We are on top of the Human Ecology Building on Michigan State’s Campus. The roof sits six stores above the ground, is only flat in the one section, where we are at, but that section has battlements around the edges. Which, needless to say, makes for an excellent roof to take in the view.

I have always enjoyed being on roofs. Any time my dad had the ladder out around the house I wanted to shimmy up to our roof. It must be the height, but perhaps it is having the sky above me. That’s a key differences in what makes a roof a roof. Taking in the view from inside a skyscraper verses atop its roof is very different, like standing on a mountain instead of gazing at a picture. Roofs are terrain in this respect, land open to the sky. Windows are just glorified holes in the side of a hill.

However, roofs are not open terrain. Jason, Marie and I had to sneak onto the roof of the Human Ecology building. There were two locked doors barring access and the shear fact that those doors could be opened easily if one was on the roof (which is why Jason had to climb out the window) says that the building’s architect did not wish anyone to be trapped on the roof. Human occupancy on a roof should be limited and fleeting. Large machinery, communication equipment, ugly cements, rocks, tars and shingles are placed on flat top roofs, only a repairman should see such things. Vaulted roofs on personal dwellings are dangerous to walk on and typically used to accent the property. All these features point to the fact that roof terrain should be controlled, hidden or serve merely as aesthetic. But not so in games.

Perhaps you have noticed, open world games are thriving on rooftops. Assassin’s Creed, Infamous, Mirror’s Edge and Prototype have each utilized rooftops as terrain. That is unrestricted terrain, roofs are appropriated as playgrounds. Players move freely and experience the game’s action atop the skyline. Certainly there is a street level down below the cityscape, most of the games have indoor areas as well, but the roofs are where players are drawn.

One would have to assume that the reason for this love affair with roofs is due to the taboo nature the roof has within our culture. General access roofs are rare. In de Certeau terms, those with strategic authority wish to keep us everyday citizens from tactically using roof space. No wonder our media are filled with rooftop chase, fight or love scenes. Those are so rare in real life that we must imagine what they would be like in our entertainment escapes.

So how are roofs imagined in open world games? While attempting to find literature that specifically talked about rooftops, or heights in general, I came across a quote in an unlikely, but welcomed, text that may help answer that question. One avenue I took in my search was the notion of having the high ground in combat situations. Descending while fighting is preferred to ascending while fighting, starting at a greater height compared to one’s opponent increases the chances of victory. Additionally, each open world game relies on combat in some respect so a combat relation to terrain is fitting. This led me to my shelf looking for The Art of War and while there are quotes stating the “High Ground” concept it was another quote about terrain that caught my eye:

“By terrain I mean distances, whether the ground is traversed with ease or difficulty, whether it is open or constricted, and the chances of life and death.” (Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel Griffith, 1963)

Traversability, openness, and endangerment, as to describe terrain, are three ways of describing how roofs are used in games.

Traversability

Each of the four open worlds I mentioned rely on speed and freedom of movement. Mirror’s edge is the most obvious example given that it is described as a “First-person Running” game. Racing to the end of the level, jumping over obstacles with ease and taking alternate routes all add to the traversability of the rooftop environment in Mirror’s Edge. Prototype is the other obvious example, Alex (the protagonist) has the ability to run up buildings, jump long distances and glide from skyscraper to skyscraper. In both Prototype and Mirror’s Edge the purpose of the roof is to provide an avenue, a corridor, for players to move.

Infamous and Assassin’s Creed take a different approach to roofs, one that is more strategic. Both games employ a parkour system which players use to climb up structures. While this makes it easy for players to climb up buildings in order to access any roof, getting to the roof quickly is another matter. For example, in both games the player can be knocked off a building by projectile fire if an enemy is in pursuit. Yet, in some cases there are quick access points to the roof, such as ladders in Assassin’s Creed. Once atop a roof the games turn into something similar to Mirror’s Edge or Prototype, though the speed is toned down. True, a player can gain upgrades in Infamous which allow them to glide through the air for short bursts or glide across telephone wires but before that time, as in Assassin’s Creed too, it is less about pure speed and more about maneuverability. Nonetheless, whether the focus is on speed or maneuverability, the rooftops are extremely traversable.

Openness

Three of the games, excluding Assassin’s Creed, have in-door levels. In these spaces I personally felt confined; the spaces are big enough to maneuver but still limiting. At these times the gameplay mimicked the feeling of being in an arena instead of upon an expansive terrain. Prototype players have to enter military bases from time to time where they are restricted to a, roughly, two store room. With the intense combat that can occur in Prototype it wasn’t hard to become surrounded by enemies in these areas, especially in the early parts of the game. Infamous and Mirror’s Edge interior areas instead felt like linear paths; where as on the roofs you felt free, in doors the player is told “you must go this way.”

On the roofs though, freedom reigns supreme. Along with speed and maneuverability, roofs gave a greater sense of having more choice in how to approach gameplay. Determining how to get from A to B, which missions to take, and the means to accomplish those missions all give a sense of agency to the player. Though the roofs are still contained at times. Mirror’s Edge, while I have been lumping it with open world games it normally would not be considered as such, is still a linear game, the finish line is always given to the player. Assassin’s Creed and Infamous restrict access to certain portions of the cityscape and only become truly open about mid-way through the game. But otherwise, the game space atop the city feels open and free, one that can be entered and exited at any time and in any way.

Endangerment

Of course danger exists among the rooftops. Whether it be archer’s in Assassin’s Creed, snipers in Infamous or Mirror’s Edge, or Helicopters in Prototype, the player needs to watch their back on the roof. Combat is supposed to start on the roof and descend to the ground. Infamous and Prototype give players abilities that rely on getting above a target in order to launch surprise attacks. Players in Assassin’s Creed are pushed to take out the archer’s that line the roofs before they move to the street level. Mirror’s Edge does not even have a street level, falling off the roof equals death, so combat starts there and stays there.

In contrast, on the street combat becomes close quarters. Players can be swarmed when fighting at ground level, having to fight their way out. In Assassin’s Creed this is dangerous, being an assassin the player is suppose to hit and run, not stand and fight. Infamous and Prototype turn into a brawler when not fighting on the roofs. Melee and “Area of Effect” attacks are extremely effective, and a little button mashing is required. But combat always returns to the rooftops.

There are defiant distinctions between the rooftop and street level combat but roofs always represent the high ground. As the rule says, fight from the high ground, and when on the street guess what the player does not have, a strategic position. Basically, this means that while fighting in the streets the player has to deal with the enemies around them and the enemies on the roof. This is why combat returns to the roof because eventually the player must always deal with the enemies that have the higher ground. Thus shifting between the roof and street level is of extreme importance but a shift that adds dimension to these games.

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Roofs are terrain in these respects, or at least they are in games. In an age when it is exciting and risqué to have a party on the roof or install a rooftop eco-friendly garden to combat global warming, games are giving players the experience of traversing roofs in the same way one would explore urban streets or even the wild hinterlands beyond. Certainly the increased popularity of other concepts like the open world game genre and parkour has exacerbated rooftop gameplay too. Combining all of these factors allow us as players to take part in a taboo adventure of running across rooftops while we have probably never even been on the roof of the building we are sitting in at this moment. Perhaps if we were rich men we would build a home with an open roof for us to play or even fiddle upon (I had to reference the play somewhere), but for now we will have to stick with the virtual ones.

