I Love Bees is an ARG, or alternate reality game. What that means specifically is hard to quantify, but ARGs tend to share a few common characteristics. They are played in real time over a finite length of time; they involve group efforts in puzzle-solving, either online or in the real world; their stories are told in rather unconventional ways, ranging from clothing lines to trading cards to false newspapers to in-game websites in games over the years. As for I Love Bees, the main action of the game occurred at the website of the same name.

The story played out in two different ways. One half took place in the present, on the website itself. Initially starting out as a pretty basic-looking site about beekeeping and homemade honey production, the site was first mentioned in the theatrical trailer for Halo 2. Within a couple weeks of going up in the summer of 2004, the site went mad. Garbled code, random snippets of story, and corrupted files permeated the page, along with a countdown. Theories abounded as to what the countdown pointed to, with a prevailing idea being that it would be a Halo 2 demo. Once the day had passed however, it became clear that wasn’t the case. What was apparent was that a number of beings now inhabited the website. There was Melissa, also known as “The Op,” a hard-nosed, slightly mad woman seeking out her “crew.” There was the Sleeping Princess (or the Rogue Process, according to Melissa), an ephemeral being who hid out from Melissa in the site’s 404 page and spoke in storybook language. Rounding out the characters were the SPDR and Pious Flea, a repair program and quasi-friend to the Sleeping Princess, respectively.

Every Tuesday and Friday the site would see updates. The Sleeping Princess would put up puzzles to be solved on Fridays, but Tuesdays took on a different sort of challenge. Early on, a series of numbers started appearing on the site. Players determined that these were GPS coordinates and times, and that after checking the locations out, there were payphones in these spots. If everything went well, when that time rolled around, the phone would ring, and Melissa, improvised by actress Kristen Rutherford, would answer. She would ask questions of her “crew,” asking them to sing songs, take pictures, and in the case of a few, get their cell phone numbers so she could call them at home. If they succeeded in passing her tests, they would hear a snippet of an audio drama, and if enough people succeeded, the clips would be unlocked on the website. From there the clips were arranged into chronological order, and another story would start to take shape.

This audio drama portion is probably the part more people are familiar with, since unlike the rest of the game, a person could simply go back, listen to it, and enjoy a high quality story. The creators of the game, 4orty2wo Entertainment, were able to assemble an excellent and rather well-known cast of voice actors, including the aforementioned Rutherford, Kari Wahlgren, and Yuri Lowenthal. Taking place in 2552, this portion primarily follows five different people—Jersey, Jan, Kamal, Rani, and Col. Herzog—and a former military AI, Durga, as they each deal with the Covenant War and a strange cover-up of a Naval spy ship, the Apocalypso, being blown apart in Earth space. These are essentially ordinary people, though each with specific skillsets and attributes, and they’re just living their lives as best they can as the world falls apart around them. I’ve heard some compare them to the crew of Firefly, and I think it’s a very apt comparison, simply in how they all interact with their peers and, eventually, with each other.

Everyone, even Melissa, felt like real people. And the players kept the Puppetmasters on their toes. At one point, Melissa was hunting the Sleeping Princess, and asked her crew about her whereabouts. The PMs didn’t think anyone would turn in such a nice character, and were quite surprised when the player “Weephun” told The Op on the phone that hey, the Princess is hiding out on the 404 page, go get her. One scrambled rewrite later, a story arc where the Princess escaped the Op was put together. Weephun, in the meantime, was ostracized in the game community, because players literally felt like he had betrayed a close friend of theirs.

Even after the story ended, the players stayed together. Some ended up buying the Xbox and Halo 2 to play with other Beekeepers, which went on to form two different clans: The Beekeepers and Evade Evade Evade (a common phrase of the Flea). And in May of 2005, players from across the US and Canada came together in Chicago for the Hivemeet, a gathering where everyone could reminisce and hang out. 4orty2wo even put out a DVD of all the audio drama parts, plus photos people had sent the Op, and gave players their blessing to make copies. I, personally, made a number of good friends across the country through this game, and always enjoy getting together with them at conventions or just online.

Even the actors, who have gone on to other things, have kept in touch with their Beekeepers to varying extents. When Bungie staffers said that the ILB story was non-canonical, the voracious fanbase complained until finally, in 2006, they did an about face and embraced the story and the mythology. The game even went on to win a GDC award for innovation, as well as a Webby.

Early in the game, Jersey told Durga, “For a quality experience, the girl has to be real.”

The new crew made this game more real—and the characters, more alive—than anyone could have expected.

Now, with the continued assistance of the University of Potsdam Press, DIGAREC has collected, edited, and published the sum total of the May 2008 conference. The result: a finished book, Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, with keynotes and lectures divided and edited into chapters.

Essays include “The Concept of War in the World of Warcraft,” “The Space-Image: Interactivity and Spatiality of Computer Games,” “The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games: Freedom and Discipline in America’s Army,” and “Différance at Play: Unfolding Identities Through Difference in Videogame Play.”

Incredibly, DIGAREC opted to publish the book as a free, downloadable PDF—but make no mistake, this is a proper book (with an ISBN and endpages and everything!), suitable for your Kindle or e-reader. It’s a pretty hefty tome. Oh, and yes—it’s all in English. (My German isn’t that good.)

• Universitätsbibliothek Potsdam – Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games (via)

Nonprofit organization Games for Change (G4C) is continuing its march to save the world through gaming. Aided by some vicarious funding from the AMD Foundation, G4C today launched a new toolkit designed as a crash course to help non-profit organizations learn how to create “social issue digital games.”

