|
Last year, Number None's Braid for Xbox Live Arcade became both a critical hit and a commercial success, proving that creator Jonathan Blow's views on experimenting with gameplay concepts can have real relevance with the wider gaming public in a concrete way.
Does this open the door for more experimentation? Where is the medium headed? Blow, who was previously a code columnist for Game Developer magazine and a contract programmer/designer for a number of notable games, from Flow through Phase, talks in-depth to Gamasutra in this post-Braid interview.
Among other things, Blow discusses his thoughts on PC as a gaming platform, the importance of PR to indies, and the new game ideas he's working on, as well as the role of story in today's biggest games:
What have you been up to since Braid shipped?
Jonathan Blow: A little bit working on an updated version for Xbox Live Arcade, because there were a couple of bugs in it. There were some more minor things, just little, tiny gameplay glitches. I've been doing that.
I have been talking to people about Braid on other platforms, like the Mac and PC. What's going on is that I took some time to do that originally, and then we hit this season where there were just a zillion PC games out. And I didn't want to release it in the middle of that, because probably nobody would notice.
You indicated at one point you were talking to Valve about Steam.
JB: A long time ago, I was talking to them, and it didn't really work out. Since then, they've come back and contacted me, and they are interested in putting the game up. So it's just a matter of me having a PC version ready that I feel is good to go with.
Would you be looking to distribute across multiple digital distribution platforms?
JB: Yeah. I don't think that locking down an exclusive agreement with one online distributor is a good idea. And a lot of people are willing to do non-exclusive publishing, so I'm just going to do that.
There are different schools of thought on that. Some people who would like to see it become almost more console-like, where it's just, "I want to be able to go into Steam and everything's there." Conversely, there's the principle that the PC should stay totally unlike consoles, a completely free market.
JB: I think both those things are true. I definitely like Steam, in that I can buy a new computer and bring it home and turn it on and install Steam and I have all my new games on there. And pretty soon, they're doing the settings and stuff now [via Steam Cloud, which allows users to store save game and configurations server-side]. That's pretty cool.
At the same time, I definitely want to be able to play games that aren't on Steam, right? I definitely want access to services that are not Steam and that are competing with them, because maybe they'll do something better. Maybe they'll do something in a different way.
So I'm in favor of both. And I realize that that introduces some amount of chaos into the thing. That's okay, though, because the PC is the place where that can happen.
If you want a very clean system where there are no alternatives, then that's consoles. That already exists. So, if we were to take that away from PCs, then what happens? What if somebody wants to do something new, and they just can't, because there's no longer a platform? So, I like the way it is now.
What I don't like about PCs is how hard it is to make a shipping-quality game on them, in terms of it not crashing on people's machines, or sounding and looking consistent, or whatever. It's nearly impossible.
Well, actually, it is impossible. What is possible is to do a job that doesn't screw up on that many people's machines. I think that there's no inherent reason for that anymore, so that needs to get fixed. But I don't see anyone working on it seriously.
Microsoft is trying to take stabs at it with Games for Windows.
JB: They're not doing a very good job. And I don't think many people would dispute with me on that fact. [laughs]
As an independent developer, there's another thing about the PC, which is there are a very large number of games -- independent games, even -- getting released on the PC.
I'm not the typical gamer, but a typical gamer only has a limited amount of attention. What should they be paying attention to? It's an open question.
And for me, as somebody who didn't have a big advertising budget, how do you communicate to people that this is a game that you actually want to be interested in?
Having it be released on a console, you don't have that problem, because, for example, on Xbox Live, there are only a limited number of games in the pipeline. If a game comes out on a given week, it's notable at least because it's the game of the week that week, right?
From there, if it's well-received on the console, I can still come to the PC and say, "Well, look, this game, a lot of people liked it." Whereas you could release a really good game on PC, and maybe just it never gets word of mouth, even though it's good. I was very concerned with that.
|
Printer-Friendly Version
I really appreciated Everyday Shooter too, as Jonathan mentioned. It's got that screenshot problem as well, but to a greater extent. The screenshots look uninteresting, but it's also not very interesting to watch if you aren't playing it, since a lot of the good vibes you get out of it have to do with the rhythm you have with the controller and the game.
Anyways, very interesting interview. Makes me wonder what stories and challenges in games will be like in 10 years...
Maybe this is even illustrated by Braid, where the whole game is one big god mode.
