SMG2 – Learning the Game

Posted on 16/06/2010 by admin

I’m a Nintendo fan. I link this to primary school field trips to Devon and playing my friend’s Gameboy. We only had Tetris and Super Mario. I remember the arguments about who was playing next and the satisfaction of completing levels. I remember begging my dad for my own GameBoy and him insisting I got an Atari Lynx instead as it was ‘in colour’, but that’s another story. That isn’t to say I don’t play other formats, I do, but Mario (and Yoshi) will hold a special place in my gaming heart. So last week I purchased Super Mario Galaxy 2. It came with a SMG2 money box. I now have something else to gather dust in my flat. The front cover of the game advertised that it came with a ‘free tutorial dvd’. At first I thought that it was something to do with having the version with the free money box. On further investigation it turns out everyone gets this dvd with their purchase. I ignored it. I’ve played before. I put in the game and off I went into the world(s) of Mario (with Yoshi in tow this time).

Last weekend I went over to visit some friends. In between a game of Agricola and lighting the BBQ we decided to watch the SMG2 dvd. We were greeted with a similar opening to the Wii Motion Plus start up video. It reminds me of an airline safety video when they explain how to fasten and unfasten your seatbelt as if it’s the most complex set of actions you’ve ever encountered. After watching how to insert the nunchuck into the Wii Remote, the DVD started to explain how you could actually move the Mario character around by using the control stick on the nunchuck. “Pressing forward on the control stick (actually) moves Mario forward within the game”. There was a good couple of minutes just explaining how to move Mario. We fast-forwarded the DVD. It continued to show each move possible within the game. These were shown with run-throughs of different levels within the game playing in the background. Having already played the first couple of levels I was shocked at how much of the game was given away through the DVD. We all commented that it should have come with a spoiler warning. The other point was that you can actually find out these moves as you progress through the actual game. As with any other Mario game, there are signposts throughout the level(s) that you can press A to read and it tells you what to do. There are even quite a few moments when you are forced to read an explanation of a new item you’ve found, especially when it changes Mario’s abilities.

So I’m left questioning the purpose of the DVD. I’d be interested to know how many players watch this from start to finish (or even throughout playing) in order to learn how to progress through the game. I usually learn how to play the game through actually playing the game. That’s what tutorials and pop-up text boxes are for. I realise you could technically watch the dvd and pause and play side by side but what’s the fun in that? For me, playing the game usually allows me to explore the gamespace, test the controls and learn through my mistakes. I like the gameworld to unfold as I progress through them, otherwise I may as well read a walkthrough and not even bother. It’s not as if this DVD even replaces the need for a walkthrough as on a quick google search (as expected) there are many available. Considering the Wii console doesn’t come with a tutorial DVD, I find its inclusion slightly confusing. It’s not as if SMG2 is a console release game. Whatever its purpose, for me I guess it’s just another thing to gather dust.

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Mapping the Skies

Posted on 27/04/2010 by admin

I’m speaking at ISEA2010 in the summer. My paper is about datalogging through GPS and what this means in terms of our relationships with the spaces/places we encounter and the journeys we experience. It’s meant that I’ve been looking more and more at maps and tracking so when flights stopped over Europe temporarily last week I became interested in the flightradar site. I started to log the flight activity at certain times each day to see how much it may be changing, but I wish I had started it earlier as I didn’t start doing it until Monday 19th (and the airspace restrictions over the UK were lifted on the Tuesday evening). I’m not sure what to do with this data yet so in the meantime I thought I would share the screen grabs to show a comparison in the amount of flights each day at 10am. The data really shows how many planes are about compared to closed airports/airspace although you can click on each flight on the website to see a flight path for it.