The Games for Change Toolkit is primarily a Flash-based presentation containing video, reference material, and links to demonstration games that cover various aspects of game design, from the initial concept to production and distribution. While an actual SDK may not be involved, the toolkit introduces nonprofit organizations to both the broad potential and finer details of bringing an issue-conscious game into reality.

According to Chartier, the design primer’s video resources are culled from footage from the 2008 symposium “Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop on Making Social Issue Games,” here reorganized into a logical hierarchy for the G4C site.

I guess I thought the G4C Toolkit would be kind of a bore*, but I ended up hunting around the flash site for a long time: this kind of game design philosophy absolutely overlaps with the broader genre of edutainment. One of the best moments, I think, is during Karen Sideman’s presentation, when—paraphrasing James Paul Gee—she asserts that games don’t necessarily ‘make’ learning fun. In fact, it’s just the opposite: games are fun because we are learning.

*More social issues games ought to be as addictive as PETA’s Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals.

• Games for Change – G4C Toolkit (via)

Seeing in the Abstract

Let’s talk cartooning.

In his wonderful work of literary and visual criticism, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains (emphases his):

...I’m going to examine cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification.

When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.

How do cartooning, caricature, and avatars relate to videogames in a broader sense? The key, I think, is iconography. Take a look at Character Design for Mobile Devices, wherein realistic character design and artistry are pared down to their simplest and most fundamental pixels.

“How did you feel,” 1UP editor James Mielke asked Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, “about seeing your elaborate illustrations transformed into such tiny sprites?”

Amano replied with an elegant description that could be applied to any type of icon. ”...Back then, ...my art couldn’t just go into the game without major adjustments,” he explained. “So I looked at the sprites as just a symbol of my art. Here’s an example: when you say ‘Mount Fuji’ and you make a motion like this”—here, Amano makes a peak sign with his fingers—“everybody knows what Mount Fuji looks like, so they get the mental image in their head. So I was in charge of making the master art piece that people would keep in their mind, and people would remember this art because of these symbols in the game.”

Avatars as Cartoons

I’m not sure where this Flash avatar software came from, but I remember it being pretty popular a few years ago. In spite of its consistent inability to produce a reliably accurate face, I like it. It is unequivocally cartoony.

Since the choices for eyes, hairstyles, and mouths are deliberately limited by the software itself, I felt like it was necessary to select the second-ugliest chin possible. Does that make any sense? What I mean is, I feel like the software forced my hand in choosing a horrific, truly gnarly chin, but the avatar itself is all the better for it.

In the aforementioned Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud conveys himself as a simple cartoon dude wearing eyeglasses. “We don’t just observe the cartoon,” he writes, “we become it!” In the next frame of his comic, he draws himself unabashedly photorealistically. “Would you have listened to me,” his hyper-real avatar wonders, “if I looked like this?”

The moment is startling. But in the very next frame, he concludes—drawn again as his former, cartoonish self, with a speech bubble blooming above his head—“I doubt it! You would have been far too aware of the messenger to fully receive the message!”

McCloud’s point is significant: a meaningful avatar is one that is instantly relatable, if only because its identity is willfully indistinct.

Facing Your Manga

Because my MySpace user photo made use of ‘MySpace angles,’ it was almost less disingenuous to switch to a Face Your Manga avatar (at the time, it was all the rage on Twitter and Flickr). An ex-boyfriend witnessed the MySpace Avatar Switch and felt compelled to message me. “Your manga avatar,” he wrote, “is absolutely creepy.”

Dave, I absolutely agree. The manga software creator allows just enough variability for me to find my almost-actual facial features and hilariously uninspiring hair-do. But—and this is a big but—the creator does not allow so much variability that I will be permitted to choose another feature out of vanity. This seems important.

Instead, I will choose beady brown eyes, framed by eyeglasses and wickedly arched brows. I will choose plain hair, a smallish mouth with zero upper lip, a beaky nose, and a face shape allowing for just as much chin as possible. Ultimately, the outcome is as cartoonish as could possibly make me recognizable, without being so cartoonish that my avatar becomes gruesome.

AbiStudio Portrait Maker

I’m sorry. There is absolutely nothing I can say about the AbiStudio Portrait Illustration Maker (AKA “the one from Livejournal”). This could be a picture of anybody.

Anyway, I’ve only edited this paragraph in because I wanted everyone to see the crow shitting in a straight line.

The Simpsons, or, WTF?

Here is my Simpsons character.

Not too great, huh?

How am I supposed to superimpose my identity onto a standard Simpsons avatar? How should I depict my own ‘character’ on top of a Simpsons character?

Generally, and especially in this case, the shortest shortcut to my visual identity is hair. After all, the facial features will be Simpson-ized, so I have to rely on hair for my avatar’s identity.

No real offense intended, but it might be different for a man. His visual identity might be able to trade on sideburns, facial scruff, a mustache. He might give his Simpson avatar short hair, long hair, a curling ‘fro.

But this is the nearest I could find to my own hair, past or present, and the outcome is, for want of a better word, shrugging. By choosing the hairstyle nearest to my Self’s real-life hair, I have created an avatar identity that is distinctively faraway from my Self. It is distinctly indistinct.

Sure, using the Simpsons avatar as evidence of anything is unfair. The goal is to look, not like myself, after all, but like a Simpson. My pale flesh-colored skin is reinvented as pale yellow. I wear cartoon glasses, and I have a stylized overbite. Yet the implied humor of ‘Simpsonizing’ yourself using the flash avatar creator is, indeed, to create a vain ‘celebrity’ version of the Self as it would appear in a Simpsons episode. But especially for a woman, this motive seems unavailable. Why is that?

