Stripped of all context there is a single ability true to all video games: amplification of input, the translation of a simple input into a complex output: I press this button and a whole new range of options become available to me; I pull this trigger and that car explodes. The idea is not to exactly replicate the input required to achieve the desired output; the chain of causality from action to consequence is often long and complicated, one single action rarely leads to a complex output without a myriad other factors.

The underlying aim of all games is the codification and abstraction of complex ideas and situations into ones over which it’s easier to obtain competence in, and eventually master of. Through mastery comes insight, understanding, and an appreciation of the complexity of the original situation. In order to achieve this insight, this appreciation, the simplification and abstraction of the original situation must be achieved in such a manner that the simplified version is easier to master but that the lessons learned from this simplified form are still applicable to the original.

Chess is not warfare, it is a highly abstracted conflict with some contextual association to warfare. It is a lot easier to learn Chess than it is to learn how to command a real military force, however a lot of the high level strategic lessons still hold. It is still applicable to the concept of warfare.

The closer games move to complete 1:1 replication of input to output, the smaller this amplification effect becomes until the gap between the skills required for a video game version of Golf and an actual game of Golf start to disappear. Is this really a problem? Well I didn’t turn on the video game of Golf in order to play Golf, I did so in order to play a video game representation of Golf.

The appeal of the representation is different to the appeal of the reality.

The appeal of Nathan Drake is that he is a decisive character. He might be flawed, imperfect and not always able to make the best decisions yet he will always make a decision. He doesn’t hesitate, he acts, often with little understanding of the full consequences of his actions but still with an appreciation of the danger he will face. He is heroic precisely because he makes decisions and chooses to act even when he knows the risk. Though described as such, he is appealing precisely because he is not an “everyman”‘ a real “everyman” would have fallen to his death within the first few minutes of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. We want our heroes to be relatable and fallible, but still heroic, still decisive, still decidedly not mundane.

That’s why the most uncomfortable parts of Among Thieves are precisely those when the way forward becomes unclear. For Drake there is always a way forward even if it’s not necessary the best choice in the long term. The appeal is in being able to have that certainty of purpose, that knowledge that there is always a way forward even if it might be the more dangerous path. These games are not about the choices the hero makes, but about the drama and emotion of operating in that decisive manner.

It might seem antithetical to the concept of interactivity but the inclusion of more agency into a game like Among Thieves would be detrimental to the appeal of playing as Nathan Drake. Choices lead to hesitancy, and deliberation, traits that Drake might possess but ones that rarely come to the fore when decisions need to be made. Stubborn, yet able to be swayed by the opinions of those he cares about, once he’s set himself on a course of action he will follow it until the end, even if it might mean his death. The appeal of playing such a character is fundamentally tied to this focus on the task at hand, this need to not make decisions, to not take orders, but to act.

Even the most limited moment of interactivity creates an immediately closer sense of association between audience and action than existed prior to that point. Even in a heavily scripted game such as Among Thieves players, when recounting their experiences, will not say “Drake…” rather they will describe the events as if they occurred directly to them.

When, after fighting your way through a heavily defended train to try and rescue her, Chloe tells you it was a mistake to come back, the sense that you have just wasted your time is one shared by both player and protagonist, though the intensity of the sensation may be different. Would the reaction have been more powerful if players had been given a choice of whether to try and rescue her or not? Potentially, however in such a situation Nathan Drake, simply wouldn’t have made any other decision. No heroic character would, it’s the difficult path, the dangerous path, and the only path such a character would ever choose. That’s what makes them the type of person they are, the type of person we want to feel like when we start playing. We choose to abdicate ourselves of the pressure of making those big decisions in the knowledge that Drake will make them for us; he is not like us, he is the hero we wish we could be more like.

What good the choice when there’s only one path that anybody would reasonably be expected to take? Is a false choice any more meaningful than no choice at all?

If a game features a well defined protagonist then the notion of including the option to behave in a way that goes against the nature of that protagonist is foolish, the very appeal of such a character is that they are already defined, often as a heroic character. Why introduce the seconding guessing and evaluating that comes from the inclusion of choice?

Among Thieves is not a game about the selection of the right tactics, or the development of complex strategies, it’s not a game about making choices. It is a game about the tension, fear and drama inherent in being heroic. It is a game about action, the quintessential action game.

With each consecutive hardware generation it takes time to achieve what was possible at the end of the previous generation. New hardware requires new software techniques and often a return to first principles. The initial move from sprite based to polygon based games saw a marked increase in the spatial complexity of environments but was accompanied by a dramatic decrease in the size and number of objects that could exist within those environments. This clearest example of this can be seen when comparing Doom and Quake, two games separated by three years and an entire dimension. It wouldn’t be until five years later that the release of Serious Sam saw a return to the sprawling environments and hundreds of enemies that Doom boasted.