However, in a game where the challenge isn't derived from "not dying," god mode does not remove the challenge.
Looking back on that I sound like a Valve fanboy, but those are just examples that spring to mind.
Anyway, on his "potential new project" I'm interested in seeing where he takes dialogue trees. We've been discussing it here recently and I think most people agree that there is much room for innovation.
From what he says I think he's overcomplicating it a bit, looking at how to change it under the hood when reworking how things are presented could be more effective, but I'd like to see what he comes up with.
Something I've been attempting is using a "moral premise" that acts as the foundation for both gameplay and story. This moral premise is a moral statement of right and wrong, something like, "quitting responsibilities leads to despair, but pursuing responsibilities leads to happiness." From that moral premise, you form the gameplay, characters and story that will let players explore, experience and hopefully agree/learn from it.
Similarly with games, we shouldn't see the challenge vs. story conflict as a fatal flaw, but rather just as a problem to be solved. Puzzle games provide hints, God of War provides difficulty adjustment, etc. etc. Alone in the Dark had the DVD feature thing. None of these are perfect, but they deal with the issue in a practical way, ensuring that most - not all - people will get the optimal experience.
I'm interested in what Blow said on indie developers vs. corporations. And I think he's right. In some ways, its better for the gaming press to hype your game for you than to overhype it. But all the same, its tougher, because if your product isn't that great, it reflects back on you. Sometimes its nice to have that corporate protection.
However, these are partial fixes and the whole problem remains deeply anchored.
The observation is correct : challenges and story are fighting against each other. But I don't feel Blow is giving solutions, except the one that consists to omit the story. Don't put in dialogues, don't use branching narratives, ... well, don't use narrative at all and it will be more pure, like the good old Super Mario Bros III. Wooha.
But is that really what people wants today? I also dislike stories in games and how they are usually integrated, but no one can't deny the hype surrounding games like MGS4, Gears of War 2, ...
So, why does this work, can't you ask yourself?
Is Ubisoft's three-game Prince Of Persia arc forgotten? They made three games that were all about a character rewinding time to undo his mistakes and finally taking responsibility for his actions instead of using magic to fix everything. No slight to Braid or anything, but "you can rewind time" has in fact been done before and certainly isn't completely exhausted by one title.
Games have the added challenge (opportunity?) of 'audience' input, and the audience is singular since the capacity for input is singular. The audience becomes a subjective participant rather than an objective viewer. The trick seems to be engaging both sides: the imaginative with no center or point of reference other than the media itself, and the participatory side where your activeness as a player is essential.
There seems to be a focus on one or the other, usually, but I think both are essential. This could be a non-issue in multiplayer games, since the imaginative side is taken care of by the setting and the 'story' becomes your interaction with other players. One way to tie the two together in singleplayer may be to have a story play out among AI players with the player involved in some way through relationship. This would take some creative use of AI like Seth said earlier about Left 4 Dead's AI Director.
Braid explores this in one way, as do the art games he refers to. I don't doubt Blow will continue exploring in future. As he says, interactivity and challenge are the strengths of our medium. Ditching them for story doesn't seem the right direction to go.
For a small game such as Braid, this metaphor resonates easily with players since there are few other elements clouding its purpose and its relevance. Unfortunately, for games that try and do the whole open-world thing, or incorporate many different types of actions or object manipulation or whatnot, most game elements are not as fine-tuned or are not treated with enough care to be well-represented.
Referring to a comment made above, Derek Rumpler points out the distinction between a cinematic of kicking in a door in versus the player actually controlling the kick. One passive, the other immersive. For those familiar with how often this action exists in the Gears of War campaigns, Epic uses the former. The player pushes X and is treated to a short cinematic of Marcus Fenix kicking in a door.
The experience is completely binary, without a variation of the degree of power of the kick, how far the door opens, or whether or not its blown of its hinges. Compare this then to the active door mechanics of say, Mirror's Edge, and the experience is both more memorable and immersive (though still not perfect).
The bigger the game, the more details need to be accounted for (and the more unlikely each action will receive its adequate fine-tuning), but even a game like Gears of War which has a relatively small set of gameplay mechanics can account for these small detail experiences.
Until games can account for even small detail actions being immersive, we will simply be pushing buttons for the sake of seeing a movie at the end.
As a gamer, I want to keep playing this type of games that really CHALLENGE you to go on and learn more from it.
Both thumbs up!