The Ambition Men

Ambitious businessmen live out of the top floors of skyscrapers; ostentatious offices that open out onto rooftop gardens and putting greens. They are outfitted in four-thousand-dollar suits, show up to governor's mansions with fast cars and trophy wives, and have cultivated expensive coke habits. Ambitious game developers, by and large, are nerds who have very intense thoughts about game design, and are also really addicted to cocaine.

No video game has ever said so much about life and death, and in so little time, as Jason Rohrer's Passage. More complicated statements have been made in games about the pursuit of love and wealth but typically in cutscenes bolted onto a platformer whose mechanics are thematically unrelated. Rohrer, however, uses no such crutches, and instead his every idea is communicated to the player through his/her act of playing the game. This industry's highest-regarded designers can't do that. Depending on your tolerance for invoking the word 'art' in discussions of games, you could call it art. Or just really good.

For some reason we don't call it ambitious. 'Ambitious' is Peter Molyneux attempting to express the same concept in Fable. The design goals of Fable were generally about probing the conceits of good and evil; Molyneux the self-made morality lifeguard inviting players into his ethical swimming pool. Aside from that exercise, Molyneux intended for players to create a character and watch him grow up, find treasure and accumulate spouses throughout the course of the game, much like Passage. It didn't fully work in Fable, since once the avatar entered maturity the world around him turned immortal. Technically the character would age, his birthdays observed by an in-game statistics menu, but the feature didn't mean anything. The character spends his whole life undertaking low-rent RPG quests, same as it ever was. It could have worked as a depressing commentary but regardless it didn't convey the sense of aging -- unlike Passage, which could do both.

So why, then, is Molyneux the ambitious one? 'Ambition', when used in game reviews, is a pejorative. It means 'almost there': not that a game is excellent but that it underdelivers on initial promise. Grand Theft Auto IV is 'a living, breathing world.' Spore is 'ambitious.'

What were the ambitions of Will Wright, another high-wire idealist? The ambitions that conventional wisdom tells us less than a month after Spore's release, were unsuccessful. Spore was supposed to have serious educational applications; it was meant to be an evolutionary sandbox, an epic biological journey, the mind-expanding, all-encompassing history of the universe: SimEverything. Something like that ought to be pretty complex in nature. Spore should have been renowned for its complexity. Instead, if any word dominated the Spore media narrative, it was -- well, it was 'DRM', but after that it was 'simple.'

We have to believe that someone like Will Wright can't make SimEverything and not at least end up with SimSomething. Spore has several somethings to choose from but for the purposes of this case study here's one particular thing that Spore offers: our third take so far on players watching their creation age. Wright's preoccupation is biology, not genetics, but his game recaptures some of Fable's lost ambition. Spore asks the player to invest, more than Fable ever did, in the physical appearance of their characters and to guide their evolutionary passage (shall we say.) Everyone's favourite part of Spore is the creature creator, but the whole game is a creature creator. The so-named tool, while versatile, can only sculpt the physical form but the game is about forming a protective, emotional bond with your species and writing their genetic history in your mind. Fable does little to indicate the passage (sorry -- let's say 'voyage' instead. Or consult a thesaurus and go with 'aqueduct') of time, but in Spore each evolution of the species is associated with markedly distinct challenges. It reinvents appearance with each scene. The difference between Cell and Civilization is that of three-foot in kindergarten and six-foot in college.

Three ambitious guys all with different takes on the same concept: Rohrer is elebrated by an admittedly small audience; Molyneux is chastised for overpromising; and Wright's contributions go largely unrecognised in the face of scaled-down dreams. Spore was reviewed on the hype and if it lives and dies by critical opinion, then that's its failure: Spore is too simple. It arguably doesn't exploit its own ambitions, it only realises Fable's by accident, and Passage outperforms both of them anyway. So why, then, does Passage work? Well, because it's simple, right?