Twenty years ago I was playing a game that allowed me to explore thousands of square miles of virtual terrain. I was driving snowmobiles down mountains in order to meet one of over thirty non-player characters each with their own personality and skills which I would hopefully convince them to use in the fight against the invading forces of General Masters. This was Midwinter, prequel to the game I still  consider my favourite game of all time, Midwinter II: Flames Of Freedom.

Since then, with each hardware generation, the scale of the environments in which I’ve been able to play has decreased. Only recently has the  trend started to reverse and I have been able to have a similar experience to that I had twenty years ago. Far Cry 2 is the nearest I’ve come to recapturing that experience of first playing Midwinter, yet even though Far Cry 2 shows a significant increase in graphical fidelity over Midwinter the range of options available to me, the possibility space of the game, feels reduced.

It would be extremely narrow minded of me to ignore the impact the increase in technology has had on my reaction to the game, or to underestimate how the subtle changes in available mechanics have altered the dynamics. Despite these advancements in both technology and design it’s still difficult to ignore the feeling that somehow I’m playing a version of the same game I played twenty years ago and that the core experience has changed little in that time.

Twenty years of technological advancement, several hardware generations all so I can have essentially the same experience available on my Atari ST. I can’t help but wonder if that time has really been put to the best use.

This is not the only example I can think of where a recent titles has felt like it could have been created years previously. Last year saw the release of Left 4 Dead, a major factor in its appeal is the ability to face off against hordes of zombies alongside three companions.  Four players together fighting off dozens of mindless enemies, it’s a fantasy that holds a lot of appeal. Yet that sense of four players against overwhelming odds, is an experience I can distinctly remember having eight years ago. Alongside three friends I faced down hundreds of enemies in the twisted ancient Egyptian setting of Serious Sam. The sheer number of enemies that game is able to thrown at the player is absurd, the final level is subtitled “Infinite Bodycount” and I honestly wonder how much of that is hyperbole.

The mechanics of Left 4 Dead could have been implemented seven years earlier in Serious Sam or even fifteen years earlier in Doom. The graphical fidelity of such an implementation would be much lower, but would the experience itself be that much different?

Of course it’s not only technology that has changed in that time. Those seven years have allowed artists, sound designers and level designers to hone their craft to the extent that even if Left 4 Dead or something similar had appeared earlier it would not possess the same level of craft. It takes time to learn and apply the techniques of filmic art direction and indirect training that make Left 4 Dead the holistic experience that it is.

This still doesn’t completely lessen the sensation that twenty years of technological advancement have done little for the actual design of games, and that is  a wasted opportunity. Commercial video games are approaching their fortieth anniversary and with the first few years of each hardware generation spent trying to recreate the experiences that were possible before it’s little wonder that it can feel like video games have had trouble growing up in that period.

Just a quick update to deal with some personal and site related things that I’ve not had a chance (been too lazy) to get around to until now.

Michael Abbott, of The Brainy Gamer, recently completed his Summer of Confabs, where he asked a number of developers, bloggers and academics to participate in a series of podcasts focusing on a specific topic that they felt has had the most impact this year. I highly recommend listening to them all, and as he was kind enough to invite me you can find my disjointed ramblings on the third podcast.

In a sort of quid pro quo arrangement Ben Abraham who I recently interviewed regarding his Perma-death Far Cry 2 experiment has also interviewed me. I can assure your that reading it will leave you will a desire to never listen to a word I say again, which in some ways might be for the best…

Finally I’ve started to update my Portfolio page with additional material, the most recent additions are a number of creative writing samples.

Love potentially a little emo, the clue’s in the title. I’ve included this as a short example of my ability to deal with a topic rarely dealt with in games.

The Argumenta dialogue heavy short story focusing around a specific argument between a heterosexual couple, again focusing on a topic not usually handled in games.

A Date with Fortune, this is a short story set in the Honorverse low on dialogue the focus is on motivations and character development, building to an action sequences. I suppose some would call it fan fiction though the concept and all the characters are entirely of my own creation.

More material should be appearing there over the coming weeks, as I finally sort out what I’m actually going to use that part of this site for; blatant self promotion I believe is the order of the day.

Sometimes you make decisions that in hindsight are really, really stupid. One such decisions and my procrastination over dealing with it is why this latest Progress Log is appearing, several months after the previous one. However before I detail that stupid decisions, I should first return and explain the motivations for the changes made to the initial revised floorplan.

Revised Floorplan.

Though improved over the original floorplan this revised version was still extremely linear in nature, although there were now multiple levels with routes between those levels movement throughout was still in based on straight lines. This type of design for a deathmatch map leads to a reliance on long range engagements with little room for tactical play, no blind corners, no potential ambush points. Such a design can be very successful, one of my deathmatch favourite maps of all time, Quake 3 Arena’s Q3DM17 “The Longest Yard” is a great example of such a map.

Q3DM17 "The Longest Yard"

With the exception of the floating platform for the Quad Damage there is literally nowhere to hide, play is fast and the Rail Gun is mater; I have spent far too much time on this map. However the aesthetic decisions I had made regarding the look and feel of DM-Aerie didn’t lend themsleves to such a design.

