Going into E3 I wanted to see only a few things: Beyond Good and Evil 2, The Last Guardian, Dragon Age 2, Mirror’s Edge 2 and anything that hadn’t already been announced. That last one is a little innocuous, because with the exception of The Last Guardian, none of the others on my list have been announced. Well I was heavily disappointed. (You have till TGS to make it up to me.)

Other than great unity that I felt with the twitterverse during the Press Conferences I got two things. One was the announcement of the next project from the studio ThatGameCompany. Journey is visually minimalistic like their other games and because of that strikes my imagination. WE don’t know what it’s about or have even seen any video of it being played. And yet I’m more excited about it than any of the over a dozen shooters put on display.

The other thing this E3 did for me was convince me it might be time to get a Wii in the near future. The number of games I actually want to play on it has reached my threshold to make it worth it. It helps that it can play Gamecube games like Wind Waker and Eternal Darkness. With Epic Mickey, Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 007 remake on the horizon and games (now much cheaper) like No More Heroes, Lost Winds, Zach and Wiki, Lost Winds, and Little King’s Story. I think I may have reached critical mass of quality games I want to play on the system. Good thing I waited until a time when the Wii now does what it was always supposed to.

I think a major blocking point of the system is how much it relies on nostalgia to market their games or at least get gamers to care about them. I have never played a Zelda, Metroid, Kirby, or really a Mario game for any decent length of time. So I have never cared about these franchises based on their name value and that is the only way they have ever been sold to me. I recognize them as great, but I can’t get excited about them. In fact I’ve had to wait for there to be enough non Nintendo franchise games on the system for me to start caring.

Actually going back to the Nintendo Conference nearly all their announced games relied on nostalgia to sell them to us. Plenty of people got excited about them, amazing so. I couldn’t understand it, until they revealed Goldeneye; I was tearing up. That’s great for those have been on the bandwagon the whole time, but what about us that might be interested, but have been with the non-Nintendo systems through their lives.

I didn’t mean to go on. So that’s it. E3, the biggest week in gaming, gave me Journey, a downloadable title for 2011 and seriously considering getting a Wii buying most of the games used.

Note: I am not excited about inFamous 2, more curious and not because of E3, but because of my posts.

So here we go.

Streets of Rage 2 – Sega Genesis – 1992

This was the first console title I ever owned for the first console I ever owned. It came packaged in and as soon as I opened it I plugged it in and immediately began playing. I remember on my first try though I picked Max, because he was the toughest and buffest looking character of the choices. I got the three-button control scheme pretty quickly and soon succumbed to a Game Over screen before I had even beaten the first section of the first level. My next major memory of the game was in co-op and how a friend and I learned the lesson of friendly fire and collateral damage. We divided up the screen; he would take the top and I would take the bottom. We also divided the health and money as evenly as the game would allow. We could never agree on weapons if there was only one. Finally my last major memory of that era was late one Sunday evening when I finally made it to the 8th stage again and after much effort and bad beats I finally finished off the last boss and got that stage clear. I cheered and hollered and jumped up and down. After the closing cut scenes and credits I was presented with the top scores board and then the Press Start to Play screen.

A while back I located, setup and plugged in that game and found none of it had left me. I still understood the tricks to beating certain bosses. I still remembered the timing to do infinite punches and most importantly I still remembered where most of the secret 1up items were. There are few games I know as well as I know Streets of Rage 2. Thanks to the Genesis collection I can play it whenever I want and in HD. I get excited whenever I hear the “dun dun duh duh de dun duhh eh eh” 80s style riff of the opening level.

In looking back what I find interesting was my initial reaction to the game. Or rather how I responded to what it presented me. The opening that sets the scene is done in showing a pixilated NYCish city in the background and a text scrawl that is the story ala Star Wars. It ends with an evil mastermind’s face and hands appearing like a puppet master over the city. I ignored the text. I ignored the story. I had no idea what was going on and who I was. All I knew I learned from the gameplay. I was the good guy and everyone else was the bad guy. That’s all you really need to know as the entire game plays out like an extended final fight scene in an 80s action movie with all the first and second acts that would take up screen time done in the opening crawl. Later play-throughs I would skip that text crawl section entirely, until I beat the game that first time. The next time I sat down to play I stopped and read the whole thing. I didn’t fully understand, I was 8, but I actually cared about the story after having seen the ending and wondering who that extra character was they rescued. I saw the resolution and then I wanted to know exactly what was resolved. Even as fantastical and unbelievable the story sometimes seemed to be getting, the details in setting forced the player to fill in the blanks about what was going on. More than any other game Streets of Rage 2 introduced me to the concept of video games as a narrative medium. I didn’t understand it like that back in, but from then on I always wanted to know why I could or was doing something rather than just what could I do.

