Mushroom eats you?
Here's to interpretin' stuff. Enjoy some Soviet Mario:
I figured I should get some disagreement about my thing on abstraction in Mario in the last post. It's all good.
Art Games Suck
I'm generally not a fan of art games. The typical art game is an excercise in ego, a formulaic juxtaposition of unoriginal bad gameplay and anything else, designed to make the designer look clever. What comes out at the end is a step backward in game design.
Let's take Petri Purho's Divorce for example:
Petri Purho's Divorce, for example.
Now, the game is Pong, as you can probably tell by the screenshot. Virtually unmodified Pong. With a completely unrelated story tacked on.
Brilliant. The Divorce is brilliant.
It's brilliant because it was an April Fool's joke. And it worked like a charm. I'd like to believe highly respected Professors wrote massive theses on The Divorce, but, yeah, that's probably not true.
Anyway, I don't believe in art for art's sake. I believe that by virtue of human nature, art exists for either an audience or the artist (or both). While I do believe it is possible for an artist to create a work of art for the purpose of furthering the art, he generally instead does so because he believes "this is the direction I believe art should go" or because "this is what I want to be known for."
Games especially, by their nature, exist for the audience. Unlike other artistic media, games require an audience. The player is a part of the medium. A game without interaction is a film.
Okay, having said that (as painful as it was), allow me to compare the following:
Super Mario Bros. 1
Both of these games are platformers. You jump on and across things, avoid hazards, navigate obstacles, and get to the end. Mario has powerups: mushrooms that grant him the power to break blocks as well as absorb one hit without dying, fire flowers that allow him to shoot fireballs, and stars that grant him temporary invincibility. Jill has none. Jill can cancel her jumps and float slowly to the ground (a la Mighty Bomb Jack - Jill even borrows from his costume design). Mario can only cancel his jumps (by releasing the A button).
Level design is a bit different between the two. Mario generally wants to go to the right, through the Mushroom Kingdom and to his Princess. Jill climbs, up through the dungeon to her beloved Queen. The challenges in Jill Off are arguably a bit more unforgiving; however, the player is granted unlimited lives (Mario gets 3, I think).
Where these games diverge most, however, is in artistic intention. In Mighty Jill Off, the Queen throws Jill down into her dungeon as a sexual/romantic gesture. Jill climbs up as a sexual/romantic gesture. Frustration in getting hit and dying is more akin to torture than, say, dying. Mighty Jill Off even draws on Mighty Bomb Jack for its torture room, where the player must perform a certain number of jumps to continue. Hence, the game is a comparison between video games and (sado-) masochism, perhaps specifically with regards to playing games with mediocre gameplay like Mighty Bomb Jack.
Mario, however, was created before game criticism had begun to develop, and therefore lacks any artistic intention!
Just kidding. Super Mario is a commentary on abstraction in video games. For those not in the know, abstraction is - in a word - the idea that your spaceship could be replaced by a rectangle without any necessarily significant impact on gameplay (except maybe making it a bit harder to figure out). In other words, it is the separation between reality (and/or fiction, such as Greek mythology or sci-fi) and the game itself.
Mario is, to a tiny extent, based on real life. You can walk around, jump, run, grab coins, save princesses. Beyond that, however, the game makes no sense. Mushrooms kill you AND give you super powers AND give you extra lives (and tell you your princess is in another castle too), coins are punched out of question blocks that are curiously situated in mid-air (these blocks are sometimes not only invisible, but do not exist until after you punch them), fire flowers? invincibility stars? dudes floating around on clouds throwing spiky red turtle balls at you? Yet, when we play, we tend to ignore all this. Our minds are too preoccupied with dodging the bad guys, jumping over the pits, ducking under the flaming... spinning flame stick things... or maybe with beating the clock or setting a world record or whatever else.
So Super Mario Bros. has both meaning and good, innovative gameplay. Mighty Jill Off has meaning, but it lacks any innovation in gameplay and instead borrows its mechanics from an outdated, mediocre game.
Anyway, bottom line: art games suck? Hmm... I liked Braid, though.
Art games suck when they marginalize the player's experience.