Unlike Fable and Spore, Passage removes every element extraneous to the theme: if even one thing doesn't contribute to the central artistic expression then it is out. In the absence of distractions, the purity of the theme is enhanced. You could make the case that Spore would have been a better evolutionary playground -- if not a better game -- if it didn't feel obliged to incorporate overly goal-oriented structures. Likewise, Fable might have been a better morality play if it didn't insist on adhering so closely to contemporary RPG convention. Both games balanced their ambition with the safely commercial. Rohrer doesn't have that problem, being the only one to work without a team, or publishers, marketers or distributors, and he doesn't need to worry about critics or hype. Spore and Fable are the expressions of many years and many people. Passage is the expression of Jason Rohrer. Jason Rohrer is one man and Jason Rohrer has a maxim: to live a life of voluntary simplicity. Is the key to ambition ironically not trying to do everything? Will the best ideas and purest expression come out of indie games, the format with the least production but also the least encumberance?

Simplicity is Spore's critical curse and the secret to Passage's success. It can mean 'elegant' and it can mean 'shallow'. Reviewers can write off Spore because it meets the latter definition, but even that negative simplicity can work to Spore's benefit. If Spore is simple it becomes accessible, and to the same mainstream, casual audience who play (and only play) the Sims. To those players, Spore works as a video game primer, a basic introduction to the mechanics and artifice of the RPG, the MMO and the RTS. Is that ambitious? I don't know. Is it valuable? I think so.

That's Spore standing apart from its purported goals. That's another point of view, that Spore should be accepted for what it is and not held to what Will Wright said at a GDC presentation three years ago before he had to come back down to earth. Wright and Molyneux are smart guys with bright ideas, worth listening to even if they don't always deliver. It's good to talk about failed ambition, I think, because it makes us look for it elsewhere. In looking at smart games by smart people, patterns will emerge. To create an awareness of missed opportunities establishes a subconscious need for them to be realised -- design goals not yet achieved -- and maybe that's how someone else is inspired to finally make them happen.

At the end of the day, where does that leave Wright or Molyneux? That while they fail ambitions and expectations, the discussion they elicit is ultimately good for the industry? They are the accidentally selfless? How can people so hugely ambitious find personal solace in that kind of reputation? Maybe Molyneux and Wright, after working so hard, don't feel totally pleased to wind up with a certificate of participation while some nobody aces the same test. Well, tough shit. Jason Rohrer makes a game a month and most of the time they're not Passage. Such is the life of the ambitious man.

Everything Old Is New Again

This is the decade of the comeback; the decade of other decades. Evidently, it's an era for veterans and retirees to survey the entertainment landscape and conclude that now's about a good a time as any to finally make their fortune. Amongst the most-discussed games of 2007 and 2008 have been Fallout, Alone in the Dark, Prince of Persia, Diablo, Shadowrun, Deus Ex, Thief, Karateka, Turok, X-COM, Starcraft and Duke Nukem Forever. Meanwhile, Indiana Jones, Rocky Balboa, John McClane and Fox Mulder return to the silver screen. Every band that was ever active between 1977 and 1989 has reformed. And Linda Evangelista, 43, ex-supermodel, has a new contract with Prada.

The comeback can be embarrassing, especially for those performers whose brilliance evaporated in the intervening years. Some acts remain on the stage for far too long, and trail off into obsolescence; and some acts are remembered for going out at the height of their power. It's the latter that will return ten years later to be terrible and break hearts. Why they do this is often a mystery. Perhaps they, like the audience, are simply nostalgic -- but for a time when inspiration came easier and the critics were kinder. It's not, for them, because of the money -- they just miss it. That's probably the case for the creative minds behind Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and The X-Files: I Want To Believe, two films which give no justification for the enormity of breaking silences of nineteen and six years, respectively, offering only the most mediocre possibilities of their potential. They have nothing to say. If they didn't want to be forgotten, they made a mistake by returning to the spotlight with the forgettable.