Therefore it was important that I redesign the floorplan to focus on medium and close range engagements, with room for tactical play. DM-Aerie needed to be about ambushes and quick escapes, with maybe the occasional risky run through the open. To that end I made the decision to reorientate the Control Room and Airstrip so they were at ninety degree angles to the main facility. I suspected this wouldn’t be enough to solve the problems with the floorplan but it was something I could test quickly and doing so would help indicate further changes that could be made. Though I draw up floorplans manually on graph paper first these are usually a poor representation of how the final level looks, the initial ideas I have are usually, to but it bluntly, terrible. It’s only after physically moving through the environment that I get a good sense of the space itself and how it should connect together, and how movement should flow through it.

Improved Floorplan.

Several iterations later I had reach a point that I was substantially more comfortable with, a set of stairs had been added to join the basement level to the main level, elevators had been added to join the basement to the Control Room and Conference Room. I’d made several experiments with the stairs in the main level and had settled on a layout I was comfortable with.

At the back of my mind while working on the floorplan and general layout was the thought of how I would handle the mountain ontop of which the entire facility was to be built. I knew I’d have to face that problem eventually so eventually decided that it would be best to simply face the difficult task. This led to me laying out a terrain mesh and shaping it into a mountain around the existing floorplan. The flaw in this approach might be obvious.

Improved Floorplan with Mountain.

I let my artistic sensibilities overide the nagging sensation that the floorplan simply wasn’t working and started chipping away at the terrain mesh using the visibility tool to remove any areas where the mesh passed through the exterior walls into any of the rooms of the facility. This was a time consuming and frequently frustrating task and my focus on doing it was distracting me from the simply fact that the floorplan still wasn’t right. I spent too mhc time ensuring that the terrain mesh didn’t intersect with the BSP and it was only when I finally stopped that I realised I would really need to change the floorplan again and doing so would require a future modification of the terrain mesh.

I’d just wasted several weeks. At this point I should note I was not spending as much time on the level as I should have due to various reasons. I have a full time job, though really that’s just an excuse, I was putting it off as I knew I’d been focusing on the wrong thing but didn’t want to admit it.

Finally I accepted that I really would need to change the floorplan, and so I deleted the terrain mesh and set about pulling the level apart and rebuilding it.

In the next progress log, which I promise will be within the next week or so, I’ll focus on specific areas of the level and detail the changes that took place and the reasons for each. Though at this point I suspect I’m only writing these for me, but that’s ok.

A large part of what fascinates me about games is the subjective nature of the play experience itself, the notion that no two people will have the same experience even within a heavily scripted game. Recently Australian blogger Ben Abraham has been gaining attention for his decision to partake in an “iron man” play through of Far Cry 2, no reloading when his character dies the game is over. The manner in which this player imposed boundary altered his play experience is something I’m particularly interested in. Fortunately Ben was kind enough to answer some questions I had:

1. In your own words, what prompted your decisions to play Far Cry 2 in this fashion?

I think the initial desire was to impose a new way of playing Far Cry 2 that would lead to more of those fun moments where it feels like something is really hanging in the balance – where the outcome is hinged upon my performance. I thought that perhaps by imposing a limit of a single life, it would add more drama and weight to my actions and performance in the game and ultimately provide me with a more satisfying experience.

In that sense it was for entirely selfish, experiential reasons – I wanted to enjoy and continue enjoying Far Cry 2 having played it a lot already.

2. Having completed Far Cry 2 previously, can you describe some of the ways in which permadeath changed the way you approach the game? Have you noticed yourself doing things differently when you played it under normal conditions?

I guess the approach I took reflected my desire to have a fun experience, and so I took it very seriously and played it quite safe at first. When the initial sense of tension and danger wore off I experimented a bit more, deliberately courted danger a little bit. When playing normally however I probably strode right up to danger and punched it in the face, trusting luck and skill to get me by, but by prioritizing my survival I became much more reserved and cautious. Kinda boring, really.

Practical things that changed how I played included picking safe options, and utilizing all the points on my “How To Kill People More Effectively” strategy. Basically any time there was a dangerous option and a boring safe option, I took the safe one.

3. Do you think this type of play through is something you could imagine doing for a game you had never played before?

I don’t think so. Far Cry 2 is quite forgiving of your mistakes in the sense that if you ‘die’ with a rescue buddy around, you get a second chance. That’s one of the reasons I thought it would be feasible for an ordinary non-uber player like myself to complete Far Cry 2 without ever dying.

4. Is there something specific to the design of Far Cry 2 that makes it more suitable to this type of play through than other games? Do you think Far Cry 2 was a good choice for what you were intending to do, and if so why?

I think the buddy rescue system is one of the best ways of dealing with the problem of lost and wasted game-time that you get by forcing players to reload and try parts of a game again – and I do think that it is a loss. Jesper Juul talks about ‘time lost’ as a punishment in a talk from GDC earlier this year.

