Indeed.

This is a subject that comes up every so often, usually spurred by a soft piece spewed forth by a local news network or “brand new” study, and it’s a topic that I can’t say I fully understand.

That isn’t to say I don’t agree that games are addictive, chances are every gamer knows at least one person whose time and effort spent on playing would be comparable to an addiction, indeed I’ve known several. Rather, addiction is one of those things that I can’t say I’ve ever fully grasped, because I’ve never been intensely addicted to anything.

First, let me clarify what I mean by that statement.

I don’t have an addictive personality.

I’ve partied hard and drunk harder but at the end of the day, I don’t need alcohol to function. I’ve smoked, but I never feel the need to smoke all the time (that statement doesn’t purely refer to tobacco either, another vice that I side-stepped neatly). I can honestly say that I’ve never tried or done anything that I’ve ever gotten to the point where it would be called an addiction, which isn’t to say I don’t have passions, far from it, but I’ve never had a living room full of people asking me to put down the Snickers bar.

I am a passionate gamer, and let no man put my credentials to that fact asunder.

I’ve been playing since I was 2 and I don’t intend to stop, I went to midnight launches back when they, y’know, did stuff.  I’ve pulled all nighters so I could finish a game, I’ve done more 100% runs than I care to mention, been to expos, ran expos, been to tourneys, had my ass handed to me by Korean kids, written for websites and worked in the biz. But if I have to pick between a date and a new release, I go with the date. If I do a midnight launch and have to work the next day, I put the title on the shelf and sleep.

I still have a life, no matter how meek

My first brush with gaming addiction that I can recall was in 1995, I had a friend, lets call him Jacques, who was an avid gamer. No mean feat in those days mind, for the younger among us it would be difficult to envision a world where there were more games for PC than any console, arcades didn’t suck and the local video game store (not a mega-chain) was a geek mecca that, unless you were a lucky so-and-so, was far enough away to take the bus you weren’t allowed to get on, to a suburb your parents never went to.

Jacques was one of those very lucky kids whose parents spoiled him to the bone, he always had the newest and best and this meant while I was still reading about games in Nintendo Power and Hyper, he had them imported from Japan, or the States, or wherever they came from, and while my PC was chugging away he had the equivalent of today’s super-beasts. It was on this PC, on a cold and wet June afternoon I went to his house and he gleefully showed me a game that his brother had sent from Canada, a game about orcs and humans that let us play our fantasy table games much quicker and without the set up time.
A game called WarCraft.

It started innocently enough, we played the game a lot that afternoon, he was still playing it when I left. Monday rolled around, but Jacques wasn’t in class. He didn’t show up all week, or the next. I went to his house to see if he was feeling well enough to do the pile of homework I had to give him, I wasn’t prepared for what greeted me at the door. This was a gaunt shadow of the boy I had played computer games with the week before, the dark bags under his eyes showed the extent of his sleep deprivation, and despite the overcast weather he still shielded his eyes from the afternoon light. As I gave him the homework he eagerly showed me the tricks he’d picked up in the two weeks since we’d last spoke, the sheets of paper thrown in a pile of instant ramen cups, I scarcely believed he’d been allowed to stay home and play games for two weeks, the shock I felt when he gleefully told me his parents tried to force him to school but he just stopped eating till they gave him back his computer is something I still can’t express.

I wish I could say this is something that I’ve only seen once but as I said earlier this is the first of many, the game changes sure, everything from Unreal Tournament to Ultima Online, World of Warcraft to Guitar Hero, but the change is the same. Each time they’ve morphed into a person who only sees the game, only sees the next big score or loot drop or whatever they’re chasing and everything falls by the wayside, relationships, work, education, hell even basic things like hygiene and nutrition lose importance. The game is king, to be the best is the only thing that matters.

Games can be addictive. There is no doubt in my mind that they can be, and I pause here to suggest that if you know someone who is, or are a gaming addict yourself that you should seek help from a professional.

Where am I going with this? Good question.

I’ve been told, with varying degrees of ignorance, that I am a gaming addict.

We’ve all been there, as gamers we’ve all hit the point where all we want is that next objective ping or level up, that next achievement or trophy. We have all, whether we admit it or not, have stared bleary eyed at 2am and declared that we’ll be done in 5 more minutes, or after this checkpoint, or when that last god-damn zombie is dead. We’ve all paid the price the next day as we struggle to stay awake at work or school, silently cursing that last zombie.

