Skyrim is it Interactive Fiction?

March 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In the world of Interactive fiction you can make choices, these choices decide how far you get into the story. Games like colossal cave adventure are a text adventure, you type in where you want to go and you go there. You make decisions to pick certain things up, you can even kill a bird in the cave but that effects your outcome undoubtedly. Games like Skyrim follow a similar construct.

 

Instead of typing where you want to go you move a joystick, people ask you questions and you make decisions about which quests to undertake. The game follows no set path just like a text adventure, often in text adventures there is more than one way to reach your end goal. A game like Skyrim is set up the same way, you make a choice of who you are, what clans you join, where you go in the world and how your story ends. Of course dying in a game like Skyrim does not carry the same consequences as dying in a text adventure. When you die in a text adventure you usually have to start all over. When you die in a game like Skyrim you just start from the last checkpoint or the last save point. Perhaps if video games were set up with more drastic consequences when you die people you start playing more conservatively. Role playing games or RPGs as a gamer would say allow the user to take on the role of their character. The user can go as far to choose what their character looks like, with seemingly little limitations.

 

I used to play a game called Way of the Samurai, in which a series of questions would be asked by character you forcefully ran into at the beginning of the game. You usually have up to three choices to choose from as your answer. The three choices represent who you will turn out to be a good character, an evil character or an independent working for both sides of the spectrum. This game was incredible. It basically becomes three games in one. There are three paths you can take each ripe with different decisions and outcomes to those decisions. Interactive fiction and text adventures paved the way for an incredible interactive experience. Instead of looking at words now you have a movie to go along with the words, a movie that you decide the plot. (to an extent of course)

 

 

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The Decline of Square Enix

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In a previous Checkpoint, I discussed the recent fad in the video game industry where games from previous console generations are being rereleased in HD. My main focus was whether or not this fad was proof that consumers are purchasing games either for graphics or for gameplay, and not necessarily for both. I wanted to narrow my focus on a specific developer and discuss how well their more recent releases hold up against their older entries. Square Enix, who before 2003 was simply Square Co., are touted as the creators of the hugely popular JRPG series Final Fantasy, which has no final game in sight due to the success of nearly every game. The games that gained this developer so much respect, however, contrast sharply from their most recent releases, and in several ways.

 Final Fantasy I through VI solidified Square Co. as a developer who knows how to make games with epic journeys, amazing musical scores, and, most importantly, really good gameplay. Turn-based RPGs were generally unheard of before Final Fantasy, and really only became popular in the U.S. following the release of Final Fantasy I. This battle system consists of the player wielding a party of usually three to four characters, each with differing abilities and equipment. Each character is given one turn per round to attack, defend, or use an item. Final Fantasy made these battles interesting in that the battles always surrounded a greater plot, whether the characters were simply fending of fiends in a dungeon or defeating an epic boss in a dilapidated castle. Additionally, the characters would grow stronger by “leveling up” and this would give them access to greater abilities and equipment, all of which would be more aesthetically pleasing to the player as they leveled up further. FF I through VI were 2-D, although they did receive more graphic detail as the series progressed. It was Final Fantasy VII that changed everything.

Final Fantasy VII was the first fully-3D entry in the series but what really set it apart was the delivery of a deeply heartfelt and engaging story that perhaps connected the players to the characters more than ever before. A skill system called the materia system was also introduced in which special orbs could be placed on characters’ weapons and armor and would allow for greater skills, magic, and even summons of creatures. Despite the game being fifteen years old, I don’t want to reveal any spoilers. The game is nonetheless worth playing to those who have already enjoyed it as well as those who never got a chance. To date, this is likely the most popular title in the series and is still regarded as the height of Square’s creativity. This game did not rely on graphics simply because home consoles didn’t have the capacity to run anything better. This in no way created a void of enjoyability, however. In fact, since it is relatively difficult to find a decent copy of the PS1 original, Sony chose to make it available digitally on Playstation Network on the PS3. FF VIII and IX were both worthy entries and are considered by some to even be superior to VII, but in terms of popularity, the two were greatly overshadowed by VII.