Goldeneye – N64 – 1997

Arguably the best movie to video game adaptation ever made, this set the original standard for FPSs on the consoles and where nearly all of my video game hours during middle school went. I beat the game on easy and then spent years trying to beat the levels on the higher difficulties. I would use the train level as others use a stress ball after a bad day at school. However, that is not where most of my time went. Most of it went to the multiplayer. Because of its multiplayer this is probably the game I have sunk more hours into than any other. Three friends and myself would all sit in front of the same screen shooting the hell out of each other at my house, at a friend’s house or at the local youth center. I like many others got the N64 blister working that analog stick.

Many games have had same screen multiplayer. What did I gain from this one in particular? I could call it a version of emergent storytelling. The same four people would play over and over. Eventually we developed favorite levels and favorite weapon stocks.  Soon we found our favorite match: proximity mines in the Aztec Temple with no time or kill limit. Beyond that we began choosing the same avatars and for every kill some of us supplied our own catch phrases. “I spit on your corpse” and “I am the lion in the jungle” were two of them. We had our own personalities in these death matches. We never got bored of playing essentially the same match over and over, because it would never be the same match.

The moment that remains in my mind to this day is where the game had been going on for a long time; I’d like to say an hour or so. The entire map has been littered with mines and if the game had destructible environments it would not be standing anymore. I stocked up on proximity mines in the large upper hall, planted a few more around and then realized I could not move without dying. I couldn’t go forward because of the mines I just planted and I couldn’t go backwards because of mines planted by others maybe 20 minutes ago. I saw one of the doors open on the far side and silently said ‘no.’ He entered and was instantly killed by the explosion. That explosion was followed by another and another and another. He had set off a chain reaction that crossed the entire hall. Just before it hit me I tried to escape and died a fiery death. That sort of thing cannot be planned and have the same effect. We were amazed and then kept on playing.

Yes the game’s graphics don’t hold up that well, but it was a milestone and everything else about the game does. Last year my friends and I went back to the game and dumped a few more hours into it. We tried a few new modes and weapons. It was still as good and as fun as ever.

Baldur’s Gate – PC – 1998

This is the grand daddy of them all. This is my all-time favorite game. It is also the best video game RPG ever made. But this about influence not quality. I dumped a lot of hours into this game as well, the big difference being that I’ve never beaten it, nor even come close. The game has so much content that I had to go off the beaten path and explore every section into the farthest wiles and deepest depths of danger and death. I went to the absolute limits of the map boarders. I went through every nook and cranny exploring every part of every map. I would uncover dangers I could not handle, run away or reload and come back, when I was ready so I could continue. This is the first video game to create such a complete world, one that seems to live and breath with so many unique characters. Even the repeatable no name citizens seem to adequately fill the world. What I love is unlike so many others are that the story allows such exploration. There is no immanent end of the world. The story is epic, but it is very personal. People are after you and you have to hide from them/fight them. Only you and your party care and some of the party members don’t even care about you and are there just for their own agendas. No one else in this world is invested in you. They have their own problem and their own lives. There are also references to an even wider world that extends the very large boarders of the world to locals like Amn, Waterdeep and Neverwinter. I was pulled into this world like no other game before it.

In part I think it may have to do that the game is based of the Forgotten Realms campaign world. The Sword Coast was already heavily detailed and much of the history, culture, and important world building were already in place. The game took the license and did everything it could to it. Over the years I had to restart the game due to bad saving choices, computer changes and faulty installs. Each time I played those first few chapters I find even more details and content that somehow escaped me on those previous ventures. For example, in one instance you meet an inane half naked idiot talking and one of the responses is as follows:

“Ok, I’ve just about had my FILL of riddle asking, quest assigning, insult throwing, pun hurling, hostage taking, iron mongering, smart arsed fools, freaks, and felons that continually test my will, mettle, strength, intelligence, and most of all, patience! If you’ve got a straight answer ANYWHERE in that bent little head of yours, I want to hear it pretty damn quick or I’m going to take a large blunt object roughly the size of Elminster AND his hat, and stuff it lengthwise into a crevice of your being so seldom seen that even the denizens of the nine hells themselves wouldn’t touch it with a twenty-foot rusty halberd! Have I MADE myself perfectly CLEAR?!”

