rock Band well enough. Please point out what I missed.

I’ve tried a couple of times to get this post started, but it hasn’t gone well. The idea still isn’t coherent on its own, so maybe I’ll explain some examples. That should help me clarify my ideas.

I’ve started to think of games as taking up an area in space with four corners. Here some guesses at names for the corners:

That’s the basic idea. Let me see if I can convince you (or myself) of it by looking at some examples.

Examples

Since this is a space, and I just name the corners, games hardly ever squeeze right up to the edge—the more modern and mainstream they are, the larger an area they tend to cover.

Here’s another, even shakier set of names for the dimensions. I am not completely happy with the names for the corners of the space, and I’m even less happy about the names for the dimensions. But here they are anyway. Alternate names welcome.

Nouns:

Verbs:

Narrative:

Narrative games are likely to be the mainstream future of games, or at least the future for the next few generations. They’re the closest to other media, especially movies. In fact, if you can imagine a reasonable game-to-movie or movie-to-game translation, then you are probably thinking of a mostly narrative game. Not to say that the translation would be good…for example, Mass Effect would make a pretty bad Star Trek movie. (Not that most Star Trek movies makes really good Star Trek movies.)

Part of that is a narrative game is much better at exploring a world than a narrative movie or book. At least, a game can make exploration a much larger focus than a movie can. But a movie is better at making you understand and care about characters, I think.

Actually, I’m not qualified to talk about movies, so I can’t say more than a sentence or two without saying something completely wrong. I’d better move on.

Social:

Like narrative games, social games also have pre-existing analogues: sports and board games. Social games, for the most part, are similar to football, paintball, checkers and scrabble. This is deadly obvious in Wii Sports, but Halo is basically just geeky* paintball. Like their physical counterparts, social games have simple rules that don’t change. It’s easy to get into a social game, but to win, you have to beat the people you’re playing with.

To quote Mitch Krpata’s A New Taxonomy of Gamers: “The Perfectionist sees success as relative to the performance of others.” Well, perfectionists play social games. (A few notes comparing my idea to Mitch’s taxonomy are below.)

Although social games don’t have to be about beating other players, they usually are. I think World of Warcraft provides a counter-example when players get together for raids—while players talk about beating a boss (Procedure Mastery), most of the effort goes into coordinating 25 players’ strategies. That sounds like Social Mastery to me. But I have to put a disclaimer here; I’ve never played WoW, just heard friends talk about it ad nauseam. (There’s also WoW’s PvP, but that’s clearly a digitisation of football. Or maybe war.)

*I originally said “more fun", but that’s probably because I’m a geek.

Procedure Mastery:

This is something new games contributed to the world: test your skill against a fixed algorithm instead of an intelligent human. Beat the machine! Just a man and his will to survive! Well, not completely new: there were already things like bar puzzles. You know, like that stupid peg triangle from Cracker Barrel. But they were very simple. Still, it’s not surprising that games went mainstream when Pong set up in a bar.

Still, games that focus purely on procedure mastery have limits to their complexity, and it’s hard to really get into them unless you have a weird personality. Normal people play at them for 15 minutes at a time. That’s the most likely reason for the pre/post-crash difference between Atari and Nintendo. Atari ported arcade games to the home. Nintendo moved games out of the extreme quarter-sucking edge of procedure mastery toward new emphases on procedure learning and narrative.

So began the trivialisation of these already-trivial games. If, like me, you grew up after the Atari years, these games went by a number of pejorative names: “Windows games” in my childhood, when all the Real Games, like DOOM and Descent, ran on DOS. Later, “Flash games", when the Real Games ran on Windows. Now they are called “Wii games", when the Real Games run on the 360/PS3.

Well, that’s not quite fair. Although the Wii brought back procedure mastery games, its focus is on social games. Still, the kind of people that skipped procedure mastery games the first time around because (1) they wouldn’t enter an arcade and (2) they wouldn’t buy an Atari…well, now that they have a Wii for their workouts, they usually have at least Tetris or Tower Defence installed. They’re fun for about 15 minutes every couple of weeks.

Procedure Learning:

If narrative and social games are the mainstream future and past of gaming, procedure learning games are the indie future. On the surface, most of these games look similar to procedure mastery games. But the point is to learn rules, not to win using the rules. Games designed all the way to the edge of this corner change the rules as soon as you have learnt them. Or before! flOw is a good example. Try the flash version and come back. (There’s also a PS3 version, but it’s nearly the same.)