Monday 19th April 10am (UK airspace closed)

Wednesday 21st April 10am (UK airspace open)

The most interesting tracks for me that I managed to capture were those British Airways flights that wanted to land even though UK airspace was still closed at 8pm on the Tuesday evening. You can see how the planes were circling parts of the UK and Ireland obviously waiting for clearance. Shortly after capturing this, the news announced that most of the BA flights would be allowed to land at London airports and the airspace was allowed to open. I really like how the plane tracks depict a story of the flights in a standoff with the authorities. I’m glad I was able to capture this moments through screengrabs, as that’s the beauty of some of these tracked journeys is that like the trails of planes in the air, they are shown temporarily, and then all memory of that flight and it’s flight path is then gone for another track/trail to take its place.

BA Flight from Vancouver to Heathrow (Tuesday 20th April, 8pm)

BA flight from San Francisco to Heathrow (Tuesday 20th April, 8pm)

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Heavy Rain (Part 1)

Posted on 16/03/2010 by admin

I have writer’s block. It’s annoying as I know what I want to say but at the moment it’s not coming out on paper. I wish there was a logic behind it, but it appears to be common as it comes up often when discussing writing papers with friends. So I thought I would blog about Heavy Rain instead, to make myself write something completely unrelated in the hope it may help.

I wasn’t going to buy Heavy Rain. I waited for the demo to download from PSN weeks ago (I’m sure it was something like 5gb but please correct me if I’m wrong). I was really looking forward to it, I’d heard so many great things and I was left with a massive sense of disappointment. I didn’t relate to detective character and I was unsure of the backstory. Weirdly these things are never top on my list of things I immediately think about when playing games (although narrative may sometimes impact on my playing, I’m never always consciously aware of it), but in this demo it felt more than necessary. The controls annoyed me as well. I had a massive dislike of having to hold down a trigger button to make my character move. It felt clumsy, awkward and unnatural compared to just moving the analog sticks by themselves. It’s funny how these things effect you, but controller design is something that has always been important to me. That’s why I prefer the PS3 to the Xbox360 a lot of the time, I prefer the neat, small design of the controller and the way my fingers jump between the buttons with ease. So I dismissed Heavy Rain temporarily. I was adamant I wasn’t going to buy it, until I had a conversation with someone at work. They had felt the same thing about the demo but assured me the game was worth buying. I was tempted, so I took a chance.

How wrong could I have been? From the moment I started playing the full version I was hooked. Sure, there are still a few things I don’t like about it but these somehow outweigh the positives. After playing for a while the controls start to feel more intuitive. As some of them, such as opening doors, or picking things up, start to feel more natural, the learning curve from the beginning actions of the game ease you in. I no longer begrudged having to hold down a trigger button to move my avatar across a room, it soon became second nature. Swapping between different characters and different scenarios kept my interest, and even the short play sessions and seemingly longer, frequent cut-scenes didn’t seem to bother me as I was intruigued as to where the story would take me. I wanted to know how everything fit together, I wanted to know if I would get to the end on time, and although I didn’t always hit the controls in the right order, I never had a sense that my avatar was going to die and I would be pushed back to an earlier part of the game. The lack of dying through inadequate control kept me going, as I felt I was continually progressing even though I often made mistakes.

I did however spend most of the game questioning whether how much this really was a game. Sure, I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it in so far as I kept playing as I wanted to find out who the killer was. It was an ‘interactive drama’ in many ways, as much as that feels like a dated term for it. Although I could control a character, there were extremely freuqnet cut-scenes and some of the action was very much driven by the outcome of the different narrative threads as opposed to me (although I guess games can be like this too. Even though the player is felt to make like they’ve made decisions, many actions are consequently driven by design. Not many worlds can be ‘infinite’ if at all). I kept playing as the narrative kept me wanting to play. Sometimes it felt like the story would continue in the same way no matter what button I pressed, but I carried on regardless. It is the first game I’ve really felt a connection with the story, as an outsider viewing the action, and as an interacter effecting what was possibly coming next.

