Futuresonic Gamesounds

The unique thing about games is you interact with them?

Bull huckey! I can cross out the words in a book, write notes in its margins, underline it, chuck it across the room, reluctantly pick it up, decide to skip to the end. It might mean something very different on a re-read; after my great grandfrog died, in the rain by a train or when I have become 20 or 40, or after my cousin read it and thought my favorite character was the most annoying and then I spit in his socks out of revenge.

Yes, but you play with games, that sir, is the key!

Bull huckey. I play with the ideas I get from books, I play with playlists on a iPod while doing homework, I play with my roommate when he's trying to relax and I put ob ear-destroying Guitar Vader, I watch people play with repeating and editing movies in different ways. Play is a broad concept.

Okay, but you are passive in other forms of entertainment. Maybe you are, you unwashed, unthinking, beer-guzzling philistine! My mind is a fire and the fireworks are my reaction. You can do it too, you've got one that's just as capable as mine -- you just might not be conscious of how much you're using it. You're reacting to how plausible the plot is, you're covering your eyes at the gore, throwing spoons in the theater revival, repeating the lines to your friends or singing impromptu in the shower. These are not passive reactions.

Ah, but the work doesn't change. Fundamentally, on a physical level, no. But the perception of it can and perception is a great chunk of reality.

I think you can say whether we are reacting, interacting or playing with whatever we are witnessing, consuming, ignoring or absorbing, it becomes slightly like a relationship. I think many people say this in a smart-lady-with-a-an-accent-giving-a-speech way. ("Our relationship has changed and that's what I wanted to represent in this exhibit.")

So I don't think it's the reactions, play or interaction, its the way we form a relationship with a game in our language and thinking. I've often thought this was curious. "That game cheats!" claims a player who falls into a pit.

"This game is a bastard!" say countless Souls series players.

"Oh come on, just a little bit more," someone bargains near the finish line.

"I tried to work with it, but I wasn't getting anywhere," says somebody who doesn't get all the hype.

"I am in love with your eyes -- cross that -- this level/character."

It might be my imagination, but I feel like I hear more personification of the work itself within a game then I do with other forms of narrative, entertainment or amusement design. Whenever I hear the same types of relationship-sounding sentences in other works, they are usually in reference to the creators or the people who like them.

I think this is a hint. I feel like people often are making a mistake when they say that games are different every time you play them because other, more static works can be too, whether they are a different edition, remix or language of the same work, or because the person or approach to experiencing them is different. However, I get the strange sensation the longer I spend with a game, the more I feel its analogous to interacting with an animate being.

I know my favorite books well and I can remember when I just met them. I can compare them in relationship terms, of course. But when I reflect on my favorite games, I feel a much stronger connection to the analogy. Devilish Brain Training is a game I've spent a lot of time with. There was an awkward phase where I didn't know it very well, or wasn't sure I wanted to get to know it better. Then as we became friends, I found all sorts of new things about it. Slowly I got used to its quirks. There were unexpected realizations that I can look back on through my daily repetitious play. I got addicted to one part of it and for a while that's all I could see. Then I slowly came back around to see the whole picture again. Sometimes after an extended absence, I would learn to appreciate its quirky delights. Sometimes I got annoyed by the things it would do; things I knew very well it would do, but tolerated them anyway.

If I try to make this same comparison to a book, it breaks in several places. Something I would potentially read every day like a book of great quotes, a religious text or poem book, something like that doesn't give me the same unexpected realizations because it does not remember like a game does, it does not vary significantly like a game does, and most importantly it does not offer a different emotional reaction based on chance. The closest part to a relationship is getting caught up on one extraordinary aspect and then pulling out to see a big picture. The awkwardness could be compared to getting used to prose, but because it doesn't throw back fail states, rewards, positive or negative reinforcement based on my input, feedback refusal or encouragement, it is far less like a blossoming relationship.

I can get used to an artist's quirks or a director's quirks, but in this case I'm often reacting to the creator, not the work itself and the quirks tend to be much more varied among the users. Everyone always says an aspect of Spielberg's works is sentimentality. People say Miyamoto's works are often light and happy. But I am not reacting to Miyamoto's quirks when I say "damn you, Mario," when I fail to line up the turtle guys to get 1UPs. I am reacting to something a little more like a relationship. I set up an expectation by initiating contact and manipulating something. It reacted. I continued along with my plans. It didn't work out. Can you really say you're doing the same thing when you get confused by the chronology of a Quentin Tarantino plot? I think you could say its a relationship to the extent that you can take on the role of someone grading or evaluating something else, like a teacher reading a student's paper or a friend offering advice. But I don't think you can say our relationships with those other mediums change as quickly, vary as much, or veer into desperate corners as drunkenly as game relationships do.