In the growing world of social networks and system integration, game companies have been jumping on the band-wagon. Uncharted 2 has Twitter integration (though they seem to have problems with it), Xbox Live with have Facebook/Twitter capabilities, and Giant Bomb links player’s achievements together. Integrate and aggregation is the talk of the town.

Now what? What do we do now that we have achieved this integration. Well, visualization and analytics of course. Sure Uncharted 2 can tweet when you finish a game chapter but how many other players have completed that chapter too. When do those players play, did they finish the chapter in the same amount of time as you? While integrating achievement systems, Facebook and Twitter makes communication easier it does not make the information presented easier to understand. Now that we have these swiss-army knife systems let’s do something with them.

Enter FIFA Earth. There are other visualization/analytic game systems available; Valve shows Steam statistics on their website for example. However, it is rare to find one that is informative, interactive and aesthetically pleasing. FIFA Earth is just such a system. It does not have an extensive list of information to sift through but what it has is style.

FIFA Earth aggregates every match that is played in FIFA 10 from around the world, while any player is connected to the PlayStation Network. From what I have been told soccer is a very important sport worldwide so it only makes sense that a video game simulating real world soccer is just as popular; which means a lot of recorded games. 39 million to be exact. Each day’s total games played is available and is similar to other visualizations like Steam or Noby Noby Stats.

Each time a player completes a game in FIFA 10 it is uploaded online and goes into two different categories. One is for that player’s country and another is for the player’s chosen club. Categories based on country and club are ranked against each other by their ‘win percentage,’ which is calculated by their wins, losses, and draws from all the matches in that category (across all players). There is also an option to view their rank changes across time. I see that players from Ecuador have a winning percentage of 53 today and have been above 40% since October 7th.

All of this information is displayed using a three dimensional image of earth as viewed from space. Which makes sense given the data presented is all geo-located. This feature is also combined with FIFA Earth’s own Twitter feed, which displays tweets about FIFA 10. Each tweet is marked on the globe and they stretch across the screen in a list next to the Earth’s image, it’s quite elegant.

When it comes down to it FIFA Earth has three things: relevant Twitter feed, records the total games played and records the winning conditions of each game (separated by categories). Said like that it doesn’t seem like a lot of information but the presentation is excellent. I hope we will see more websites and game features like this in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, these type of social games are games (there are goals, actions, rules) and they can be seen as more of a critique on MMORPG gameplay as much as the Flash game “This is the Only Level” is for redundant level design.

However, I don’t see what is so social about Mafia Wars. I see my friends, I can place them in my mafia family and the game says they “help” me complete jobs, but this is all asynchronous gameplay; I am never actually helping my friends or playing with them. There’s a big difference here compared to other “social” games like Scrabble online which allow players to play each other right then and there.

The difference between these two types of social games is actually the age old division between communities and society (nature vs. modernity or tribal vs. systematic). This fight weighs the benefits/drawbacks of a small, local, egalitarian community verses the large, systematic, democratic society.

Many writers and theorists have written on the subject: which organizational structure is the natural human state, what properties of each should be cultivated, which is considered good or bad, etc.

Ferdinand Toennies is one sociologist that I believe does a wonderful job of separating the two distinctions in his published work “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft” (meaning “community and society”) back in 1887.

Community

Toennies emphasizes the fact that humans in a community relate to one another based on their blood, neighborhood or common habits. Communities are often family oriented, in the same general location and everyone is friendly with each other, participating in common rituals and have similar likes/dislikes. In a community, members adjust to each other, understand and organize together, provide common support and promote ownership amongst all.

Society

A society is the artificial construction of community, according to Toennies, where individuality takes over and “everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of tension against all others.” Everyone must rely on artificial means of currency and exchange in a society because there is no sense of shared worth, like in a community. Individuals are separated from the process of exchange and force (legal and governmental bodies) must be created in order to manage human interactions.

Not Social, Community and Society

There is a striking resemblance between the two types of social games I mentioned and Toennies’ distinction between communities and societies. Mafia Wars is defiantly an example of a “society game,” as players are isolated from one another and are always at ends with other players, trying to get more power or money. Scrabble online, on the other hand, is a “community game” where players have a chance to catch up and enjoy each other’s company.

I think this distinction is key in understanding where social gaming is going. It seems like the only community games that exist are re-hashed old boardgames that are digitally transformed. While the society games look more like the vending machine games, trying to get into everyone’s pocket book while appearing to connect the player to all their friends.

My worry is that these trends will continue unperturbed. We will not progress past the boardgame motif for community games and micro-transaction gameplay will plague the society games for years to come.

Perhaps some combination of the two may be reached and these two types of games do not need to stay separated. It is essentialist to think that only the properties of either communities or societies show up in a specific human organization, while in almost all cases a mixture of properties appear. The problem is that games are abstractions and have the ability to be essentialist, casting out the properties of one organizational structure or the other, and focusing on only a subset of properties.

My plea is thus not for Mafia War or 140Blood to disappear but for game developers to continue to push for community games too, besides the typical boardgames, and attempt to mix the two game styles together. There is a lot that can be done with Mafia Wars such as offering more real-time gameplay when friends are online, richer strategy/skill-based elements in the game, and communication between rival players other than just “attack me.”

We must foster what it means to actually be a part of a community online because we often get lost in the properties that make it more like a society.

I have a problem. I was on vacation for two weeks and spent very little time catching up on blogs and my other news feeds. As you can imagine I have a lot of information to sift through.

Now the problem is not so much finding relevant information. I use Bloglines and I can search through my feeds for specific information. I also have personally made feeds that snag any story that has certain keywords.

My problem is that as I sift through each individual feed I reread the same information over and over. Yes I know Twitter was DoS attacked last week and thus do not need to read about it in every single tech blog feed.

Therefore, this problem is not one of searching for relevant content but one of automatically grouping similar content together; whether I find it relevant or not is … well … irrelevant. I want a RSS reader that will group similar stories together into one group automatically. If I find the group interesting then I can sift through the multiple copies of the story, if not then I can toss the entire group (delete them from their respective feeds) making my individual RSS feeds that much clearer to peruse.

I put out a tweet today trying to find a service or reader that has this feature but only received information on services that “sorta” have the feature (Like Fever or Google Reader). So, striking out on my own, I have been trying to find any RSS reader that comes close to the “grouping” feature I am looking for.

Here is what I came up with. (In short I didn’t find anything but learned a lot about the types of RSS readers)

Blending, Mixing, Combining, Mashup

Those words all mean the same thing apparently (they are just as bad as interactive or engagement). Take two RSS feeds, add a dash of a keyword or two, and you get a healthy snack of a single RSS feed which takes two feeds and turns them into one. The benefit to this style of blending is that you can manage, search, filter just one feed instead of tens or hundreds. This is fine but the only way to group the items in the feed is by a human going in and filtering the feed; either by searching for a keyword in real time or by setting keywords to search before hand.

Not what I was looking for but here are some posts about blending RSS feeds which talk about services like Blogsieve.

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is basically a do it yourself RSS feed creator. You blend feeds, filter them, run content analysis on them, all using Pipes’ wysiwyg graphical editor. At first glance Pipes seems like it could be the answer.

Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem as the blending option, nothing is done automatically. Users must enter specifically which feeds they wish to group and have to modify the Pipe if they ever want to add more. Plus, Pipes’ “TermExtractor” module, the one used in the creation process to search for keywords, does not seem robust enough. The description says it finds the few important keywords in a feed item but what about URL links, pictures or embeded videos.

The other downfalls of Yahoo Pipes is that 1) it is not a reader itself and 2) in general, it is for the Techie crowd and is intimidating for someone to jump into and start creating feeds.

My search continues.

Digg-Style Readers

Next I found a couple of downloadable products that do not help with the sorting of feed items in general but instead sort items based on personal taste. Perseptio works similar to Digg, allowing users to state whether they like or dislike items they find in their feeds. Perseptio will then rate future stories based on that like/dislike information. It is a standalone desktop app and is free to download. I’ve installed it but I probably will not use it because I’m not really looking for stories I like, just a way to group similar stories I may like together.

Fever is another similar product but looks a hell of a lot nicer. It rates stories based on your personal rankings and by how popular a certain item is; so again, kinda like Digg. However, Fever costs $30 and must be installed on your own server space. It defiantly looks like a nice product and if you are in the market for what it is offering than I would defiantly check it out. Me, I’m still looking.

AIR Apps

Quickly, I next came across a recent post about RSS Feeders made with Adobe AIR. Scoop and Espressoreader looked interesting as they can sync with Google Reader but again didn’t seem to have what I was looking for.

Social Readers

Finally, I come to Social RSS readers. These are basically sites that link users together who each have a set of RSS feeds and allow users to share information from those feeds with each other. Technically, you could call Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg Social Readers too. But I did find one site called Streamy that I signed up for (you can check out a short video demo here).

Streamy doesn’t seem to have the grouping feature that I am looking for but I think it is on the right track. For my phantom grouping feature to work it would have to rely both on algorithmic methods of combining RSS feed items together in addition to utilizing the knowledge of my social circle. Meaning a grouping reader would need both a way to analyze the content as well as analyze the collaborative information of my friends or other users. Streamy looks like it is combining these two avenues, though is a little heavy on the collaborative/sharing side. And do I really need another “social” website that I need to maintain? I’m still going to check it out though, maybe I will switch from Bloglines.

So in the end, no I did not find a reader that grouped similar feed items together. I believe I know a thing or two about web parsing, the “semantic web” and recommendation systems but maybe it is a harder problem then it seems. I’m going to give Streamy a try but right now Bloglines is still working out for me.

Hopefully the grouping feature is just hidden somewhere out there and I have not found it. I just want that one feature but no one is giving it to me.

At the same time, Sly collects any mushrooms he comes across, some of which are in hidden caves, hidden behind the game’s scenery. This makes the game much more about exploring the terrain because the hidden areas have no visual distinction. Sly must also worry about Darklings, which are evil creatures that do not harm Sly himself but eat any fairyflies that Sly has collected. Luckily, Sly can gain some power-ups, one of which allows him to glide while the other allows him to dispell Darklings.

Reading that description, the similarities between William and Sly and say another platform like Super Mario Bros are blatantly obvious. Sly runs and jumps, gains power-ups, and is on a hunt for mushrooms (no pipes though). There is even a sense of hidden wonder in both games where pipes allow access to hidden areas in Super Mario and in William and Sly there are hidden caves that have no differentiation from their surrounding landscape.

But when playing as Sly you do not feel the same way as when playing Mario. The level design in William and Sly is based on recreating a forest; while the graphics are not photorealist they are defiantly more realistic than say the hills or trees in Super Mario games. The bounding and running animations of Sly are superb, I found myself just examining Sly’s motions because they are so smooth. Couple those with the excellent somber music and the thunderstorm effects, the game does much more to place the player into a world that is less based on cartoony action and more about experiencing the surroundings.

Collecting items works differently too. When an item is collected the player is given a brief acknowledgement that they found the item but nothing else is shown. No running total is in the upper right hand corner, no score, not even a timer. In fact, the game has no UI in its main play mode at all. Hitting SHIFT will bring up a single page that lists all of the items the player has gathered but I for one barely used it, since I didn’t care how many mushrooms I was collecting.

The power-ups Sly receives are few but interesting in how they are presented. For dispelling Darklings Sly has to gain a “white magic” power. Sly is given this power after he unlocks a runestone but only for a short time. A Darkling can be anywhere in orientation to any given runestone so it adds another element of exploration if the player wishes to find and dispell as many Darklings as possible.

*Spoiler* The second power-up is the gift of flight, or the ability to glide if the player holds the up button. This is gained by patience. When Sly comes upon an alter in the middle of the forest a sign gives a hint that if he waits on the alter he will learn to fly. After about 15 seconds of waiting a message appears telling the player that Sly can now use his wings. Waiting there struck me as something different, platformers are typically about speed and progression. Having to wait, albeit for not a long time, was an excellent way to add in this power-up, especially in regards to the explorative nature of the game.

I immediately thought of Blueberry Garden while playing William and Sly. Both have large maps that players explore and items to collect throughout. Yet, each add something different to a platformer game rather than fighting or speed. The player can still focus on those aspects as both games allow them, one can dispell every Darkling in William and Sly or may try to kill the animals in Blueberry Garden, but the player is not forced to do those kinds of actions. Each game takes the same-old platformer mechanics but frames them in a way that is serene while still keeping with the spirit of the platforming genre.

The other game William and Sly reminded me of was Tale of Tales’ game The Endless Forest. Dubbed a “multiplayer online game and social screensaver,” The Endless Forest takes place in, well, a forest too. Both games nudge the player to explore the game’s environment but at the same time are almost too whimsical to play, where the player would rather just let the game run because it creates a soothing atmosphere. At the moment I am writing this I have William and Sly running in my browser and I’m just listening to the music/sound effects from the game, it’s quite nice.

If I had to make a complaint about William and Sly it would be that the points should have been removed from the game. The player technically receives a score if they finish the game, where every mushroom collected is worth 100 points and every Darkling dispelled is 1000. There even seems to be points awarded if the player finishes the game in a certain amount of time, though no time is shown anywhere while playing the game. I never felt like I was working towards a score, nor was I trying to beat the game fast. Adding points may motivate some people to play the game, maybe even push people to play the game differently, but for me the gameplay was intrinsic enough that I wanted to play just to play.

There was a game design conversation yesterday on Twitter that discussed such things as how gameplay centers too heavily on Power Fantasies and Discreet Choices, or that games are just Movement and Collision Detection. I feel these arguments are always too reductionist in nature, boiling down to a discussion of why “game X doesn’t have Y.” While this is a great thought experiment, people tend to focus on very popular games in these arguments, your WoWs, your GTAs, Rohrer’s games (which for the “elite” gamer is popular). I rarely see people discussing Flash-based, as William and Sly is, or Social games in their arguments of how we can bring gaming to the next level as a medium, art, or whatever.

Is William and Sly a Power Fantasy? Maybe, you can certainly play it as one. I personally liked bouncing around. Does it have Discreet Choices? Sure it is basically a linear level with an ending but you don’t need to enjoy it in that way. What about Movement and Collision Detection? Well of course, it is a spatial representation of a forest and a platformer. Did I feel that all I was doing was moving and colliding, no more so than I could argue that life is based around movement and collision (might throw good old Virilio out for that argument).