Final Fantasy X was another leap or, a staple, in the series. This game proved yet again that fans of the series appreciate a good story more than anything. The graphical leap from PS1 to PS2 was a plus and added to the fans’ general adoration of the game. FF X did not use graphics as a crutch and focused on a love story surrounded by the greater story arch of the possible end of the world. Perhaps even more than the story, it was the characters who really engaged players and gave them the desire to see them through the game’s end. A boy transported far into the future, a girl tasked with sacrificing her life for the sake of her world, and several guardians with their own individual story lines created an even larger fan-base for the series and it even led to a direct sequel. The sequel was quickly maligned as a cheap way to capitalize on a greater story, coming off as vapid and generally worthless. The gameplay was actually somewhat interesting because it involved a new battle system, but that was the extent of any possible enjoyability. More recent entries seem to be so graphic-oriented that something has certainly been lost in the process.

Final Fantasy XI gained some attention before its release in 2003, but because the game was a poorly-created MMO, it only ever gained a specific group of players – namely those who simply enjoyed punishment in the form of endless grinding, nearly impossible bosses, and genuinely impossible drops of useful gear. Most of the servers running this game have since been shut down but certain masochists continue to enjoy its supremely difficult gameplay. Yet here again it is proven that gameplay (which in this case only ever supports the storyline) and not really graphics, is what the players respect. Final Fantasy XII received generally mixed reviews and is truly hit-or-miss with most people. The graphics and gameplay seemed to be limited because it is a product of a fading console generation. I can’t help but feel it would have been better received on the PS3. It is rumored that this game, like FF X, will eventually receive an HD remake which, in my opinion, is actually warranted in this case. XII was, after all, marketed as a single-player game set in an MMO-sized world. I just don’t think the PS2 handled it as well as the game deserved.

Final Fantasy XIII is somewhat of a consumer-minded abomination of the series. When you ask a fan of this game what is so markedly impressive of the title, the ubiquitous answer is the graphics.

YouTube Preview Image

Other than the main character, the characters in this game lack any reason for the player to care about them. The main character does not carry the game, though, nor should she. Instead, like every Final Fantasy, the game jumps from the personal story of one character to another. Were the characters actually interesting, this would be acceptable, but they simply aren’t. Most of them have stories that either aren’t interesting or actually don’t even matter for the purpose of the main storyline. What’s worse is the gameplay. I feel like Square Enix thought the graphics were so good that the gameplay needed to be cut back in order for the player to gaze at the beautiful polygons even more. This was a huge mistake on their part, in reference to the respect of their fan base. Since consumerism determines “the shinier, the better,” XIII has done well and has even spawned an even worse direct sequel. It’s disgusting that a developer which is so obviously capable of amazing games has taken this direction and it’s really inexcusable.

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Initial Covetous Exploration

March 29, 2012 By 1 Comment

For our upcoming analytic paper, i have already made the decision to do a critical study on the flash game Covetous. While this blogpost is not the most in-depth analysis, it is a creative outlet in order for me to explore the not-so-organized ideas in my mind and maybe figure out a few things to have a veritable direction in which to disseminate and succinctly argue.

Screenshot of which the entire game takes place.

At first glance, the picture above might give the impression this flash is a happy–albeit with a visceral twist–game. We see green bile as a portion of this body of a smiling person that has clearly been ebbed away maybe in a Operation board game style. As a white blob in the center can be seen as your avatar within the game. You might even be saving this man from something.

Hardly the case at all.

Newgrounds has infamously been around for quite some time after Tom Fulp embarked on creating a website dedicated to flash of which i am sure he never intended to become the ever-evolving beast it is today.

While the site began as a place more commonly known for hyper violent and over-the-top games, over time the site and its users have matured. Much like video games, flash entries have been created with the intent of making art. Indeed, Newgrounds is still a haven for ridiculous and perverse flash to be exposed to the Internet, but the site has expanded to include not only flash games but movies, user-created music, an art portal, forums, and a site of free exchange of ideas. Every now and then something more artful and thought provoking will appear, quite shockingly when compared to the majority of muck one can find on a daily basis.

The author, programmer, and overall creator of Covetous is Austin Breed. He has posted several pixelated flash and flash games that tend to err on the side of art. Covetous made its debut on July 18th, 2010. His brief and only description of Covetous is that he quickly made the work in 48 hours for “Ludum Mini-Dare 20, with the theme ‘Greed.’”

Ludum Dare is, as the sub-heading says, a “Rapid Game Creation Community” of which to share and display ideas. Clearly after playing Covetous there is more to Austin’s simple Newgrounds quick explanation. Our main insight are the tags Austin has posted the game with (thank you, Professor Whalen!): “cancer; creepy; greed; chestburster.” Austin did directly say the primary theme of Covetous is the topic of greed, but only until a few days ago did Professor Whalen point me toward the tag of “cancer.” Creepy, greed, and chestburster i understood, but cancer–wow, that changes the whole ballgame up rather quickly.