Video games are at once similar and dissimilar to those examples. 2003 and 2008 reinventions of Prince of Persia have not only acknowledged contemporary standards of game design but have sought to raise the bar. It's nice when they innovate, but an important reason why these franchise remakes and resurrections exist is simply to exist. Next-gen isn't just a buzzword. Prince of Persia 2008 is Prince of Persia 1989 reinvented with a next-gen vocabulary and for next-gen audiences. It has to be this way because old games (here's the problem with being the innovation medium) do not age well. The Prince of Persia has returned to recapture his relevance, and hopes also to keep his trademark in the public consciousness. Gamers could go through the trouble of finding a copy of, and successfully running on Vista, Jordan Mechner's original, but on the other hand here's this new version. It's made for them. This is the explanation behind every American remake of a foreign culture's film, or the movie adaptation of a dense novel: one version is saddled with subtitles and footnotes, available for those willing to stray outside of their comfort zone, but there's this alternative that was created to be accessible today.

In a way, it's not completely cynical. It only ever matters if the original idea meant something. The idea of Fallout, the idea of Prince of Persia, they meant something. The ideas will persist, but the reality is that the form has to change. It's like the annual EA Sports variations only with fewer iterations. People buy Madden '09 to get the best available Madden experience and to keep conversant in the series. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a Prince for '03. It added to the original formula but it was very much what Prince of Persia was always about.

Even an ostensibly original game like The Force Unleashed is a reinvention of what Jedi Knight was doing twelve years ago, but repackaged and made attractive for 2008. Even if it's not as good, it's the only one of the two that can make a case for itself today. Unfortunately, old games die. They can't be shown off to anybody's kids, for two reasons. The first is availability, a challenge which every other entertainment medium on earth has resolved. This might be changing to a limited extent, with ventures like Good Old Games, but in the face of Microsoft and Sony deprioritising backwards compatibility for the consoles, it doesn't make fiscal sense to be old anymore. To say nothing of what the future holds with DRM, limited install activations and incompatibility with future versions of Windows. There is an effort to preserve old games, but they're preserved -- as museum pieces, not contemporary prize-fighters. The world of video games is a world where Raiders of the Lost Ark is available only as an out-of-print VHS on eBay, and where, consequently. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will define a new generation's expectations of Indiana Jones.

Secondly, innovations in graphics, physics, AI, camera, control schemes and narrative techniques happen with such frequency as to render games older than five years painfully antiquated. That's the effect of these franchises coming back -- while studios cashing in on a license is part of it -- to maintain relevance through a legacy. It's why Chrono Trigger DS is good, not redundant news: it's an update of an absolute classic that's modernised and playable on current hardware. It's why there's the clamour there is for a Final Fantasy VII remake. Fans want what was emotionally powerful and groundbreaking in 1997 -- overwrought and clichéd now -- to be all those things forever. Games have a short lifespan. The evidence for Final Fantasy VII as a landmark moment in game storytelling becomes less convincing as time goes by.

How can today's developers build a game that endures? Not just a game that audiences will still be playing in ten years but one that stays profitable -- a game of today that has the audiences of tomorrow picking it up for the same reason they buy the DVD of Badlands, The Third Man, or Rashomon over The Kingdom, Never Back Down or Street Kings. Developers can be, and have been, remarkably creative, but they're still inevitably outdone by the pace of technological advancement. To a significant degree, the staying power of their game is out of their hands. Developers need a game built like Linda Evangelista, acclaimed by Chanel designer Karl Lagerfield, who says today of the nineties supermodels: "Time makes them more interesting.... They are, and stay, irreplaceable." It's an imperfect comparison -- video games to human beings -- but both have faced, and will face, the struggle of being a last-gen girl in a next-gen world.

