For the last few weeks, I’ve spent the greater part of my free time soaking in the experience of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption.
It’s everything the critics say it is – beautiful, immersive, well-written, well-acted, epic, and in terms of the physical environment, incredibly well realized. Most agree that it does a better job in plunging you into its world than GTA IV or its previous incarnations.
Its not only the improvements on performance and rendering that make Red Dead Redemption more immersive than its predecessors, and its not gameplay in the single-player either. The reviewers who do address it are right to say they stick with what works in RDR… Grand Theft Horse, one might say.
There are two fundamental differences with RDR’s sandbox that makes it much easier to get lost in the simulation, and I would argue that these particular elements position it closer to Bully than GTA IV. Its not gameplay, its not graphics, its not technology or voice acting, its not writing – its the setting, and how it relates to people and violence, and the player’s interactions with both.
Although Red Dead Redemption is without a doubt setting the bar extraordinarily high in terms of realistically and compellingly rendering huge, wide open swaths of land that feels right, in a sense the GTA series is fundamentally more ambitious; ambitious to an extent that the experience becomes less sustainable – immersion as a function of authenticity becomes more difficult to maintain.
LIBERTY CITY
Grand Theft Auto IV was another incredible technical achievement. I had never experienced such a feeling of place and life in a simulated environment in the opening hours of its gameplay – and the referential, satirical nature of the entire place only increased the delight I felt walking its streets. This was a familiar feeling – they did the same with GTA III when it was first released, and San Andreas also captured a certain sense of life, space, and danger in its take on suburban Los Angeles neighborhoods.
What happens after a few hours go by in the game? The immersive quality of the simulation as virtual place starts to crack. The more a player delves into the world, the more the experience of this fictional, satirical, living city returns to the category of “game to be gamed.” As a virtual place, that not tied into the inherent mayhem of the player’s potential actions is ultimately hollow – a collage of facades, fake doors and storefronts, a Hollywood set.
How much more ambitious can you get than attempting to capture the life and activity of a major global city, and to give the player freedom to go wherever, whenever? If the illusion of authenticity as virtual place fades for some players (it did for me), what keeps immersion in GTA going is the time-tested sandbox gameplay, technology/rendering, and unparalleled writing.
My main point though is that the beginning of GTA IV doesn’t feel like only a sandbox, it feels ALIVE. You drive carefully(maybe), observe the locals. Listen to hours of radio shows. Sit and watch television. Take a stroll through the neighborhood. You take care of your car, park it nicely. Maybe take a girl to a show.
But by the end, you know it. You’re gaming it. The sheer amount of violence you’ve experienced creates a dissonance between Liberty City as virtual city and Liberty City as deathmatch map. You careen around corners, slamming into curbs and passerby. You dump a car into the river for the fun of it. Do whatever you want, and its fun, but its not quite as alive anymore. Whether or not this is developer intention is one thing, and it is fun – but still nothing in GTA feels quite so compelling to me as those first moments of feeling the life of the city.
BULLWORTH ACADEMY
If we compare Grand Theft Auto to Bully, we see a much less ambitious, but structurally similar setting to its parent series. It remains brilliantly written with the usual solid gameplay, but incorporating such a different setting that the player’s potential actions are dramatically different, while utilizing similar progression and narrative logic.
Bully takes place in a fictional New England town, where the prep school is its most defining feature. It is no metropolitan center, but it has its quirks, its neighborhoods, its alleys. The school itself is a microcosm itself of typical school-age social groups – still a satirical take, but one much smaller in scope.
You navigate the social landscape of the student body – try to get what you need from the geeks, try to impress the girls, fight off the bullies, harass the jocks, and so on – while slowly gaining access to more of the town itself, but don’t get caught breaking curfew, mind you. The protagonist spends his time avoiding townies, exploring the natural surroundings, participating in bike races, and so on.
Bully is a take on American adolescence that should resonate with authenticity to anyone who received a contemporary American education, in ways that GTA’s stories of car chases, shootouts, and gang wars does not. Nevertheless, in terms of gameplay logic and narrative progression, Bully is still GTA at school, minus guns.
Regardless, Bully felt much more alive and authentic throughout the entire experience, simply because there is less facade(actual and symbolic) in a more fictionalized and less urban space. There is no attempt to simulate the immensely complex social ecosystems of a major global city, or even the open countryside – instead just that of a little prep school and its environs.