5. You have been describing the events that took place from a first person perspective (With a notable exception), and as a connected narrative, is there an explicit reason for this approach to the presentation of your experience?

Part of the attraction to the “one life” approach was that it made everything in the game more meaningful to the story – that is, never ever was an action ‘wasted’ because I died and had to start over. I had also hoped that it would add weight to every action, even insignificant ones, but as it turns out, it’s not quite that straightforward.

I wanted to write from a first person perspective because of a couple of reasons – firstly I was (and still am) increasingly bored with straight essay style writing about games. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate the good ones, and they’ll certainly always have their place, but more and more I’m finding myself attracted to the kind of games criticism that involves some application of creativity of expression. I’m a bit of a desperate fan of Kieron Gillen’s somewhat controversial New Games Journalism style of writing because it doesn’t just give permission to a writer to be creative, it demands it. I think a lot of people mis-read it back in the day and took it as meaning that was the only way you were meant to write about games, but it’s not meant to be so constrictive – it’s just another tool in the critic’s toolbox.

I also thought that the first person perspective would let me describe how I was feeling while playing it, and as the whole point of the exercise was to change the experience, keep it new and interesting, that seemed the logical choice.

6. The concept of adding additional rules to a game is not a new one: “Iron Man” runs, “Speed Runs”, various approaches have been adopted when playing Thief: The Dark Project: “Ghosting” etc. From your own perspective why do you feel your play through has garnered so much attention? How much of it do you feel is because of the way your have presented your experience? Do you feel people are more interested in the story of your play through, or the concept of what you are doing itself?

I think Kieron Gillen when he linked to the story in RPS’ Sunday Papers hit the nail on the head when he said he wished he’d thought of it. Like you say, self imposing additional rules and constraints isn’t new, but the idea of writing about them is still not done particularly often, and almost never with a view to how it changes the experience.

So in that respect I think it’s the concept that made people sit up and take notice. Whether they stuck around and enjoyed the story, I can’t be sure, but if it’s any indication comments have dropped off slightly in the later episodes while pageviews are still holding steady at somewhere around 100 a day.

When thinking about whether people are explicitly interested in the story, the question I’ve got to ask is “What really is the permanent death story?” Is it the experience that I, the player, have in the game? Or is it the story I construct with blog posts and pictures as it’s received by readers of the blog (and eventually, in the PDF novelization)? From my vantage point as both player and reader of the story, I know that there are a lot of things that happened in the game that get cut from the written story because they either make it too long and boring, compromising the quality of the narrative, or they’re nearly impossible to convey to a reader.

How does one write about the feeling of boating down a river under the cover of darkness as the moon slides behind trees? How do you convince a reader that you really were imagining the feel of the breeze in your face, and the feel of being immersed in this environment? Does the reader even care whether or not I was engaged at this particular point or not? How do I convince a reader that the idea of a soldier who I already shot, but who was still staggering around, was going to burn to death mildly horrified me? The fact that it horrified me in a videogame at all is still amazing to me because videogames suck at making me feel anything other than a desire to collect shit or blow stuff up.

I think it’s in trying to convey these sorts of experiences and personal reactions that I draw the most inspiration from NGJ. Not that Permanent Death is even an NGJ piece, it’s not quite personal enough and it often borders on the edge of being Fan Fiction, so I guess there’s that.

7. Permanence is an unusual term to use when discussing any video game, after all isn’t every decision you make permanent? You can return, change your actions and play out the consequences of that alerted decision but that doesn’t remove the fact that at some point you did make that initial decision?

When writing my thesis last year, I downloaded a single-life speed run of Halo 2 completed on Legendary difficulty. I watched it religiously – I watched all two and a half hours of it through more than once. I think what was so attractive and mesmerising about it was that it seemed to me like this is how Halo 2 was meant to be played.

In terms of making sense within the overarching narrative and fiction, this was how Master Chief would have done it. Any time you die, you mess up and you fail to live up to the chief’s standard, so you have to repeat a section until you get it right. Why do we not see the inherent weirdness in this? I think we have this ingrained, rote-learned blindness to the fundamental strangeness of videogame narratives. We do not experience the real world in anything remotely like the way we experience the events in a videogame.

Obviously, there are lots of good reasons for some of this – if it weren’t possible to fail then where would the challenge in the game come from? I think there are some great alternatives just waiting to be discovered, but so far all we do boils down to retconning the story on-the-fly. Ideally, every game would be perfectly set at that optimum level of difficulty that made it just hard enough to stay interesting, but not hard enough that you ever die and have to repeat any sections. I think most games err on the side of un-boring and go for just a little too hard. Which is fine, but it’s hardly a perfect system.

8. In reference to the previous question, would the decision to play Far Cry 2 again after this play through mitigate the decisions you made? Is that your intent, to never play Far Cry 2 again, and therefore make this your definitive play through?

I definitely intend to play Far Cry 2 again in the future, so no, the series of events in-game that became ‘Permanent Death’ are in no way meant to be the (or even just my) definitive Far Cry 2 story-experience. For starters, they are a fantastically more boring sequence of events than I have had in even other games of Far Cry 2, so it would be doing the game a disservice to leave it at that.

