Triple-A Games for Women?

Triple-A Games for Women?

A fine evening to you mortals.

So, as stated in my previous post, I've been reading the Gamasutra article "Triple-A Games for Women? Seriously?" written by Ernest Adams.

Ignoring my personal irritation at what appear to be wild and unjustified accusations made toward video game marketing researchers, let's jump into this one without looking first and answer the question provided:

What do women want from games? How does this differ from men?

Well, according to Brandii Grace, the article's interviewee, women want games which offer more in the way of emotional conflict, as opposed to the direct conflict so popular among male gamers. And they certainly are popular; just look at more or less any popular core game over the last few years, violence and other direct conflict is fun in games. Guns, swords, armies fighting armies, people being killed left right and centre, core games are typically a very violent part of the media.

However, can we be certain that games with emotional content are what female gamers would play? This is somewhat hard to tell by looking at video games; most video games have a certain level of anonymity, making it hard to tell if any one player is male or female, unless they grab a headset and start talking to other people playing the game, at which point they are instantly treated differently by many players because she is female.

Video games are also very much a male-dominated medium, as this piece of science shows:

Now, this fact sheet shows an estimation of the male to female ratio of people playing games, and roughly how much time each side of the demographic spends playing games. As you can see, males typically form the majority of both, very significantly, in the case of younger males in the case of time spent gaming.

So, if we can't draw any solid, dependable conclusions from this media, the next best thing is to look at a similar media and work it out from there. Movies are about as close to video games as we could wish for in this case; action movies, like action games, are very popular to male movie-watchers, as with science-fiction, horror, and sport (though of course, popularity is usually on a film-to-film basis, rather than overall genres).

So, if the same genres and themes are popular between video games and movies for men, we can assume that the same could well be true for women.

Let's look at some films which are popular among women, and the themes replicable in video games.

Number one, Twilight. No getting around it, this film series was popular among the ladies. The most major theme employed by the Twilight series was, of course, romance, probably the most emotional of all film genres. Other themes include mystery, action (to a lesser extent), and drama. So, overall, a very emotions-based series.

Another popular film among women was The Notebook (apparently). Again, just from reading the IMDb brief on this, I can easily see that romance was the major theme. Looking at IMDb's list of most popular women's movies, actually, I can tell you that more or less all of them have at least a minor theme of romance.

So, the stereotype that women like romance movies is very much true, it would seem. Romance bases itself in the emotions of the characters on-screen, and the emotional reactions of the viewer, so it's very much an emotion-based theme.

Assuming that popular themes and genres among men and women carry over into games, it would appear that emotional content, such as relationships and both personal and interpersonal conflict, is exactly what female gamers want. Men, as we have already established, typically enjoy direct conflict in movies and video games, but that doesn't mean that's all that we want.

If you look at my previous blog, I presented three video games with differing levels of action and emotion. Call of Duty 4, the least emotional game among the examples, made the least impression on me, while Katawa Shoujo, the most emotional, made the biggest impression, and is the game I am most likely to remember of the three a hundred years from now. Of course, that's not to say that Katawa Shoujo was my favourite title in that list; Mass Effect 2, offering a nice blend of emotion and action, in my opinion, was easily my favourite.

So, taking that into account, we may be able to conclude that while male gamers do enjoy action in games, many might also like emotional content to be there in some form as well.

Well, that's me more or less done, I think. At last. It was a long post, but I'm kinda proud of the effort I put into this one. I coulda left it at a single paragraph, but no; I decided to do some research and draw my own conclusions.

I don't frankly care for this article overall; the idea of marketing directly to female gamers is nice, but they're slicing out the majority of the gaming demographic with it. Rather, why not just advertise to both males and females with more emotionally-focused game content? That kind of stuff could be popular among male gamers as well.

Also, I have no idea where Brandii Grace is getting her information from, but any video game market researcher who says "women need main characters with three-letter names," was either fictional, or had no right to be a market researcher. Or be allowed into normal society, for that matter. The same with "women won't play games with no real-world benefit." Honestly, if there is any such researcher, then please immediately fire him, he's doing his company no favours.

Have a good weekend, mortals. May the Emperor go with you.

Action versus Emotion

Action versus Emotion

How-do, mortals?

So, it's about time to get a reading post down up in here.