From a game point of view there were many things I didn’t like. The way the characters acted like Sims frustrated me slightly. Although it was interesting that you could use the bathroom, shower, brush your teeth, etc, each action involved a timed animation of the event, wishing that I could fast-forward and carry on with the story. The AI was similar, with each interaction with another character at a designated point in the narrative feeling like I really didn’t have any control over the moment. Some points felt inconsistent. I could brush my characters teeth but I could only go under a certain section of the police tape, and I could only leave some buildings when the narrative allowed. I know this is down to the mechanics of the game, and it isn’t possible to have every scenario but sometimes these inconsistencies stood out too much, especially as soon as the game promised to be user-driven, you, as a player, were bought back with a bang to having to follow what the designers intended. This sometimes meant the narrative sequences skipped like a movie DVD and on a few occasions the sound and action didn’t sync up as the PS3 struggled to keep up with loading the data.

Despite all of this I was hooked on ending the game. It took me 8 hours, which is one hell of a movie, but cost for cost, it is more expensive than a movie. The ending didn’t turn out like I wanted, but I wasn’t disappointed, probably because I knew I could play again. Which is what I am doing now. I’ve gone back for a second run, and I’ve already discovered a few new things that didn’t occur before. I guess that’s the explorer in me. I love to explore what more a game can offer, I love a good glitch, and in this case I’m keen to explore the other alternatives to scenarios I had played previously. That is why this is titled ‘Part 1′ as maybe I will blog again about Heavy Rain, maybe my attitude to it will change again on another playing. I’m not in so much of a hurry to finish it this time. I’ve had one ending, and even if it turns out the same with this new playing, I will have still discovered new things, and experienced a different narrative a second time round.

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Late at the Tate: Game Play

Posted on 11/03/2010 by admin

Last Friday (5th March), the Tate Britain held ‘Game Play‘ as part of their monthly Late at the Tate series. The night offered game playing (from games of Werewolf, through to large displays of the newly released Heavy Rain), talks, workshops and Blast Theory‘s location based game ‘Can You See Me Now?’. This was my main reason for going as I seemed to have missed previous opportunities to play this game and have enjoyed some of Blast Theory’s previous offerings.

‘Can You See Me Now?’ is played through virtual spaces as well as tracking real world spaces in and around where the player’s are located. The aim of the game is to spend as much time in the virtual space as possible, without the real-world runners catching you. The tate foyer was filled with about 12 Macs, with 2 sets of headphones attached as players could have another person listen in on their game. You are asked to type in your name, we made one up. Then you are asked to type the name of someone you haven’t seen for a while, again we made one up. Then we were in, our avatar was placed within the virtual world representing the buildings in and around the Tate Britain. I was controlling the character but negotiating with my friend as to where we should go, so we turned it into a co-op campaign with one avatar. Our avatar was first placed near a courtyard within the game so we spent the first few moments figuring out where we were and where the runners were in relation to us. This meant we were trying to stay behind walls or at least up against them before venturing out into the rest of the world. In doing so, we found a few glitches such as walls that we could accidentally move through, so that became another part of our mission, trying to find out what other areas were mysteriously available.

After realising that the runners were far away, we ventured out into the surrounding spaces around the Tate. It seemed as if it was possible to be in full view of the runners and still get passed them on a few occasions. All the while you are playing, information is being relayed about people’s whereabouts on the runners walkie talkies that you can listen to via the attached headphones. On the moment when we decided to stop and hide for a moment, listening to the action was an interesting way of finding out who had been caught and where they had been caught, but some messages were muffled and often hard to decipher. We managed to stay in the game for what felt like a long time, many players were caught within minutes, yet we were still navigating around the grounds, trying to match real world spaces with virtual ones, and were sometimes left wondering if the paths were that bounded in the real space. Many paths around the buildings seemed to have collision detection attached so you couldn’t always go where you think you should be able to go, but that was part of the learning process in being able to move around the gameworld.