I Hair, Therefore I Am

In a recent blog entry (well, it was recent—editor), writer and indie game designer Auntie Pixelante explores the importance of Hair on female avatars.

Specifically, her blog looks at the changes in the hairstyles of Princess Toadstool and Princess Peach. Are they different people only because they have different hair colors? When clothing is stripped away—and indeed, in the case of fan-made pornography, Pixelante remarks, it is literally stripped away—hair color is the only discernible identity marker for Mario’s leading lady.

(Quick aside. Three seconds of research yielded the following: Princess Toadstool and Princess Peach are, in fact, the same person. -editor)

In her final paragraph, Miss Pixelante discusses iconography in a broader sense. She writes,

There was a time—those of us who are growing up with videogames as a given may not realize this—when the minute details of the appearance and identity of the characters who inhabit our videogames were not etched out and trademarked, and each of us had room to fill in the ambiguities between a character’s pixels. This is why I think projects like ‘i am 8-bit’ are so important: they reassert that each of us as players own an image of our favorite game’s characters that may be different than their author’s, because Nintendo doesn’t own our experiences. This is part of the reason why the cast of the ‘8-bit era’ resonates so much with us: because we define them, much more so than the talking, hyper-detailed characters of so many contemporary games.

I do not mean to miscommunicate her intent by publishing just this paragraph, but it is this paragraph that coincides most with Scott McCloud’s writings on cartooning and caricature. With a cartoon, and especially an 8-bit one, we are able to superimpose our own intent onto the blank slate character we are shown.

On the subject of hair, and for Auntie Pixelante’s aforementioned blog post, I remarked:

There was an online game-project, three or four years ago, that was all about word association. You were shown an image, or photograph, or graphic, and you needed to type the words that came to mind. Your goal was to type the same words you thought everyone else had assigned to each image.

Of course, the project was not a game at all—the idea was to get real humans to tag photos and make them human-searchable rather than robo-searchable. Here’s what they found out instead: any time somebody saw a photograph of a woman—any woman!—they would type “hair.” It is, especially for a man, the most salient thing about a woman’s appearance. It immediately and conveniently simplifies her visual identity down into an icon.

More broadly, though, I think we do the same with race, eyeglasses, wheelchairs, braces. I am not sure what this means.

I know for sure that Miss Pixelante is onto something. Otherwise my avatars would not rely on out-of-date hair for their identities.

Edit, five months later: over here.

Will it never end? Is there no respite? The disjointed ruminations will, we hope, come to a close in Avatars, part III of III.

Related posts:

1. Avatars, part I of III: Caricature
2. Video Game Feminist of the Decade: or, when “You” is a girl
3. Identity in Second Life: part one

My Second Life avatar is sitting in my stead, attending the fourth-ever Living Game Worlds symposium, streaming live from Georgia Tech. And right now, Raph Koster is speaking. The symposium focuses on the interplay between, and I quote, “multiplayer games and virtual worlds.”

You too can attend Living Game Worlds via Second Life (fitting!), if only you click here. Of course, if you wouldn’t be caught dead in Second Life, you may also participate by opening the live streaming video in one window and keeping IRC open in the other.

I think I want to talk more about this soon, but right now I’m really just enjoying it.

edit: It’s over! Until tomorrow.

What’s really neat is, the IRC channel and the theater in Second Life are ‘bridged,’ so that everything the kids say in IRC pop into Second Life, and at the same time, Second Life users appear as users in the chat room. Neato.

Related posts:

1. Identity in Second Life: part one

But, writes blogger Akela Talamasca, “none of these games [Cosmology of Kyoto, Phantasmagoria, Silent Hill] left me with that nearly indefinable feeling of having experienced true horror, the kind that calls into question your perceptions and expectations of what it means to truly be alive, and how tenuous your existence might be. In fact, what these games trade on is their ability to startle, not scare.”

Talamasca concludes that true horror “rarely exists in video games: the player is almost never truly helpless.” I think I agree, except that I’ve gone a step further and specified that true horror is almost always unfair.

Why aren’t horror games frightening? Talamasca pares the goals of horror, as a genre, and the goals of gaming, as a medium, down to the basics.

First, there is the problem of agency. Talamasca writes, ”[T]he point of a video game is to make you feel heroic. ...Simply giving the player control over his destiny removes most of what makes horror so effective.”

But there is another problem with horror gaming, and that is the very object of the game. Talamasca continues,

Thematically, horror operates at a different level than its cousins in genre. The goal in an action movie is to defeat the villain. The goal in a science fiction movie is to solve the problem. The goal in a fantasy movie is to realize your true potential. The goal in a horror movie is to survive. And while survival under extreme conditions in reality is heroic, for a video game, there must be more.

Must there be more? Titles like Siren and Fatal Frame are evidence that pure horror games needn’t be complicated with tacked-on combat objectives: trying to survive is quite enough, thanks. But in the case of Cosmology of Kyoto—an extremely eerie game—there is no real plot or goal at all.

While my own contributions here are, again, a complete retread of what I’ve blogged before, I find myself wondering anew what the real horror ‘X Factor’ is.

Of course I still believe that, in horror games, survival is goal enough, and that helplessness and a lack of agency are crucial. I believe that combat mechanics should be, by necessity, absent. I think puzzle or adventure elements should be, by necessity, present. And again, I believe in unfairness (in the case of Kyoto, encounters with ghosts and demons are often random, sudden, inescapable).