To see how procedure learning differs from procedure mastery, imagine if flOw were released in the 1981 arcades instead of the 2006 internets. What would people say? “The game is too complicated. I can’t tell whether I’m winning or losing! But it’s also too easy! I never died once! And there’s no score!” Well, that’s the point: it’s not about whether you beat the computer or get a high score. The point is to play with the rules and figure them out. By that measure, I didn’t really “beat” the first three worlds, because I still understand less than half of the rules for the creatures I played.

So, yes, indie games tend toward procedure learning. With good reason: procedure is unique to video games. If you make a Prince of Persia movie*, you can try to convey the sense of exploration, but the concept of rewinding time can only be translated where the game uses it as a narrative device. Where is has to do with gameplay, it’s impossible to translate. What are you going to do–rewind the movie 30 seconds and play that part again?

Come to think of it, even where rewinding WAS central to the story, wouldn’t it have been better for the game to leave the final big rewind up to the player? Instead it’s presented as a cutscene. It should have been more like the ending of Half-Life.

But I digress. Even though it’s the farther thing from an indie game, The Elder Scrolls (TES) games are in this corner because they pack so many different systems in. They encourage you, for example through the guilds, to explore the different systems. As soon as you’ve got good at sneaking around, sniping from the shadows, you’ll get a quest that requires you to magically breathe underwater for half an hour. So you’ll have to learn how to be a wizard next. Realistically, this is the heart of the game—it’s the part that most people will play for about 20 hours before moving on. Of course, if you like completing quests and levelling up (and I do), then you have moved on past the Procedure Learning part of The Elder Scrolls and into the Procedure Mastery part. But it turns out that mastery of TES is very easy. And takes a really long time. (Of course, this means you’re getting good value for your money, always of paramount importance to the PC pirate gamer!)

*Yes they are making a Prince of Persia movie.

On learning

On learning: One of my friends, a game designer, points out that “fun is learning". However, the bottom half of this space is not about learning. It’s about beating somebody else, or maybe seeing what kind of story they can tell. You can be perfectly happy in Final Fantasy or Team Fortress long after you learn how the game works. This is especially clear in Half-Life. You have to learn the rules, and then win a little bit, but they want you to see the story so much that they make it really easy on you. I mean, I beat both games on Normal. Me! And I played the second one with a controller!

Furthermore, the right half of the space is about systems that are “easy to learn, difficult to master"*. The left half has games that feature systems that are “hard to learn, easy to master". In other words, for algorithmic games, learning the system is the game. The game isn’t hard to play, it’s just hard to figure out. The Elder Scrolls games are a good example: you can have a lot of fun playing while you learn how the various systems work. But the game itself is never particularly hard.

*Or in the case of Wii Sports, “easy to learn, impossible to master".

On “A New Taxonomy of Gamers”

I can’t ignore Mitch Krpata’s “A New Taxonomy of Gamers”—it’s a big influence on my “coordinate space". (I thought about calling my idea a taxonomy, but that implies putting things in only and only one box.)

Specifically, his first distinction between Tourist gamer and Skill gamer is exactly the difference between Exploration game and Mastery game. The only difference is whether to attribute the difference to the game or the gamer. I suppose you could argue that, but I don’t know whether it’s worthwhile.

His next distinction is between two types of Skill gamer: Perfectionist and Completionist. When fit into my space, this distinction is a bit epiphenomenal—the terms don’t need to be explicitly specified because they naturally fall out from gamer’s responses to different types of games. A Perfectionist is a gamer who best understands Mastery games. A Completionist is a gamer who understands Mastery games, but happens to play Exploration games. To a Completionist, it makes no sense that a world could be created just to tell a story, or worse just to be. Much less a rule set! Rule sets are for figuring out and winning! To satisfy these kinds of gamers, many Exploration games make a badge for Exploring everything. That way you can ‘master’ the game. That makes the Skill gamer happy, and doesn’t bother the Tourist gamer. (Note: As Mitch says in his Metroid”’ case study, there may be a more coherent way than badges, but at least badges don’t bother anybody except when they make that Plonk noise right in the middle of an important cut scene in Mass Effect…"Congratulations, Shepard. You <PLONK! Saved the Galaxy Achieved> saved the galaxy"…but I digress.)