After reading that there was no way I could not choose it. It’s a line that I make a point to keep memorized. The old man’s response went along the lines of: “Well if that’s how you’re going to be.” He went on to give one last fact that made utterly no sense. Until I read some book on a random shelf and what he said clicked. It sent a chill through me. It is that kind of interconnectivity that you just don’t find just anywhere or I think even anywhere else. Nevermind that the dialogue choice is itself the best critique of the RPG and fantasy genres ever. I often find myself wondering why a game doesn’t try a morose and utterly depressing character choice? Why isn’t there a character who isn’t happy to see adventurers? Why isn’t there a quest that solves itself while you look on? Why does everyone have to know you are the hero and not some shulb? Or a quest where the quest giver doesn’t want you to complete it for non malevolent reason? And then each time I come up with something I stop and realize whatever example I was lamenting about had already been done in Baldur’s Gate. It was just so big and full in my eyes that despite any problems I felt like there was a world there I could live in if I could crawl into the screen.

I scoured my memories trying to figure out what games effected me in some way. The ones that influenced the way I react to them or even those that shaped my current tastes. I remember games lost to time. I remember games that probably wont show up anywhere on the internet if you do a search. I thought I knew what the first video game I played was, but going further and further back I realized how long video games have actually been apart of my life. I remember Win 95, I remember the autumn leaves wallpaper of Win 3.11 that I could only get to through a DOS command. I remember my Genesis, I remember my Game Gear, I remember my earliest electronic tutors and yes even my family’s Apple II in all its black and green glory. From King’s Quest VI to Myst to Doom to Wolfenstein 3D to Pixelart to Reading Rabbet. I remembered so many games I’d forgotten about and the time spent with them. It was wonderful sitting down to figure out which games stuck with me, which ones my mind thought deserved to be remembered and which ones Made Me.

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You said during the podcast that Nintendo had revolutionized gaming. I have to respectfully disagree. They have only revolutionized it superficially. What they have done replaced button presses with Wii-mote waggles. The idea is to simplify gaming with simple controls that can make sense. And for Wii Bowling or Wii Tennis its perfect. But as soon as you take the control outside of that simple one type movement control you up the complexity of the game. There may only be one button, but if you translated each movement to a button press or analog stick movement you’d realize how equal the complexity is for anything other than the mini-game compilations. Given the nature of motion control at present and its impreciseness it makes the controller even more complex and frustrating.

It has been proven with testing that for an abstract action a button press that stays consistent within the game, i.e the same button for the same action, makes more sense than trying to emulate the action, mainly because it is easier to replicate input with a thumb press than it is to move the entire arm in the exact same manner.

I have no doubt that motion control can offer a different experience, but developers are still treating it as a standard controller and are having to make up for the loss of button with waggle. Then there are the games that do not need it, but add it in out of some necessity of being on the Wii. Twilight Princess comes to mind where you had to act out many of the actions, where the Gamecube controller used a few simple button presses to perform the same actions.

Yes the current gen controller are prohibitive, as were last gen. In fact there is a high learning curve for new gamers, but kids some how manage it. That’s another issue of cognitive age response and learning, but the NES has a D-pad and 2 buttons. Some games now can work with that. The idea is not to simplify the machine, but the in-game system. If you gave a newcomer a game on the 360 or PS3 that only utilized the d-pad and two buttons there would be no problem in getting into it.

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I should add some testimonial I hear about the new Wii Motion Plus. I cannot verify the validity of these comments, but it sounds truthful to me. That yes it does change gaming on the Wii, but does come with some problems. Namely, when the Wii first came out people were waving their whole arms, because that is how they thought and were told it would work, but then people adapted to only moving their wrists, for it was the basic movement not the degree that mattered. Now Wii Motion Plus changes all that because now you have to control it like you first thought it would work and will cause people to re-adapt.

