THE 4TH WALL

What side of the glass are you looking through?

The concept of the 4th wall is a metaphor derived from the geographical nature of a theatre, the existence of 3 walls; one to the right, one to the left and one behind us, the fourth being the screen. We the audience are passive viewers of the activities on a screen, sure, video games are already flipping the passive script and getting our lazy asses involved. From interactive cutscenes to getting up and having a dance when the wii tells us to, there is certainly a thumb on the pulse of player interaction. You could say the breaking of the 4th wall is just a developers intention to add some humour to a serious moment and for the most part it is. Actually, I cant really think of any reason other than humour to be honest, so lets stick with humour.

If we are going to talk about the concept of the 4th wall we are going to talk about Metal Gear Solid, lets face it.

There is a very crafty man out there (well, in Tokyo) that has taken video games to a whole other level, and has made us do a lot of waiting in the process, and for good measure too, can any one honestly tell me they have encountered a glitch in a MGS game? No, well okay then. Kojima and his team has built a monstrous world of fiction around the MGS franchise, each game ties itself into one another using quotes, items, scenes, characters etc. You could say that even that is a little hole in the 4th wall in itself. But there was one important moment, for me at least that exposed me to the raw integrity of player to video game interaction:

It was a warm night in the summer of 2001, when Ryan, an old friend of mine and I rented out Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty from the local Blockbuster, we took it home with our Subway dinner and played it for hours (you see only when you’re young you can some how manage to play a 1 player game with 2 people). Into the long hours of the night our eyes grew weak and Ryan had fallen asleep, but I continued playing, in the dark, in amazement. And for those who remember reaching Arsenal Gear for the first time, things get a little bit creepy, when GW begins to break down and those NPCs you thought you trusted lose all control. Sleep deprived and left having to get Raiden’s naked ass through the mission, this happens…

I should have just called the post “I need scissors, 61!”. So try to imagine I am alone in a dark room and the video game starts talking to me, no, it wasn’t the Subway sandwich, it was in fact the one of the finest moments in gaming history. Sure this concept appears in film also, but all they can really do is get the actor to look into the camera and say “hey you!”, woah man, that was funny the first time and all, but us gamers have got something really special going on here. When used in moderation the 4th wall can be a nice bit of fun, however, over use can detract from the strength of the storyline, it must be treated with a level of elegance for it to mix.

Hell, even I dabbled in 4th wall entertainment when I was featured on Good Game the other night 😀 Check the link!

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/goodgame/video/xml/20110927_2030.xml&item=04

Player Agency and the Virtual Environment.

So who is in charge here, The game designer, or the player?

In video games player agency/interactivity is hideously, hideously important. To usher along the player through a narrative that rarely allows any sort of two way exchange can be an unwelcoming feeling for the player.  I am just going to jump straight into an example to substantiate this idea.

Take The Legend of Zelda for example, though it is a fantastic adventure game, it is incredibly linear and player interaction is almost non existent. This is especially evident in the dialogue, not only can you not respond to a thing any NPC says to Link, he himself is completely mute. Sure the NPCs are brilliantly scripted and expressed in all Zelda games, but all they essentially do it talk at you rather than with you. Each dungeon in the game is specifically and carefully planned out exactly to Links respective abilities, and some times we wonder “if Gannondorf wanted to hinder our path then why has he set out everything so perfectly in order for us” and furthermore, how come Link cannot do anything other than what Gannondorf has prescribed for him any way?

So you see, there needs to be elements in a game that give the player agency over the outcomes of the actions we take. A fantastic example of a game that combines cinematic cutscenes with player agency is ‘Heavy Rain’. The players actions are the driving element of the game and each cutscene is interactive, in fact the action of the game is played out by on screen control prompts, such as press square or rotate control stick. As for narrative control; if the player manages to kill one of the 4 playable protagonists in a cutscene – they stay dead, and the story continues on with out them, leading the games ending to a player created outcome. The only thing that it truly lacks is any sort of inventorial customisation.

Screenshot from Heavy Rain

Another fantastic example of an interactive game is Fallout 3, It hooked me in because of dialogue engine. I loved being able to choose from a set of very well thought out remarks to use in various conversations with some brilliant NPCs, It was the first time I had ever played a game with that level of interactivity and it kept me up for late hours into the night.

Fallout 3 Interactive Dialogue

The other great element of Fallout 3 is its multi-path mission structure, the designers have allowed the player to take the option between being good, bad or indifferent in any given situation in any mission. And not only are the missions optional they can be taken at any point in the game, rendering the flow almost completely in the players control.

Games are an interactive medium wether we like it or not and there is really not much purpose in a game at all if the player lost control of what happen, otherwise it would just be a movie. Developers need to consider that in order for a player to be fully immersed in their game’s environment it to give them the tools and show them the roads. Because nothing is more dull for the player than to endure a life-less, unchangeable, sequence of scripted events…

unless they actually enjoy Gears of War.

OOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH SNNNNAAPPPPPP!

Video Game Analysts Need to Stop Using Tomb Raider as and Example of a Sexist Game NOW!

They say that her body is too sexually out of proportion, but I bet they still enjoyed her tits.

I swear, if I read another academic article explaining character driven game design and use Lara as an example of being successful only due to her physique, I am going to slander the author into next week.