When these types of discussions come up we need to be more open minded about the breadth of games that exist. There are game designers who are trying new things and I think more of us should be putting our own ideas of how to further the medium into practice. The EAs and Activisions of the world will not be producing the same games forever, especially if we all try to sneak in new ideas and frame our games differently so more gaming audiences take notice. We just need to be sly about it.

For those who may have not played Infamous, it has a laundry list of genre/mechanic titles. It’s an open-world, shooter, morality, parkour, rpg game. The setting is three city filled islands, similar to other open-world game landscapes (Assasin’s Creed, GTA). Players traverse these cityscapes by climbing, gliding or skating on the city’s architecture. The premise of the game is that Cole, the main character that players control, is infused, no pun intended, with electricity, allowing the player to use the electricity stored in their body in a number of ways. Shooting electricity like a gun is the basic ability but other powers can be unlock or upgraded, such as electric grenades or arc lightning. Topping it all off, the game places the player in a number of morality situations, making the player choose to act good or evil.

Each of the five titles that describe Infamous offer something in the game, though not necessarily something good.

Open-world

The open-world landscape is very well designed. The islands are smaller than in GTA, which makes sense considering the player must rely on their own powers for travel. Eventually players get the power to glide across power lines and grind on train tracks, making getting around much quicker. It was not as fast as say quick travel in Fallout 3 or using cars in GTA but in Infamous I felt like I actually experienced the city. Open-world games often have contradictory concepts, developers build huge worlds for players to play in and yet players are given extraordinary means to travel quickly though the world. Infamous had a good balance between having a quick way to travel and having to know your way around the city.

Water was another story. Since the world consisted of islands there was lots of water to be seen. Since Cole is electric, the rational in Infamous is that water hurts Cole. It doesn’t make much sense considering Cole will grab live power lines and be fine but steps into a water puddle and loses health. Water was generally used as a separator. It separated the islands and it separated the platforms players had to traverse in the sewers (Cole had to go underground to turn each island’s power back on). Basically, if the player was in water they most likely screwed up. Either they missed a jump or they were fighting on a bridge and fell. In the former case water added difficulty, in the latter water was a mercy kill so the player could get back into the fight quickly. While death by water didn’t make sense I can see why the developers added it. Thank god, it never rained in the game.

Parkour

Parkour gameplay is certainly being stream-lined and Infamous is one of the latest examples. I found climbing on buildings was much easier and quicker than in Assassin’s Creed. The design of Infamous required this; the buildings are too high and varied for the parkour mechanics to work otherwise. But this brings up an interesting problem, if you make it easy to climb why can’t I climb on everything?

I’ve seen other reviewers laugh and criticize the game for not allowing Cole to climb on chain-linked fences but that made the most sense to me. At no point was Cole able to climb that type of fence. As with water, chain-linked fences are not allowed, ever. I figured that out right away and was fine with it. What frustrated me was when objects that I had climbed on before were suddenly made un-climbable. Stacked shipping crates, certain rubble patches and specific “story important” buildings with special textures were un-climbable, even though most of them looked as though they would be very easy to climb or, in the shipping crates case, would only allow climbing if the player could grab the very top of the structure. This is the problem of “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.” I was taught that I could climb on everything, and yet it was taken away from me.

Shooter / RPG

I’m still not very good at console shooters, I can’t control the analog stick very well. Infamous was easier for me than other shooters because different powers allowed for splash damage, making accuracy not as required as with a typical gun. The diversity of the powers added a lot to the game but the option to upgrade powers seemed tacked on. The game would have benefited from a “use and level up” mechanic instead, where the more a power was used the higher that power’s level increased. Plus, each type of power had a good and evil side where players could only upgrade the powers on their chosen morality side. No neutrality in this game, and at this point the only reason to replay the game would be to use the powers I was not allowed to use the first time, which is not sounding that appealing.

Morality

I played as an evil character, because I am pure evil. Actually, I always decide in a morality game whether to be a good or evil character during the first few major moral decision. Then I usually go all out for that side. I believe I chose the good option during the first moral decision but decided I didn’t like the love interest in the game so gave my soul to the utter darkness, never looking back.

To me it didn’t seem to matter. The cut-scenes and dialog with the story characters rarely mentioned the fact that I was on a killing spree. At one point I drained the energy out of a helpless person, which charges Cole’s powers, right next to a story character. They didn’t mind, just went on talking like nothing happened. It’s one thing when players perform evil acts in games and only “evil” enemies are around as witnesses but when the main character is interacting with other story characters as frequently as in Infamous the morality tale fails miserably because everyone has amnesia. Or is blind. Or both.

Now I may be wrong but the way I feel now, after finishing the game as an evil character, I do not think the story would play out any differently. Pursuing the opposite moral choices is not an appealing prospect to me because the story would be the same. Whether that is true or not I don’t know, but the fact that I feel this way means that the story was not good enough to warrant a replay. That means the only other reason to play again would be to use the opposite morality powers but, having seen the opposite powers, I don’t think using different powers would offer enough change in the gameplay.

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I finished Infamous, so that says something. It is a great open-world game where you can jump on buildings and grind on train tracks. The quests, combat elements and powers were varied enough not to get boring either. Some parts of the game were frustrating: the climbing properties changing on certain objects, having to arbitrarily level up powers and the moral choices not affecting the story. Did I like this game better than Assassin’s Creed or GTA? Hmm, that is hard to say. GTA games defiantly have more content and usually not as heavy handed with the story. Assassin’s Creed benefited from ancient cityscapes, which automatically bracketed what was possible in the game making for a tighter experience. So no, I don’t think Infamous is better than AC or GTA but I did, and continuously wanted to, play the game all the way through. It may not be the best open-world, shooter, morality, parkour, rpg game but it’s still pretty good.

Summary: The game has easy mechanics to follow, variety in the plant and zombie types, tons of strategy and lots of mini-games. Gameplay is a little ambiguous at times without health bars and everything in the game must be unlocked. However, these faults matter little after you have played ten hours of the game and still want to play some more.

From the maker of the games more addictive than heroin, Pop Cap has made another highly enjoyable one with Plants vs. Zombies (and this fix will only cost you $20). PvZ is a tower defense game but does not involve placing towers around a zigzagging corridor which enemies follow. Instead the player is charged with defending their lawn represented by a checker board type field with zombies walking along the horizontal rows (A similar Flash game Warlords).

Zombies will eat any plant that they come into contact with so each row must have some sort of protection. Plants usually function work along there horizontal row, any turret or blocking plant used will only affect the zombies in that row. Each row only has nine or so grid spaces and only one plant can occupy one grid square at a time. The strategy of the game is a balancing act between which types of plants you put into each row and how to counter each zombies unique abilities. For instance, the ‘Cactus’ plant shoots spikes which can take out the zombies floating on balloons. Did I mention that this game is both funny and the animations are awesome

The economy in PvZ is based on two currencies, sunshine and money. Sunshine is used to buy plants while playing a round. Powerful plants cost much more than normal ones but players can place sunflowers to collect more sun while the round is underway, making purchasing better plants possible. This is another bit of strategy, the player needs to learn to build enough sun-flowers to acquire more sun but at the same time defend those sunflowers from the zombies (since sunflowers are defenseless). Zombies sometimes drop money, which is also given as a reward for completing a round. Money is used to buy upgrades or other items that work outside of the main game rounds. But it’s worth mentioning that instead of sunshine and money automatically being given to the player, the player must personally click and collect these currencies. The player is always engaged in the action for this reason, continually looking for new sunshine and money icons to collect during the round, while placing plants to defend their lawn.