By reducing the amount of effort needed to make an inherently social, massive environment compelling and visually striking in order to counteract the inevitable struggles with authenticity, time can be spent instead to fleshing out the personalities of the much more limited nature of the school, town, natural environment, and social groups.
Just as importantly, the actions the player takes may be fictionalized and cartoonish, but they don’t create a dissonance between the life of the area as virtual place and the mechanisms and meaningfulness of what the player is doing.
Ultimately its far less ambitious, but the game positively teems with culturally relevant authenticity and life.
NEW AUSTIN, ET AL.
Red Dead Redemption has taken huge leaps from GTA III, Bully, and GTA IV in terms of displaying the virtual environment. GTA IV had its vistas, but RDR has VISTAS with capital letters. It without a doubt recreates the initial immersion of playing GTA IV again – the place is empty, desolate, and unforgiving, but oh-so-alive.
Here’s where Red Dead Redemption has more in common with Bully than Grand Theft Auto, however. Though technologically unparalleled, in a sense New Austin and RDR’s other territories are much less ambitious environments than Liberty City. There are very few social landscapes to map. The suggested population is the tiniest fraction of that suggested by GTA. There are no blocks and blocks of storefronts, no floors and floors of apartments. There are no crowds of people going about their business on the streets, every day, all day. There is only the desert.
The characters, the writing, and the gameplay are still all on point, but nothing new. RDR feels better than GTA because less holes show through the facade; there’s less to simulate; there’s less to impersonate. The key was making the frontier feel like the frontier, and the less people are involved, the easier it is to do that.
Red Dead Redemption is GTA in a lawless wilderness, giving greater context to the violence which you inflict and suffer, and showing less set pieces of complex AIs to simulate which ultimately feels that much more authentic and immersive. Does it make RDR less ambitious? In that sense, yes – but the experience feels richer and more alive throughout the entire game.
DESIGN NOTES:
People and social environments are hard to sustainably convey authenticity with over the course of a long game. Unless you want to attempt GTA-level scope of writing, acting, rendering, technology, narrative, and gameplay, strategically limit social environments with deliberate settings to create less fractures to cover.
Violence can make a realistically simulated environment feel less alive, less real, and less immersive over time, unless violence is an intrinsic part of the setting.
“A short existential game about alienation and refusal of labor.
Or, if you prefer, a playable music video.”
I felt a trace of Tale of Tales’ The Path – in order to fully experience and “finish” the game the player is required to essentially do the opposite of what the character is told; the opposite of conventional designer-dictated narrative. “Don’t stray from the path” as “Get to your cubicle.”
One could play the game forever, but the monotony of the looping routine gradually becomes agonizing.
Suicide is a game element but is used in an odd way that can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to be reminiscent of “Groundhog Day” or “Moon.”
Some of the most memorable moments are those of player-initiated absurdity. Standing alone in a field in your underwear with a cow, while your idling car blocks traffic being one. Most of it involves being in your underwear, actually.
A curiosity about this “follow/don’t follow”, “do what i say” or “don’t do what i say to do” binary is that in the end, everyone can pretty much discern the ultimate intent of the game designer, following an initial mental re-adjustment, but again, that’s the point, isn’t it?
Are the only true player-subversions of perceived or actual designer intentions through cheating, bugs, or exploits, or is it in unexplored emergence? The latter is an exploration of systems and mechanics interplay, whereas the former can be supplemented with player-constructed narrative explanation? Narrative fallacy?
I found the game to be more contemplative than subversive, and ultimately bleak, but moments of beauty persist.
“The iPad is the beginning of a new category‚ one that is hyper-convergent and humanistic.” (via designmind)
I am definitely impressed with some things (and less impressed with others), though I personally wouldn’t buy one until perhaps the 2nd or 3rd generation. That seems to be the trend for my purchasing of Apple products, anyway.
Regarding the possibilities for the iPad as a gaming device… it seems there is major potential, although it may not be as attractive to developers as Apple would like. Gamasutra had a good summary.
“…although Apple’s official specs page simply lists “accelerometer,” an Apple representative at the event told me the device’s accelerometer will be able to detect tilting on both the X and Y axes, unlike the iPhone, unlocking true 3D control as a possibility, but this capability was not demonstrated.”