Music, these days can often have a lot more of this kind of dynamic. You can take on a lot more varied roles as its appreciator, remixer, editor in your list of tracks, cutting out the intro you hate, and it implies mastery of a sort. You have to build a certain amount of knowledge with the medium and how it works if your going to remix it, post a Youtube music video, or even just convert the format on your computer or do things like crop it or adjust the decibel playback or equalizer. Adjusting various settings on your TV so you get whatever effect you might like doesn't quite cut it. Writing parodies of book sections or doing off the wall things with your webcam is close, but not the same, because often there is a gap between the book and movie and your new idea, whereas with music, the two are very close together in a way that I think resembles games.

Many people say the pacing is off in games, but I think they are wrong. Games, instead have things like tempo, rhythm, beat, breakdown, choruses, refrains and everybody can interact with music on a level where others can easily evaluate how skilled they are. This doesn't seem to happen very much with books or movies. People don't often congratulate you on your skilled reproduction of When Harry, Met Sally or The Grapes of Wrath. They do? What on earth do you for a living? Anyway, I guess reciting poetry or being able to act out a few lines is close, but notice how both bring sound and musical concepts into it?

But there are still limits to how we can form a relationship with music. I kind of doubt anyone has ever said of a music track, "I swear, if it does that one more time, I give up today!" That's something we say of animate beings when they do something that annoys us, because we know they can stop, but more importantly we know have some sort of agency that hopefully make them stop. Have you ever threatened to The Black Eyed Peas to stop saying "Immabe" and put some real lyrics into their song the next time it plays at your supermarket? You do? Well then, you have unique relationships don't you.

So no, I don't think the unique thing about games is that your interact with them. I think the unique thing about games is that our interactions with them form more complex relationships than some other forms of amusement and edification.

Don't Open the Box: Tamagon Has Sinned, He Must Repent

I've done it! I've figured out Devil World!

Alas!

Tamagon, the main character is a creature that has been Left Behind. This happened because he committed the sin of gluttony. He loves sunny-side-up eggs. But because he did not repent to the Lord Jesus like the too-fat-to-walk riders of electronic chariots, he did not proceed to the Great Bacon Party in the Sky on the day of rapture.

Now he's stuck on Earth, which is infested with demons. Unbeknownst to Tamagon, the Devil controls his life! Tamagon must take control by finding the Lord (who grants the power to breathe fire to thy enemies via Holy Halitosis) and eating the blissful white leftover souls of people zapped away on the day of reckoning. (The real Light Souls starts here!)

The solitary eye is for cruising hot guys.

Speaking of enemies, notice how the only inhabitants left are Tamagon, demons and pink creatures? Pink? I think we all know what that means: God doesn't let gay people enter the Kingdom of Heaven! Want proof? Once confronted by the fires of the Lord, the gay people burn away into delicious eggs, obviously because of the deposit of excess reproductive material that has built up in their butts!

So after Tamagon finds enlightenment by devouring the souls of the righteous like some Walmart CEO, he must learn to piece together fragments of the Bible ripped apart by the demons and bring them to the Holy Church (aka McDonalds) where all the righteous convene with their unemployment dollars to in Bible Studies surrounded by healthy family food. There, Tamagon can learn to say, "Jesus, ba-ba, ba-ba-ba, I'm lovin' it!"

Struttin' in sexy red underwear!

 Once he does that, of course the Devil (who also is obviously gay because he wears  red hot pants) gets turned into a bat like all the characters in such popular demonic  witchcraft books like Twilight and leaves poor Tamagon alone.

 Alas! Every time Tamagon manages to banish Satan from his mind, he succumbs to the  temptations of the tree of knowledge and instead of being born again, eats his green  extra life. Thus the cycle of death and rebirth begins anew, sometimes with Tamagon  being squished by his own narrow view points and sin, until he learns the way of the  Lord.

 Gosh! When they say Miyamoto is a genius, they really mean it!

Mr. Fix It: How Random Battles and Lives Systems are Like Balding Remedies

Dear Sazanami,

My friend just recommended what he called a great RPG to me. But I starting playing it and to my horror, it has random battles!

I spent good money on this game! Why would my friend do that to me?

-Quaff, a Hairy Middle-Aged Accountant from Wisconsin

My dear Quaff,

I have a friend who has been blessed with a natural affinity toward beauty. Without any effort, he has maintained a nicely muscular frame, avoided any nasty kind of facial blemish and been endowed with lovely, floppy hair whose default state is permanent sexy. He doesn't use skin products, work out or constantly fuss with his hair.