This isn't it, however. This is a post of my own about action versus emotion in games.

Quite often recently, I've been faced with the problem of video game sotrylines and why they're emotionally inept. As I was in the process of reading the article "Triple-A Game for Women? Seriously?" written by Ernest Adams, I have found that I really want to get my thoughts recorded here before I fuddle the mucking things up. It also gives me a reason to have another rant, so let's do this!

So, Adams was speaking to someone he knew at a 2012 gaming event, Brandii Grace, who he learnt is forming a company to create AAA game titles for women.

My first reaction to this was that this is nonsense; women don't play games anywhere near as much as men do, this isn't me being a sexist pig, this is flat-out, statistical fact.

Well, this is where the article gets interesting.

It seems that Grace's line of thought has lead her to the conclusion that women will be more drawn to games which offer emotional conflict as a feature. She uses Twilight and Underworld as an example;

Underworld attracts a more male-oriented audience by using sex appeal and guns to advertise their movie. Twilight, on the other hand, is much less focused on fighting and action, and more on emotional bonds. According to Grace, it seems, games for women need to be more focused on drama and personal and interpersonal emotional conflict than on the kinds of action games currently feature and place emphasis on.

Which brings me onto my point of action versus emotion. Now, I hate Twilight as much as the next male (in most cases), but I can't help but think that some games which feature emotion and emotional investment would be pretty sweet.

I'm going to offer three example games here: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Mass Effect 2, and Katawa Shoujo. I think these games offer some decent context of the various levels of emotion and action in games.

Call of Duty 4, in my opinion, is a game which is almost entirely focused on action, rather than emotion; I enjoyed playing the campaign, it was shoot-y, it had a storyline I could follow, and I was given a heck of a lot of things to blowup. What more could I want from a game? Well, my problem is that, while all of this was happening, I had no reason to care about any of the things that happened. Oh, so this guy just got shot and killed? Big deal, he wasn't all that important anyway.

I had no emotional investment in CoD4, largely because the player wasn't supposed to, it wasn't created with that in mind. Therefore, once I was finished, that was it, it was over. I put the game down, and haven't played it seriously since. It was fun while it lasted, but I just don't care about anything that happened in the storyline.

Mass Effect, I think, offers a nice balance between emotion and action; the gameplay has a lot of shooting and gunplay in it, but it also has characters I care about. I want to learn more about Tali's people, I want to find out what Garrus thinks about this new situation, I wonder what Mordin is working out right now in his lab.

In Mass Effect 2, when the mysterious Archangel took of his helmet, revealing himself to be Garrus, I was overjoyed enough to shout out with glee. When he was gunned down less than an hour later, I was furious, not towards the developers, but towards the bastard who had just shot my friend. Garrus survived, by the way, thank the Nine.

It's moments like this that made Mass Effect my favourite series of games ever created, and the reason I cared about these moments was because I was emotionally invested; these were people I cared about. not plastic or cardboard nobodies with guns.

And finally, Katawa Shoujo. Ok... this is the game I ranted on about at the end of the Christmas break for about a good page. That was a page of me being an emotional wreck. There's no action, just emotion. The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is literally nothing but reading and making very occasional, but significant choices.

I'm still affected by the thing; just listening to the music is enough to inspire some of the same emotions I felt when playing. I'm practically having flashbacks as I listen to it now.

Now, I fell in love during the course of this game; Hanako is the most wonderful character I've ever met in a game, I care more about her than any other character ever. And if I click on the piece of music from the end of her storyline, when she's spilling out all of her emotions to my character, confessing to everything she's done, falling apart as she exposes her soul...

And I'm suddenly incredibly close to tears, just from listening to it. This game has broken me.

I was so emotionally invested that I'm scared to even open the executable again.

Look, my point is that I fell in love in this game. Not my character, me. And that is enough for me to dub this game a masterpiece of character development and writing. I doubt I'll ever find anything that makes me feel the way a few pieces of artwork and some writing with the right music has.

I can't get this from Call of Duty. Mass Effect makes a good go, and almost succeeded, but it just fall short of the mark.

What I'm trying to say is that action and emotion are two very different things. They aren't in direct competition, but they can be hard to pull off together. Action is easier to create; you're a guy with a gun, here's some other guys with guns, go have fun shooting each other. However, action is a one-off event; it's only important to a player while it's happening. Emotion, on the other hand, is harder to create, and it has the potential to stay with you for weeks, months after the initial experience is over.