Another excellent mechanic in PvZ is the fact that a player can only choose a certain number of plants to take into any round of play. While there are over 40 different types of plants the player can only have up to 10 plants available at a time (players start with eight six slots, but can purchase more). Though the player does not make this decision blind, each round shows which zombies the player will be facing next making it easier to decide which plants they will need.

PvZ feature five different lawn-scapes for the player to defend. There is the player’s front and back lawns, which are played during the day and night, and the roof. Those zombies may not be quick but they understand what it means to flank a position. Each area offers something different. During the day the front yard consists of five rows to defend; at night gravestone popup on the lawn making it impossible to place plants in those squares. Also nighttime makes it harder to collect sunlight but certain nighttime plants become available. In the backyard a pool is added, where the player must learn to use aquatic tactics since regular plants cannot be placed in the water by themselves. At night the fog rolls into the backyard making it hard to see the first few columns of squares on the board. Finally, the roof area is vaulted, so the player has to learn to use the plants that fire on a ballistics trajectory, instead of straight shots. Having such a variety of play areas makes this game much more enjoyable than other tower defense games that are played on a single area or map.

PvZ also offers different modes to play. The game eases the player in through Adventure Mode, stepping through each plant and zombie type as the player experiences each of the five play areas. Adventure mode is the only one offered when the player first installs the game and they have to play through most of it to unlock other modes, but it never feels like grinding just to get to other options. The player gets introduced to some of the mini-games while playing the mode as well, making the entire mode a boot-strapping experience.

Other modes include Mini-games, Puzzle, Survival and Zen Garden. The Zen Garden is an outside area to grow plants and earn money, but is mainly a side area. The other three modes, however, add a lot to the game and all of them are extremely fun to play. Some of the mini-games combine their gameplay with other Pop Cap games like Bejeweled and Insaniquarium. Puzzles are about making the right move at the right time and Survival stretches a round of play over multiple rounds where any plants that are placed stick around but more and more zombies are thrown against them.

Wrapping this review up, besides having to unlock everything, one major drawback to the game is that the plants and zombies are given ambiguous statistics. Zombies do not have visible health points and it is not clear how much damage any plant does to a zombie. The player learns rough estimates, a simple zombie with “low” health takes ten shoots from a “normal” damage plant. From a casual perspective having vague terms describing the stats of each unit is fine but I feel not having the accurate numbers represented somewhere takes away some of the strategy that min-maxers may enjoy. Yet it is nice to not have to worry about the stats as much. If you keep up with current tower defense games many flood the screen with unit stats and some are even designed so that the player must understand those stats in great detail to have any chance of winning. Not casual by any means.

Plants vs Zombies has a lot to offer any player and considering that it can be played in small chunks is great as a side game. The variety not only in the unit types and play areas but in the different modes as well add plenty of playable hours to the game. And while this is not your traditional tower defense game, it is not your traditional tower defense game. Which makes it that much more appealing.

Other review run-down: The Escapist, Wired, Gamespot.

Blueberry Garden is stylized, spartan in design and heavy on the exploration. While a short game, it was immensely fun and for $5 on Steam something that cannot be missed.

From a marketing perspective Blueberry Garden, created by Erik Svedang and has won a few awards for it, is a platformer. The basic walk and jumping mechanics are there, along with the abilities to pick up objects and, if edible, eat them. Oh and you can fly. I forgot to mention that. Technically you spend less time on platforms and more time BASE jumping from platform to platform. Flying isn’t free form (meaning you cannot fly up as well as down), as I said it is BASE jumping, or a controlled glide. Getting to higher and higher elevations so that one can glide to the next area of interest is the true puzzle in the game.

There are a few problems with the controls when the game character is near breaks in the terrain. At one point I was caught in an infinite jump and other physics-related hiccups occurred while I was moving. Nothing that made it impossible to play and didn’t hurt the game at all. Plus you can press the HOME key and the game’s character is transported back to the start position, instant fix. Actually that function is there so the player can bring back fruit to the start position quickly but more on that in a bit.

You as a player control an un-named protagonist who is placed in the world (looks like a Parrot crossed with Mr. Peanut). At the beginning of the game the player is shown a large water faucet on the upper left hand side of the world and it is gushing out water. The first time I played I did not take any notice of this and was enjoying my time gliding around having fun. That was until the water level started rising rapidly and the game ended because the garden flooded. So much for being purely an exploratory game. There is a goal.

When the player is first dropped into the world a few control hints popup as the player explores their surroundings. These helpful reminders seem to be in very relevant places, which must have been tweaked with play testing. However, just knowing the controls means very little in the grand scheme of things. If the player wishes to win the game they have to understand the world.

As in the name, the game takes place in a garden … of sorts. The world where the game is played is actually quite large, both vertically and horizontally. There are boundaries that can be reached but this defiantly not a small garden. You will find very few similarities to Viva Pinata or Harvest Moon in Blueberry Garden when it comes to actual gardening except for its basic elements. Flowers bloom, trees grow and die, fruit ripens, and animals wander around … actually that is Viva Pinata.

The first major epiphany the player gets is when they stumble upon a larger than life object. These objects (represented by tomatoes, cheese, books, plastic bottles, dice, etc.) can be found throughout the garden and are to be collected by the player. Remember that there is water pouring into the garden and that water faucet is very high up, well over to the left hand side of the garden. Luckily those large objects that the player finds will aid their quest.

Each time an object is found the player is transported back to the initial starting position (with a little blurred fade effect). The object however is placed on a platform next to the start position. Every new object found continues to stack on top of each other to form a tower of an interesting variety. The player at anytime can hit the up arrow when they are under the platform and instantly be transported to the top of the tower. They then use the tower as a jumping off point, as the tower goes higher the player can glide farther. The goal is to get it large enough to glide over to the faucet and hopefully turn it off.

Not every object is easy to find or to approach, which is when the fruit make their entrance. The player is introduced to fruit almost immediately when they enter the world but there uses may allude them for a while. I did not use them for quite some time until I got to a point where I could not collect objects any more so I decided “Hey, let’s eat some fruit.”

Five types of fruit exist in the garden and they each produce a special power when eaten. Blueberries allow the player to fly upwards (instead of just gliding) for a short period of time, making it easier to get to higher elevations without being quite as high. Star fruit (which are very good in real life) allow the player to breath under water, with a bubble being placed around the player’s character. At the bottom of the level there are underwater chambers that do contain objects and the player cannot stay underwater for very long. Pears and cherries augment the garden’s terrain, pears can extend platforms horizontally and cherries extend platforms vertically (however I didn’t really use either of them except to get one or two objects). The final fruit I never understood, nor do I even know what type of fruit it is. It would drift away when I tried to eat it. Perhaps it has some use, I just never found it.