Let's take Petri Purho's Divorce for example:
I recommend that you make your own interpretation of the games rules and their meaning, but here’s what I had in mind.
The bats are of course my parents. My parents are very long and thin, so this is represented by the shape of the boxes. The ball is an unwanted child of their marriage. I was quite young when my parent’s divorced so, that is represented by the size of the ball. Goal of the game is to score 10 points in court to ensure that the child doesn’t end up living with you.-Petri Purho
Now, the game is Pong, as you can probably tell by the screenshot. Virtually unmodified Pong. With a completely unrelated story tacked on.
Brilliant. The Divorce is brilliant.
It's brilliant because it was an April Fool's joke. And it worked like a charm. I'd like to believe highly respected Professors wrote massive theses on The Divorce, but, yeah, that's probably not true.
Anyway, I don't believe in art for art's sake. I believe that by virtue of human nature, art exists for either an audience or the artist (or both). While I do believe it is possible for an artist to create a work of art for the purpose of furthering the art, he generally instead does so because he believes "this is the direction I believe art should go" or because "this is what I want to be known for."
Games especially, by their nature, exist for the audience. Unlike other artistic media, games require an audience. The player is a part of the medium. A game without interaction is a film.
Okay, having said that (as painful as it was), allow me to compare the following:
Super Mario Bros. 1
Both of these games are platformers. You jump on and across things, avoid hazards, navigate obstacles, and get to the end. Mario has powerups: mushrooms that grant him the power to break blocks as well as absorb one hit without dying, fire flowers that allow him to shoot fireballs, and stars that grant him temporary invincibility. Jill has none. Jill can cancel her jumps and float slowly to the ground (a la Mighty Bomb Jack - Jill even borrows from his costume design). Mario can only cancel his jumps (by releasing the A button).
Level design is a bit different between the two. Mario generally wants to go to the right, through the Mushroom Kingdom and to his Princess. Jill climbs, up through the dungeon to her beloved Queen. The challenges in Jill Off are arguably a bit more unforgiving; however, the player is granted unlimited lives (Mario gets 3, I think).
Where these games diverge most, however, is in artistic intention. In Mighty Jill Off, the Queen throws Jill down into her dungeon as a sexual/romantic gesture. Jill climbs up as a sexual/romantic gesture. Frustration in getting hit and dying is more akin to torture than, say, dying. Mighty Jill Off even draws on Mighty Bomb Jack for its torture room, where the player must perform a certain number of jumps to continue. Hence, the game is a comparison between video games and (sado-) masochism, perhaps specifically with regards to playing games with mediocre gameplay like Mighty Bomb Jack.
Mario, however, was created before game criticism had begun to develop, and therefore lacks any artistic intention!
Just kidding. Super Mario is a commentary on abstraction in video games. For those not in the know, abstraction is - in a word - the idea that your spaceship could be replaced by a rectangle without any necessarily significant impact on gameplay (except maybe making it a bit harder to figure out). In other words, it is the separation between reality (and/or fiction, such as Greek mythology or sci-fi) and the game itself.
Mario is, to a tiny extent, based on real life. You can walk around, jump, run, grab coins, save princesses. Beyond that, however, the game makes no sense. Mushrooms kill you AND give you super powers AND give you extra lives (and tell you your princess is in another castle too), coins are punched out of question blocks that are curiously situated in mid-air (these blocks are sometimes not only invisible, but do not exist until after you punch them), fire flowers? invincibility stars? dudes floating around on clouds throwing spiky red turtle balls at you? Yet, when we play, we tend to ignore all this. Our minds are too preoccupied with dodging the bad guys, jumping over the pits, ducking under the flaming... spinning flame stick things... or maybe with beating the clock or setting a world record or whatever else.
So Super Mario Bros. has both meaning and good, innovative gameplay. Mighty Jill Off has meaning, but it lacks any innovation in gameplay and instead borrows its mechanics from an outdated, mediocre game.
Anyway, bottom line: art games suck? Hmm... I liked Braid, though.
Art games suck when they marginalize the player's experience.
I Dream In Retro
Has anyone ever dreamt about a game that didn't quite exist? I remember dreaming about a co-op Mario 1 once when I was six...