I don’t think playing again would diminish the permadeath story, either. There will always be the written record that roughly equates to that in-game series of events so I don’t think it would be impacted by playing again – or even by someone else attempting the same (or similar) thing.

9. How do you feel about the fact that there is no way to prove you have actually done anything you’ve described? Have you ever considered that there is no way in which the game can confirm that you in fact have not died? Is there such a means of recording this information that I have missed?

It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking recently about what I would do if I died right before the end of the game in a brain-meltingly stupid way, by shooting myself in the face with a grenade launcher, for example. If I was tantalisingly close to the end and messed up I know I would be tempted to lie about it and just keep playing as if nothing happened – after all how would anyone know? As far as the written Permadeath story goes, it’s whatever I say it is, right?

I guess there is no way of proving that I really did all the things I said I did, except to take me at my word. I don’t know if I’d want to there to be a way of proving what I said I did was what really happened, either. I wonder if it would limit the things I could do with the written story – as in, I couldn’t get away with as much ‘sexing up’ of the story as I have so far. I’ll freely admit that I’ve added in all sorts of stuff to make the written story more readable – like adding in some imaginary reasons for why I did the things I did in game.

It’s quite boring to just say “And then I shot some dude because it feels good to click my mouse and have the little man fall over” so I often invent a motivation for the character. I think it comes back to the question of ‘What is the Permanent Death story?’, because if you’re being truly honest, there aren’t any reasons for why we do a lot of what we do in games. Why do we shoot enemy soldiers? Because we’re told we should? Are we even explicitly told that most of the time? It’s certainly not because we are afraid of dying ourselves, as would be the case in a real combat situation. So is it fair game to pretend that’s why I was doing it in the game? I think for the sake of making an interesting written story, it is.

10. Do you think if there was an Achievement for completing the game without dying (Well until the very end), this is something you would have attempted for no other reason that obtaining that Achievement? What about if there was a scoreboard recording the total play time before death, would you be interested in trying to beat the “scores” of others?

I think if there were an achievement for it I wouldn’t need to do the Permanent Death ‘experiment’/story. I’m not very interested in achievements so I may have never bothered with it, but then I may have just to get some additional replay out of the game. Who’s to say?

Actually, I take that first bit back – I may still have done the permadeath play through because it’s important to note that anyone who finishes the game already does never die – because any “narrative branch” of the story that leads to the players death, gets pruned off when they die. Your loading the game eliminates the series of events between that save and your previous death from the Far Cry 2 history and your character goes on none-the-wiser. You may know and remember, but as far as the story is concerned, no one else does because it never happened. Now, the difference with permanent death is that there are no pruned branches.

I’m not really a competitive player, so scoreboards hold next to no interest for me. If you want to play Left 4 Dead with me though, I totally love cooperation and I daresay I work harder at a game when it’s for a cooperative goal than when it’s for a competitive reason.

11. Personally where do you fall on the ludology vs. narratology debate? How do you feel your personal opinions have influenced the decisions you have made during your play through?

I think the ludology/narratology debate is worn out and as Ian Bogost says in his DiGRA keynote, even the question of whether it’s one or the other presupposes a formalist approach to the ontology of games. Realistically, my opinions on whether games are play versus narrative only really matters when thinking about games as stories or games as playgrounds and any other time of the day I’m quite happy to let games be whatever they want to be.

Bogost characterises the Ludology/Naratology debate as “a formalist rather than functionalist approach to the study of games” and by arguing over what games are we end up ignoring what games mean already.

12. A number of other people joined you in your permadeath play through at the start, I believe none of them are still playing having already died. Do you think there is anything about the way you have approached your play through that has helped you to stay alive?

I think it’s more sheer bloody-mindedness that’s kept me going. Michel McBride got bored and quit, and if you’re an experienced player it’s not that hard to stay alive on normal. A reader who started up his own blog was playing along too, but on the hardest difficulty and he didn’t last very long. For me, it’s turned into an endurance test, rather than a skill test.

Ask somebody about something they did or something that happened to them recently, you might have encourage them to open up but try it anyway. I can wait…

… Let’s assume for the moment that you did that, what happened? You were told a story. Whether the teller realised it or not, they almost certainly explained their events using dramatic tools and structure. There were characters, there was an ordered sequence of events; there was likely a beginning leading to a middle an through to an end.

Now ask somebody about something they did or something that happened to them in a game they played recently. The resulting story will be very different in terms of content, but the form in which they explained those events will be same. They dramatised it, they provided it with a structure and logical order that it didn’t originally contain.

People having be creating and retelling stories about events in their lives since the birth of communication. Encouraging players to do the same with the events that happen to them in a game is natural; in fact I’d say it’s impossible to prevent them from doing so. Self-authorship, or more accurately the post structuring of events into a dramatic sequence, is a natural human trait and of course it should be encouraged.

