The Sensationalist: Loyalty and Star Fox

This post is part of "The Sensationalist," a continuing series here at Experience Points in which we examine games' abilities to evoke emotions and sensations in video game players. Please have a look at the series' introduction as well its previous entries. As always, we welcome your thoughts on all the matters we discuss, and look forward to analyzing one of gaming's most powerful, yet intangible, abilities.

If the Star Fox team, were a basketball team, it would be the equivalent to LeBron James backed up by three members of the Washington Generals. Flanked by Falco Lombardi, Peppy Hare, and Slippy Toad, what starts as a four-person assault on a galactic empire often turns into outer space baby sitting. Some my most vivid memories of the game are of when the missions would take a a sharp, exasperating turn so that I could save my hapless wingmen from deaths caused by their own extreme lack of self preservation. This is not to say that I was always altruistic: Who among us can claim not to have blasted Slippy out of the sky in a fit of rage?

And yet, Star Fox 64 is one of the few games I can recall that elicited a sense of loyalty to my virtual teammates.

The task of making secondary video game characters not only memorable, but empathetic is a difficult task. In many games, the characters serve simply as tools with a thin veneer of personality. In genres like real time strategy, individual characters become faceless pawns in a larger war. While one may make friends in the trenches, few characters inspire any kind of lasting connection.

Games that have successfully unpaired loyalty towards their characters have accomplished it through a combination of narrative and gameplay techniques. To trot out a well-worn example, Aeries' death in Final Fantasy VII was jarring both because I had invested my time in developing her skills and because the narrative invested time in developing her as a pivotal character. Her untimely death served to cement my dedication to the rest of the party and harden my thoughts towards Sephiroth.

Similarly, Team Ico's way of crafting empathetic non-playable characters helps engender in me a sense of loyalty . Yorda and Agro are not directly controllable, but their crucial skills along with their narrative impact inspired a sense to protect and do right by them.


In Star Fox, the skills your wingmen bring to the table are occasionally useful. They add a small amount of depth to the still shallow story, but the game can be played basically as well in their absence. They typically bumble along behind you, shooting poorly, periodically interjecting with useless, annoying dialogue, and shrieking for help whenever an enemy has the gall to fire at them. Certainly, the loyalty I feel towards the Star Fox team has little to do with their skillful piloting or intellectual capabilities.

The loyalty I feel for the Star Fox team speaks to broader issues of socialization and group identity. In a situation in which people work closely together against a larger force or insurmountable odds, the twin threads of of affection and contempt form a uniquely strong bond. Put plainly, belonging to a group tends to confer on its members the right to talk shit about said group. Everyone is guilty of complaining about their crazy family or ragging on their hometown's football team. However, outsiders who would make identical critiques have no legitimacy to do so: Regardless of how bad things are, the members of the group share a unique relationship and exert ownership of their clique, which foments pride and group loyalty.

So while I might roll my eyes when Peppy nags me about barrel rolls, I am on some level fond of the senile old hare. I groan when Falco makes yet another snide comment, but I secretly enjoy his "badditude." I might purposely lob a smart bomb at Slippy as punishment for his incompetence, but deep down I find his earnestness endearing.

I might deride, or possibly outright abuse, my team, but I do so as a member of that team. Solidarity is ultimately exemplified when faced with those who would attack the team from the outside. When those Star Wolf jerks have the audacity to fire on my wingmates, my first thought is "OH NO YOU DIDN'T!"

The Star Fox team might be the Bad News Bears of interstellar combat, but they're my team, and you better believe I'm loyal to them.

EXP Podcast #27: A Game's Travel

Our bags are in the trunk, Teenage Wasteland is playing on the stereo, and our coffee stained road map is on the dash: On this podcast, we're hittin' the road. This week, we draw our discussion from prolific and esteemed games writer/pseudonym L.B. Jeffries and his excellent article on Popmatters. Early last month, Jeffries discussed his thoughts on travel in videogames and raised some interesting questions. This week, Scott and I tag along with our own journey through videogame travel, hitting such topics as basic math, warp tubes, and boredom. As always, we encourage you to share your own tales of navigation in the comments section below.