True 3D control? Old school arcade turret games come to mind…
“The iPad will be as big a crap shoot for developers as the iPhone is. Forstall promised “another goldrush” when the iPad launches. But that promise, rather than exciting them, might make most developers a little queasy.”
A bigger crapshoot, I’d say. Especially within the first generation.
Also … still no Flash(!) – but Unreal Engine 3 on the other hand… the combination of low cost SDK/developer access and Unreal’s free UE3 licensing plan is an explosion of UE3 content waiting to happen, provided it sees support for non-PC dev.
Having spent some time designing for user interaction and interface on the Civilization Revolution iPhone/iPod Touch port here, I’m pretty excited to see the beta SDK for iPad roll out… I want to see the capacity for multitouch recognition. Two players simultaneously? Four?
You play as a lone person trying to stem the tide of a riot. There is no context given – only black and white to indicate disagreeing opinions.
The game begins with you as a lone dissenter among a raging sea of “white” opinions. If you don’t push against the tide, it carries you along with it.
The game states the goal as bringing as many people as possible to the side of peace. To do that entails entering abstract rhythm matching games for each rioter you attempt to convince. I found it simple but nuanced. Verbally shotgunning a rioter won’t convince anybody – you have to wait; listen.
As your words spread through the crowd you gain more and more converts to your cause, but ultimately you find that swaying the opinions of the masses results in simply a mass reversal and more violence and rioting – your converts put down their placards and take up torches once again. You change colors again and again to promote peace, but the situation escalates nonetheless.
Finally you become gray, your words lose their impact. You can’t convince anyone, because you yourself aren’t convinced of anything anymore.
That’s my take on it, at least. Kudos to Intuition.
Just some quick notes on this great modern point-and-click adventure game. The narrative is characterized by simple, nonverbal communication – it is a quiet, contemplative game that lacks much in the way of exposition. The most of that happens to take place in the main character’s head, through his memories and feelings expressing universal, archetypal stories.
Gameplay feels a bit limiting at times, with limited control of character movement and action – but puzzles work out to be quite rewarding.
The real star of the show is the art; contrast between sharp, rich textures and pencil sketches, minimal animation that is full of personality, and true originality in bringing this strange world to life. See for yourself…
Spent some time with the newest releases from Neversoft and Harmonix yesterday.
Guitar Hero 5 plays great. The design is incredibly user-friendly and playing the songs felt fantastic. It reminded me of my first exposure to the series, and washed away some of the pain of subsequent releases.
On a business trip to a studio some years back, I had a chance to sit and play Guitar Hero 2 for a while. I was initially skeptical, as I had thoroughly grown out of my DDR phase, as well as harboring a little bit of, I admit, musician/music fan-pretension. I was fond of Harmonix’s earlier releases but hadn’t felt compelled to pick up the Guitar Hero series right away. Then I strapped on the guitar and within thirty seconds of playing realized I needed to own it, IMMEDIATELY. Guitar Hero 5 brings me back to those moments.
From what I’ve seen so far, the fifth installment is definitely the most approachable and flexible of the series – however even with these highlights I would not have felt so positive were it not for some improvements in other areas…
The art direction of the franchise has always sat poorly with me. In particular, Guitar Hero 3′s character, venue, and animation design were pretty miserable. The animation felt jerky and the entire presentation felt stagey; contrived. In fact, taking context into account, the lead male singer may have been the single most unappealing character design I’ve seen in a game, ever.
The art and general presentation of Guitar Hero 5 represents a huge improvement since that particular low point, although I am still not completely sold on the direction. I say it’s time to dump those old characters, Judy Nails, Pandora, Izzy Sparks and the like – they just haven’t aged well. Obviously the point is to capitalize on a distinct look and artistic personality to associate with the series, but watching cartoon characters play and sing these songs just doesn’t feel right anymore.
Speaking of that bit about cartoon characters… it should be interesting to see what happens regarding Courtney Love’s supposedly upcoming lawsuit. Does anyone NOT think that Activision will kick her ass in court?? That said, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl’s statement definitely resounds with me. Activision at the least should be considering their points very, very seriously. Their treatment of Cobain seems somewhat revealing as to how Neversoft approaches Guitar Hero as not much more than just a game, although they profess the same kind of rabid dedication to music as their primary competitor in this genre.
So enough about Guitar Hero. It was fun, I played for about an hour, looking forward to playing more.