I'm going to have to stop here and go and cry for a while. I'm entirely serious, I... I just need to spend some time alone.

Gods damn Katawa Shoujo, and Gods bless it at the same time.

4Chan, you have crafted something incredible.

UPDATE - By all means, leave me a comment about what you think of my conclusions, I'd like to know exactly how botched this post is.

Walk always in the Emperor's Light.

Interactive Stories

Interactive Stories

"Oh, yeah, I promised three posts, didn't I..."

Sup, mortals!

My final reading post for tonight is Chris Crawford's chapter on Interactive Storytelling from some book I don't know the name of. "New Riders" was written on the page, but I can't tell if that's the title or not.

Anyway, Crawford tells us exactly why the stories in games are poorly created and emotionally crippled, so here we go!

First of all, he discusses the nature of stories; a story, Crawford says, has a complex structure which must meet certain criteria, many of which are hard to specify. However, even a child can tell you what is and isn't a story. For example, Itsy-Bitsy Spider, the nursery rhyme, has a story to it, including a protagonist, a conflict, struggle, and a resolution. A child could identify this as a story. However, something along the lines of "Once upon a time, there was a knight who lived in a castle. One day the knight went out on his horse, but they fell into a hole and died. The end." is not. You tell that to a child and they will tell you that that's not a story.

So, if a child doesn't accept that as a story, then why should a game? I can more or less guarantee that a game somewhere has had that as it's player story, even if not it's complete narrative.

Next, Crawford tells us that stories are not about things; they are about people. For example, The Lord of the Rings isn't about the one ring. It's about Frodo's struggle, among many other things.

Games, however, seem to place much more value on objects, like swords or armour, than on people. To give one of my favourite quotes so far this year,

"The cardboard people in games do for drama what inflatable dolls do for sex."

After this, Crawford tells us a thing or two about conflict, and yes, I am rushing this a little bit, because it's half past two in the morning, and I'm kinda tired. There are two types of conflict, according to Crawford; direct and indirect.

Direct conflict is done very well by video games; fighting and wars are seen in nearly every video game worth remembering. Indirect conflict, however, is more difficult to represent in a game world, or so you'd think. Indirect conflict occurs between two sides which aren't openly fighting, but the struggle for victory is there in the background of the narrative. Think Jurassic Park 2.

Puzzles are next in my list of notes. As should really be fairly simple logic, a puzzle is not a story. Rather, a story forms around the people solving the puzzle; if a puzzle is going to show up in a narrative, it had damn well better be focusing on the choices of the individuals rather than the puzzle itself. Also, a puzzle is not a necessary component of a story, but is a method of helping to develop characters for the audience.

Choices are also very important; a story is, after all, at it's most basic form, about the choices individuals make, which build up characters, which the audience is interested in. This is true to the point that a story can build up to or revolve around a single key decision made by a main character, kinda like the final Matrix film.

Spectacle is an interesting one here. Spectacle is the form of entertainment based of exotic visuals; looking at something just because it's different or exciting. Michael Bay movies are full of spectacle (unless it's Shia LeBeouf, and who really cares about Shia LeBeouf?).

Video games are also filled with this nonsense consistently with more and more realistic-looking graphics, and it makes them sell. However, spectacle is not story, and the new generation of gamers is becoming confused between the two.

This has led to the "Tyranny of the Visual", as Crawford puts it; culture is being dominated by the image, rather than the word, he believes (and, hey, I don't think he's wrong). This can be a good thing, he says; war glorification is harder with films like Saving Private Ryan floating around, showing people being blown up and ripped apart.

However, it can also lead to a lack of enlightened perception of the universe. For example, when we look at a tree, we can know about all of the things that are going on inside the tree, and that alters our perception of it. That knowledge was imparted through word rather than image, and with the word side of things receding, it may become that case that, in stories we don't understand certain narrative points because we're not paying attention to what isn't directly shown to us.

Thus, visual thinking should not dominate storytelling.

Next (we're almost done now, I promise), is spatial thinking.

Okay...

Spatial reasoning is the brain's ability to anticipate and project an object's spatial location based on previous input. I saw the spoon fall behind the fridge, so I know that if I reach back there, I'll be able to find it.