I know I have, in my hey day I would play until the wee hours of the morning, grinding random encounters in FF: VII, trying to get all 150 Pokemon, 5 starring Bark at the Moon on expert, tracking down hidden packages, trying to get the magical 10,000th kill. The last big goal I chased? 100% in Red Dead Redemption, but I stayed up later to watch the World Cup than I did riding the open plains of New Austin. And it’s not like I’ve never considered gaming over everything else in my life, even this morning I was honestly weighing the pros and cons of leaving my nice warm bed and FIFA10 or getting lunch and taking care of the errands that had slowly piled up over the morning, my conclusion? I put the controller down, and some pants on.

So where do we draw the line between passion, and addiction?

I’ll figure it out after one more game.

Not in volume mind, but rather in the amount of time actually spent playing games, my own Mum has surpassed me. She made the casual observation over the Saturday breakfast table, much to the delight of my brother and Dad, that she spent more time playing Super Mario on my DS than I have on any of my shiny new purchases (sitting on a pile next to my couch, slowly gathering dust) and that perhaps she’s the hardcore gamer and I’m the casual one in the house. We laughed and moved on, but something about the statement stuck in my mind, I thought about the amount of time I actually spend playing games as opposed to a couple of years ago, the more I thought about it the more I realised I’m not alone.

If we think about the people who played games in the past, the young teens of Generation X and the early starts of Generation Y (such as myself) have grown up, finished school and moved on to other responsibilities, we suddenly don’t have 10+ hours a day to dedicate to the pursuits of a virtual nature. This isn’t just an issue for us time poor gamers, developers now have to contend with players who purchase titles based on how much they can finish in a sitting, an entire demographic has shifted the way it plays and the way it looks for value.

Disagree?

Consider the consoles, ten years ago Sony’s Playstation was considered odd for it’s CD player function. After all who buys a gaming console to play music? And yet the current crop of games consoles are lauded as much for their multimedia functions as they are for their ability to play the bleeding edge in gaming. People are seemingly less likely to put up with a large box under their TV that only plays games, especially in multi-user households where gaming isn’t the primary use of their time. A consideration evident in the marketing of today’s gaming consoles which come with more features than the proverbial Swiss Army knife and promise ever so sweetly to fit in with your home’s decor, the ability to play music is a given, DVDs (and now Blu-Ray) are a must and they even have PVR add-ons and video on demand. Forget about delivering DVDs to your door, now it’s about downloading films to your console while your corn pops!

Games too aren’t immune to this new brand of consumer, where once it was more common for a title to be released without multiplayer, and a small list of extra features and modes, now it seems if your new title doesn’t deliver on multiple fronts then it will be skipped over for one that can. A game that offers only a single player experience is limited in how much replay a player will get out of it, especially if that game is a linear one, this is a major reason you see many single player titles hype up “moral choices” or “dynamic” story lines in an attempt to show potential players that they can get more out of their single player game than they can from most others. Online multiplayer is another much valued selling point for time poor gamers who can get online and have the same core gaming experience without having to decide whether to socialise with their friends or worry about how much time they have to play. It’s much easier to play three or four games of capture the flag at five minutes a piece than move through a single player game rushing to get to the next checkpoint. Add into that the promise of DLC and developers have a raft of options to try and show that yes, we too are worthy of your money, more-so than that movie ticket or new album because we can deliver more content, and in a way that will fit to your schedule.

There is a cost to all of this of course, let’s not forget that while us old school gamers are doddering off to Sun City with our 8-bit ringtones and Pixel Ties there’s a brand new breed of hardcore gamers who are powered exclusively by guarana, are water cooled, over-clocked and don’t care about value or finding time for gaming. Long school holidays and part-time jobs with no rent or bills means they are bored and loaded to the gills with cash, they go for games that are guaranteed to hold their attention for the same amount of time it takes to get into a multiplayer game and scream threats and insults to people from every corner of the world, level up before all their mates an “pwn noobs”. Which of course means that by the time your brand new AAA title hits the shelves you’d better already have a sequel in the works and it has to be shinier and louder than the first, (with the ability to simultaneously offend as many people as possible in real time via online multiplayer.)