But there must be something else. What is it?

• Big Download – Big Ideas: Why horror games are so rarely scary (via)

Related posts:

1. How to save survival horror
2. Siren: Blood Curse! Or, how to make your game appeal to an American audience

Annoyingly, Lee K. Abbott was not wrong. There are stories we tell that are very deliberately ‘unfair’; it is now obvious to me that Abbott is not a fan of horror.

In the horror genre, and especially in Japanese horror, real fear comes from the thrill of discovery. And Japanese horror itself takes a cue from, not just the principles of Asian cinema and plotting, but also the very distinctly Japanese design philosophy. Japanese design is less about agency, and more about uncovering a plot. Lee K. Abbot would be furious with it.

Recently Leigh Alexander published this intriguing feature at Kotaku, about the history of survival horror. Apart from being an excellent overview of the genre, it wisely compares Western and Japanese game design philosophies. Most importantly, Alexander asks this question: does survival horror still exist? She writes,

Don’t Fight, Just Run! Titles like these all have distinct differences, of course, but they all tend to have a few traits in common. First, they largely de-prioritize combat mechanics, favoring challenging the player through elements like on-location puzzles, mazelike game areas, using the environment itself against enemies, and even fleeing and hiding instead of direct combat.

It’s true. Alexander names Siren and Fatal Frame as two of the finest examples of using vulnerability to create horror and panic. In the Fatal Frame canon, you do not use weapons or ‘defeat’ anything, per se—rather, you are a young woman wielding a camera.

The original Siren for PS2 is, to my mind, the very best survival horror title around. In it, combat is really not an option. You are weak, ill-equipped, and outnumbered by creatures too smart—and in a way, too emotive—to be called zombies. Also, the game is hard. Super hard. Is it frightening? You betcha. And this point counts for a lot: the goal is not to ‘beat’ adversaries and win. The goal is to keep them from approaching you. In short, the goal is literally to be a survivor which, to use modern reality TV parlance, means to “outwit” and “outlast.”

The new Siren for PS3 is very, very good, too. But what disappointed me about it was, in its quest for accessibility and a broader audience, it allows melee combat. It’s still a frightening game—you can knock shibito down, but they eventually stagger to their feet again—but it absolutely lessens the emphasis on your goals to “outwit” and “outlast”. It is still a game that basically occurs “on rails,” and a lot of the sequences are horrifying, scripted affairs. But characters have so much more agency, and in this regard the game itself feels distinctly Westernized. It is fitting, then, that the game is called, in Japan, Siren: New Translation.

Lee K. Abbott, the fiction professor I never liked, is correct when he says that, when uncovering a mystery plot, this very process is “unfair.” The more unfair the plot—the more switcheroos there are to uncover, the more work you as reader or gamer are given—the more stressful and thrilling the plot potentially becomes. In video games, the very same is true of actual gameplay elements.

So great horror isn’t just about vulnerability, the shower scenes, the being caught unawares. It is also about unfairness—that which is seemingly insurmountable. In the original Nightmare on Elm Street, the heroine is trapped inside a living nightmare, knowing that she has to keep herself from falling asleep. Because she is the last character standing, she earns the big ending: she earns her right to agency, subsequently standing off with Freddy Kreuger in only the film’s final act. Or in a plodding thriller like Alien, Ellen Ripley—initially little more than a supporting character—is victorious because, seemingly by chance and luck rather than intellect and skill, she outlasts the other characters. Her final act, too, is a standoff against the titular, otherly adversary. She earns her one moment of agency, and so lives on to see too many sequels.

What else makes a game unfair? Survival horror fans and detractors all have long held that a lot of the genre’s fear factor comes from willfully hobbled game design: bad controls, shifting and twitchy camera angles, and limited perspective all turn an ordinary suspense game into a thrilling challenge. Crippled design, I would argue, also cripples the main character’s agency. At the very least, the design is unfair.

And as technology has improved, it follows that survival horror has atrophied. The greatest survival horror game in recent memory, Resident Evil 4, is a technological wonder, with marvelously fair, skill-based controls. But is it survival horror? While at times your main character’s survival is absolutely in question, he has a lot of agency and more than a handful of passing allies. What’s the difference between this game and any other third-person shooter?

In many ways, I’d venture, we aren’t patient enough for survival horror anymore. A lot of Siren was waiting and sneaking. So many examples of survival horror use extreme resource management—perpetually low ammo, too few health power-ups—to generate a real sense of vulnerability and a false sense of panic. Even modern horror cinema, with the exception of Japanese entries like Ring, needs character agency to seem alive and action-packed to its audiences. The semi-recent Land of the Dead movie, which I have dismally named “zombie Blade Runner,” imbues not just its human characters with a sense of agency, but even the zombies. Ugh.

We aren’t patient enough for slow, strict survival horror play anymore. Survival horror is, albeit arguably, one of the last vestiges of the semi-dead genre of adventure gaming, itself a genre that demands a long attention span and a high threshold for intellectual and emotional pain. The once-revelatory, now-torturous adventure genre has been called, even by its onetime proponents, unforgiving and unfair. No surprise there.

Adventure gaming isn’t dead, by any stretch. Newer consoles with very limited hardware, like the DS, lend themselves to scripted, plot-driven point-and-click affairs with a distinctly classic adventure flavor. Other games, like the glorious Psychonauts, have simply evolved the adventure game template to suit modern gamers’ tastes (and attention spans), adopting gameplay elements once reserved for other game genres.