Now, The Beatles: Rock Band – I played a marathon five hour session with friends, and it was absolutely sublime. There’s really not much more to say. I’m hoarse from singing those five hours, and can’t wait to further destroy my vocal chords. The DLC simply cannot come soon enough. It will be the first (perhaps only?) time I buy ALL the available DLC for a game.
In the recent weeks Beatlemania has descended upon me in force, for the first time in years. It feels good.
Just wanted to quickly mention one of my favorite recent indie webgames – Pixeljam’s Dino Run.
The concept of Dino Run is extremely simple – control a dinosaur running for its life from the effects of a nearby asteroid impact.
The presentation is intentionally outdated as a stylistic decision: pre-8-bit era styled pixel graphics and ambient sound effects, with a few flourishes. Overall a very nice retro/minimalist aesthetic of prehistoric fauna and increasingly desolate environments; forests, waterfalls, tar pits, caves, volcanoes, etc. Some of the level art has a nice depth to it despite the color and resolution simplicity, and crashing meteorites are suitably dramatic.
Gameplay is mostly minimal as well with some nice touches if the player wants to delve deeper – in RPG-esque features, items, speedruns, multiplayer, boulder rides/doomsurfing(!) and so on.
The game understands and does a few things particularly well, in my opinion, gameplay-related, atmospherically, and thematically.
FLIGHT (DEFINITELY): Running for your life is a classic gameplay technique when supplemented with the appropriate atmosphere. That is, with the proper treatment, something as straightforward as a set time limit to gameplay becomes something frantic. This kind of gameplay, when done well, can invoke some of the most primal of instincts, fight or flight. Narrowly escaping when it seemed the wave of destruction would overtake you can trigger euphoria, despite the simplicity of the presentation. In my opinion, Dino Run joins the ranks of other lofty examples of this idea done well – Metroid, Half Life 2, Mirror’s Edge… among others. Finally, the fact that your little dino manages to indulge his insatiable appetite while running from certain death adds an amusingly morbid dimension to the experience.
LEVEL DESIGN: Game design which does not allow the player to do or see everything in a typical playthrough invariably adds to the believability, specifically verisimilitude, of the game world (see 20 Mysterious Games on Gamasutra). This is only a good thing if the game is already well designed at its core. For games with a strong atmosphere, not being able to see the limitations and boundaries of the game world and the fiction of the experience in striking clarity only adds to the immersion a player can feel. Dino Run is not perhaps the best example of this quality but the combination of the simple gameplay and multi-path level design (including some hidden paths) work well together to encourage the player to wonder “what if I had gone the other way?” Games which allow the player to see the ends of all roads, metaphorically speaking, and all possibilities lose some of that quality of immersion.
EXTINCTION?: Finally, as an extension of the first point, there’s something compelling about playing a game in which the goal is to survive, but not only for the sake of surviving – rather that of staving off extinction. The game intentionally uses those particular terms – extinct and doomed – and the finality those words evoke tended make me consider humanity’s existential crisis and the ultimate (perhaps?) destination point of all things, oblivion. The player’s actions in the game seem to not only represent the struggle of a single creature to survive, but also symbolizing all life’s universal fight to outpace extinction. The presence of your fellow dinosaurs and mammals running through the stage heightens this feeling. Although the player actually can succeed in guiding his dinosaur to safety – ostensibly at least – the feeling of grim inevitability runs consistently throughout the experience. Pretty deep for a little browser game, huh?
Some things I would have had on my wish list if I was on the dev team:
- higher danger from other creatures (being trampled, eaten, etc.)
- a better feeling of acceleration and momentum
- being able to select or unlock different species of dinosaurs (and mammals?) with different starting stats and access to certain areas of the map – i.e. higher starting strength vs. lower starting speed, small tunnels, etc.
This should of course be incredibly obvious upon spotting a screenshot of the game…er…maybe not?
Despite the fact that this image is downright adorable… the point seems to be that the game design capitalizes on the player’s preconceptions of what such a cute-looking indie 8-bit style platformer should seemingly be like. However while music and visuals and simple gameplay initially points in that direction, the game ultimately leads to a quite different experience from the player’s expectations.
It manages to make a smoothly gradual transition into unease, menace and beyond while simultaneously shocking me at least a few times. The sound and music were great, but the control and level design certainly could have been expanded on. However the effect the game aimed to create was certainly not hurt at all by these minor shortcomings.
Very worth the few minutes it takes for a playthrough.