As if dragged by some beauty inertia, his careless handsomeness has led him to become as vain as the sorceress from the Gummi Bears, Lady Bane. About a year ago, nearing the last futile bleats of his roaring twenties, my friend found his hair was starting to thin. This caused a sense of crisis in him until the day he saw a tip on variety show that advised people to stand on their head a little each day. Doing so would increase circulation to the head, which is needed for healthy hair growth, so goes the traditional wisdom.

At this point, I imagine many who read this can be dragged into two categories. You could be the curious, open-minded type who is sometimes easily fooled, "Oh, does that help stave off balding?" Or you could be the type who scoffs at such things as if they were irrational nonsense, "Scientists have found no direct link between such silly remedies and hair growth."

However, like usual, I think the truth is in the middle somewhere. It would appear that the prevailing fact is that once hair follicles stop growing -- not simply falling out, as from brushing or cancer treatment -- that's it, there's no getting them back. Until evidence comes saying otherwise, that's what I think is the truth. On the other hand, as somebody who was pulled into endless bathroom sessions to confirm that yes, my friend's hair did seem to be thinning at an alarming rate, with no discernible sickness or malady causing it, and seeing how he looks now, I can confirm that his hair definitely made a recovery. Apparently, the trick has worked for others as well.

That may down to what they and my friend did though. He's never been the type who can stand on his head, or do cartwheels, but every morning, after introducing an exercise regimen of various push-ups, pull-ups and the like, he spent some time against the wall teaching himself to stand on his head. Now, he has become quite an acrobatic guy who can walk on his head and do some impressive body-bending tricks.

My hair will be victorious against the ravaging of time!

He also started to take in more minerals, cut down on snacks and eat more fruits and vegetables. He learned to become more flexible and changed his sedentary lifestyle to something a little more athletic and healthy.

I think what happened is a combination of good living habits made his remaining hair much thicker and staved off any additional hair loss. He perhaps realized that nobody stays beautiful forever without at least a little effort. Either way, the change has made him a healthier person. He still doesn't use balding creams or spend hours in the bathroom, but indulges in good habits to maintain the pride in his natural beauty.

This could be called a healthy kind of vanity: a kind that inspires movement in a better direction and does not make the person seem like a massive piece of dick lint. So elements that have passed out of favor in video games, like random battles and lives systems, are at their best when they are inspired by a healthy kind of vanity. I bet you thought I would compare them to balding because such old video game ideas were once considered normal and natural, and have now faded away, didn't you? Gotcha!

No, no. The truth is that some people go bald and others keep their hair. (Some games still use old ideas for their mechanics, others adapt the new ones.) There is a third category of person though. They try endless remedies, like tonics or implants and such, to regrow their hair. (Some game designers throw in old elements without thinking much, in a misguided attempt to recapture the old days.) In this third category, there is still another person like my friend who practices healthy vanity. (They continue to carry on the tradition of the old games by thinking about the reasons why they started to fade and adopting healthier practices to prevent them falling out of favor.)

There go the random battles of my youth.

There are many unhealthy practices that went on with lives systems and random battles that led to some gamers thinking these ideas are now obsolete.

Because it was easy to design, older RPGs would repeatedly vomit out easy battles and with little care, attention or thought, one could mop up the chunky brown monster goo by taping down their A button. There weren't many engaging ideas in the battles, but that's not because they were random. Another complaint was that, like a wannabe rapper interrupted by his mom yelling to come to dinner, it interrupts the flow of the game and happened too frequently, which isn't so much a complaint leveled at the mechanic as it is due to sloppy game design or an incompatible taste between the developer's intentions and the player's wants.

Likewise, now that we can save our games to hard media independent from the game itself, the consensus seems to be that nobody wants to replay the same portion of the game. If a game isn't much fun anymore under the duress of repeated play, how good could it have really been? Even if it's a game where the appeal comes in experiencing the interactions, like any good story, it should inspire another go eventually (any parent who gets a nighttime request for the same book for weeks on end can tell you this). Everyone has their personal level to which they like to repeat an experience. Which would be healthier: insist that the only modern ideal of game design should be to keep the player going forward as much as possible, at all times, or that there is a spectrum of different preferences that can be catered to by knowing your audience?

Random battles, as a design element, still have a lot of value.

They can be a boon to developers with scarce resources. Inventing a system for encounters where battle initiate through contact with a visible object involves animating, programming and designing a whole host of symbols or enemies to populate the world and then designing environments so that players can avoid them, but are fostered into enough battles to keep the difficulty curve in the desirable area. Doing this incorrectly makes the whole thing cascade into the same kind of frustrations that poorly implemented random battles used to cause; players can still get caught into a series of battles that cause tedium and frustration because of AI routines, enemy or area designs. Developers who want to focus on character growth, intricate tactics or other mechanics; they can skip implementing symbol encounter battles and focus on the mathematical equations and ratios that are much easier to tweak and change.