What will keep survival horror alive in the US mainstream, then, is its own adoption and adaptation of popular game mechanics like shooting, running, and off-the-rail ‘sandbox’ environments. But what will keep survival horror ‘true’ and ‘classic’? How to recapture that old-fashioned ‘unfairness’?

I’d wager that classic horror will soon rely on exactly what adventure games and 2D sidescrollers have long used as floatation devices: deliberately hobbled technology and, of course, limited storage spaces. When better technologies are available, these media are the ultimate in unfairness.

For example: Although Siren for PS3 was a disc-based game abroad, on North American shores, a lot of its appeal came from its episodic gameplay, which was made available only as exclusive, downloadable content. Sure, it took ten years to download wirelessly to a PS3’s hard drive, and it takes up a whole lot of HDD space, but by god, it is downloadable.

And some developers have gone even further, attempting to produce original (and not so original) survival horror for the Nintendo DS, despite that idea’s laughability. Still, no matter their creators’ best efforts and general sense of goodwill, most portable survival horror entries have been duds. (One or two horror games planned for the DS, though, continue to generate interest.)

But in the case of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse—which most bloggers have taken to simply calling “Fatal Frame Wii”—the very idea of bringing the beloved franchise to a wimpy console with notoriously imprecise infrared controls has driven genre enthusiasm to a fever pitch.

But will this plan to reinvigorate interest in the survival horror genre work? Only time will tell.

Related posts:

1. No, but seriously, what makes a horror game scary?
2. Siren: Blood Curse! Or, how to make your game appeal to an American audience
3. Takashi Shimizu’s ‘Feel’ gets a trailer

The bitGenerations series of games were high concept/low-bit carts for Game Boy Advance, released only in Japan, in 2006 or so. Each bitGenerations game is essentially a tiny, playable art installation with a retro bent.

Including Orbital, I own three bitGenerations titles, which I play exclusively on my Game Boy Micro. This is to say, I don’t play anything else on my Micro; I only play these three bitGenerations games on it.

Stranger still, I’ve never played a bitGenerations game on my DS, my GBA SP, or even on my Game Boy Player. I think this is because at some point I read, somewhere (God knows where), that the bitGenerations games were specifically created to better market the Micro. I believe it. To me, GBAs are decidedly SNESy little 16-bit handhelds. My Micro, however, is disguised as a Famicom; therefore, only 8-bit games will suit it.

Of the three titles I own, Dotstream has the best music. It’s chippy and forceful. Dotstream is a racing game, except that each of the racers is just a pulsing line, sort of like a heartbeat.

There’s Soundvoyager, which Kohler gave me. I don’t remember his logic in gifting it to me, exactly, but it had something to do with how we are each deaf in one ear, which in turn makes the game nearly impossible to play.

Not least, there is Orbital, my favorite.

I bought it from Pink Godzilla during PAX 06. Initially, I was so frustrated by it. There are no instructions. You realize that your D-pad does nothing; one button pulls you toward astronomical bodies, and the other repels. So you can’t really control your course absolutely, you can’t completely direct what happens to you: you only float, and tug at your path, and the path is really governed by the context of the bodies that surround you. It is a perfect metaphor.

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The simplicity of the game is a deception, of course. It is possible to become very good at it, at moving decisively toward a goal and gaily colliding into it. In fact, Orbital is addictive because, as with Lumines or Tetris, you can feel yourself getting better at it. There is the slow realization that, with a patient hand, you have control over your course and your destiny. It is zenlike.

Here is the goal of the game: you are a particle of space dust, just a little grey speck, and you want to grow. So you collide into smaller planetary bodies and consume them, adding them to your sum total. You become larger and more meaningful, until you are finally large enough to draw the sun into your orbit. That victory marks the end of a stage. So I guess it’s like Katamari Damacy, but with fewer cats and candies.

As you grow, you also add smaller planets to your orbit. In the game, the sounds begin as mere cosmic ambiance, but as you add planets to your orbit, layers of aural complexity reflect your progress. In that way, the sound and music in Orbital is the best of bitGenerations. You can hear yourself becoming faceted and beautiful.

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I’ve compared. In Orbient—that’s today’s WiiWare downloadable—the sound effects and music are just like Orbital’s, mostly, if somewhat less chippy. The sound of actually moving is a little bit different—it sounds a little bit like if you were able to adjust a radio frequency inside of Galaga. Also, I count only 30 levels in the original Orbital; Siliconera reports that Orbient boasts 50 levels.

Orbient is, in many ways, an improvement. Moving your space particle around seems maybe a little easier, less frustrating and more focused. The Wii remote suits Orbient’s design perfectly, too, and movement is intuitive. Bringing your thumb down on the big face button draws you closer to planets; depressing the trigger button underneath the remote pushes you farther away. The buttons seem especially responsive to pressure, in a way the original Orbital controls perhaps weren’t. You can push yourself away from a planet, and you can push harder.

It was difficult for me, in a way, to acclimate to seeing such (comparatively) pretty graphics, and on a (comparatively) big screen. You’ll remember, when I began this whole reverie, that I said I’ve avoided playing Orbital on any screen larger than a nicotine patch. Remember, the Micro has a playscreen about the size of the face of a men’s wristwatch. Seeing Orbient on my bigscreen television—de-de-rezzed—absolutely struck me down.

But the updated graphics are not, to me, an improvement. Little pathways and trajectories illuminate onscreen, where their implication ought to have been enough. Instead of abstraction, this time things are carefully demarcated.

