The Spy Who Loved Me

James Bond got a free pass on being a misogynist. It probably irritated the harder-working lotharios not blessed with the ability to slap the girls to make 'em swoon, but Bond had no reason to care. He got the girls no matter who he offended, so why bother pretending to be something he wasn't? He was, indeed, a sexist. It was easier for him to act like it. So why did we let him off the hook? Well, for one, we thought he was cool, and -- here comes rationalisation -- he was born in an age and a culture of institutionalised misogyny, and the passage of time has desensitised us to antiquated excesses.

It's the same reason why Diablo doesn't seem as weird today as maybe it should. In 1996 it wasn't as curious a design decision for Blizzard to build a supermodel-level game entirely on repetitive and reductionist combat. The game is a point-and-click Space Invaders, with attack, parry, thrust, defend, shoot, reload, zoom, alt fire, holster weapon, duck, strafe, dodge, walk, talk, blink, breathe all mapped to the left mouse button. Click click click on lots of monsters, and that's Diablo; that's carpal tunnel syndrome. Combat like this would be a relic in any game on a similar production scale, if not for that once upon a time Diablo was very successful and spawned a franchise and imitators based on that singular mechanic. Today, amongst Gears and Gods of War; varied and multi-layered combat systems that provide the player with an ever-expanding array of input and feedback options, evidently there's still a place for Diablo.

Diablo has fans, Blizzard has their money, and thus Diablo 3 can be absurdly simple to play. If another major title, carrying with it a level of hype comparable to Diablo 3, came out and it was click click click? Disaster. Diablo has nostalgia, and it has a pass. Diablo-clones can get a pass too, but they'll never be the real thing. Titan Quest and Hellgate: London never generated as much affection as Diablo 2 and as much enthusiasm as Diablo 3. They're merely filling a void, and now the dark lord has returned to claim his throne. Nobody does it half as good as him.

It has an exemption, and so it is to gameplay what Metal Gear Solid is to narrative. More accurately, Metal Gear Solid is to cutscenes what Diablo is to monotony.

Metal Gear grew up in the pre-Half-Life era of high cutscene tolerance. Now, they're in the process of being eradicated completely. Tearing down Metal Gear Solid for its cutscene length is a tired grievance these days, and in leveraging the "genius" of Hideo Kojima, it's an easily deflected critique.

Still, put anyone with a broad gaming literacy in front of Metal Gear Solid for the first time and they'll be stunned. They'll have the same reaction when they see Diablo. There's so many mouse clicks. There's so many cutscenes. These games were designed in a vacuum where contemporary design sensibility never applied. How did they get away with this? How are they still doing this?

Indulgent cutscene length is another instant black mark for any game -- other than Metal Gear Solid. Kojima's impenetrable brilliance and pretensions are backed up by tradition, and a fanbase that will not only accept Kojima's idiosyncrasies but defend them. Metal Gear Solid gets players in any event, so why should Kojima bother pretending he's something he's not? His writing is repetitive, it is expository, it is ridiculous, but he can get away with that storytelling model while no other game can. Kojima's specific insanity has been endowed with the success of a Blizzard, and so he is granted the freedom to choose his own adventure.

Makes you feel sad for the rest. No one else can do what Kojima or Blizzard does, and what those two are doing is actually easier. Diablo's combat is as elementary as it gets. CliffyB can have all the paintball battlefield inspiration he wants, but Diablo, the anachronism machine, will remain a strong competitor. Meanwhile, other developers -- Valve, 2K -- are just as interested in telling a story as Kojima is, but without a history of lengthy cutscenes, they're stuck operating within modern narrative structures and gamer preferences. The preferences which say gamers don't care about cutscenes unless they're Hideo Kojima's. Marc Laidlaw and Ken Levine have to puzzle out a way to tell a story that doesn't wrench control from the player. It's easier to write a story as a screenplay than as audio fragments scattered around the architecture of a first-person-shooter. Kojima takes full advantage of his position; augmenting his epic saga with all the pseudo-science footnotes he wants. Like many have said, Kojima could use an editor, but no one's going to make him get one. For a writer like Kojima, the easiest setting is verbosity. Such is Kojima's luck that he gets to do what's easy.

Does it irritate the competition? Cover systems and squad AI can take months of work but click click click is a guaranteed hit? Perhaps it does. But when you look at why Kojima and Diablo are able to subsist at their most comfortable, it's because they never failed. They have the right to be nonconformists but they don't use it to make bad games. They never lost their audience. Never lost the critics, never lost the money, and never lost the right to ignore anyone who told them "no".

Kojima tells engrossing, emotional tales even though they're bizarre melodrama. It might be an unfairly discriminating set of circumstances that let him do so, but at that kind of intricate saga, he's the very best. Diablo's genius lies in its simplicity, as it translates to just one more monster addiction. They don't need to modernise it because everyone's already hooked. They trade on nostalgia, sure. But they'll never, ever betray those memories. They'll never stop reminding you of what you like about them. Diablo can stay conservative and Kojima can stay insane and they'll keep you coming home. Why?

Nobody does it better.

Dernier

[Hey, you can read this post at Gamasutra and GameSetWatch. Radical! Thanks to Simon Carless et al. for republishing it.]

Pretend this is the final post.