So I open my morning writing for games reader over breakfast and nearly lost my toast when I hear that “Lara Croft is simply a female version of Indiana Jones, except that she doesnt have anything like the depth of Indy and that if he is two-dimensional then she is one-dimensional. Lara eminently demonstrates that not only are we ripping off the movies, we’re [game developers] also doing a bad job of it too, as far as characterisation goes” (Rollings, A. & Adams, E. 2003).

Whhoooaaa there! I was not expecting to get donkey punched with a dirty opinion when I woke up this morning. However, it aint the first time I have read about this business, no, I am well aware of the Croft Hater clan… crew, or what ever you guys have going on. Okay, maybe Lara lacked back story in the first two games, but there are other games believe it or no which greatly compliment Lara’s family and history, the next forthcoming game is even set when Lara is still young, around 23 when she survives a shipwreck. Comparing Indiana Jones to Lara Croft is almost a moot point, Indy was 20 years ago man, take a look at what we have going on now. Besides, do you really want to compare the Tomb Raider game to the most recent Indiana Jones flop, I mean film…

Yes I though not.

I know I am probably just as much of an opinionated bastard the rest of the game studies authors, but I feel it is my role as a student to critically analyse various texts, and so it goes, my reasons why Lara Croft is not just a shallow rack.

1. I have ben studying my girlfriend playing Tomb Raider [Legend] and have gathered that she enjoys the game for its stunning environments, great-game play and the sense of being an archeological explorer.
2. It was virtually the only game at the time to have a female as the playable protagonist on a field that was DOMINATED BY MALE CHARACTERS. (This could be part of the reason why females also enjoy this game and it all comes back to the element of player agency, which I will explain in further detail in another post).

Perhaps even just the fact that Lara is an iconic female protagonist is part of the reason why she is such an anomaly to predominantly male games analysts (and perhaps the players). C’mon guys, do we really need more Duke Nukems to make ourselves feel big? If we can reflect our personalities onto video game characters like Kirby or Sonic, a cloud and a marsupial then how hard is it to do a girl?

And how can we forget that pesky butler?

Stay tuned for more studious ranting.

Rollings, A. & Adams, E. (2003). Character Development. On Game Design (pp. 122-146). Berkeley, California: New Riders

Writing For Games

Myself in the game’s environment.

In 2009, after trialing multiple TAFE campus’ during the confounding post-high school phase in search of discovering my true passion, I had attempted the creative music certificate III and later tried part-time film and video studies; unfortunately both did not work out for me. Untill in 2008 when Metal Gear Solid 4 had finally been released for the PS3, it became very obvious to me that I was going to work in the field of video games. So in 09 I went and sat the STAT test to lift my academic points up enough to be accepted into ECU’s university preparation course, endured the rudimentary grind of mathematics and English, came out with a distinction average and now it is very clear that university works for me.

Using my existing knowledge in computer music I have taken on a double major in GDT and MTQ (Music Tech), I am also growing a collection of books relating to music for video games. I am a few samples short of a decent demo reel but I have the facility to create emotionally provoking scores for games, it is through my time at uni that wish to learn to implement audio into the game’s engine.

Though I am using my skills as an audio designer to enter the game design process I am also very interested in game narrative and style. Themes like fantasy, sci-fi and perhaps medieval does not inspire me so much, however fantasy in a video game is almost unavoidable, but that’s fine. Video games need to allow themselves room to breath; by this I mean that there needs to be a level of self reflexivity to assure the player that the environment they are exploring is genuine and will allow them to explore at their own pace.

I wont go too far into this idea yet as it is the first post, but i will just say that for a game designer to theorise over a video game is to fully flesh out and expand upon the games environment, it’s an inquisitive thing to do. A well thought out video game will represent itself to us as something we are able to confide in, and this is integral to the games virtuosity.

Stay tuned.

Transcendence

So it is getting very near to the end of the semester, crunch time as I call it. Since the work load really started to pick up I have had this mentality of  “suffering comes before winning” (Yeah I know, hell optimist right). When I first took the plunge into university life I had this idea that all I wanted to be was a video game sound engineer and uni would grant me this enlightened state of being for me to finally be at peace with my creative processes. It then became more clear (and necessary) that before I can do what I actually set out to do, I have to face the hard yards of everything in between, and I was not deterred, I totally understood this and embraced it (even through the grueling Uni Prep Course). Trust me, accepting the reality in front of you makes the pay off of transcendence so so much sweeter, this is what I am here to tell you about.

It has a lot to do with ego I believe and how we perceive ourselves and a certain level of endurance. For the past three weeks I have worked 40 hours each, due to the other full-time manager being on leave, this was right in the middle of all my assignments being due aswell,  I even spent 9 hours on Monday attending a first aid training course for my work, but I could tolerate it. Because I knew after this was all over I could go on leave myself and finally get around to immersing myself in the new Fallout video game for a couple of months. My real idea of transcendence relates to harmony, in life and its activities.

But patience is totally a virtue, you cannot create something amazing without first creating something crap, it’s a learning process. If it means taking your laptop to work every day to write a few sentences of your essay in between making some orders, so be it, after all, without sacrifice there’s nothing worth it.

So when you embark on those core units/electives just keep in mind that it is all part of the grand-scheme, if you can manage to see your journey as a whole and work on the pieces, you will find that the pieces are only as good as the whole (Slipknot reference right there).

So to leave you with some examples of transcendence, here is some “next-level shit”.