Worst of all… there is a tutorial. I cannot believe how much I wanted instructions in 2006, and how much I hate the tutorial now. I understand that, without a tutorial, Orbient could be too alien, too inaccessible. But to me—and I am comparing Orbient against Orbital and to my own revelatory zen-rock-garden experience with it, of course—Orbient is almost too clear-cut. It is—I am sorry I am such a snot!—fitted too carefully for a new, broader audience.

There! I said it! I’m terrible!

Dear Diary, I know this is absolutely the snottiest thing I’ve ever written. I also know that, if I were playing Orbient/Orbital for the first time, here on my living room sofa instead of on an airplane, I would become completely frustrated without instructions, hitting the directional pad in a fury. If I couldn’t understand the dynamics of the game in the first three minutes, I’d probably quit it.

I’d written this much, and stopped. I suspect my bias has to do with this: I played Orbital for the first time on a plane, trying to forget that I am scared of flying. It made me forget.

Maybe it has everything to do with which game you play first.

So at this point, I asked a friend to play Orbient, then Orbital afterward. Of Orbital, he said simply, “This one is way too hard.” I suspected so. To be honest, he didn’t really seem to like it. But awhile later, he said: “It’s tougher. But I think… it’s prettier.” In the original Orbital, your movement is more about duration of button-pressing; in Orbient, it has to do with pressure, too. But both games are beautiful and tactile. “I really like both, in different ways,” my friend concluded.

I am conflicted. Making Orbital available, as Orbient, is wonderful—I hope everyone will give it a little time and realize how engaging, even emotionally affecting, this game is. I love that, as Orbient, the game is less frustrating and, by all mainstream aesthetics, prettier, in a way.

I can’t shake the idea that the original Orbital is the more elegant game. If you can find a copy, you might love it, and if not, big deal! I can’t wait to see what your mom, sisters, and friends think of Orbient.

Orbient is available now for 600 Wii Points, which comes to about US$6. Which means, even if you like Orbital a little bit more, Orbient is by far the better buy.

• Siliconera – Nintendo’s Art Style Is Bit Generations For WiiWare?

• 4 color rebellion – Import Worthy – bit Generations: Dotstream/Orbital

Amazon gives the book’s description thusly:

With both young and adult gamers as loyal fans, The Legend of Zelda is one of the most beloved video game series ever created. The contributors to this volume consider the following questions and more: What is the nature of the gamer’s connection to Link? Does Link have a will, or do gamers project their wills onto him? How does the gamer experience the game? Do the rules of logic apply in the game world? How is space created and distributed in Hyrule (the fictional land in which the game takes place)? How does time function? Is Zelda art?

Ugh. If these musings are any indication as to the content of the upcoming book, count me out. It will sell thousands of copies while real philosophy languishes on the shelves of your library. I’m not saying video games aren’t fertile ground for philosophic discussion, this one just seems…a bit surfacey.

The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy is scheduled to hit booksellers in late November.

• 61 Frames Per Second – Philosophy? In my Zelda?

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1. Game Feel: a Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation
2. Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, July 07, 2010

A coworker was suspicious. “Is this so you can play Geometry Wars at home?” he asked.

I glowered. “Yes,” I said quietly.

In short, I own a 360 so’s to download things.

Last Wednesday, Crayon Physics creator Petri Purho announced he had purchased a 360 specifically so he could buy and play Braid. Is there any more glowing a compliment?

Yes, there is. Earlier in the day, Purho wrote:

...[A]fter playing the game I got somewhat depressed because of it. So if you’re an aspiring game designer and you think you know something about game design, don’t play this game. You will get depressed, sad, and fanboyish towards [lead designer] Jonathan [Blow].

• Kloonigames – number_of_xboxes_bought_because_of_braid++
• Kloonigames – Braid
• See also: David Hellman .net – Braid

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1. Kloonigames: 24 months, 24 games
2. Digital Download Korner: 10 games for your MacBook
3. Purho’s latest still shrouded in mysteriousness

All told, the series took about a month to write—pretty good, considering Ray put it together in his scant free time. I’ve been following his blogs closely.

Midway through, I asked Ray whether he were going to create an index page for the finished product. “Eventually,” he said. And true to his word, here’s the index of all 25 Famicom write-ups.

“As a final gift for all of you who kept up,” Ray writes at his official personal work blog, “I put up a Muxtape of Famicom remixes and arrangements, picked from my own collection.”

Orchestral arrangements of NES-era compositions get me a little weepy (and electronica covers get me jazzercising!), so if you ask me, Ray’s Muxtape is the best part of the whole deal. My favorite track is the ukulele cover of the Kid Icarus theme.

• Ray Barnholt’s 1UP Page – 25 Sorta Significant Famicom Games: The Index
• Muxtape – 25 Years of Famicom, Remixed

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1. LTTP: Mega Man 9 theme music on ukulele
2. Famicom cart customizations
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To clarify, Siren: Blood Curse and Siren: New Translation are the same game. Much of Siren: New Translation, the Japanese version of the game, is in English, since its main characters are from the United States. The game is subtitled in Japanese.

The original Siren is easily the most frightening game I’ve ever tried to play. Originally released for the PlayStation 2, it had impressive graphics for the time. The face-mapping seems comically dated now—photo-realistic faces are grafted onto subpar models—but in 2004, the uncannily human adversaries were positively shit-yourself terrifying. Wikipedia explains:

Rather than employ traditional facial animation methods with polygons, images of real human faces were captured from eight different angles and superimposed on the character models. This eerie effect is similar to projecting film onto the blank face of a mannequin.