This demand for new titles of course means that there is a much shorter development schedule than in years past, a shorter amount of time to update all the previous game’s systems and mechanics, fix all the perceived flaws and make new content. In this high turn-around of new titles, and pressure to innovate something has to give way, unfortunately it seems that the loser in all this focus on short pick up and playable games, with expansive features and large online components is the single player experience. Case in point is Infinity Ward’s holy-crap-it’s-explosions-and-guns-wow the single player campaign can be knocked over on the hardest difficulty, Veteran, in less than three and a half hours, contrast that to the first game which took me the better part of a week to finish on Veteran and you can see my issue. The game ends with a “to be continued” and a friendly pop up telling me to go play their new online modes, something that made me quit in rage and not go back to it for two weeks. In fact it seems that many of the new blockbuster titles coming out can be completed in less than a few hours, and if you want a long game with an engrossing and detailed story then you have to either deal with pointy eared elves or androgynous males that come standard with current RPGs. Really, is it any wonder that with the way people buy games we are treated to rushed yearly sequels, entire series driven into the ground under the weight of expectation and cookie cutter gameplay? Even the ones that shine amongst the average, like Bioshock or Okami are now either being treated to the clone and port or bolted on multiplayer that is expected, nay demanded of current titles.

And here I sit, next to yet more titles I end up buying as I try to keep ahead of the curve, wondering why I get so disappointed by short games, with too many features and the depth of a teaspoon. Surely it’s what I want, I can finish them faster and make that pile smaller, I can go back later and try a new feature and I don’t have to worry about being so involved with a story I look up and it’s 3am. But I think that’s the problem,

It’s not what I want

I think if we honestly thought about why we started gaming to begin with it wasn’t because we wanted to play as many as possible or finish them quickly or even have more features than that Swiss Army knife. It’s because we wanted to have incredible experiences and a shed load of fun, to get that rush that came with destroying an alien invasion or scoring a winning goal. I want to get so involved in a story that I look out the window to see the sun coming up, I want to spend as much time as possible exploring the game’s world and I am willing to have less features if it means more fun. And hopefully you are too, because until we start rewarding developers who deliver that content and invest our time in these titles, we’ll be playing the same sequels every year until we all rage quit and sadly, don’t come back.

’till next time

More details at www[dot]freeplay[dot]net[dot]au

This isn’t a new idea by any stretch of the means, the older amongst us will remember fondly the dilemmas poised to us by titles like Ultima and Planescape: Torment but where titles like these had subtlety and a great understanding of the intricate nature of creating a truly memorable player conflict, it seems that in the current market as long as you give the player a choice of how terrible or upstanding they are you can effectively call that a moral choice and give yourself a pat on the back.

Too harsh?

I think not considering that while developers are giddy with the idea of challenging gamers with complex decisions, the harsh reality is it never amounts to more than picking your wardrobe or what particular powers you want to have. Want red lighting? be evil. Want that white hat? be good. There’s no real impact on the player, no-one walks away from the current crop of games talking about how a certain decision tore their perceptions of the world asunder. There aren’t any choices you ever have to make that seem the least bit realistic, in this rush to ensure that the player has the choice of good or evil it seems nobody stopped to consider what actually makes the choice tangible to the player and makes them stop to think about what they’re about to do.

Case in point: Fallout 3, a title that featured a prominent “karma” system where the player performs good deeds and the world sings your praises and helps you on your way, perform an evil deed and the world treats you with a snarky tone but still helps you on your way. One of the first major quests you’re presented with is a choice to blow up the tiny settlement of Megaton, so named due to the rather large, live nuclear ordinance in the town center. You can either side with the two dimensional town sheriff and defuse the offending bomb, or the two dimensional evil business man and atomise all the town’s doe eyed innocent civilians.

Can any of us honestly say that’s a choice that anyone, anywhere, will ever be seriously confronted with?

There’s a scientist in the town, a gunsmith, travellers that pass through on a daily basis (including a weapons expert that sells you salvaged explosive devices), any of whom would surely be a more logical choice than some random guy who, quite literally, just crawled out of a hole in the ground. The consequences are scant, you get a house either way, the plot still moves on, key NPCs still help you, the only difference is in the way they talk to you and for blowing up an entire town with a nuclear device, sarcasm and calling you names behind your back hardly seems fair.