Some discussion starters:

- Do you ever use out-of-game distractions during in-game travel?
- Are games allowed to be boring? Not just calm, or unexciting, but actually boring?
- Do you use landmarks, or any other tricks, to help make sense of space while traveling?
- Which games capture your definition of travel best?

To listen to the podcast:
- Subscribe to the EXP Podcast via iTunes here. Additionally, here is the stand-alone feed.
- Listen to the podcast in your browser by left-clicking the title. Or, right-click and select "save as link" to download the show in MP3 format.
- Subscribe to this podcast and EXP's written content with the RSS link on the right.

Show notes:

-Run time: 25 min and 53 sec
- Travel in Video Games, via Popmatters
-Music by Brad Sucks

Let's Talk

Despite our daily communication with friends, family, and coworkers, reconstructing a natural conversation is surprisingly hard. Countless films struggle with believable dialogue, earning praise when successful. Actors are paid to communicate naturally, avoiding awkward silences or strange intonations that seem out-of-place for a particular scene. Many videogames have no voice actors to worry about and still have trouble incorporating players into an engrossing dialogue.

One potential pitfall, as I have mentioned before, is that most of the time we don't really have anything interesting to say. In order to maintain an exciting pace and indulge the protagonist's self-importance, even nobody non-player characters may respond with overly dramatic dialogue and emphatic intonation that seems out-of-place. Dialogue becomes even more treacherous when player choice is involved.
Traditionally, players participate in conversations through dialogue trees. Branching choices shape the outcome of a conversation, alternatively offending or befriending NPCs with a few available responses. Bravo for developers who wish to maintain interaction throughout the entire experience, but in-game conversations via dialogue trees are strange. Real conversations, particularly with strangers, tend to be much less rewarding. Rarely do these consist of one or two sentence inquiries with an equally short response.

Intimate chats with friends and family is not unusual. These conversations can last quite a long while, covering a range of topics and including long rants. A good game of D&D can include such ramblings because the game creator is there to make up things on the fly, but videogames are sadly incapable of such spontaneity without exquisite AI. In the mean time, our own dialogue takes the form of text-based responses.
Voice acting, particularly good voice acting, can add a lot to a scene. Voice acting allows us to interpret a piece of dialogue the way those having the conversation interpret it. There is a big difference between "Where have you been been?" with a concerned tone and "Where have you
been?" with an accusatory tone. Hotel Dusk has no voice acting and suffers from this problem far too often. The detrimental solution is to create extreme dialogue that is difficult to misinterpret but obviously overblown.

Dialogue choices in Fallout 3 are clear cut, even extreme, seeming very unrealistic. Developing a morally gray character is difficult in these circumstances. When I threaten to kill someone, I have no doubt they'll understand my meaning. Such threats cannot be insinuated; thus, a great deal of narrative depth cannot be created without veering from the standard dialogue construction. Also, Fallout's protagonist repeats your text choice verbatim, without their own accompanying voice. In order to simplify player choices, the game unrealistically constrains dialogue.
Mass Effect and Hotel Dusk adapt and improve conversations by giving players only the general idea of dialogue choice, and then allowing the protagonist to respond appropriately. In this way, player choices are simplified while still allowing subtle intonation in their response or through voice acting. The problem with Mass Effect's dialogue is that player choices are not always reflected in the conversation. Perhaps the way I interpret certain dialogue contrasts with the game designers interpretation. This can be troublesome. For example, if you choose a dialogue option with an exclamation point and the character does not yell their response, are you unsatisfied?

Of course, these are my personal preferences. I can understand some players wish to know exactly what their character is going to say before they say it. But to satisfy my own desires, dialogue options should have as much information regarding its tone as necessary to convey meaning, including descriptive tags (such as hostile, inquisitive, insulting). Alternatively, voice work can accompany text choices to convey meaning through intonation.

Including realistic NPC relationships, there is still quite a bit of innovation to be made in RPG dialogue. We could always relegate all conversations to cut scenes, but we would be missing unique opportunities for interaction in moments with undoubtedly long lasting effects. Some great and terrible repercussions can stem from simple conversations. Alternatively, we can go the Zelda route and just not say a thing. Sometimes, shutting up can be awfully appealing.