Then he further divides gamer into Wholesale versus Premium gamers. This distinction doesn’t have anything to do with games—Oblivion and flOw are both Procedure Learning games, but Oblivion is definitely wholesale while flOw is the opposite. Notably, in his case study of the Orange Box, he stops talking about the Tourist/Skill distinction, despite the fact that Half Life 2 is a Narrative game (I don’t imagine that it offers much challenge at all to a competent TF2 player), Portal is edged pretty far into Procedure Learning territory, and Team Fortress 2 is a purely Social game. So: Wholesale/Premium is a useful gamer distinction, but has more to do with the intended audience for the game rather than intrinsic game design.

Next time: A Theory of Everything should provide explanatory power, so I’ll see how well it covers a couple of games.

As a programmer, I use the power of indirection all the time. While indirection grants you flexibility, it also makes things less efficient. That’s the story of LostWinds’ innovation: instead of a Jump button, you get a Swish button that makes the wind blow. You can Swish your player to jump, but you can also Swish enemies, items and scenery to do lots of other things. LostWinds replaces several special-purpose buttons with one general mechanism. That’s the elegance of indirection.

I wish it worked in LostWinds. It doesn’t, really. It seems like replacing one button with one gesture would get you the simplicity of Mario’s 1-button jump with the flexibility of Metal Gear’s 8-button CQC system. Well, you kind of get that…about 33% of the time. Another 1/3 of the time, the game misinterprets your gesture and the last 1/3, the Wii fails to register your gesture at all.

LostWinds is a platformer that is mostly about puzzles instead of action. It tries very hard to exude an indy feel: there’s a little direct story-telling but most of it is picked up along the way or, even better, exuded by sheer force of personality. There are numerous variations to the gameplay in a short amount of time. In this respect, it’s a good game. If you are interested in playing, though, you should start with the first of the two games. The second game assumes that you have already played the first.

This assumption is a problem because the learning curve on basic jumping is huge—3-4 hours for me—and since the designers assume that you have already learned how to platform in the first game, the first hour of the game plops a timer on you as you platform from safe point to safe point.

For the beginner, this is supremely frustrating in many highly innovative ways. The timer gives you about enough time to make two mistakes on the way to the next safe point. After the first mistake, you have to decide whether to keep trying. If you opt to go back to the last safe point and start over, you spend extra time. If you try a second time, the Wiimote starts buzzing madly as the timer continues to run down. But if you’re like me and only start up the Wii once a month, that means your Wiimote battery is now running down almost as fast as your timer. So you run up to the ledge, make the attempt, fail it, and run back to the safe point. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Add 5 seconds of dead time between each attempt to learn how to platform in this stupid game.

If you’re going to make players suffer like this, don’t put it at the beginning of the game! Do like Metroid’ 2 (and Mario World, and Mario Galaxy…) and at least put it partway in, after the new players have a chance to figure out the controls.

Even after I mastered the jumping, there were new and exciting ways to fail. There is a section when you have to lift 3 items to the top of the screen. These items have two salient points: (1) they are round and (2) they burn. So, unlike Our Hero, they roll around when flung upwards onto tiny platforms. Have you played the awesome game Population Tire? Imagine that 3 screens taller, made a tiny bit easier by having intermediate platforms. Except that, if you Swish too close to a torch, the tire burns up and you have to start over at the bottom. Actually, I encourage you to play Population Tire and then play the Wii version. Even though the Wii version is considerably slowed down, it’s still harder than using a mouse.

I finally learned (from watching a video walkthrough) that you can use the Guide technique to lift non-Hero items gently along a path, which minimises rolling at the end. That way you just have to worry about the fire.

A final technique that I never got good at was drawing circles. I don’t know if it’s a problem with how I hold the Wiimote, or how the software recognises the circles, or maybe just a mismatch with human physiology, but drawing circles is NOT easy. Drawing polygons is easy enough, but they’re never really round. More…squished. I have this problem in Okami too, where circles are just as important, although at least Okami pauses completely while you’re drawing instead of going into slow-motion.

So I didn’t like the gameplay. Unlike Banjo-Kazooie, which also innovated its way into an annoying game, I have a harder time disliking the game as a whole. It helps that outside gameplay, the presentation and story-telling are appealing and cute. I think the more important reason is that the innovation here isn’t inherently a bad idea (unlike “vehicle-based platformer"). It’s just crippled by a crappy input device and slightly dodgy recognition. This game would be so much better with a mouse, it’s not even funny. Seriously. I really hope it’s ported to PC at some point. If it were not a downloadable game, even 360/PS3 ports would be feasible because they could just pack in a $5 USB mouse.