It is a minor concern yes, but it is worth saying. It also attaches to my argument of the Wii-mote’s movements being a replacement for button presses. Now with full motion recognition it is supposed to have 1-1 replication. The thing is you can only replicate simple motions. If you design something too difficult people would not be able to replicate the action in their own house. The basic idea of escapism that most, not all, games are based upon would suffer with this idea. Sword, tennis racket, baseball bat swinging are all basic motions that we all understand in real life and replicate on the Wii. However if you want any finesse with those motions or to do more complex motions like rowing, driving, etc. you will be sorely disappointed. One problem is that it does take some practice or practical knowledge of those activities to do them correctly. Secondly, there is a certain amount of resistance required to do them properly. Without that resistance, with the new fine motion controls you are going to overshoot what you were doing, it is going to look ridiculous and immersive breaking on screen and more than likely you are going to fail. I can see scenarios where the motion breaks the experience instead of immersing you.

Example: Say you are rowing a boat the Wii-mote and Nun-chuck are the oars. But you speed up because you get into it and there being no real water resistance you suddenly see your character flapping the oars around like a chicken with its wings. A real person cannot row like that and yet you are seeing it. Immersion broken.

It wasn’t understood when it was first created, but the control is much more than an input device. It is a blank slate of iconography. Each button, each analog stick is a symbol for an action. It is different for every game, so the controller is a blank slate. The player learns and know that the icons (buttons) are, but they have no meaning on their own. There are basic principles that people understand about the buttons, because they generally hold true through all games and if not there is a reason for it. In North America anyway on the Playstation, X is ok, O is cancel, left analog stick for movement, right analog stick for camera. This works for First Person shooters as well. In Japan X and O are reversed, but they remain the same for all games in that region. The only exception I can think of is the Metal Gear Solid series that does that for specific purposes, but that is getting a bit of topic. The controller is a bunch of icons. The game than tells you what those icons and symbols mean. You then associate when you need to do something with that icon for the rest of the game. Humans are very iconographic. We associate people, concepts, countries and ourselves with icons and symbols of the greater whole.

The Wii-mote in the name of simplifying the control removes that iconographic interface. People get sucked in by meaning and association, its why we can read, because letters are nothing but icons to sounds. Movement however is not an icon. You cannot be shown a picture of it and understand what the motion means to the game world. You may know to move the Wii-mote left will aim left, but there is no mental association going on that allows your conscious mind to focus on the interactive area, but rather on the interactive motion of your avatar. It forces the mind to think about what you are doing step by step rather than as a whole experience. That is not how people function in the real world. We do not think about every step we take, we just walk. We do not take into account every letter in this sentence you are reading right now, we just read it and comprehend what it is saying.

Simplification is needed for new gamers in the current market, but the Wii and everyone copying them is the entirely wrong approach. Simplifying means cutting away complexity, not replacing it. Most of the Wii games, use the classic Wii controller, which has the same amount of buttons are a Gamecube controller. If you want it to be simple, create games that could be played with an NES controller. Everyone got that back in the day. There is only a D-pad and two buttons to worry about, but the association will stick and it the representation can be understood by the player as he immerses himself in the game.

For anyone to really understand the evolving state of an art form or medium must understand where it came from. Though video games have only been around for around 30 years it has a very long and detailed history, mostly thanks to the nature of technology. Of course the differences are more than just technological. There is a mentality change in the designers and the audience. We are presently in the 7th generation of consoles. Simultaneously we are in the Second Age of gaming and the 4th Era. Some may not know the details of the first, fewer of the second and I can almost guarantee no one had a clue about the third.

Something worth mentioning: this is the cliff notes version of video game history. My intention is to give a quick breakdown and explain the concepts. If I don’t mention your favorite obscure console, I don’t care. Some of the generations have upwards of 30 consoles I’ve never heard of and that never captured a market share.