But what about the meaning of these stories? What is the emotional and intellectual potential of this self-authorship? How much can players learn about themselves and the world through games that focus largely on self-authorship? Self-authorship relies on players contextualizing events based on their own experience and bias, events are analysed and structured through the lens of the individual experiencing them, they are stories formed through self-reflection. Self-reflection is powerful, but difficult to master and gaining insight from it can be a laborious task that, though, ultimately rewarding may come too late in life to put that insight to use. Insight without sustained self-reflection requires us to be challenged, it requires a catalyst to push that self-reflection into new and previously unexamined directions. It needs events to be examined through the lens of another, somebody with a different viewpoint from us, different values, experience and a different bias. Insight of this kind can change the way we think about the world, by encouraging us to see it through the eyes of somebody of a different gender, or race, or sociopolitical philosophy. Insight of this kind requires an author.

Really? What about The Sims, Michael Abbott (The Brainy Gamer) recently proved that The Sims has the potentially to offer powerful insight into his own psychology and affect him in unexpected ways. The Sims doesn’t have an author so clearly I’m talking nonsense…

… Though it’s true that the story Michael described had no prescriptive author beyond himself the game itself has dozens of authors. The fact that Michael was able to be affected by the game was because the context was instantly understandable and relevant. The tasks he was performing and the decisions he was making had a cultural significance. The Sims presents a view of life that is familiar not simply from our observed reality but also from decades of suburban Americana in other media. Western culture is rich with that particular strata of American culture. From The Wonder Years, to Desperate Housewives, suburban American is a social and cultural construct that many of us understand immediately even if we’ve never been directly exposed to it. The Simsdidn’t need an explicit author it has already had hundreds of them.

The range and type of self-authored stories that emerge from a game like The Sims is something not seen in a game like Spore which provides a lot of the same tools for self-expression and agency. I think the reason for that is that alien civilization as depicted in Sporedoesn’t have the cultural cachet of suburban American. There is not the wealth of pre-extant authored content to serve as contextualization for our actions. With no author for the work itself, and few examples in other media Sporeis a play ground devoid of relevance or association to our own lives. We can only relate to our creations in the most basic terms and with no external lens through which to view them, we are forced to find meaning once more from self-reflection. Powerful yes, but difficult and not always pleasant.

As powerful a tool The Sims is for self-authorship and self-discovery it could only exist in a culture overflowing with the idealised view of suburban American that exists throughout other media. The Sims is a game that could not exist without the authored work of dozens of writers, producers and directors over the last several decades. Left 4 Dead’s power comes from the filmic history of Zombie movies, Grand Theft Auto IV’s from shows like The Wire, or The Sopranos.

Is this the best games can do? Relying on the work of other authors to define the context and meaning of available actions?

The Sims is rich with meaning but it is inherently limited in scope, it has a lot to say about family, and human relationships (Which is incredible if you stop and think about it), but little to say about the meaning of life, or the nature of good and evil. It can deal very well with the topics we engage with everyday of our lives but it’s ability to push beyond that to questions that are outside the immediate scope of the family and the neighbourhood is limited. In order to explore these questions games need to start relying on different topics, potentially ones that don’t have the preexisting cultural associations that The Sims is able to draw upon.

Therefore games need an author, to provide the different lens through which we can examine our own actions and decisions. Games need the author to provide the structure against which we can push, the authority we can rally against, the challenges we can overcome. Games need the author or they are doomed to rely on the authorship of those who have gone before, and therefore limited to only mining the veins already tapped.

Games need authors. The only thing left to discuss is how visible those authors should be and that’s a topic that will keep us going for the next few years at least.

At any moment during a game players are liable to be thinking about events in multiple timeframes at once. Performing tasks that are over in seconds, in order to achieve goals that are over in minutes as a means of completing missions that may take hours.

The lowest level of actions occur on the Immediate layer, these are the second to second decisions made in the heat of combat, during a conversation, or while climbing a wall. When and where to shoot, which dialogue line to select, which handhold to reach for. These events are the Encounters, over in seconds and repeated dozens of times during the course of the game. The narrative strength of actions in this layer is best served through directly embedded content. Animation cycles, dialogue lines, and the options available to the player all serves as vectors for narrative meaning.

Above this there is the Tactical layer, the longer term minute to minute decisions made in the execution of plans. Which particular enemies to engage, which NPCs to talk to, which wall to scale. These are the Objectives, and can be defined either explicitly by the game, or implicitly by the players themselves. Variation in these Objectives and the levels in which they take place can be used to provide narrative.

Operating above both of these there is often, but not always,  a Strategic layer, actions on this layer occur over a much longer term, possibly hours. They include, which missions to accept, which character upgrades to select, which tools to equip. They can be either explicitly defined as Quests chains, or often they are not defined at all the goal of the Strategic layer simply being to reach the end of the game. This layer is best used to define the narrative context for actions that occur on the lower layers.

• The Immediate layer is Reactive.
• The Strategic layer is Proactive.
• The Tactical layer is both.