One important point I take away from this is that I am just about done with the Wii. The platform, like most winning crappy-grey-box platforms, is short on inherent value compared to alternatives–good software is good in spite of the platform, not because of it. But there’s not much good software on the Wii, at least compared to 3 years into the PS2’s life. In other words, I really wish I had bought a Wii at the end of its lifetime like I did the PS2. That way I could buy only the really good games and not have to suffer through the gimmicky or unusable innovations. As I think back over every game that has used the Wiimote well so far, they would ALL (all!) be better with mouse control*. The things they do are cool, but the Wiimote is so finicky and inaccurate that in all cases, there is (1) a huge training time and (2) I am MORE likely to quit the game out of annoyance.

I’m not sure what my final opinion of the game is; I think I’d like it a lot better after a second playthrough. Maybe it’s just one of those games you have to play more than once. One thing I’m sure about: this is the last time I buy a game based solely on the Brainy Gamer’s recommendation. Our tastes are just too different. I think Michael is the typical arts professor: he values certain things highly, like emotion and innovation, and has a huge capacity to enjoy a game despite its problems. As for me, I don’t value innovation nearly as much, and I can’t ignore problems as well.

*In case you’re wondering, the list is: World of Goo, LostWinds, Metroid’ 3 and Okami.

But there’s a another list of games for which Wiimote control is peripheral. Mario Galaxy and Zelda: Twilight Princess wouldn’t lose much on a Gamecube controller except arm fatigue. And games like Fire Emblem and Smash Brothers encourage you to use a Gamecube controller.

I just finished Dragon Quest 4, so here’s a review. Well, to be honest, I finished the original five chapters. Even though the DS version I played has a bonus sixth chapter, I don’t hold with bonus add-on content, especially since it’s hardly ever as good.

What distinguishes Dragon Quest 4 from all other JRPGs, which are invariably based on Dragon Quest? The biggest thing is division into chapters; the individual characters are introduced in their own chapters and combined into one team in the final chapter. As a gameplay device, it’s a lot more fun than Final Fantasy 4’s constant suicides/swaparoos. It also gives you the satisfaction of that early levelling curve *five times*.

The other thing that distinguishes Dragon Quest 4 from modern RPGs is that it basically doesn’t care about its story. The characters don’t engage in histrionics or solemn vows of revenge; the only thing that keeps the story moving is the deadly obvious clues that the villagers drop about the Next Step. The whole thing would get old, except for the complete change of scenery every chapter.

Which leads to the other other thing that distinguishes Dragon Quest 4 from modern RPGs: battles are constant, frequent and fast. That’s a lot different from Lost Odyssey, which is that last JRPG I played. It has the gall to feature loading times before battle. 2-3 seconds even. (I quit playing that during the LAN party after Frazier made fun of “exciting menu-based gameplay” that I was in fact playing in order to put myself to sleep.)

Anyway, back to DQ4: you can crank up the text speed to max and blaze through most battles in 10-20 seconds. That’s good, because you’ll have to do a lot of grinding while finding your way through the dungeons of the game. I suppose when you replay it, you’ll know your way and maybe the bosses will be more challenging at a lower level.

Oh, right: the game isn’t super hard. It’s somewhere between FF4, as released in Japan, and FF “2″, as released in the US. I died a few times, but never fighting a boss; it was always early on when I decided to delve deep into a dungeon I wasn’t ready for. Because you get to keep experience even after dying, though, you’ll still eventually finish.

The chapters are a great idea, and the basic but zippy battles are fun, but the low point of the game was in chapter 5, near the end. There was a giant fetch quest to get an armour set or something, and it just felt like the designers were trying to give me my money’s worth by making me revisit every town in the world looking for clues. Given my bargain-bin approach to buying games, I would have been happier with a 18-20 hour game instead of the 28 hours I put in.

This is the first Dragon Quest game I’ve played, and I see now why it’s so popular in Japan. I still find Final Fantasy more interesting as a series, but that’s because it keeps changing. I bought Dragon Quest 8 this year, and I’m eager to have time to play it, but I don’t expect it will be much different from DQ4 from the hour I’ve played so far. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy is the series with FF5, FFX and FF12. That just about delineates the boundaries of the the JRPG genre. I guess that’s the difference: Final Fantasy tries to find the boundaries; Dragon Quest is the solid centre of the JRPG.