A Lesson in History

The first generation could be explained as the cartridgeless generation. First the Odyssey, the home version of Pong, and others were machines with a single game programmed in and the later ones had two or three. The second generation saw the rise of Atari, and later ColecoVision. It was a great golden age of home console gaming that focused on bringing the arcade experience to the home TV. After the great video game crash of 1983, a new company came to American shores and brought the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES with them. Nintendo re-imagined the interest and became a powerhouse, meanwhile the last remnants of Atari, in the form of the Jaguar, died out as a hardware manufacturer. This is the 3rd generation, also known as the 8-bit era, named for the NES processing power. The 4th generation brought NES’ sequel, the Super NES and its competitor, the Sega Genesis. This is the 16-bit era. Lots of action between the companies as they battle for market dominance. Moving along to the 5th generation. Thanks to a betrayal and a few mistakes, Sony entered the fray with the original PlayStation. Nintendo stood fast with the N64 and Sega fumbled with the Sega Saturn. The 6th generation is where it gets a little complicated time wise. Sega made one last stand with the Dreamcast, giving it an early release, but was quickly overshadowed a year later by Sony and their PlayStation 2, which I believe is the most successful console of all time as I write this. Sega dropped out just in time for Nintendo to bring in the purple lunchbox, also known as the Gamecube. Finally, the first western competitor since Atari enters the fight, Microsoft and their Xbox. This generation is the first to see online capabilities to home consoles. Now we are in the 7th generation with two sequels, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and a reinvention, the Nintendo Wii. This way to view the timeline is defined by the technology of the console and companies upgrading their consoles.

I mentioned before that we are also in the Second Age of gaming. What do I mean by that? This refers to the industry behind the games or rather the infrastructure of the medium. This is a medium based on technology unlike any other before it. The First Age was one of American infrastructure. From the beginning all the way to the great crash is the first age. The Second Age is Japanese infrastructure; ignore Microsoft for a second, I’m generalizing here. It was Nintendo that pulled video games back from the dead and it has continued based on the groundwork they laid. Their business model was a reaction to what was generally considered the fall of the video game industry in 1983. They required 3rd parties to register with Nintendo, limited the amount of games and other draconian rules set down for their system so that the crash would not repeat itself. Now with more consumer awareness and the internet I doubt there will ever be another crash. Yes some companies are failing, but the entire industry wont have its existence in the balance like last time. Regardless, the Second Age structure is still in place.

Finally I labeled us in the 4th Era of gaming. I divide each era by a great change, advancement, or overhaul in the medium as an art form. Basically how the designers approach making games. The beginning, 1st generation, comprises the entirety of the 1st Era. Back then it was basic, rudimentary; each machine was a game unto itself. The 2nd Era of gaming began with the introduction of the exchangeable media and programmable architecture, namely cartridges. This Era was the entire 2nd generation of consoles. Back then only a single machine was needed and the games had to be purchases separately at a cheaper price. The 3rd Era of gaming began with the Second Age and 3rd generation. There was a huge leap in processing power, which would become the standard from generation to generation, but the jump here caused several unique changes. The first being recognizable, recurring characters. It also added rudimentary story telling in game, art style and color schemes. Finally we come to the 4th Era in gaming, which began in the 5th generation, the generation of the N64 and Playstation. The move from 2D to 3D was the greatest upgrade of the Era and is where designers have been working ever since.

The Future?

When I first conceived of this post several months ago I thought that we might have remained in the Second Age and 4th Era, but with the recent developments of the industry moving to digital distribution in DLC and services like Steam have me thinking that the infrastructure may change from the platform originally set up by Nintendo. And while we have been exploring the design space of 3D, I feel that we’ve reach a limit of technological innovation and now the focus will turn to more artistic innovation. Plus with the existence of the Wii there could be a permanent division between traditional controls and alternate controls. Either way we could be on the verge of the next Age and Era if we are not already there.

The Point

It’s the old saying that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. That is true on a small level, with game franchises like Tomb Raider never changing their formula or fixing what doesn’t work, but it also works on larger scale concepts like the design space and the industry. We are still feeling the effects of the video game crash of 1983. Previous to that game making was about what ever the designer could think of and thought would be good. After the crash, because of the hasty flop of E.T. and 3rd parties flooding the market with cheep shovelware, Nintendo reacted to prevent such a thing from happening again. Companies could only release a certain amount of titles every year to steam the flow of games to the market thereby confusing potential customers. They also created a system of quality control to make sure the customer never got too bad a game for their purchase, e.g. one that was free of game breaking bugs. This in combination with the qualities of the 3rd Era we have companies needing to make more money on fewer titles. They needed games that would sell and the fastest way to do this was with games that have already proven themselves to be successful. Thus the franchise was born. Even though some of the causes have faded, the mentality has led to the sequelitis of modern day gaming.