Though some traits can be associated with each layer,  the boundaries between them are fairly permeable. The goals of the Immediate and Tactical layer are often elements of those defined on the Strategic layer. Strategic goals lead to the creation of multiple Tactical goals, and multiple Immediate goals will be needed to fulfil a specific Tactical goal.

If the Strategic goal is to get to a specific location, it might require engaging in combat with several groups of enemies. This leads to the creation of Tactical goals concerned with how to deal with each enemy group and in what order. These Tactical goals in turn lead to the creation of Immediate goals, when to shoot, where to move. Successful completion of the Strategic goal requires successful completion of the Tactical and Immediate goals that stem from it.

In this way it can be seen that actions on the Strategic layer directly influence those on the lower layers.

Plans trickle down from higher layers to lower ones. Immediate actions are defined, their scope is limited by decisions made on the Tactical layer. Where you are and which tools you have at your disposal are based on decisions made at the Tactical layer, which in turn are influenced by decisions made on the Strategic layer. If a particular character upgrade has not been obtained on it will not be available.

This flow of influence does not only occur in one directions. Actions and their consequences trickle upwards. Events that occur in the Immediate layer change the Tactical status of the world, new routes are located, items are found. Events on the Tactical layer in turn affect the options available in the Strategic layer. Meaningful actions are ones that send ripples out beyond the layer in which they occur and affect decisions made on all layers: actions on the Immediate layer that leads to consequences on the Tactical and Strategic layers.

In ludic terms each layer has some degree of repetition, as there are only so many valid actions that can be performed at any given time. The repetition is mitigated most on the Strategic layer because the goals are long term, any repetition that does exist occurs over the course of several hours making it difficult to ascertain any patterns in the type of actions being performed.

On the Immediate layer the sense of repetition can be the strongest, as often the core mechanics of a game only allow for a few options. However at this layer the direct connection between action and outcome serves to lesson the impact of the repetition, as the consequences of actions on this layer are often the most directly stimulating, the blood spurts of a successful headshot, the ding of a loot pickup, the fluid animation of a character clambering over a ledge. Each one a little endorphin kick that keeps us engaged; if anybody is in doubt I point you to the immediate feedback presented in a game like Diablo.

The biggest problem with repetition comes on the Tactical layer. Action games suffer the most on this layer. Consider Far Cry 2, the actual combat mechanics and the options available to players in combat can be quite engaging (The Immediate layer is well designed). The ability to select which missions to attempt and in which order lessens the restrictive sense of repetition on the Strategic layer. However regardless of which mission the player selects and for whom, the short term goals required to complete each are usually very similar, if not identical: go here kill, these people\find this item, get back to here. The execution of these individual Tactical goals on the Immediate layer might be entertaining but that does little to cover up the fact that players are basically doing exactly the same thing during each mission. This is not helped by a lack of narrative feedback regarding the overarching consequences of actions. Assassinating a Police chief might be contextualised differently to the assassination of a Warlord but the narrative feedback from each event is not differentiated enough to mask the underlying repetition.

Because Tactical goals can take minutes to an hour to complete they occur over too short a timeframe for their patterns to be lost in the noise of all the other decisions, yet at too long a timeframe for that endorphin kick to keep players engaged. It’s here that a strong narrative context can keep players engaged in performing what are mechanic very similar actions.

Halo: Combat Evolved is another prime example of a game that suffers on the Immediate layer. Those “thirty seconds of fun”are, at least for me, some of the most pleasurable in gaming, but there can be no denying that on the Tactical layer the game is little more than a sequence of goals of the form: “Kill these hostiles.”

With their focus on Immediate and Tactical actions, action games are geared to a shorter play session, that serves to mitigate their repetitive nature. Plans are often completed within seconds or minutes, so players are given more points at which they are “free” to quit because they have no plans remaining to complete. Under these circumstances it’s little surprise that action game stories are fairly perfunctory, serving only to cover up the core mechanical repetition and provide a loose context for who, where and why.

Arkham Asylum, or more formally the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, is not a pleasant place. It seems you are a nobody in Gotham City’s criminal fraternity unless you have spent some time there. Batman: Arkham Asylum draws influences from the various, often contradictory, sources of Gotham history to create a fully realised island compound, a gothic nightmare combination of penitentiary and mental hospital. It is home to facilities and practices that easily cross the line from treatment into torture, often bearing euphemistic names such as “Intensive Treatment”. 

For the majority of the game Batman’s foes within Arkham are the various thugs and career criminals “shipped in from Blackgate” Gotham City’s correctional facility, aided of course by a rich cast of supervillians led (If such a term can ever be used within such an unpredictable mercenary group) by the Joker.

Among these residents of the titular Asylum are those patients who are contextualised as being mentally ill, the portrayal of these characters in the game is something that is a little worrisome. Manic, screaming and liable to pounce they have to be incapacitated quickly, usually by smashing their heads into the ground. That this act doesn’t kill them is one of the many fine lines walked by any medium depicting the actions of Batman.