Reproduction of fruit is as important as eating the fruit. Fruit is created by trees which are in turn produced by fruit that has ripened, fell to the ground and finally turn into a seed. Trees themselves will eventually die but as long as there is fruit on the ground more trees will spring up. Initially there are places where fruit trees already exist and seem to be placed there in order to help the player find more large objects. For instance a group of star fruit trees (for breathing underwater) was growing next to an underwater tunnel that led to a large object.

The player can also play a role in cultivating fruit by picking up fruit and dropping it in locations across the garden. Trees will grow anywhere with space to grow, meaning there cannot be too many trees in one locations. The fruit trees also compete with each other. I brought back a number of fruit to the game’s start location to plant them and eventually one type of fruit tree would out grow all the other fruit. There is rhyme and reason to the ecosystem.

And what is an ecosystem without animals. There are a number of animals in Blueberry Garden that are mostly there to piss you off. They eat the damn fruit. I’m trying to cultivate some blueberries in a location and they are scarfing them down like there is no tomorrow, which is exactly what I’m trying to prevent. But seriously, they add an interesting element to the game. Instead of the fruit tree population exploding out of proportion, the animals are there to keep the population down (and it is a garden, there are always animals).

The animals reproduce too. The best part is when the little guys with party hats start kissing and more of them pop into existence. Just as with fruit the player can affect this too, separate the animals and they do not reproduce. A little vindictive but even when I left the animals alone they still ended up going extinct.

Eventually the player gets the tower high enough to glide over and turn off the water. Once that is completed a sign appears next to the start location with a picture of a moon, and points to the upper right hand side of the screen. The rest of the game is played at the player’s leisure, they must collect any leftover objects in the world in order to reach the moon and win the game.

That’s when I realized that the unknown fruit and cherries in my garden had gone extinct, along with all the animals. I don’t know if that is deliberate but I felt disappointed, now there was time to play with everything at my own pace but I lost some pieces along the way. This makes me wonder if this game could work, not as a platformer but solely as a simulation garden game.

It only took me about an hour and a half to beat the game and that was with two tries; the garden flooded in my first game. I would have liked to seen more in the game, either randomly generated levels, a level builder or just more levels in general. But the price tag is cheap, the develop team was one guy and hopefully additions will follow.

Going into Blueberry Garden I thought it was going to have a message. Something about conservation perhaps or the futility of life (maybe the player could not win). Seems like a lot of Indie games have been taking this route, which is fine but can be convoluted if done wrong. I can’t tell but nothing like that seems to present itself in this game. Blueberry Garden is just a game that meshes platformer mechanics with interesting power-ups, a simple eco-system and simple puzzles. All in an artistically stylized package. It’s just a game, no message required. And I am perfectly fine with that.

In other reviews:

Kevin VanOrd’s review over at GameSpot calls the game mediocre but the review is mediocre itself. Comparing Blueberry Garden to games like Braid, Flower, and Flow (PS3 version) is like comparing blueberries to oranges, they have completely different in scope of development and project goals. Now games like Everyday Shooter and And Yet It Moves is fine, but I would still say that Blueberry Garden has a certain charm to it that I personally enjoyed. That said, the game could be longer and the eco-system more prominent. This review also points out bugs in the game, which as I said for me where just physics-errors.

Nathan Meunier review over at Green Pixles is a shorter version of mine, lots of praise for the game.

Here are some interviews with the Erik Svedang, the creator of the game (got this list from his site).

“Of Blueberries and Gardening” by The Escapist
“Flying high in Blueberry Garden” by Tuna Snax
“Greenfingers: An Interview with Erik Svedäng” by The Reticule
“Ten Questions with Erik Svedäng” by Game and Player

Also when you beat the game you get a link to a special URL where you are treated to some interesting stuff like the image below. I will not say anymore.

“If you have watched any of the videos or read any of the press around Project Natal, there is no doubt this is game changing technology. Now that the buzz has died down about Project Natal, we want to let you know that we are hiring for key positions on the team. That said, we are contacting you to tap into your network and get the word out that we are building out the remainder of the Project Natal team and that ground floor opportunities are still available.

You probably know people that would want to work on an early stage project where there is still room for creativity and defining the parameters of a product. We would love for you to tell them about Project Natal. You can forward this link to your gaming friends or colleagues that will showcase the activities of Project Natal.”

So it looks like Natal will not be out anytime soon if they are advertising that it is an “early stage project” where “defining the parameters” is still an issue. Click the link in the quote and you can see the 20 jobs that Microsoft is trying to fill (also the list is below). No doubt there will be some stiff competition for them.

Found some other stories on this subject but this is new stuff, at least in the last day: G4TV, alt+f4 , Team Xbox.

I like tying up loose ends, being efficient and exploring new ways to get things done.

This can translate to I like killing people, with as little effort as possible in a variety of glorified ways … in Fallout 3.

Or it can mean I like collecting every animal, growing my plants to perfection and trying to find all of the different animal varieties in Viva Piñata. The difference, well there is no difference in the mechanics. The skills that it takes to make an efficient garden can be put to use when deciding how to efficiently dispatch an enemy. However, the framing is different, the context and perception that is given to the mechanics, which makes these two types of scenarios unlike each other.

Yesterday, Simon over at Chungking Espresso tweeted about the relationship between Brenda Brathwaite’s game Train and Gonzalo Frasca “one-session game of narration” (OSGON) format. I’m late to the game, as usual, seeing as Train was introduced two months ago and Frasca’s article was published in 2000, but I want to discuss what it means for games to be one shot experiences and how Train’s serious subject is portrayed.

One-Shot

Frasca’s OSGON format describes games that are played once: every decision is final, if you die the game ends, and once means the game never begins again. As an example, he makes mention of William Gibson’s poem Agrippa which would encrypt itself after the user read it. Unless the reader was a hacker they could never read it again. Obviously today you can read the poem whenever you like because the encryption method did not hold up.

Frasca notes that a way to get around someone “hacking” a one-shot game would be to treat it like a happening, occurring during a set period of time over a fixed duration (or perhaps episodically). I would compare this to what ARG games have evolved into today, especially ones that are used to promote products that have fixed release dates. I Love Bees (for Halo 2) or the ARG surrounding The Dark Knight are games that cannot be played again because those games were for specific products. You were either a participant in the game when it was running or not. You can’t go back to the bakery and find the cake that had the tape inside with a recording from the Joker (which did happen for the Dark Knight ARG). Some other player did though and they can tell you the tale.

Games that can be replayed discourage portraying serious subject matter in games, as Frasca writes. Replayable games promote sadistic actions, for instance for my second time playing through Fallout 3 I am killing everyone I meet, and force players along a “correct” path, where if the player fails they can always start over or load a saved game. Creating OSGEN games allow designers to invoke more emotion from serious subjects, placing games at a higher artistic level and cultural status in general.

I would agree that OSGEN can be one potential way of exploring serious subjects in games but it is not be the only way. Frasca’s argument is similar to the arguments made for behaviorism in games, where the player is a passive interacter who reflects little on how they are performing in the game. Only through absolute death or irreversible decisions would a game be able to break this behaviorist notion and allow players to truly reflect on their actions. I don’t believe this is true and think time is a big factor in how players perceive their actions.