A Bit.Trip Beating

I try to make it a practice to complete games before I write about them, but in the case of Bit.Trip Beat, I will have to make an exception. This game is so damn hard, I am unable to hazard a reliable guess as to when I will finish it.

According to the game's official site, Gaijin, the developers, "wanted to make a game that used the tools of today to inspire the fun of yesterday." The result is a game that resembles a combination of pong, guitar hero and space invaders, all presented in glorious 8-bit graphics and sound. The retro homage goes deeper than the chunky graphics and chiptune music: this game channels the controller-throwing frustration that was 8-bit gaming.

Gameplay takes place on a pong-style board, except the right paddle has been replaced by an off-screen block launcher that challenges the player to return a variety of shot styles. If the player is skilled (or lucky) enough to survive for any length of time, they are rewarded by being able to add to the music with each successful volley.

The game starts with basic shots that send the ball towards the player in a straight line. Things soon take a turn for the vicious: although the projectiles' colors denote their behavior, trying to return a sinusoidal wave of pong balls while eyeing another group ricocheting off the ceiling is the stuff of nightmares.

Bit.Trip Beat recalls a time when games were designed to grow fat off a bounty of quarters. The varieties of pong balls and their patterns are extremely difficult to volley, even after committing the patterns to memory. Memorizing patterns is one thing, but it takes calm nerves and a steady hand to clear the levels.

The game seeks to challenge the player in different, equally maddening ways regardless of their success. Missing too many shots in a row will eventually plunge the game in to a black and white pong replica screen. In this mode, the only noise comes from the speaker in the Wii remote. Its harsh beeping reminds the player that they are perilously close to seeing the all too familiar "game over" screen. While the pong screen removes the distracting background graphics, it also strips the projectiles of their color, a crucial clue in anticipating their behavior.

If one manages to put together a respectable combo of flawless returns, the game rockets into "hyper" mode: the music gets pumped up while the background graphics grow increasingly psychedelic. While these flashy rewards denote success, they often serve to make it even more difficult to see the balls which often lead the player back down into the pong-themed basement.

Back at the game's website, Gaijin goes on to say "Our goal was to make a game that was as simple in gameplay as the games of the early 80s and equally as fun—even though gamers' tastes have changed over the years." They have done a good job tapping into the current popularity of rhythm games, as it is supremely satisfying to add to the well-done music. Mercifully, the game supports co-op, allowing up to four people to battle shoulder-to-shoulder in the pixelated trenches. This is probably the only reason I was able to clear the second stage.

Still, "fun" is an odd word to use to describe this game in light of the medium's contemporary conception of challenge. The rise of the narrative-driven game has lead to a relaxing of difficulty in huge hits like Prince of Persia and Bioshock. Other rhythm games like Rock Band have generous "easy" or "no fail" modes. PixelJunk Eden was even patched to ratchet down the difficulty. Using these metrics, how can this game be fun?

The answer is rooted partly in history and partly in the nature of the medium. Bit.Trip Beat reminds players of a bygone era in which brutally hard games ruled the main stream scene, unapologetically handing us our asses. The undercurrent of such an era is felt in most games, but raw challenge has been superseded by new design philosophies. Still, the occasional walk down memory lane is enjoyable, especially when the knowledge that a return to modern gaming is only a few menu clicks away.

Additionally, Bit.Trip Beat remains attractive because it simply and elegantly illustrates how video games distinguish themselves from other mediums: while games might challenge our interpretive and analytical minds, they also provide a test of physicality, dexterity, and the implementation of theory.

Bit.Trip Beat challenges us on a basic level: no amount of philosophy will make that paddle move any faster. It is a challenge to prove that flesh and bone can best silicon and pixels. And that is why I can't rest until I get to the third level.

EXP Podcast #26: Spring Cleaning!

Every week, we add to a massive list of notable news, analysis, and opinion pieces related to video games, knowing full well that most of them will never make the show. We figured it was time to sort through some of the backlog for any gems that may have been passed over and fashion them into an auditory smorgasbord.

The topics vary widely, and range from art design, memory and history, dating, and even death. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to the articles. As always, feel free to weigh in on the discussion in the comments with your thoughts on the stories, or with links to some of the stories you've enjoyed over the past months.