Which of today's developers best resembles Ponce de Leon questing for the Fountain of Youth? I think it has to be Crytek, who push the envelope of mortality and are placing their bets on the future-proofed Crysis and Crysis Warhead ("Opportunity Warhead" in China.) How likely is it that gamers of 2013 will be hyped for Grand Theft Auto VI, Fallout 5 and... Crysis? The technology will finally be up for it, but will the gamers? It does seem like Crytek are undercutting Crysis' position as a game built to stand the test of time by releasing an improved game one year later. What makes Crysis more desirable than Warhead, or instead of the already-planned Crysis 2 and 3 -- all of which will likely be packed with improvements over their predecessors? The problem with future-proofing is it necessitates future-predicting: what will be en vogue in 2013 or 2018? Can Crysis compete with the games of 2013, which will look as good as it does now and have incorporated the heretofore unseen next five years of gameplay innovation?

Crysis may learn the moral of every single parable about vainglorious men who should have been careful what they wished for. Crytek want immortality, or at the very least, to live a little bit longer than everyone else does. Games should be able to compete, like every other medium can, with their descendents. Somewhere there's a solution to that problem. Trying to prolong a game's life, however, through future-proofing or content updates or rapid-fire sequels, might not be the best way forward, because sometimes they end so perfectly. Consider what the game gets, and what the audience get, from the graceful exit. There's a quiet dignity in retirement, and benefits to a legacy consisting solely of memory. Standard-bearers for the contrary are the Simpsons and the Rolling Stones, both of which, sad to say, have been bad for longer than they were good. Look how many fans get mad that bad sequels to their favourite games even exist. Remember what Team Fortress 2 was like before the achievement farming? And how exciting were Katamari Damacy and Guitar Hero, once.

Once upon a time, it was kind of prestigious to have seen the Pixies live -- before the Pixies actually did reform and anyone, however young they were, could see them at far from their best. The comeback is fraught with peril. It can diminish the value of memories. Who can't see the Pixies or the Stooges nowadays, but who would want to either? But for those who were at the Pixies' very first show in Boston, or at the premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark have those moments to themselves, which were maybe nonchalant occurrences at the time, but have since been mythologised by the next-gen. That's the reward for losing favourite things; they can be remembered at their best. If it ever seems like it's not the best of times, imagine someone asking how amazing was it to be a gamer when Jeff Gerstmann was fired, and to have witnessed the laughably disparate reveals of Diablo III and Dragon's Age, and to have listened to GFW Radio every week. In a thousand years, even that may be worth something.

Sharing And Caring

If everyone can agree that games deserve to be reviewed, critiqued and discussed by intelligent and literate journalists, no one can agree on what they'll sacrifice to make that happen. There are too many public representatives of developers and publishers who champion a smarter gaming press but only until it affects profitability. Evidently games journalism walks a thin line between respectable, serious criticism and unfair, irresponsible sniping and reviewers cross that line every time they dent somebody's Metacritic average. Then PR is like the father turning the car around because video gaming's road trip to Integrity And Mainstream Legitimacy would have been real nice but the game journalists in the back seat just couldn't play nicely.

There will always be cases of bad critique but pressure from PR and publishers is as responsible for a sub-par enthusiast press as compromised editorial direction and individually poor writers. The industry is a quagmire and there's a lot of blame to go around, but this anonymous PR representative doesn't see it that way: "...it needs to be remembered that most serious games are projects that have involved dozens, if not hundreds of people for years.... The developer, in most cases, kills itself to get a game completed. Any good PR people working for a game publisher understand what a developer goes through, and should fight hard to get the game looked at by journalists fairly. This is not to say a bad game should get a free pass, but every game should be given a fair appraisal, with considerations made for target market and price."

To distill his argument, developers work hard and critics don't. That sounds reductionist, but so does this: from Michael Fitch of THQ in his response: "it's easy to criticize but hard to create." Games deserve special consideration because their developers worked so hard and for so long, and the righteous art of creating a game is many orders of magnitude tougher than the random act of assigning a score. Life is a conservative paradise where if a man is honest, fair and hard-working then he will succeed and have valid opinions about video games. Reviewers rarely take into account the man hours put into a game, or how much the developers cared about making something great, or enduring the misery of crunch time in service of art, or the collateral divorces, and so for a developer to see two years of his life reduced to an off-hand 6.5 that disregards all of the above factors, it hurts. If this all sounds like developers don't respect the press, it's because the press doesn't respect them.