While it may not seem as sophisticated as definite concepts like death or irreversible decisions, the amount of time a player spends in a game can have a profound effect on that player. I remember one instance while I was playing Ultima Online. By the time I started playing UO the game developer had already introduced the policy that if a player is killed that player can loot their body before anyone else (within a limited amount of time but it was enough time). Rarely did I run into a situation where if I died I could not get my items back, except for this one time up in the town of Yew when the town was being overrun by monsters. I was grinding monsters for seeds that had been introduced in the game that week, but that is not important. Some monsters ending up backing me into a house and killed me. I respawned and after four or five attempts could not get anywhere near my body to retrieve my belongings.

Now UO was not like WoW where every item was special, so everything on my avatar was replaceable … except they were not. I had items on me, like my hat and cloak, that I had on my character for months. Since an avatar’s skills in UO were the main attributes that gave each avatar their power, items could be kept around for longer periods of time. Given that you could dye your items different colors to make them more personal and your name was placed on any items you created, those items could have a lot of sentimental value. In WoW it’s hard to become attached to items because the purpose of the game is to find the next tiered item. When I lost all of my items, the ones I had been playing with for so long, I was devastated.

Now some 6-7 years later that episode has stuck with me. Sure I found other items to replace my old ones and was able to fashion my avatar exactly as it was before the incident but I had LOST MY ITEMS, the ones I had spent so much time with. The fact that it was only a game made it worse, I know that with a flick of a few bits a game master could have restored those items to my avatar. Yet, the game rules discouraged that scenario and my items were lost to the UO void (or to who ever came along and picked them up later).

If we didn’t believe that games had the power right now to evoke emotional responses I don’t see why there would be movements like games for change, health, training, etc. While games about serious subject matter can be made compelling using the one-shot format that should not rule out how games can be compelling at this very moment.

On the Train

Brenda Brathwaite’s Train is like a one shot game but not for the exact reasons that Frasca discusses.

Train gives players control over railroad cars and tells them to use those railroad cars to transport people from one destination to another. Each player has a car to place little people figures within. Cards are drawn to see how far a train moves, which can move a train forward or back, and how many people are placed in a player’s car. The object is to transport all of the people to the final destination as quickly as possible.

When a train reaches the final destination and must return to pick up more people that player receives a destination card for where they dropped those people off. Those destinations are Nazi concentration camps. Players are transporting Jews using trains to deliver them to places like Auschwitz.

Obviously this information only becomes immediately apparent once the first destination card is handed out. Then the ambiance objects gain their meaning, the broken window that supports the board symbolizing Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass” and the SS typewriter that was used to type out the rules. Other reviews have stated that people started to cry when everything clicked in there heads and they realized that they were helping transport Jews to concentration camps.

In this way Train is like Frasca’s one shot games as a happening. Players think they are sitting down and going to play a board game like Ticket to Ride and they end up committing genocide. Actually, breaking the window glass and the SS typewriter adds to game as a physical event that is truly occurring right this instant. True, the game can be replayed but once the players know what they are doing their play changes for good, like an irreversible decision.

Mechanics or Frame

Train is part of Brenda Brathwaite’s game series “The Mechanic is the Message,” where focusing on simple mechanics can produce strong reactions from the players. However, while I am jaded on more than one front (I now know the game’s twist, I’m an academic gamer steeped in serious games and I am just an experienced gamer in general) I find some of the aspects of Train needs further discussion beyond the common rhetoric of “games can change the world” which academics are embracing everywhere.

For one thing I did not like the twist in the gameplay. It seems more like a gimmick than an epiphany type moment. A review over at Game Culture said that others had made the comparisons to a Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man.” In the episode aliens visit Earth and cure all of man’s woes, but come to find out the aliens are just fattening earthlings up so that they can cook or “serve” them as food. Planet of the Apes is another example, except earthlings are the culprits in that one (maybe a little more egotistical in that sense).

However, in the same review it was said that the brilliance behind Train was in the player’s complicity about the action they were taking. Since everyone was helping the trains get to the final destination they were all at fault. Games are supposed to be fun, safe experiences as the reviewer says (though it can be said that those are assumptions that the general populace believes in, not designers working on games for change) and the complicity of the situation is the big draw of the game. But that is not the case, it is the complacency that players feel as they are moving the people to their final destination. Up until the true destination revelation, players are just playing a game, playing the mechanics. Once the destination is revealed the mechanics don’t matter anymore because the framing becomes more important.

Players begin the meta-game once they discover what is going on, where they try to find ways to subvert the rules and wish to save the Jews from being transported. In that way there is no complicity about it, the players become part of the resistance movement trying to stop the Nazis from carrying out there plans. They are now playing against the game because the framing is different.

For example, take a look at Calabouço Tétrico. It is a Tetris clone but you stack tortured bodies instead of blocks. A gruesome game to say the least. Same mechanics, different frames. Framing matters.

Hidden Information

I’m wondering if the revealing of Train’s hidden information, that the trains are heading to concentration camps, could be handled differently?

This type of revelation is similar to jumping out and scaring the audience in a horror film. Yes it induces an emotional response but it is easy to shock someone out of complacency, or during a quiet period in a movie. But for players who have learned to separate games from reality this would fall on its face for the same reasons that Frasca said were the bane of replayable games. Those players know that they are not really transporting Jews to their death, they can always just stop playing and it may even turn sadistic where players try even harder to finish the game quicker.

Now inducing paranoia would be totally different, it is not a one shot emotion at all but a continuous feeling of dread. Have a look at Peter Tscherkassky short film Outer space. As a viewer you are seeing the film through the eyes of, potentially, a being from outer space that has descended on a suburban home. In the film the viewer never gets a clear camera shot of what they are looking at, the entire time the visuals and sounds are extremely distorted and the whole film is shot in a voyeuristic fashion. The film itself is very unsettling: you are looking through the alien’s eyes, you have no real connections with the humans in the film and your senses are continually bombarded with disorienting effects.

How could we introduce this into a game? Would it have to be a digital game?

Trying to Beat the System

Paranoia is one aspect of the Battlestar Galatica Boardgame. Actually, it is just a dreadful game in general. The point is not to lose, the entire game is about stopping horrible events from occurring and killing the fleet of human star-ships. Additionally, there is the possibility that some of the players are Cylons, the enemy. The game itself is supposed to be cooperative, where everyone helps the humans in the game. If someone is a Cylon though, they only win if the humans lose. For the entire game there are human players trying to protect themselves while going on a witch hunt for the players who are Cylons. The accusations fly like crazy.

BSG also adds a kink in the game by having a sympathizer card in the game, allowing a Cylon player to be part of the human team. Though adding this card just makes things more complicated, now Cylons can be helpful. This also brings a human’s loyalty into question as they may wish to screw the humans over for the fun of it. Thus, nothing stops any player from declaring (openly or not) that they do not want to help their team any more. I could be a human but try to hinder my team has much as possible. Luckily there is a brig (jail) where players have little effect once they are placed there, so any traitor can be handled. In that way the problem with players being sadistic, or trying to kill everyone, is something that the game can deal with. Plus there is never a “correct” way to play, again focusing on Frasca’s attributes of replayable games, because the game excepts paranoia and treachery, all of which the mechanics provided for. A great marriage of mechanics and framing.

