Jane McGonigal's appearance on Colbert Report

I don't really have anything to add. This is just something else to think about.

Jane McGonigal - The Colbert Report - 02-03-2011

Take Chances, Make Mistakes - Cursed Mountain

While playing Cabela's Survival, I found myself reminded of another game called Cursed Mountain (which I had never finished). That game also created an aesthetic around surviving in the freezing wilderness, and it succeeded at giving the player a sense of urgency, of fighting for your life. While there is a lot of fun to be had with the game, its control flaws originally compelled me to put it down and forget about it.

Anyway, I decided to revisit Cursed Mountain for this journal, and I'm glad I did.

The game goes to great lengths to create it's aesthetic quality: a creepy mood that keeps the player on edge, and it usually succeeds. First of all, the player character moves pretty sluggishly. This seemed awkward at first, but somehow just feels right for the setting. Our hero is high up in the mountains wearing heavy climbing gear, after all. Secondly, while the graphics aren't stellar, there is a lot of careful detail in the environments. Every room in every building has character.

 

Third, there is the dynamic atmosphere. As you move into a dangerous area, the colors slowly bleach out to leave an eerie black-and-white image of your surroundings, and the ambient noise warps and changes. It really communicates a feeling of dread to the player.

The combat isn't perfect, but does at least provide an interesting example of giving players a choice instead of a problem. First, there is the option of fighting in melee or using ranged attacks. My strategy usually employs both depending on the situation, but it's possible to clear most encounters using only one or the other. (A few bosses require the ranged weapon to finish them off, but can still be fought with melee)

Second, the player acquires different ranged weapons throughout the game (and upgrades for them). At the level I reached so far, there are two options: one which fires a quick, powerful shot of energy but takes a little while to recharge, and one which fires a slower-moving blast, but recharges much faster allowing for rapid-fire. A few specific situations might encourage one strategy over the other, but they're both viable options.

Cursed Mountain's biggest flaw is shared with many Wii titles: unresponsive motion controls. Aiming your weapon with the pointer works quite well, but the gestures (which the game uses mainly for pointless quick-time events) will sometimes fail to register. Since you typically need to succeed at these events to defeat or evade an enemy, failure by the game to read your motions can spell the difference between victory and death.

"Press X to Not Die" becomes "Wildly flail the remote like a mental patient to Not Die."

In the end, Cursed Mountain is just another title whose developers thought the Wii would be the perfect engine for bold new ideas, but the reality of the game's execution fell far short of expectations. Lousy implementation of the motion technology ruined an otherwise great idea. It's something of a teachable moment: our dreams may be big, but technology ultimately determines the reality our dreams turn into, and the most powerful gaming tool in the industry is useless if developers (or players) don't know how to effectively use it.

Deja Vu All Over Again - Cabela's Survival

Not all game developers are looking to take chances with inventive new mechanics and bold new designs. Some are just out to make more money on what's tested and proven to work (or at least, proven to sell). It's how the same sports and shooting games get released and sold year after year, and it's at least in part why Cabela's Survival: Shadows of Katmai came to be.

I just got this game on a whim, hoping to get a little more use out of my Wii. I've played about an hour and a half into the story mode, and while I kind of enjoyed it so far, I have plenty of complaints. My chief complaints: lack of originality and immersion.

Climbing and exploring seem to be key to story mode, but the camera makes it clear that you can only "explore" along a very narrow linear path. What's more, the climbing mechanics, which make up the bulk of your time outside of shooting things, are blatantly copying more successful adventure games like Ico/Shadow of the Colossus. Even Logan's posture while climbing looks almost identical to Ico's. The trouble is that Ico's ledge-scaling mechanics made sense in a giant castle. Logan's on the side of a mountain in the Alaskan wilderness, so seeing all these perfectly horizontal grooves and ledges cut into the mountainside just looks unnatural.

Aside from that, the chief aesthetic is supposed to be the feeling that you're fighting to survive, but it doesn't feel like that at all. The constantly-regenerating health and abundance of checkpoints are part of the problem, but I blame the lack of immersion mainly on Logan's adventure-game-style movement. He runs through several feet of snow as fast as he would on a paved road, has near-perfect grip while climbing and jumping between ledges, and he has a running long-jump that would win Olympic gold medals. These things would make sense in fantasy-oriented games, but in this game they feel out of place and ruin any chance of immersion.

This isn't an outright bad game, but it's far from being really good. I was laughing more often than not, both at the gameplay and the characters, so it's nowhere near the aesthetic the developers were looking to create. The mechanics can be somewhat fun still, but seeing as both the climbing and the shooting elements have been done much better by other games, there's no real reason to play this one. It's just trying to cash in on the Cabela's brand recognition among fans of shooters, while at the same time hoping the survival gimmick will draw in other gamers. I guess they at least suckered in one.

Approaching Violence as Art

I'm sure entire books could be (and probably have been) written about the controversy of violence in media, or even just in games. So, I'll try to limit my discussion here: comparing two games which heavily feature violent imagery, and deciding which sends the better moral/cultural message.

For starters, there's MadWorld. I don't think it'll surprise anyone who so much as looked at the cover to hear this, but this game is a bloody mess. The gameplay approaches killing enemies with the same silliness and whimsy of a kitten merrily ripping apart a catnip toy. While I personally enjoyed the game, and would even argue it has many redeeming qualities, there is simply no denying that the game sends an overall bad message: violence is silly, fun, and has no repercussions.

Manhunt 2. Now I'm guessing this will surprise you, but I'm citing this game as an example of a positive, mature approach to violence in art. I recall this very game was once used as reason for some fanatical groups to boycott the Wii in an attempt to protect their children from violent imagery. However, the reality is that this game provides an experience that sends a much more responsible (albeit graphic) message about violence.

First, there are the kill sequences. All melee kills are largely obscured by a visual effect. It creates a hazy image that can sometimes completely hide what's going on until the kill is over. Some gamers hated this, calling it a stupid attempt at self-censoring, but I thought it wonderfully reflected the character's fuzzy, detached state of mind when killing someone, which brings me to the next point.

The character's reaction to his actions. At the start of the game, the main character makes it clear he does not want to hurt anyone, but is told he has no choice. After killing someone for the first time, he immediately says "I feel sick" and vomits all over the floor. (If you're interested in seeing this, I found a playthrough on youtube. I warn you it's fairly graphic, but click here if you want to see the scene)

The point here is that the player is really confronted with the morality (or lack thereof) of what they're doing. The character is disgusted and horrified by what he is doing, and rightly so. As the player transitions from killing criminals and sickos to killing cops and soldiers, the morality becomes more problematic. Is this really all just for survival? Does that even make it okay? Toward the end of the game, there are levels set inside the character's own mind where he is confronted with all the weight of his sins.

Manhunt 2 is appropriately called "mature," because it approaches the horrors of violence with the maturity and gravity that they deserve. There are tons of games where the player can kill characters in the game and never feel any remorse or have to pay any price for what they've done (insert popular first-person shooter here). Manhunt 2 aggressively confronts the player with what they're doing and forces them to think about it. If videogames are to be considered a legitimate form of art, they need to approach cultural taboos with some level of responsibility, and I think Manhunt 2 took a step in the right direction.