This line of reasoning is out of place in drama, Crawford says, because, simply, it doesn't matter. In Odysseus, no-one questions the location of this mythical (and fictional) island, because that has no effect on the narrative.

Space is comprised of stages with no spatial relation; what happens between those stages is merely transition, it's what happens IN the stages that counts.

And finally, stories have a certain trait called temporal discontinuity; this means that the narrative rarely goes perfectly chronologically, but rather skips large portions of time and goes backwards and forwards and to other places entirely, depending on the requirements of the story. Flashbacks, skipping of transitional or otherwise unimportant periods, "x units of time later"s, these are all necessary in a story to keep it on track and not get filled with completely meaningless nonsense.

Speaking of meaningless nonsense, I'm more or less done here.

Great article, loved reading it, it made a wonderful impression, 10/10, game of the year, whatever, I'm going to bed.

I'm being serious there, the article really was very good. It made me think harder about what makes video game stories so frankly dreadful.

For me, it's the lack of significant characters. There hasn't honestly been a non-player character I've cared about (discounting Katawa Shoujo, cos that game is freaking built around caring about the characters) since Mass Effect. It was borked at the end, but up until that point, I really, honestly gave a damn about Garrus and Tali. And Wrex, I guess, but not so much. I could care less about Miranda and her problems.

Oyasuminasai, mortal-chan. Kotei-Kami-Sama Homeru!

The Technoludic Film

The Technoludic Film

Hello again, mortals.

This is part two of three in my blog posts tonight, and covers the article "The Technoludic Film: Images of Video Games in Films (1973 - 2001)", written by Matteo Bittanti.

https://learn.ucs.ac.uk/webapps/blackboard/content/contentWrapper.jsp?content_id=_215609_1&displayName=Matteo+Bittanti%2C+%282003%29+The+Technoludic+Cinema%3A+Images+of+Video+Games+in+Movies+%281973-2001%29&course_id=_9172_1&navItem=content&href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamecareerguide.com%2Feducation%2Ftheses%2F20020501%2Fbittanti_01.htm

This time, I definitely don't know if the link will work; even if you can get to the title page, the links to the rest of the article at the bottom are borked to all hell. By all means read the title page, but it's not very informative. I was mainly taking notes from that and a PowerPoint provided by the tutor (and thank the Nine he provided it, or I wouldn't have a clue about this).

Enough explanations, onwards unto learning!

Bittanti tells us that the rise of video games in 1970 coincides with a fall in the film industry starting in 1950. Bit of a gap there, but I see where he's getting at.

From this, he goes on to theorise that convergences between film and video games has led to a new film genre: the Technoludic genre; films which incorporate video games into their narrative or themes.

Before going into this more, Bittanti introduces some delicious jargon. Remediation is the representation of one medium in another (basically what he's talking about in one word). This is considered to be a defining characteristic of modern digital media.

Next, immediacy is used to describe media that try to make the reader forget that they are viewing media, and instead draw them into their own reality. Books and films have been doing this for years, attempting to make the viewer feel like they're part of the story.

Finally, hypermediacy describes artefacts that are aware of their constructed nature and try to display it to the viewer. This includes many video games in the form of Heads-Up-Displays (or HUDs); they player can't forget they're playing a video game because elements like the HUD are always reminding them that the game has a constructed nature.

Bittanti points out that immediacy and hypermediacy are not preserves of any one medium, but rather are shared between mediums; an example is the HUD from video games being used in television. If you look at a news show today, you'll see all kinds of information being displayed on the screen on a big, intrusive Heads-Up-Display, such as stocks, weather, and major headlines.

So, why does this remediation happen? Well, successful conventions are traded between media, such as HUDs, to see if they can work as well or better in other places. The other reason is because it can take time for a new medium to discover it's full potential of content, and to develop unique content. Video games are currently in the process of finding their unique content; there are experiences available as video games that can't be found in any other medium, but there are also still games which try to be like movies, rather than like video games.