There is very much an existential vibe to this ominous game; much like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, we’re immediately put into a grotesque out-of-the-blue situation having no full idea of how or why the situation starts the way it does. En media res we are put into an absolutely strange circumstance of genuine absurdity. Again, like Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, we are found in an insane position with no explanation and no justification but to simply push forward in existence.

The fact that this game is made using the most basic of digital art, the pixel, makes the work all the more creepy, as Austin puts it. Surely, had the game been drawn using a more hand-drawn style, the overall feel may have been even more disturbing.

Oh, God, why?! -- Courtesy of UrbanLyra

But something about this truly basic computerized art style gives this unsettling aura of something much more primal. Even the music is a disturbing lo-fi de-rezzed 8-bit spine grabber. Everything about Covetous just exudes and oozes gruesomeness. Considering the short length of the game and the most simple of control schemes, the game can be a stimulus-overload with sound, sights, and nasty ending despite the simplicity and the rock-the-one-level aesthetic.

The brother-to-be somehow given a second chance at life is clearly quite and angry and selfish and misunderstood. It’s even more eerie to note that this…thing is not quite human:  beginning as a single cell somehow simply born it becomes human shaped; it has a human-like intellect; it has a human-like affect and spectrum of emotions; but it is not fully human. i always refer to the movie Jacob’s Ladder or the Silent Hill series (of which was directly inspired by the movie) when discussing relatability to monsters. Silent Hill’s Masahiro Ito fully intended to make human-like aberrations that were not so much beasts as deformed parts of bodies with a human base. Somehow this sort of vibe is ingrained into Covetous and it makes you downright uncomfortable to play as this growing cancer while having a certain level of knowledge at the injustice of the circumstances.

As a cancer, things move slowly. You as a cell start small and work your way of infecting or taking in other parts as a manner in which to grow. As you grow, you notice your brother/kin/host’s smile start to fade; clearly something is amiss with pain. But you begin to take form as a pixelated fetus that goes more and more. No longer is the music the same drudgery but a sirens call showing how anxious you are to have life. The whole situation is only more complicated as the cell admits an affection for the host, but ultimately and with ferocious anger demands death of its host and in the fashion of Ridley Scott’s Alien, chestbursts to life as this bipedal monstrosity.

Chestburst is another tag there. Pop culture was really given that gift with the movie Alien, which thrives on twisted sexual imagery and distorted births and deaths. Your covetous life is the death of another with this second birth. Not so much a child as a parasitic invader whose parental relationship is disgustingly tangled. Suffice to say with Covetous there’s this underlying asexual yet incestuous goings-on setting.

The final part i have to figure out for this upcoming analysis is whether or not this work falls into the category of art. Indeed, Newgrounds did not start as a creative outlet for intellectual gratification. But as the site evolved, an actual collection of art games has been established. Reading Ian Bogost‘s articles and regular postings on Gamastura sheds some light on my direction, as well as taking into account Roger Ebert’s aphorism that video games cannot be art. There are a lot of conflicting views but it also presents to me and other players a dilemma: how do we perceive art? What is our subjective definition of art?

Such a vague notion of art and what is and is not and everything going on in Covetous, i have a lot to work with but am trying to not hang myself given all the facets of this work with which to focus. i think ultimately it will come down to defending this unsettling work as whether or not it’s art and have to describe more in-depth the allusions and ideas floating around in the game and my jarred head. Thankfully i have Professor Whalen’s guidance and direction and having done this blog has provided a little more introspective insight into where i want to go and what angles i want to focus on.

It’s all there, jumbled but there. Now to organize, formalize, and wreck shop in the literary sense. Go team.

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Twitter as a Primary Source

March 29, 2012 By 1 Comment

Recently in my Anthropology course we’ve been talking about inequality in society, and gradually the conversation progressed to racial inequality. My professor often points to history to explain the origins of said inequalities and slavery often enters the discussion. Humans have a fair amount of experience in enslaving one another as a result of racial prejudice or conquest or what have you. However, today my professor showed us a more recent article to demonstrate that these injuries are perhaps buried deeper in a more modern age, but far from gone. I am of course talking about the reactions of many Hunger Games fans in response to casting decisions for the movie. If you haven’t read one of the articles about this, check it out.