And Fallout isn’t alone in this, even when the choices are realistic (or, realistic to the game world situation) the consequences are never serious enough for the player to consider their actions beyond the gaming logic of “what’s in it for me?”. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, today’s gamer isn’t looking to get emotionally invested in a title as much as they were say five years ago. As titles have been churned out and gameplay, for want of a better term, simplified, they’ve become goal oriented, stat obsessed and treat their play environment with apathy. So as designers and writers if we want to create meaningful moral conflicts for the player, we need to work that much harder to ensure they empathise with the world and it’s inhabitants. There’s no point telling them these people are worth saving if the player doesn’t believe it. When the player is confronted with choice, their play experience must have a tangible change due to consequences of their actions beyond simple aesthetic differences or dialogue changes. If I destroy a town I want to feel that impact throughout the world, I want to feel like I’m playing as an amoral bastard, rather than the same character I would have been had I saved the town.

Easy to say, not so easy to do. But we can improve the way in which games handle moralistic mechanics, and it’s in the same way we improve other mechanics in games.

Study and Apply.

If we want to give the player choices that affect the way they interact with the game we need to understand the principles behind moral philosophy. Let’s be honest this isn’t a new issue, people have been pondering ethics and their role in human society ever since the first man had to choose to vaporise the first village with the first nuclear device. There are quite literally thousands of books and essays on the topic, it’s taught at major universities all over the world and whilst it would be impractical to suggest that every designer should read all of these, it would definitely be in our best interests to have an understanding of the some of the major components of ethics and morals and perhaps consult these experts who have studied these topics. Games that appeal to their demographic like EA’s skate. do so because the developers have taken the time to actually understand what makes them tick, and brought on experts in the field and it should be the same for moral choices in games, ergo if we better understand the finer points of creating ethical choice situations for the player then the experience will be greater, the immersion will be fuller and in turn more memorable and perhaps we can make games that gamers remember and talk about long after the final boss battle.

’till next time

For those not in the loop, last Wednesday the gaming world was informed that long running development house 3D Realms would be shutting down and after 12 years and 9 days so would development on the longest running joke in the games industry.

Can we say we’re surprised? Hardly. I don’t think anyone ever expected DNF to ever see the light of day, at least not during our lifetime. Even if it was released there’s no way it could live up to the expectations that it had built up over it’s gigantic development time, the new innovations it had promised in 1997 are old hat by today’s standards. Vehicular combat, enemy swarms, physics based game play would have been hailed as the bleeding edge of gaming had it been released in a manner more timely. The Dukester would have gone down in the annals of gaming history, 3D Realms would have dug themselves out of their financial pit and the sky would rain down Skittles.

Let’s face it though, this isn’t exactly a the first time a long development period has almost killed a 3D Realms title. Diligent followers of their gaming history will no doubt remember the Prey saga. A game that was in development hell for a period of eleven years, a game that also promised the very latest in gaming technology to deliver unique player experiences, a game that swapped lead designers, then whole development teams, brought on a single coder to work on the engine for a year, was shelved for almost 2 years, a game that was eventually outsourced and completed in a fraction of the time by another company. Finally released in 2006, it was a success for Humanhead Studios and is remembered as one of the stand out early titles for the Xbox 360, an interesting storyline and great puzzles that bent time and space made for a fantastic game with a sequel on the way.

So what can we glean from all this?

There are still rumours flying around the gaming press and hearsay from their forums telling of the woeful organisation, lack of development timetables and milestones and countless “should have, could have, didn’t” stories about Scott Miller and George Broussard’s handling of the situation, but until there’s an official announcement we’re left to merely speculate as to what went on inside the offices at 3D Realms. There’s a bunch of people without jobs who have to read the jibes and taunts of outsiders and their industry fellows, while they try to find work. And a community of people, us gamers, many of whom were around when DNF was first announced, before our beloved pastime became mainstream, us who chuckled each time someone mentioned Duke’s name or at the mere thought of the title being released are still waiting for something to come of this all. There are still those who remain hopeful that Duke will have one last hurrah saving the world from evil space monsters and mutant pigs, some even hoping that the indie community can get the build an maybe finish a game that is worthy of being called Duke Nukem Forever and perhaps it will. But maybe it shouldn’t, this thing that has become one of the best and most loved phantom of gamers around the world carries too much with it to ever be completed, maybe we gamers should be happy with the few clips and the handful of screen shots, the laughs and the memories of countless drunken debates and close the lid on Duke’s coffin.