So, let's finally get onto the matter of convergences between games and films. There are four nodes of intersection in the Technoludic genre, according to Bittanti:

• Commentary: film can be used to project the fears of society. Society fears that video games will reach the stage where we can't tell if we're in a game anymore. An example of this is the Matrix Trilogy.
• Quotation: video games are used in some movies for illustrative purposes rather than as the central theme. Bittanti's example of this is Inception, though I don't much understand this.
• Adaptation: converting a piece from one media into another has happened for hundreds of years. In the case of video game movies, it's usually done poorly. Examples include Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and Silent Hill.
• Remediation: finally, remediation is the incorporation of certain aesthetics and narrative codes from one medium into another. Bittanti's examples include Groundhog Day and Toy Story.

Well, that's where my notes end. It could very well be an interesting article, if only I could read the full thing. Then again, I'm not all that inclined to long periods of reading anymore; it just gets boring after a while unless there's a particularly good narrative.

Overall, I think this article makes a good point about the convergence of video games and movies, and explains them fairly well most of the time. I don't understand some of the examples given, though, which means that either I haven't grasped the main point, or the examples are poorly chosen. This article was published in 2002, as well, so, in my opinion, it was too early to be able to draw any solid conclusions from the convergences at the time. Over the last ten years, we've seen some major interaction between movies and video games; a new study carried out today would probably yield far more interesting results.

Have a good evening, mortals. Praise the Emperor.

Legend of Zelda Level Design

Legend of Zelda Level Design

Sup, mortals.

Ok, I'm a tad behind on the weekly reading posts, so let's just hammer a few of these things out and call it even.

First of all, Mike Stout's Gamasutra article on the Level Design in Legend of Zelda.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6582/learning_from_the_masters_level_.php

I have no idea if that link will work...

Right, Stout splits the level design of a basic dungeon into several different parts: Level Flow, Intensity Ramping, Variety, and Training.

Level Flow includes the critical path that a player has to take within the dungeon to get through the level without using any secrets or shortcuts. Essentially the shortest possible path from the start to finish. A to B. Stout points out that the first dungeon in Legend of Zelda, which he is analysing, has a very linear critical path, making it simple and easy to traverse. Once the player starts going off and exploring non-critical rooms, it gets a little more complex.

The linearity is hidden by a couple of things, so the player doesn't realise that what they're doing is as simple as it is; firstly, re traversal of rooms the player has already cleared, and secondly, hidden shortcuts to later rooms.

Intensity Ramping essentially means the increase in the level of difficulty the player has to face; the learning curve of the dungeon if you will. This is dictated by two main factors in the first dungeon (and many dungeons after that): monster patterns along the critical path, and room layout.

The monsters you face are an obvious factor in Intensity Ramping; increasing the number of monsters and how powerful the monsters are is one of the most basic forms of difficulty increase. Level design and layout is also very important; in two different rooms are the same kinds of monsters, but in one the player has cover to hide behind, and in the next there is no cover. Thus, increase in difficulty.

Variety very much speaks for itself. The types of monster the player fights, the layout of the levels, what the player has to do to progress to the next room, all of these have to change over time to keep the player interested in the dungeon, and to make them want to progress.

Training, finally, was only minimal in Legend of Zelda, and was generally rare in the days of the Gameboy and NES consoles, outside of the game manuals. The ones in Zelda tried to help explain to the player how certain aspects of the game worked, or tried to offer hints as to the locations of secrets. In the English version of the game, however, this wasn't explained very well due to the translation from Japanese. It has been attempted in Zelda games since, and the process has been improved somewhat; we can think of the original Legend of Zelda training being a stepping stone for the developer, somewhere to start and improve upon.

Well, that's about all the notes I have for the article, mortals. This reading was done in something of a rush, and my notes are a tad minimalistic. I didn't even have anything written under "Variety", I had to remember from scratch.

I'm not complaining, or anything, I'm just telling you in case you were wondering why this post seems a bit different from the rest of the blog.

The article could have been based around any game there is; the fact that the author chose Legend of Zelda shows that he knows what he's talking about. It was during the days of the NES and SNES that we saw some of the best level design and layout. This was back when you couldn't attract an audience with stunning visuals and cinematics; you had to give them something good in the gameplay, including a well thought-out design.

This article has chosen out the best parts of some of the best level design we might ever see, and has analysed it in a way that emphasises how the design was both genius and well-hidden as well, guiding the player without them knowing it. Overall, a very good piece of reading.

That ends my little cliche moment.

Praise to the Emperor, mortals.