The article describes essentially how many fans had a very different mental conception of certain characters, despite having textual evidence to the contrary, and how the race of these characters affected the way they were perceived. Where did Jezebel find some of these reactions? Twitter. The tweets range from mild shock: “after watching the hunger games preview 6 times in a row, i realized Rue is black. whaaaat?! #shocked” all the way to “Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself“. Despite the societal implications this has, I’m more concerned about the medium these people used to express themselves.

Twitter as of April 2010 has begun donating all public tweets to the Library of Congress, and you can check out that article here. This is and will be such an immensely rich database of the past, first and foremost because of the number of different perspectives it offers. For instance, Twitter played a large role in the recent Egyptian unrest as well as Iran’s election protests. These tweets will hopefully allow a fuller and more complete perspective on historical events as opposed to the limited and often biased versions we have now. The article also mentions that “Twitter will be one of the most informative resources available on modern day culture, including economic, social and political trends, as well as consumer behavior and social trends.”

It’s tough to keep track of one’s digital footprint in the current state of things, but before you tweet make sure it’s something you’re willing to have go down in history bearing your name.

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Sooth by David Jhave Johnston

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

David Jhave Johnston’s Sooth is interactive text over video. The text is a series of six different interactively triggered phrase-by-phrase love poems. Each phrase is paired with it’s own alternating volume audio, giving each individual phrase a sense of individuality. Each poem has the option to be featured in English or in French. Interestingly the title of the work “Sooth” means truth. Each poem is circled back to these overarching title theme, presenting words of truth and thoughtful emotional themes.

Upon opening Johnston’s work, the user is introduced to a black screen with grey text, prompting the user to select a poem from the left menu list. The first of these poems is the aptly named title work “Sooth”. Clicking on the title prompts the beginning of video, in this case wind moving ferns. The user is prompted to click the screen to introduce each new phrase of the poem. The words glide smoothly on to the screen and seem to rustle in the wind with the ferns. The poem and video are combined with sounds of birds, water, and music. With each click and introduction of new words to the screen, the video pans to a different aspect of the landscape and the tone and quality of the color of the video changes. Five lines of the poem, after clicked on to screen, continue to float around the page – alternating position and changing sizes. Each click  forms a  new 5-phrase combination of the poem as they fade in and out around the screen.

The second poem, “Weeds” features a panning close up video of a person laid down, resting. Their eyes open and close intermittently. There appears to be a strong focus on appearance and texture, of the eyelashes, skin, cloth, and even words. The word choices and movement of each line by line delivery are both surprising and interesting. Various words are brought on to the screen and float around. Creating and recombining in the same way that the first poem does. Fading, growing, shrinking, moving. The color tone of the screen changes constantly, altering the mood of the poem in front of you.

The third poem, “Body” follows the same format. The video is a minimalist image of of color-tone changing curvature of what could be the curves of a body or the outline of a landscape. The words come on the screen in clicks in the same way as the previous poems, overlapping and creating alternating stanzas of compelling language.

“Root” is set to a background a flowing water a calming background image that features the poems lines swirling and flowing back and forth as soon as they appear on screen, moving with the flowing water. Each new line seems to be a complete thought, each which flows together nicely with the next.

“Soul” is set to a background of underwater rocks feature a large semi-grotesque black fish breathing through it’s gills. Each new word comes up twice above the fish. Once in large letters that fades out in the background and is replaced with each click and introduction of a new word, plus a smaller pairing that is always in motion alternating in size and brightness with each other word. The words of this poem are about sex and love, an interesting pairing against such a non-sexual or romantic background setting.

The final poem in the series is “Snow.” The video features and extreme closeup of clean, perfect, snow with a small strip of blue at the top, presumable sky. Each phrase appears in white, an interesting choice against a white background that can make them almost unreadable, but each set of words floats up to the blue sky above it, making each phrase legible. The poem features lines about being together and alone at the same time.

If you haven’t checked out this work yet, I’d recommend it. The form and interactivity makes it a very interesting set of poems to look at and analyze. The video, ever-changing tone, word movement, and sound effects add a depth and interest to the works of poetry, making them more interesting than if they were simply presented flatly and in place.

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“Wordscape”: A New, Confusing Kind of Landscaping

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I remember at the beginning of the semester, I was banging my head against a wall trying to figure out what to write my checkpoints on. I used to peruse the E.Lit blog to see what my classmates were writing on (and secretly to see if they were getting frustrated as well), and one of the few posts that stuck out to me was this one about Peter Cho’s “Letterscape” that was written by the username khilton. “Letterscape” is a fun collection of interactive pictures that was created in 2002. It won numerous awards including the Tokyo Type Directors Club Interactive award.