In a Wall Street Journal Article about Train, Brenda Brathwaite makes mention that players did end up turning on the game in the same fashion. They would ask if there was a way to stop the trains, subvert the trains or rescue the Jews aboard. Some cards would derail a train and the player would say they are taking them to a new location. But I’m wondering if the game has any mechanics that attempts to stop this subversive behavior like in BSG. If the player does help some Jews to safety will they themselves be captured and sent away, can other players snitch on those helpful players and remove them from the game?

OH! It’s the Holocaust

With all this talk about subversion, framing and mechanics it is easy to miss the fact that we are talking about a subject that is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. While I have no problem with the Holocaust being portrayed in a game (see my other post about the Iraq war and WWII Kamikaze bombers in games) I do feel it is another instance of a gimmick being used.

Just like the 911 attacks and the Kennedy assassination it is hard to not feel moved by those events as an American. Those events bring up strong emotions in some people or at least bring a surrounding context with them. So again I ask are Train’s mechanics the compelling part of the game or is the event, the Holocaust, the bigger factor? What would it be like to frame it in lesser known massacres (in the American psyche that is), like Darfur or Saddam’s gas attacks on the Kurds? (yet, even those are sort of in our psyche because I just pulled those off the top of my head) Is it the Holocaust that is so striking or the game itself?

Hush was brought up in a review as another example compared with Train. Hush is a rhythm game where you have to press the keyboard characters h-u-s-h as the letters fall on the screen. The opening premise is that the player is a mother who is trying to calm her baby by pressing the keys in time. As the game progresses they learn that the mother is in Rwanda in 1994 trying to keep her baby quiet while her village is being raided by the Hutu who will come for her if the baby is crying.

Not having as much knowledge about the genocide in Rwanda as I do about the Holocaust makes me feel Hush is more compelling to myself even though it used the same type of hidden information as Train. So does that type of shock revelation only work on people who know little about the subject? If that is the case then fine, it’s a method that can be used with school children learning about the subject or adults who do not have knowledge of such events. But choosing a topic such as the transportation of Jews to concentration camps will automatically bring up emotions that were already present in many American’s minds because we know so much about it.

Simon suggested that there should be a game about the S.S. St. Louis which was a refugee ship carrying almost a thousand Jews fleeing Germany after Kristallnacht had occurred. Except this transportation story is just as heartbreaking as the one portrayed in Train. When the St. Louis arrived at Cuba thinking their refugee passengers would disembark, their final destination was the US, they were turned away. Negotiations kept the ship anchored off of Cuba for days as the fate of the passengers was decided. Eventually the ship had to return to Europe because their food was running low and no one would help them. Suicides and an attempted mutiny occurred during the voyage back. Once back in Europe, some countries ended up taking smaller groups of the refugees however, each of those countries, except Great Britain, were eventually taken over by the Nazis and those refugees ended up in concentration camps.

The story of the S.S. St. Louis is a story about American isolationism before the war, and as Simon also said, does not show “how righteous and heroic the US was during WWII.” It’s easy for us today to see a movie about the Holocaust, read a book about the Holocaust or play a game about the Holocaust and not feel that sense of regret that such a horrible event occurred but also know that we as a country helped liberate those camps. Except when we did not.

But we have grown complacent again. We as a country make the assumption that the Holocaust is bad and we know we will never do that again. Next I put forth a new game design based on Train’s model to see if I can evoke something different from players who think they know everything about the Holocaust.

Train Re-Imagined

Think about this game. Players sit down in front of a board with three runways on it. Off to the side there are three cargo airplanes, a box with little people figures in it, a stack of cards and a pda. To start the game a person picks up the pda and read out the text that displays on the screen. The text says that the players are military personnel and they have been order to move the Abu Ghraib prisoners to new prisons around the world. This needs to be done as efficiently and securely as possible and the one that can transport the most prisoners will be promoted. Each player runs one of the three cargo planes and it is to be used to move the prisoners which start in the box. The cards are either event or movement cards, events can either help or hinder players (or be used against other players such as “delays in flight time”) and movement cards allow players to either pick up more prisoners or, once the plane has left the prison, to get to their new destination (ex. move three spaces or add one prisoner to your plane). When they reach their destination a player gets a destination card for the prison (like Zichsutwa in northern Africa) and those act toward a player’s promotion, along with the number of prisoners transferred.

Once all the prisoners are transferred then the winner is determined by the number of prisoners they transferred divided by the number of prisons (greater than two) where they arrived. The reason they are divided is if the player took prisoners to too many prisons they spent a lot of money on fuel and increased the overhead for using other prisons, which would work against their promotion. Whoever transported the most prisoners get the promotion.

After a winner is declared the airplane and landing strip covers are taken off to reveal that the players were actually using trains and rail tracks to transport prisoners. The prison names are anagrams for places such as Auschwitz and the prisoners were actually Jewish citizens. The players had just participated in a façade that represented the Kristallnacht, becoming knowing participants in the operation to transport prisoners who they believed would oppress and hurt them if they were free to live their lives.

How is this different from Train? Well, this would get at the heart of the feelings of what it would feel like to be in Germany during the Kristallnacht. Instead of just looking at the logistics of the game (or the mechanics) it would tap very relevant events surround terrorism and the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal that are around today. (It’s always powerful when you can combine some new with something old)

Some players wouldn’t feel any remorse for sending “terrorist” prisoners to other prisons, stacking them as high as they could into their planes. Other players would feel horrible about transporting these prisoners, trying to make their progress safe or as slow as possible, not caring about the promotion awarded for winning. Not every German citizen felt that rounding up Jews was the right thing to do, but what could they do against the Third Reich who were making all the decisions in Germany? They couldn’t voice their opinions, just like voicing your opinion in the game would not change the winning conditions, but they could try to hinder the Nazis, as you could do by stopping the planes from reaching new prisons.

But the fact that the façade would not be revealed until the very end would help show how we as American’s can fall into the same traps as the German citizen’s fell into when they wanted to help protect their country and followed the Third Riche.

I understand what Brathwaite is trying to do with her “The Mechanics are the Message” game series but I believe that The Frame is the Message. Sure mechanics play a role in this type of game, but people are not mindless robots. If you hide a key fact that would make a player play drastically different I do not see that as potent enough. Where allowing them to play exactly how you would expect them to play and then tearing away the façade that surrounds their play to reveal how they actions and thoughts can be compared to another situation, that’s when true reflection can occur.

Wrap it up

Brathwaite says the most important thing about games like Train is that it starts discussions. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work for me. The game makes me wonder about what does inspire me, moves me, and how I would create a game to evoke those emotions. Discussion and providing game options are the key points to take away from this. Games like Train, World of Warcraft and The Kill Everyone project can co-exist in this crazy mixed up world of games.

We as academics, and game designers in general, should continue to produce games based on new assumptions about what games are and look past the common assumptions that are still held by the general populace. Only through a continued dialog and giving players options will we be able to finally defeat those sacred, dogmatic assumptions about games. Fun and safe work for some games … other games, well … they will rip your heart out.

Edit: Just as I pushed this out Gamasutra put up a Featured Column by Ian Bogost, talking about gesture game interfaces and linking it with the gestures that Train players perform. So Brathwaite says the mechanics matter, Bogost the gestures and I say the frame. See we have options