R.I.P Duke Nukem, we hardly knew ye.

I couldn’t help but consider that maybe by covering the protagonists’ faces they effectively blocked the player from seeing anything in the character they played as, there was no chance to see their reactions to what the player was experiencing, and so the player would be distanced from the character. After all as humans we take a lot of our cues on the way we should behave or react to a situation via the subtle facial expressions of those around us, one of the earliest complex shapes recognized in a child’s cognitive development is that of the face and they glean the meaning of expressions from the facial cues of those around them. So therefore by denying us the ability to gauge or approximate reactions to situations through our character’s facial cues it creates this problem of no investment in a character and thus apathy toward the story progression.

This particular problem hit hard in another title I played recently, “Dead Space”, it checked all the boxes for the survival horror genre. Tension? Check. Über creepy setting? Check. Flimsy Premise for being there? Check and mate. But despite all of these things, the lead character (Isaac) was incredibly hard to relate to and as a player I couldn’t help but not care about his situation, much like Army of Two you only see his face briefly in cut-scenes and never during a shared experience with the player. The first time you encounter a xenomorph, the only emotion you can gauge is your own with the only reaction in Isaac being the blood splattering off his cold, steel helmet. And whilst everyone else around you are defecating their respective undergarments at their predicament, Isaac never does more than insist on his never ending quest to save his girlfriend with blood spatter across his cold, steel helmet.

But is having the facial connection so important in building an emotional bridge to the player character? If it was surely the first person shooter must be the genre the most devoid of personal connection, but we can see from this isn’t the case.  Take submarine art deco horror game Bioshock, a universally praised game with a very strong emotional bridge between the character and the player, from the moment you set foot in the ruins of Rapture the character shares the same experience as the main character (Jack), each twist in the story and each new horror confronted hits the player in the same way as it would in him, it makes you feel like what is happening to Jack could have easily happened to you in a similar situation (had you not been disembowelled as soon as you alighted from the bathysphere) . So perhaps the facial connection isn’t as important as I thought, but then again Bioshock isn’t exactly the average FPS game. Consider the loved and loathed Halo series, the lead character, Master Chief, left many cold (myself included) and whilst some connected on a “I want to be a superhuman killing machine” level, it was one that the majority of players couldn’t care less about. No deep connection, no lasting effects.

It’s important to mention there’s a difference between connecting to the character and having a visceral experience from their point of view, if you’re simply seeing things from their side and not getting a link between that experience and some sort of feeling or emotion then it’s fair to say that you’re responding as a viewer and not a participant. Take the modern shooter Call of Duty 4, there is a scene where the player’s character is caught in the blast wave of a nuclear weapon. Now the scene is supposed to instil a “Shock and Awe” reaction in the player, with the fleeting player controlled scene afterward of the character crawling from a wrecked helicopter and collapsing on the ground supposed to inspire a feeling of sadness, equal perhaps to other war movie death scenes. But in most players it was more of a “Whoa DUDE!” response, with more focus being on how awesome the explosion was rather than how sad they were the character died.

So where does this leave facial connection? Even games that have lukewarm story can make the player empathise with a character through the subtle facial cues that come in a game’s progression connecting you, however briefly, to that character. In the ‘roid raging bro fest Gears of War 2 there’s a touching moment in the game’s story where secondary character Dom succeeds in his never ending quest to save his wife only to find she’s been reduced to a mangled shell, forcing him to make the tough decision to end her pain. Now although it’s not a particularly tear jerking scene what with the rather ham fisted way in which it is conducted, but the player can empathise with Dom, the expression on his face as he reluctantly pulls the trigger is one that is rarely seen in action shooters and so makes the player pause for the tiniest of moments before continuing the slaughter of another species.

I think that in the processes of character and game design it’s important to remember that the player is always looking to identify with the character they’re playing as, whether it’s using the powers of writing to create situations the player can transplant themselves in or confirming the player’s reactions in the cues of their character’s facial expression. Even by simply providing a face that the player can see and link their experience to, it provides a way to bridge the gap between the player and the story, and make the player more emotionally invested in their gameplay experience.

Till next time