My friend Travis Megill of The Autumnal City initially brought the treatment of these patients to my attention, referencing how similar it was to the manner in which people of colour are treated in Resident Evil 5. Having been enjoying my time with Arkham Asylum I instinctively came to the defense of the game noting that it’s portrayal of the mentally ill does not come with the associated cultural and historical significance of a heavily armed white male gunning down Africans; it was these allusions to the racist and colonial history of western nations in Africa that was at the heart of debate concerning race in Resident Evil 5.

Though the history of the treatment of the mentally ill has not been consistently just or humane, it does not carry the same associated cultural cachet so played upon in those initial trailers for Resident Evil 5. However Arkham Asylum does imply that it is somehow not a problem that Batman physically abuses the mentally ill, of course it’s not as clear cut as that, they are only there because they are “criminally insane” to begin with and Batman is never in a position to instigate action against these inmates as they will instantly attack him on sight. It could also be argued that Bruce Wayne is far from mentally well adjusted himself, being that he spends his nights beating up criminals dressed as a giant bat, so also suffers from at least one classifiable mental disorder. However such an argument seems to imply Arkham Asylum is the intellectual and social equivalent of bumfighting. In the end the issue is that the mentally ill are treated as just another video game villian whom it’s alright to beat up, like Zombies or Nazis have for years.

It’s a situation made more worrisome in the context of the entire game, there is no reason why Batman can’t be given a specific tool with which to subdue the freed patients in a less brutal fashion that using his fists. A tranquiliser dart would fit perfectly within the context of a Batman title, and it could likely have additional uses in other areas of the game. Even simply requiring that Batman use the Batarang to stun these patients would make more sense. In both cases it could be tied to the collection mechanic that already exists within the game, with rewards provided for humanely subduing patients instead of pummelling them into the ground (The distinction between a Batarang and fists is probably a fine one, but the visual representation is far less brutal).

I can hear the counter arguments now: “It’s just a game!” That’s true but this is one of those thin end of the wedge situations, if we accept the mentally ill as valid villains, what’s next? Beating up fat people? Euthanizing the old and the infirm?

Will any of this stop me playing Arkham Asylum? No, I accept that it is a work of fiction and that it would be extremely unwise to treat Gotham City as being representative of the real world. However it would have been better if the game didn’t make me  mentally wince every time I was required to slam a screaming incoherent mental patient into the ground ostensibly for my own protection. This representation of the mentally ill and the “treatment” they require is one I had hoped had died out a century ago.

In the interests of pacing it’s not uncommon for action games, and first person shooters in particular, to vary the style of gameplay over the course of the game as a whole, and over the course of individual levels. This variation of gameplay style leads to a variation in the aesthetic experience of play, and because of which it can be used as a narrative tool.

While playing Resistance: Fall of Man, I found I was able to break each level down into a combination of seven distinct styles of gameplay. With one notable exception all of these different gameplay styles used the same control scheme. In order to provide this degree of variety without changes to the core mechanics, changes were made to the layout of the levels, the placement of enemies and other objects (Nouns), and the range of tools (Verbs) available to the player. This form of level design is common throughout action games.

The seven distinct gameplay styles in Resistance, should be  familiar to anybody who’s played an action game in the last decade:

• [A] Combat in a corridor or along another form of restricted path.
• [B] Combat in an open area.
• [C] Boss Battles.
• [D] Mini-Boss Battles.
• [E] Navigation past mines, and other traps.
• [F] Combat against Turrets or other fixed emplacements.
• [G] Vehicle Combat. (The sole exception where a new control scheme is used).

While each level in Resistanceis united by an overriding narrative goal and aesthetic (Visual, aural) theme, the gameplay is made up of a combination of these seven different gameplay styles. It’s possible to examine each level and break it down into a string of characters describing the gameplay, for example BEFAB, or ABDAG.

Each of these gameplay styles changes the experience of play, eliciting a different psychological reaction from the player. Therefore it’s possible to ascribe certain emotional responses to each gameplay style. Often in areas that are focused on gameplay style B (Combat in open areas) the player is provided with support from allied non-player characters, the aesthetic experience is one of cooperation and teamwork. Areas that are focused on gameplay style E (Navigation past mines, and other traps) keep the player alone and lead to slow and careful progress, the aesthetic experience being one of tension and deliberate action.

A level built from the structure BE evokes an aesthetic experience of teamwork followed by tension and isolation, an implied narrative of having to “go it alone”. This is a different emotional reaction to a level structured as EB, which contains an implied narrative escaping isolation and “pushing through to your teammates”. In the former case the narrative arc of the level moves from a position of  camaraderie and power to one of tension and isolation, a downward arc. In the latter the arc is reversed and the player ends the level with a with a sensation of power and comfort that they did not possess at the start, an upward arc.

In this way it’s possible for a level designer to indirectly influence the emotional experience of a player, altering  their personal narrative, through changes in the gameplay style of a level.