After being in the game for a while we started to get restless, and made the decision to hunt down the runners and turn the game around. This took a little while as the avatars movement in the gameworld seems to be rather slow. I’m not sure if this is deliberate or some kind of lag. Either would make sense, as in the virtual world the avatar has no obstructions such as traffic or other people which the real world runners would encounter, therefore maybe the avatar movement is deliberately slowed down (or maybe it is just a technological constraint). We finally found 2 runners together and moved our avatar directly up to one. If we could have tapped them on the shoulder we would have done (our only option was to communicate this action through a chat screen). Nothing happened, so we moved up to the next runner, and at one point were situated between 2 runners. Still nothing happened. Then after about a minute delay we were finally caught. Our position was spoken to the rest of the playing community, we had been found. Then the runner had to say the name of the person we hadn’t seen for a while. Ours was ‘Yoshi Poopypants’, and in saying it, the runner muffled a giggle over the walkie talkie. It was a perfect ending to a mixture of real world and virtual world activities.

On a separate note, I managed to catch most of the talk on ‘Video Games: design, narrative, gameplay’ chaired by Ste Curran (creative director of Zoe Mode), with a panel including Charles Cecil (creator, writer and artist), Kieron Gillen (game critic and writer) and Dave Gibbons (co-creator of Watchmen). The talk was interesting, discussing topics such as the design of gameplay, the importance of narrative and engagement with characters in relation to gameplay and how different types of narrative and gameplay techniques were constructed. It was definitely driven towards a gameplaying audience, with references to games commonly encountered within gaming communities. Having spent the last few years surrounded by academic game research, it did feel like the age old narratology/ludology debate raising its head again, but was a worth-while event for those that engage with games and were interested in their production processes.

All in all it was a great evening. Games seem to be growing more within UK galleries. Seems the next V&A late night is themed around games and play too, hopefully I’ll have something to say about that at the end of the month. Watch this space.

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Contemplating Foursquare

Posted on 08/03/2010 by admin

I’ve been doing a lot of datalogging lately. My interest in paths and journeys is increasing once again, and I’m presenting a paper at ISEA 2010 in the summer about GPS datalogging and landscapes. So in order to understand logging and places a bit further, I finally started using FourSquare. I’ve had it installed as an app on my iPhone for a while now but haven’t had much of a reason to use it. On Friday evening, I went to the Tate for their monthly late night as it was game related (I will blog about this later), and as I met friends beforehand I decided to log the places I’d been. I started off with my train station and collected a Newbie Badge. The excitement soon wore off when I logged in my next destination and didn’t achieve anything. When I logged my coffee stop at the Yellow Cafe in Selfridges, things became a bit more exciting again as I was informed that I could get a free coffee in Debenhams (Oxford St) on a Friday. This happened after I’d sat down and had ordered my (soon to be paid for) coffee in a separate coffee shop. Now I know for the future that if I stand outside places, I will be informed of offers near my location. That really brings me to the point of this blog-post. I’m not 100% sure of the purpose of FourSquare for me at the moment. I understand how it’s supposed to be a ‘game’ with ‘real-world achievements’, but my initial experiences of it feel like a chore. When I’m out and about I don’t want to have to stop and think about logging in. On the other hand, I don’t want my every movement tracked and logged so I wouldn’t want the app to do this on-demand for me either. I can see that it can be used as a marketing tool, and as a way of letting your friends and others know where you’ve been and the experiences you’ve had there, but I feel there are other applications that do that for me already. I can look up where I am on google maps and it will show me pictures and places around me. I can browse the internet, or use twitters location function to find out what’s on around me as well as other news. I am slightly confused as to what more FourSquare can offer me. Maybe it’s because I’m not into achievements. I don’t care much about unlocking achievements or trophies on my Xbox360 or PS3. When I do unlock any, the box distracts me slightly rather than makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. The game’s I’m playing already have some sort of rules, I already know whether I’m progressing or not.

I guess the point of this post is to comment on my uses of FourSquare so far. I know I can’t comment on it in full as I’ve used it for approximately an afternoon, and even then I forgot about it and the logs didn’t become a true representation of every place I’d been that day. I forgot to log Victoria bus station, the other tube stations I went through, and the pub I went to after the Tate. Maybe it’s just another service to remember to use, like a pictorial logging of my daily life, rather than commenting on it through the text-based descriptions of Twitter. Maybe I will never be into achievements enough to worry about it. Maybe I will learn that it does something so amazing that I will integrate it into my everyday life. Watch this space…

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