When I clicked to look at the electronic work, I saw that there was a “sequel” to “Letterscape” entitled, “Wordscape.”

I thought it was really cute that both of the titles played off the word, “landscape,” since the word alludes to “comprising the visible features of an area of land,” which in this case is the space on the interweb.

When you begin “Wordscape,” there is a large blue matrix with white letters floating around, a concept that was similar to that in “Letterscape.”

The difference was that when you clicked a letter, instead of a blown up version of the letter, there would be a “landscape” of a word that began with the selected letter. For example, this is the image that appeared when I selected the letter o:

It was the word “obsess” in yellow blobs that looked like the animal cells you saw in a microscope when you were in your high school biology class. When you hovered your mouse over the word, the word began to move in a way like the page was a piece of fabric and there was someone on the other side pressing against it, causing the yellow blobs to move around. Below is a screenshot in case my explanation makes absolutely no sense (I’m awful at describing three-dimensional effects!):

Like the user khilton, I had a difficult time trying to figure out what the meaning behind this electronic work was. I felt that there was only an arbitrary connection between the word and its landscape; there was nothing too substantial to analyze. I understood that you could analyze the word itself and then find some sort of connection between the definition of the word and the way the word interacts with the user; however, I felt that even after looking up the word “obsess” and closely watching the three-dimensional effect, I was still unable to come up with a rational connection to the work like most kinetic typographies have, like in DAK0TA and the Conan O’Brien one I previously wrote about in a past checkpoint.

Since I couldn’t find a deeper meaning, I Googled around to see if I could find any reviews from smarter people that could analyze this work better than me. I looked around for a while and came across this site called Electronic Literature Organization. They discussed how in Cho’s work, the words can be considered “’negative’ space, the yin/yang interaction between inky darks and untouched whites in Asian art in a pictorial realm dominated by gestalt switches between solids and voids, and dominated by color.” Yeah, I’m not going to lie, but I don’t see that…

Overall, I really enjoyed playing with Peter Cho’s kinetic typography. Even though it was frustrating to me as a student to not fully understand the work, it was still interesting to watch how the words only moved when you interacted with them, which demonstrated the universal concept of “you only get what you put into it.”

So classmates, if you think you understand this work, please comment below with your thoughts. I would love to see what your interpretations of this work are!

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More of a Story Than a Game

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Wow.  That’s all I have to say after playing the Interactive Fiction game Shrapnel.  I decided to check it out because we had talked about it in class and I wanted to learn more.  I was so frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t quit the game, that I felt like there had to be more to it.  After I played a few minutes in class, I became hooked, went back to my room and played all the way through it.

You “play” as a character who is from the Civil War era.  You have been in war, you have been wounded, and you keep on dying.  It’s infuriating.  It doesn’t matter what you do; you will always die doing it.  However, you keep waking up in different places and as different people.  (Warning:  Spoiler alert).  As you go through, the time periods also change as well as the places and people.  After dying several times, you go into more of a story mode than a play mode.  You come in contact with Green who really reveals he is from the future and is in love with your daughter.  He reveals all about you.  He knows that you are a father who was wounded, went into a risky business venture, raped your own daughter who later hung herself, and he was trying to go back in time to save you from getting injured, so you wouldn’t do any of these things.  He used a time machine in which to do this but while he was trying to save you from the shrapnel, his time machine got destroyed by some shrapnel of its own.  This sent the two of you into a limbo like area, where you find yourself, blipping back and forth between times in your life until you eventually just die and the game ends.

You have no control much like the main character in a lot of this game, if you can even call it a game.  Adam Cadre not only gave you the story part of the game, but he used the little parts of the game, like the fact that you can’t quit the game when you die or sometimes you don’t have a choice as to what happens next, to show you how frustrating it can be to not be in control of your destiny.  It is a very easy game to play.  You do not have to do much to try and figure out what you are doing.  There are few movements to the game, in which you are almost trying to die so you can learn more.  The point of the game is to just figure out what the heck you are doing and what is happening to you.  There is a lot of reading involved but I was so into the game that I didn’t care because I was so confused that I wanted to know as much as I could.

I loved it.  I loved the slap in the face realization at the end.  Cadre did the same thing for me in his Interactive Fiction “Photopia”.  In both “Shrapnel” and “Photopia”, Cadre does every scene out of order.  This causes more confusion but it makes the ending that much more of an eye-opening realization of what was really happening.  I would recommend everyone playing through “Shrapnel” and experiencing it for themselves.  It was awesome.

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