Some discussion starters:

-How do you keep track of your past gaming experiences?
-Have you ever learned about history through gaming?
-What is the perfect "date game?" Does such a thing exist?
-Which games do you admire for their artistry?
-Do you have any life/death stories that took place in an on-line space?
-Which recent gaming articles have you enjoyed recently?

To listen to the podcast:
- Subscribe to the EXP Podcast via iTunes here. Additionally, here is the stand-alone feed.
- Listen to the podcast in your browser by left-clicking the title. Or, right-click and select "save as link" to download the show in MP3 format.
- Subscribe to this podcast and EXP's written content with the RSS link on the right.

Show notes:

-Run time: 31 min and 53 sec
-"Altars," by Lara "KaterinLHC" Crigger, via Gamers With Jobs
-"Can Games Handle History," by Luke Plunkett, via Kotaku
-"The Dating Game," by Wendy Despain, via The Escapist
-"Artist Wants More Diverse Game Graphics, Says Developers Should 'Believe More in Games,'" by Steven Totilo, via MTV Multiplayer
-"Death Leaves Online Lives in Limbo," by Peter Svensson, via The Associated Press, posted on SFGate.com
-Music by Brad Sucks

May '09 BoRT: Videogame Memorials

This post is part of Corvus Elrod's monthly cross-blog event, The Blogs of the Round Table. This month's topic is A Game Is Worth a Thousand Words: What would one of your favorite pieces of non-interactive art look like if it had been created as a game first? May’s topic challenges you to imagine that the artist had been a game designer and supersede the source artwork–whether it be a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or any other piece that can be appreciated in a primarily visual way–to imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

Last year, poking around London's parks and gardens, I stumbled upon a sculpture-fountain hybrid, the beautiful piece of public art pictured right. The installation was commissioned by the Canadian Memorial Foundation who held a design contest to select a project. The winner was Pierre Granche, and his task was to design a war memorial for the Canadians who lost their lives in the two world wars.

Though admittedly not my favorite work of art, I find it visually appealing and immensely interesting. I chose this piece because the difficulty it poses for the designer. A memorial must visually appeal to an audience and speak a message that respects actual historical events. Now to add a function, to ask this piece to be interactive and entertaining while maintaining the traditionally quiet solemnity of a memorial, is no easy task. Yet I believe videogames can lend themselves well to this goal, serving a similar purpose with tact and intimacy.

Drawing roughly 3 million visitors every year, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. is perhaps the most well known memorial in the United States. It is a standing monument to the general war experience while maintaining the importance of each individual person whose name is transcribed on the wall. Like the Granche's work, it draws on historical events to speak a greater message.

Yet war memorials are strange. What message they do speak is incredibly subjective. Though they may tacitly normalize or even condone state violence, memorials are theoretically politically neutral. One visitor to Green Park may see the fountain as a message about the futility of war, while another may interpret the falling leaves as symbols of national war heroes that prove war is inevitable.

Memorials are also fundamentally public experiences. Like a national gravestone, they serve as a site of communal mourning, solemn appreciation, weighty contemplation. Yet while inviting the gaze of any passersby, memorials do not invite criticism. They are not meant to be hung in a gallery to be rated by critics. There is almost an obligation to respect this particular form of art as outside the medium, serving a higher purpose than art for art's sake.

My videogame memorial design must be a completely free experience playable in your browser. Players are invited to explore narrative puzzles that track individuals' experiences before and after war. With just enough information to find a solution, visitors to the memorial game are investigators, solving riddles and following clues through a collection of photos, diaries, interviews, and official records to create a portfolio of one person's life during the war.

Though the game is opened widely to the public, it loses an important unique to occupied public spaces. A sense of community is strengthened when in physical proximity with others in a shared space. Being bound to other visitors equally in awe at the human experience is appealing, so this game memorial would require multiplayer elements. In addition to a general chat, skilled players could combine portfolios and collaborate with others to track the experience of a battalion. A running list of player names, locations around the world, and their portfolio status, can facilitate a communal experience.

A tiered difficulty system, one which includes basic puzzles for children and entertaining educational lessons, could be incorporated to satisfy players of multiple skill levels, improving accessibility. The game should be fun, if that is what you are looking for. I do not believe fun is incompatible with respect, nor did Granche, who "anticipated the public's appropriation of the monument: children can often be seen sliding on the sloping sculptural mass, and it also serves as a fountain: a fine layer of water trickles over the two surfaces of the pyramidal body, reflecting the environment of vegetation, clouds and people."