Siren was, above all, a stealth game—you had to slip past the zombie-like shibito undetected—and in that regard, its utter lack of combat broke the survival-horror mold. In terms of plot, the subsequent Capcom title Resident Evil 4 owes a lot of its essence to Siren: these villagers aren’t exactly zombies, and good luck with solving the village mystery! But Siren more closely resembles the original Silent Hill. No surprise there; the two games share the same director, after all.

Although it is remembered as arguably the scariest game for PS2, and although the game received generally favorable press, Siren never quite achieved commercial success here in the United States. It didn’t help that the game was notoriously difficult. Worse, the controls were fairly complicated, a bit much to master from the get-go. In some ways, the troublesome controls deepened the fear factor—a lot of survival horror, the Retronauts crew once agreed, relies on the sense of helpless panic only mushy controls and a crippled camera can bring. Siren’s gameplay innovations—and its unyielding commitment to those design choices—made it tough for anyone but a totally dedicated survival horror buff to play the game from start to finish.

Siren: Blood Curse is not a wholly unique work. Rather, it attempts to rework the original Siren plotline into a more navigable, accessible game experience. And although Blood Curse is being released to multiple markets, including Japan’s, I think it’s safe to say this revision largely targets gamers in North America. The original Siren lacked any real combat; in Blood Curse, you can creep up to the shibito and brutalize them from behind. Incorporating more action makes Blood Curse, well, not breakneck, exactly, but surely not as plodding and ponderous as its original incarnation was. But in playing through the demo, it’s clear that Blood Curse disposes of the very patient puzzle gameplay that made the original Siren (and its Japan-only sequel**) so frightening.

The storyline in the original Siren game—a disjointed, cinematic narrative, revealed in out-of-sequence ‘missions’ and cutscenes—relied on a lot of Japanese mythology and urban legend, rather like the Fatal Frame games or the Japanese horror movie Ring. Many of Siren’s protagonists were residents of the cursed island village, too young to know of their town’s macabre history.

To appeal to a broader (read: Western) audience, Siren: Blood Curse takes what I call The Grudge approach. This is to say, the game centers on a new set of protagonists, this time an American film crew (oh god; in Japanese horror cinema, it’s always a film crew), and these English-speakers are essentially hot-dropped into the middle of the horror.

As a J-horror cinephile, I’ve long found this ‘remake’ method interesting. The United States is a very young country, of course, so it might be more difficult for its residents to understand concepts like ancient, mythological, or provincial evils. But setting the action of the story anywhere but a remote Japanese village would deny the original plot of its evil-spanning-the-ages gravitas (although, to be completely fair, the U.S. remake of Ring did a fantastic job of recasting the story in a remote village near Seattle). The only shortcut, then, is to make the horror more foreign, more alien than it already is, by making the protagonists not just outsiders, but also Americans—and therefore, I suppose, immediately relatable.

Blood Curse takes some other cues from The Grudge, the Sam Raimi -funded U.S. localization of Takashi Shimizu’s seminal ghost movies. For one, the narrative of Blood Curse looks to be more streamlined, rather than out-of-sequence. The U.S. version of The Grudge was similarly adapted—Ju-on: the Grudge’s overcomplicated timeline was actually crucial to the plot, albeit difficult for short attention spans—though, to The Grudge’s credit, the movie alluded the whole space-time interplay at the plot’s most crucial moments.

The Grudge also combined story elements and ‘scare scenes’ not only from Ju-on: the Grudge, but also from Ju-on: the Curse, Shimizu’s excellent direct-to-video prequel. In Blood Curse’s downloadable demo, the protagonists roam through mine shafts and are pursued by zombie coal miners: given that this is a huge part of Siren 2’s plot, I suspect that the two Siren games have been combined into one superstory. If this is true, it’s actually a very nice touch, as the Siren sequel never enjoyed a release outside of Japan.

It’s true that I haven’t yet played the game beyond the download, but I have my reservations about Blood Curse. After all, ‘catering’ to a broader audience is just that. Patient, difficult gameplay might have a very niche audience, but it does have an audience. I would admit to being a purist and a snob, except for one little truth: for all its attempts to be translated into a product a broader world market might enjoy, The Grudge was not the better movie.

There are definitely aspects of the original game that Siren: Blood Curse gets right. You’re still hobbled by maybe-I-should-adjust-my-televsion depths of darkness. Your third-person vantage is also somewhat limited by your absolutely enormous character model, so much so that it’s sometimes difficult to see what you’re running from, or toward. These aren’t exactly snipes—I’m a huge fan of the survival horror genre and form, and I really do think these design quirks contribute to feelings of fear and disorientation, even though they sideline tighter gameplay.

And because Blood Curse is much simpler, the controls aren’t quite the nightmare they were. The characters’ facial expressions are top-notch. And most importantly—beat on them with pickaxes as you may—most of the shibito still don’t die. There is nothing so frightening as watching in dumb horror while a recently-felled zombie slowly staggers to his feet again.

I do think that, in yielding to Western tastes, game developers (and filmmakers!) should use caution—it seems such a shame to lose anything in translation. No matter what my concerns, I will be front and center when the game goes live on the Playstation Store today—hopefully, Siren: Blood Curse doesn’t tamper with the series’ template too much.

Siren: Blood Curse is available as a single US$40 download. You can also purchase missions in bundled sets of three.

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1. How to save survival horror
2. Takashi Shimizu’s ‘Feel’ gets a trailer
3. No, but seriously, what makes a horror game scary?