Everyone else is wrong. That's the mindset of life in a foxhole, where alliances with the press are tenuous and laden with suspicion but an unfortunate reality. That's why the panelists at the 2007 GDC developers' rant concluded (to applause) that you can't really criticise games unless you've made one (not a problem for game journalists these days.) This is exactly true of the gaming press as well, when they portray PR representatives as score-obsessed obstructions. Journalists and PR are two groups of people who fundamentally do not get each other. They live in the separate houses of Montague and Capulet. They both think they know what's best for the industry and that best thing happens to coincide with their job description. There is an impasse.

Criticism is a two-way street but seemingly the greatest defense that the above quoted can muster is that a lot of work goes into games and reviewers don't appreciate that. Nowhere do they explain why hard work and ambition specifically matter to critique. PR assert the nebulous existence of a trump card instead of playing it. I'm right, but I won't tell you why. It is the last refuge of the oratorically exhausted. Their perspective is worthwhile but not persuasive. In fact they themselves prove how hard criticism is when they propose to measure quality by developer effort.

In cases where art acts as personal expression (if games even do that -- I have vague assurances that they do) it might help to know the behind-the-scenes story. But you didn't even have to know about Bob Dylan's marriage breaking up to like Blood on the Tracks. It would augment a reading of it but not create appreciation where there was none before. Nor would hearing about how sometimes the design team had to stay as late as three -- three! -- in the morning. It's callous to dismiss personal hardship, but the audience doesn't care, and they'll like what they like regardless. To convince them otherwise would take some kind of writer who could explain clearly and thoughtfully a game's positive qualities and its accomplishments relative to other titles, and communicate insights in such effective language that readers reconsider their own opinion, and describe game experience to captivates the reader's interest. Too bad more people don't do that kind of writing, because I hear it's pretty easy.

To fall back on "we tried to make a good game and worked very hard" is to say you lack confidence in the game itself; that it does not stand on its own; that given all the history and all the ideas behind it you're not ready for this one thing to speak for everything. But the audience doesn't care about everything. The trick is knowing what to leave out. "It was hard" is always what you leave out, especially as an attempt to convince players that your game was good. Jonathan Blow took some hits for his reticence to discuss interpretations of Braid's story, but he is comfortable with what he feels the game says. He does not try to match others' perspectives exactly to his so that they are treating the game "fairly." Although it is possible, to hypothesise for a moment, that Blow's attitude would differ if reactions to the game were not as positive and if no one was interested in discussing the story.

It's a skill any creative person needs: knowing when to stop sharing; knowing when it gets in the way and starts to annoy. This includes games journalism, the worst excesses of which outweigh the anonymous tirades of any jilted PR representative.

"Spore is a highly anticipated game. So much so that when my editor assigned this review to me, I didn't know how to approach it. I began at least six different drafts but none of them seemed like they were going to say what I wanted them to. I stayed up all night thanks to at least six cups of coffee (!) and I IMed my editor (Steven) and he gave me some really great tips on writing. Anyway, yeah, Spore sucks."

"Flying to Bethesda (in first class), I reflected on the fact that I would be the first one to see Fallout 3. Not just the first journalist -- although I am the first journalist to see Fallout 3 -- but the first person ever, because the guys and gals at Bethesda have actually been working on the game blindfolded this whole time. They have this whole theory about Beethoven being deaf and making awesome music and they want to replicate those results. So, find out in our exclusive preview, does Fallout 3 measure up to the lofty standards set by its predecessor Beethoven? Yes and no."

The press. The developers. It's an uneasy relationship. It's hard to make it work but audiences only care about it when it works and not when it was hard. There's no answer here, not one that will make everyone happy, because this relationship will never be a great one. There's disrespect and impasses and mutually exclusive goals but there are always things everyone has in common. There are ways not to fight.