But nothing was ever as awesome as this little charmer:
So I'm thinking maybe I should turn that into the real thing. Hm, on the other hand, though, I wasn't a really much of a ROM CHECK FAIL fan. (But check it out anyway. It's neat.)
But nothing was ever as awesome as this little charmer:
So I'm thinking maybe I should turn that into the real thing. Hm, on the other hand, though, I wasn't a really much of a ROM CHECK FAIL fan. (But check it out anyway. It's neat.)
Russian Roulette: A Postmortem (nyuk nyuk)
Russian roulette is a game of chance wherein a revolver is loaded with one round, spun to randomize the chance that the round is chambered, pointed to the player's head, and fired. Losing means death. Winning rewards the player with nothing.
"Wanna see something Cool?"
I bring this up for three reasons:
One, because Russian roulette is a game. Students of video game studies seem to trip over themselves in search for a definition of "game." Not only is it generally unnecessary to define "game" (If we can't decide to classify a thing as a game or a toy or even a war, what does it matter? It does not change the nature of the thing.), but games created for the purpose of exploring the definition of "game" tend to, as games, fail; they suck. Frankly, Russian roulette or, to be a little more fair, Sim City better explored the definition of "game" than, as I most recently played, Kloonigames' Conceptual 4 minutes and 33 seconds, in which the player must run a program for 4 minutes and 33 seconds to win. (The game connects to a server and can only run if no one else is playing. If someone else starts the game, your game terminates. That was a spoiler, by the way!)
Two, to point out the compelling nature of - as a parallel to video games, esp. violent ones - either the game itself or its portrayal in the media, in that it has the power to persuade people to kill themselves for excitement or whatever else a player might seek to derive from it. I have nothing to prescribe.
Three, penalty, that bastard child many* would rather ignore or eliminate completely. In my experience, penalties are much more interesting than rewards as well as more important. (Negative stimuli have more drastic effects on behavior than positive stimuli, but that's beyond the scope of this article.) In video games, with occasional exception, the worst case scenario is temporary, meaningless death. Dying in a Zelda game, for example, punishes the player by merely changing his location. Death becomes the "go back two spaces" spot on a cheap board game.
Russian roulette, however, is better. Russian roulette succeeds as a game.
*Asterisk.
Addendum: I wrote a Russian roulette script in mIRC a while back. Join #rpgn on irc.rpgamers.net and say !roulette if you feel like giving it a shot.
"Wanna see something Cool?"I bring this up for three reasons:
One, because Russian roulette is a game. Students of video game studies seem to trip over themselves in search for a definition of "game." Not only is it generally unnecessary to define "game" (If we can't decide to classify a thing as a game or a toy or even a war, what does it matter? It does not change the nature of the thing.), but games created for the purpose of exploring the definition of "game" tend to, as games, fail; they suck. Frankly, Russian roulette or, to be a little more fair, Sim City better explored the definition of "game" than, as I most recently played, Kloonigames' Conceptual 4 minutes and 33 seconds, in which the player must run a program for 4 minutes and 33 seconds to win. (The game connects to a server and can only run if no one else is playing. If someone else starts the game, your game terminates. That was a spoiler, by the way!)
Two, to point out the compelling nature of - as a parallel to video games, esp. violent ones - either the game itself or its portrayal in the media, in that it has the power to persuade people to kill themselves for excitement or whatever else a player might seek to derive from it. I have nothing to prescribe.
Three, penalty, that bastard child many* would rather ignore or eliminate completely. In my experience, penalties are much more interesting than rewards as well as more important. (Negative stimuli have more drastic effects on behavior than positive stimuli, but that's beyond the scope of this article.) In video games, with occasional exception, the worst case scenario is temporary, meaningless death. Dying in a Zelda game, for example, punishes the player by merely changing his location. Death becomes the "go back two spaces" spot on a cheap board game.
Russian roulette, however, is better. Russian roulette succeeds as a game.
*Asterisk.
Addendum: I wrote a Russian roulette script in mIRC a while back. Join #rpgn on irc.rpgamers.net and say !roulette if you feel like giving it a shot.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