Completing a game with the aid of infinite lives—even if the means of achieving those lives were made available by the original programmers—is, by definition, cheating. -Why Do We Cheat?

I’d been trolling 61 Frames Per Second, a rather young games blog, for posts by my friend Nadia Oxford. And via this post, I arrived at her recent article, Why Do We Cheat? It isn’t only a history of cheating-in-games; it is a rumination on cheating’s wherefores. After all, everybody cheats.

From the article’s introduction:

Every game has rules and a means of breaking those rules. Videogames, which are among the most complex games on the planet, feature suitably complex means of cheating. There are in-game codes, hacks, mods, code-altering devices, algorithms, walkthroughs, and many other means of breaking down a game in order to do what you’re not supposed to do.

We agreed that Sharkey had a real talent, itself fueled by some innate and unstoppable curiosity. I’m convinced, now, that creative play and destructive play are alike. Really living in a virtual world to its fullest requires, to some extent, breaking it. (Sharkey once inadvertently discovered a problem that, if exploited, would have ruined an entire virtual world’s in-game economy; he rushed to inform the game’s developers.)

Easter eggs, exploitable game errors, patches of code that can turn clothed avatars into a nudie beach: these are all magical, somehow. I remember, in my childhood, attempting to outguess the Game Genie. There was already the requisite book of codes I’d refer to—the book itself was a source of awe, an 8-bit spellbook. And I’d locate an invincibility code, then enter it into a similar game, just to see whether it would work. My memory might be playing tricks on me, but I feel like sometimes it did work. Maybe it didn’t.

I like game modifications—those bits of code that users have added later, usually without permission—because they are like those cheats we employ in everyday life. Who doesn’t reappropriate his POM Tea glasses? Who doesn’t know how to jostle the keys in the lock of the front door just so? Or how to clean the apartment windows with newspaper and vinegar? There are people who resolder old toys or use programs on Game Boys to make strange, new music. By cheating ordinary objects of their original purposes, people can give them new purposes.

But back to videogames.

Are cheats as interesting as they used to be? Even with the Game Genie, the codes were long, and they were difficult to enter, and they seemed a little mystical and arbitrary and accidental. Ten years ago, cheating in a PC game often meant slipping into the developer’s debug console to enter new commands. And all these lines of code that were meant to be hidden would rise to the surface, trilling down the monitor. Perhaps the real magic of a cheat or ruined boundary is seeing the insides of a game all splayed out.

So much of the magic is gone: for maximum firepower, I might enter the secret passcode “Rambo,” for instance. The codes aren’t accidental anymore, because a game developer has already prepared the cheat codes for me. Cheats are magical only when a legitimate secret is uncovered. What I call a “cheat” no longer necessarily denotes a broken rule. What happened?

Have we become too impatient for game cheats? Maybe we’ve become neurologically rewired; we’ve become too impatient to deconstruct games the way we once did. Even when I owned hint books for Sierra adventure games, I could stop myself from peeking into them—each book was a big red button, the last-ditch walkthrough. Now, when faced with a problem, I tire early in. “Someone’s already figured this one out,” I think to myself a little sadly. “Someone’s already beaten this puzzle.”

Why do we cheat, anyway? I have resolved that there are two kinds of cheats. (This may well be a cop-out.)

There’s the kind of cheating that is, essentially, giving in to the game. When I turn to a walkthrough, I am succumbing. I have been beaten. There is a secret to the game, and I don’t trust myself to find it. I cannot outguess the game’s design. The internet has facilitated this brand of premature hopelessness, so although this type of cheat has always existed, I nonetheless think of it as the Modern Cheat.

Then there is this cheat’s polar opposite; for the purposes of this blog, I’ve called it the Magical Cheat. This rule-breaking involves genuine play, and it recasts the videogame as a different kind of playground. Cheating isn’t “giving in” at all; it is defiant! There must be a secret to the game, a wizard behind the curtain! With ‘magical cheating’, a childlike pioneer learns the thrill of discovery. A third of the discovery is trial-and-error. A third of it is genius, or patience. And a third is happenstance—that’s the word pragmatists use for “magic.” This kind of cheat is as much about seizing control of the game, I think, as it is about chance. It is, in every way, off-the-rails.

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Two years ago, independent game designer Steve Swink wrote an essay, an amazing, brilliant manifesto titled “Principles of Virtual Sensation.” In this design primer, Swink lists the tenets of movement and animation, and how these principles correspond to virtual sensation, which in turn makes for what Swink simply calls “good-feeling gameplay.” But what is virtual sensation? Swink explains:

Driving a car, you have a very strong sense of the position of that car, the feel of steering and controlling it, of mastery. This is the ability that every person who’s ever learned to drive a car has: the ability to extend precise control over something outside your body. There is a great amount of pleasure in the learning and eventual mastery of such a motion translation. [...] Many people also find this pleasure in video games, where it is both distilled to its essence and free of the constraints and dangers of more physical activities. You can change the turning radius of a car, but you can’t change gravity. This experience of control is derived from an artificial kinesthesia. This is the ‘feel’ of the game, the thing that makes your mom lean left and right in her seat as she tries to play Rad Racer.

If Swink’s essay leaves you wanting more, don’t worry!

Game Feel: a Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation is over 300 pages of game design philosophy, with plenty of insights from Swink’s indie design peers. (Incidentally, Phil Fish of Fez designed Game Feel’s cover jacket.)

Game Feel drops this October.

• Amazon preorder – Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation
• Steve Swink – “Principles of Virtual Sensation”
• Via

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