Ideally, the videogame memorial fills the differing desires of those who would visit Green Park, allowing play alongside quiet contemplation. Down time, moments in between play that invite reflection from participants, is incredibly important and could serve as a reward for excellence. Each portfolio completed will shape a unique story, that blends with the stories of others into a larger piece, a game to remember, create, and interpret simultaneously. Interactive can globalize traditionally nationalist experiences and remind us of the very human sensation of loss across borders.

Book Review: "From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games"

In From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games, Ed Halter attempts to elucidate the tumultuous relationship between video games and warfare. Beginning with a survey of war's historical representation in games, the book winds through World War II, the birth of computers, and the subsequent proliferation of computer technology in both the military and entertainment sectors. In doing so, Halter makes a compelling case for viewing the link between warfare and video games not as a one-way channel, but rather as a porous wall: a wall allows the two spheres to intermingle, blurring the line between reality and virtual reality.

Halter begins his study with a brief discussion of games' historical association with war. Games have been used to simulate organized combat since antiquity. Whether it was Egyptian Pharaohs or Viking raiders, games about the strategy of combat were used as both diversions and educational tools. The conflagration of battle and gaming grows stronger through medieval times and into modernity (a claim based largely on the generous availability of primary sources), as games like chess and go assume their positions as quintessential examples of war games. With the advent of industrialism, chess variants such as Kriegsspiel and the mass appeal of toy soldiers more explicitly linked gaming with waging war.

Halter's narrative of video games' birth dovetails with countless other stories in American history: despite being a nation ideologically obsessed with independence and autonomy, the interest and funding of the federal government has been critical to video games. Early games like Spacewar! were created on machines designed to fight the Cold War. Machines created for venues like Vietnam instead became virtual battlefields for students looking to take advantage of the latest technology. Soon, schools like Stanford had to explicitly forbid people from using the computers to play games during business hours.

Nothing this popular goes unnoticed by either the government or the military. Halter calls upon The Great Communicator to illustrate the government's growing attention towards games:

"Even without knowing it, you're being prepared for a new age...I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain, coordination in playing these games. The Air Force believes these kids will be outstanding pilots should they fly our jets...Watch a 12-year-old take evasive action and score multiple hits while playing Space Invaders, and you will appreciate the skills of tomorrow's pilot."

-Ronald Reagan, from a speech given at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center, March 8, 1983

Games like Atari's Battlezone demonstrated the rising popularity and sophistication of games, as well as their utility in the eyes of the military. While the Army-commissioned version of Battlezone may not have caught on, military integration continued to grow with the rise of increasingly complex games, as well as the mod scene. By the 1990s, there were army recruiters in the arcades and clear engagement with contemporaneous conflict in games, such as Operation Secret Storm.

In the book's second half, Halter displays his keen sense for journalistic profiles. A parade of strange, almost secretive folk residing in the nexus of the entertainment, military, and edcuation industries describe their work towards creating the perfect war simulation. Companies with deceptively bland names like the Institue for Creative Technologies combine talented people from the Hollywood, academia, and the military in the hopes of creating increasingly useful military training tools. Halter makes a strong argument that, if a holodeck is ever created, it will be on Uncle Sam's dime.

Halter ends by bringing the focus back to the cultural complexity of war in games, a complexity that has grown more tangled since the days of chess andkriegsspiel. From mainstream games with military endorsement like Kuma War and Full Spectrum Warrior, to the menagerie of social commentary-meets-pulp works found on Newgrounds, it is clear that video games are at once used to lionize and criticize war. Discourse from accross the ideological, artistic, and financial spectrum is both created and analyzed by the medium.

From Sun Tzu to Xbox is an important book, as it demonstrates an academic approach to games that takes a different tact than traditional "games studies." Instead of theoretical constructs, Halter uses games as evidence to explore society's views on war and gaming. By the end of the book, it is clear that, while shocking, games like Six Days in Fallujah are nothing new. War and video games are no strangers to one another, and all signs suggest their relationship will only grow closer.