In video games, the ones that tell the player a long, linear story, the ending is usually an uncertain proposition. Prose and film teach an audience to expect three-act structures and considered pacing in storytelling. Instead, games have what Warren Spector calls the second-act problem; where act one is the intro movie, act three is the outro movie, and in between is the game. Games are structured less like a novel and more like an anthology; an arbitrary number of assembled vignettes, thematically united in post-production. A collection of missions and quests that exist because one designer had a cool idea for a boat chase sequence and another designer had an awesome idea for a stealth mission. It's a problem of pacing, and it relates directly to the presupposed need for games to have fifteen-hour narratives.

I think this issue is compounded by another: players don't know how long a game is. You can hold a novel in your hands and feel the weight of the pages. An album has its track listing printed on the back. A television season consists of a predetermined number of episodes with those episodes at a fixed length. A movie is somewhere between 90 and 180 minutes. No such guidelines with video games. They lack an intuitive metric: it'll fall between one and one hundred hours.

If players don't know when to expect the real ending then they'll have to guess. Maybe after this mission in GTA we'll get to the endgame. Wait, no, one more thing. One more thing after that. With these interminable games that try for an engrossing narrative, players just get tired. Will it ever actually end?

Fallout is based on the premise that the player must find this water chip. It takes a long time, it's an exhausting journey, you find it and return home victorious. And then... one more thing... and you're actually only halfway through.

Objectively, there's nothing wrong with the content. But expectations frame experience, and the game had just prepared the player to say goodbye, not to enjoy another ten hours. Having to take a game at its word, players feel betrayed and jerked around. We react to a piece of content differently if we know it's the ending. When we watch the season finale of a TV show, we know that this time the characters are really in danger. With a video game the player has no idea. Is this thing going to go on for another hour? Or five? Or ten? Where the hell am I in this story? I'm not sure many developers are aware that this can be a problem; like how Ken Levine has said he didn't anticipate the ugly comedown from the stratospheric highs of BioShock's Andrew Ryan scene.

Expectations are everything. The movie Gone, Baby, Gone has a fake ending at about the 70-minute mark, but the audience doesn't start leaving the theater. They know how long a movie is and they're mentally prepared for the remainder of the film. I don't think Fallout players would be as bummed out if they found the water chip at the 70-minute mark. But no one knows how long Fallout is, like how no one knows if Return of the King's running time is three hours and two minutes or three hours and four minutes. The movie continues long past the point where anyone was interested.

One more thing. One more mission, one more quest, one more rung in a ladder carved from monotony and you have only the vaguest of assurances that the ladder ever stops. I wonder why people don't finish games.

Oblivion's core story is paced terribly, which is to say it's paced like a video game. One more thing. One more lost object to find. That's at least consistent with Oblivion's general M.O. as a treasure-hunting smorgasbord, and Mass Effect doesn't handle that dichotomy nearly so well; instead redefining 'sidequest' as a repetitive grind existing at the periphery of the story. BioWare dumps a whole lot of extra content on the player for the purposes of making Mass Effect long enough to count as a conventional video game. It dilutes the tightly focused, very linear narrative that they're trying to showcase. It's also why games like GTA that measure game completion with a percentage stat don't really work, since it can take players five times as long to get from 76% to 77% as it can from 1% to 2%.

Subquests aside, Mass Effect is able to manage player expectations of length. After act one, you get on the spaceship and you're given a certain number of planets to visit. Those are goalposts; checkpoints by which the player can measure their progress in the second act, and theoretically the third act should be as long as the first. See? Easy. Knights of the Old Republic did that, Monkey Island 2 did that. No unpleasant surprises and the player is never unintentionally misled through poor design.

Some games telegraph their length with exceptional results. Right up front, Portal tells you: 19 rooms. Indeed there are, and so the player never thinks that room 15 might actually be a plot-critical gameplay escalation instead of a puzzle chamber. Portal continues after 19, of course, but here it works. It capitalises on the players' perception that the game is over; the "epilogue" comes as an intentional surprise more of the same. When you anticipate player psychology as Valve clearly does, then you can work with it.

You know how everyone in the world is able to pinpoint the exact moment that A.I. should have ended? Spielberg kept telling the viewer "one more thing", and the more times he said it, the worse the movie got. Unless you're Portal, unless you know what you're doing, when players think a game is ending, they should be right. If a game prompts players to say goodbye, then, one way or another, they will.

Water Disappointed

"I must say I am disappointed that Blizzard has stayed on the conservative side in terms of design with their updates to Diablo and Starcraft."

"'Disappointed.' That comment, made earlier this morning by Bethesda producer Ashley Cheng, was discovered within hours by internet bloggers and quickly republished on message boards and podcasts.

"It's being speculated that this surprisingly frank admission from Mr. Cheng may prove commercially damaging to Fallout 3 when gamers go to the stores in October. Certainly, we've seen this happen to products in the past. Tommy, and thank you for being with us now, Tommy, we still have not -- no -- still no comment from Pete Hines at Bethesda, but many are anticipating the developer will formally denounce Mr. Cheng and his statement later today.

"This story is still breaking. We will keep you updated throughout the rest of the day on Mr. Cheng's gaffe, a story which some in the media are now terming 'Waterdisappointed', in reference of course to the Watergate, President Nixon scandal of 1971. Now, Tommy, and again, we thank you for joining us live today, the question I want to ask you, and that our viewers, I imagine, must be asking themselves right now: is Ashley Cheng the man that the public wants producing Fallout 3?"