Random battles also allow for interesting and fantastic contradictions. You can have a knight crawling in a series of narrow pipes and fighting witches and ogres. Some may say that ruins immersion, but many will also say they don't care about that, and like the strange gap, and rightly so for both parties. Random battles also help less coordinated players who do not like to have to contend with any action elements. They're also great for preserving surprise and tension.

Similarly, leaving the concept of lives and continues to drown with the Titanic would seriously hurt the design scope of surviving games. Many have noted that modern Mario games are so easy that "it makes the concept of lives meaningless." I wouldn't go that far. For one thing, I still encounter younger children or less skilled players who play Mario levels and can't get through a level without running out of all their lives. "Exactly! That's why there shouldn't be any lives. Just replays!" Not so fast.

Many games adopt a difficulty structure where the challenges grow more complex as the game continues. If a player is having trouble completing a certain stage, one reason might be that they have not learned or perfected skills in earlier stages that would help them. Designing a lives system that punishes the player by requiring a play-through of earlier stages can be a great strength of the design. Players may be reminded of other ways to play, might strengthen skills that could help with further portions and encounter situations that may provide hints or new insights to their current problem. In real life, is it reasonable to say anyone should just their charge their horns into their problems without taking a breather, looking at it from a different angle, telling the intern to do it instead, or going back to an earlier step? I think most would agree, it's often not healthy to do it this way.

There are many benefits of a lives system such as bragging rights, infinite 1-up tricks, rewards for exploration or skill, pithy comments about getting a life and easy numerical comparisons of how much more skilled one player is to another. Anyone who has played modern Mario games know also that it can also be fun just to stop and find ways to generate lives.

There are all sorts of other mechanics that have come under fire by using hyperbolic statements that call them archaic, like turn-based battle systems, save points or indeed, even things like boss battles and boss rushes. These well-trodden, traditional game mechanics are much like works of art whose perceived quality fluctuates based on the cultural values of the people who view them (also because plebes point at them and say, "I don't understand it, therefore it has no value.")

Let's keep them around by involving a healthy amount of skepticism toward sketchy ways bad designers implement them, letting them wax and wane like the hairline of a recurring chemotherapy patient, and by indulging in healthy vanity to keep the tradition alive. 

Yours If You Want Me to Be,

Sazanami

Don't Open the Box: Columns

Face it: dodge ball is the Dark Souls of recess. Maybe the stories don't have any truth in their brittle bones, but I hear that its being banned across schools in the US for being too unfair and promoting violence.

I remember dodge ball in elementary school. It was both infuriating and a lot of fun. People singled me out. Fights broke out. Kids were massive dicks. I think it did me a lot of good. I learned something valuable: sometimes the world is out to get you and its your job to get out of the way until you can do something about it. I like the unfairness of not getting to play at all if you're not good enough, especially when I could inflict it on others.

Dodge ball is a game where you can let out your inner jerk. The greatest of Greek catharsis can be channeled into that ball. Dodge ball should be enshrined as a wonderful little microcosm game for teaching children how harsh life can be.

But instead of having children play games with unclear life lessons where they might have to internalize, reflect and come to their own conclusions, I think we should invest in 3DSes preloaded with the virtual console release of Columns. The easy mode on this sucker is so easy, it reinvents the easy mode. It a shining innovation amongst easy modes. The most inept child could get extremely high scores. Think of the self esteem it would boost! Think of the smiles on millions of improperly diagnosed children on the autism spectrum! And it has shiny jewels that mesmerize as they fade away, symbolizing the fruitlessness of material collection. What else do you need?

Columns is one of those early puzzle droppers. Its fuel is the endless hunger for a better score, not vs. play against the computer or humans, or experience leveling in an RPG tunnel, two roads people would have us say the puzzler evolved into. The score you see up there was easily procured within 20 minutes by messing around on easy. As long as you vaguely try to arrange the gems together into patterns of three or more diagonally, horizontally or vertically you are bound to run into combinations of pattern completions sparkle and disappear that can last for a minute or more of you simply watching the unexplained mass disappearance of gems unfold. Your score blossoms. Your self-esteem grows.

To the left you can see what happened after I triggered one simple pattern erasure near the top of the screen. It looked like I was going to wipe out, but no. It was gem genocide. The Hitler of precious rocks would have been proud.

This could be so valuable in a school setting. Think of the life lessons it could teach! If you bumble along with the basics for long enough it doesn't matter if you get any better or put any effort into anything; matters will clear up all around you with no real punishment. Obviously, this is a much more realistic lesson than dodge ball could ever teach. A great deal of these kids will go onto jobs re-arranging the valuables of others where their effort and hard work will never be properly appreciated. It's best to let them know they can get by through putting in the cool minimum and not think about anything else too hard, except maybe the weekend.