Bullet Points @ timlongo.com

Is the title of this post one of the most famous lines from anyone who has ever traveled through time? It must be. I am about to travel back into time myself to retrieve a series of posts from the past six months that never quite got published due to an extremely busy schedule. To keep an accurate sense of a time capsule I will be marking them as posted in the actual months they were originally intended for, thus changing time forever! I can literally go back in time and alter it so that Sarah Connor never read my blog (apparently it got her killed). The problem is, the only way for me to travel back in time is to do it naked. I can’t let that stop me…

So I’ve been obsessed with two semi-recent zombie games. Once I finally got a 360 the first thing I wanted to play was Dead Rising. Having not finished the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 when the Wii version recently came out I decided to start over and finally see it through as well. I haven’t been let down by either. I think both are truly great experiences for obviously very different reasons. I’ve been on this extreme Zombie kick thanks to reading The Walking Dead (Thanks Joveth and Morgan!) and I can’t get enough of anything zombie themed that is actually good. So on the fantasy fulfillment side of things these two games bring it home ten fold. As you may know already, Dead Rising finally delivers that Dawn of the Dead feel in a real-time sandbox way and RE4 goes straight for the linear amusement park horror film genre. I really can’t say enough about either when it comes to the things they do really well. But that isn’t what this post is about. I’ll leave the gushing for the enthusiast press. The ironic thing about both of these games is that they both have some fundamental flaws that just can’t be ignored. For some, they are so bad that those people put the games down. However, if you do decide to embrace the bad design choices, give in to what the team was trying to do and choose to accept these shortcomings, then and only then will the true game in each case be seen. How is it that a potentially bad design decision can result in not only an off-putting situation for some but also act as the the key to understanding the true nature of the experience. It is almost as if without these flaws the games would not be as great. It is both a designer’s worst nightmare and wildest dream (whoa that was cheesy). Here are some bullets to set things up:

Dead Rising
• One Save at a time.
• Eroding weapons.
• 100% complete impossible in one playthrough.
• Discourages cautious players trying to never restart.

Resident Evil 4
• Poor camera controls during combat.
• Unintuitive character controls during combat.
• Out of context characters and situations breaking the experience.
• Random ammo drops for potential weapons you can’t own.

So that just names a few and some are more egregious than others, but they hit the main points. With Dead Rising it basically comes down to the “one save at a time” and the need to power level your character by restarting the game over and over again. With RE4 it is mainly the controls that are called out as the biggest hurdle. In RE4 when in combat you have to aim with the Wii remote, use analog stick to move your camera, hold B down and finally fire with the A button all at the same time. All to shoot one zombie! All of these examples of feature implementation are almost no-brainers for most designers. When you hear them out of context you assume they are really just bad ideas. Bad design. No one wants to stand still while they shoot while fumbling with three other inputs. No one wants to have only one save game in a game where your best tactic is to die and restart the entire game in order to level up your character. No one really wants to worry about their weapons breaking all of the time. And when I say no one, I really mean most. There are always exceptions I know. But don’t take those into account for a second. Plus, no one spends millions of dollars on the “exceptions” anyway.

So all that being said, the games still work. Now putting those bad design ideas into context we start to see a potential method to the madness. In both cases it is almost as if the experiential goals that the teams were trying to achieve bled into the actual interface and shell features. I’m not talking about merely HUD skins to dress up the front end. These are fundamental aspects like save games. These are a very conscious choices to try to achieve a specific feeling. The sense of dread when running through a pack of lumbering zombies, knowing that any of them could grab me and take me down didn’t just come from the traditional tricks of camera angles, music, effects, etc. It actually came in part from the fact that I only have one freakin’ save game. Is that pack really worth the risk? If I fuck this up I might have to load my only game or worse yet, restart the entire game. When I press my B button and plant myself firmly in one place only to wait for the running hooded Spanish zombies to charge me with a chainsaw, I’m really committing to that. I almost feel helpless when I do that. Sure, you can try to run away, but you can’t fire without standing still. When I’m firing a weapon in a game being chased by tens guys with pitchforks, I kinda want to strafe and shit. I’m used to it. But take that strafe-while-firing away and you can bet your ass your heart rate gets going.

There is an extreme emotional relationship with those controls in RE4. Could it be that bad controls (or at least seemingly bad controls) are actually the key to the best horror moments in video games today? How do they get away with that? Or is the entire package in both cases so good, that we look beyond these flaws and embrace them only to later realize that what we assumed was insanity and folly is actually a brilliant assessment of the right designs driven by the right goals at the risk of, at first glance, being huge sacrifices.

It is an enormous burden to try to design something that is against the grain and common sense of today’s standards. I’m not talking revolutionary decisions. Even small ones can change the face of your experience. Only one save game isn’t revolutionary, really, but it is risky. Extremely so. To step out on that limb and embrace that “bad design” for the greater good of the entire package is something that scares me (and has given me ulcers in the past) and though I dread the next time I’m in that situation, I secretly long for it as well.

Just taking a few words to self promote my upcoming REI talks/clinics on Desolation Wilderness. Shameless plug I know. Especially seeing that many of you can’t even make it to the talks. But some might be able to. I’m having a great time with them so far and look forward to sharing one of my passions with the public. Without getting too sentimental and cheesy it is really amazing to me how excited I can get about this stuff. I’m up there talking to these people and almost yelling at them about how important it is to be a “good Wilderness (yes with a capital W) steward.” Some of them are wondering what I’m getting so worked up about, but some are also on the same page too I think. So it isn’t totally humiliating. Anyway, I love it and it is always a nice change from yelling about something games related anyway.

The talk is basically an hour long tour of Desolation Wilderness with discussion afterwards. Some things it covers:

• Introduction to the concept of Wilderness in general.
• Some history of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and what it means.
• Overview of the main features of Desolation specifically.
• Things to know before going to Desolation.
• Then finally it features 6 specific trips that one might want to go on, each with a different emphasis.

Here is the description from the REI store sites.

Exploring Desolation Wilderness
7/12/2007 7:00 PM

Southwest of Lake Tahoe and only a three-hour drive from the Bay Area, Desolation Wilderness is a 99-square mile gem with many of the great features of the High Sierra. In tonight’s slide presentation, former U.S. Forest Service wilderness ranger, and now volunteer, Tim Longo will introduce you to its spectacular landscapes, which include more than half a dozen peaks over 9,000 feet, 125 alpine lakes and 123 miles of trails. Come find out about permits, trailheads, route suggestions and Leave No Trace practices for your next Desolation adventure.

Additional dates/venues:

• 7 pm, Thursday, July 5 at REI Saratoga
• 7 pm, Wednesday, July 25 at REI Mountain View
• Location: REI San Carlos
• Contact: Custoomer Service 650.508.2330
• Cost: Free
• Registration Required? No.

Ya never know, maybe I’ll see ya there…

Lower Twin Lake at 8,000 ft.

For a long time I was fairly behind on keeping up with the daily news and opinions of the gaming press. I don’t know if it was a lack of time, interest, or effort, but I just never took to making it a regular part of my week. Well, since being at Crystal I’ve tried to remedy that and have been able to get in the habit of doing just that and I have to say I was missing a lot. One might say that it is really part of our jobs to make sure we are up-to-date on the current state of our industry or that knowing the opinions of the members of our press is critical when making important decisions about our own games but in the end I’m just having a great time being on the same page as everyone else (and in some cases ahead of most others) on our weekly landscape. So much so that in a few cases I’ve even become a fan of certain journalists. One interesting advantage with being so tapped in though, is being able to keep tabs on the trends that these journalists create via their opinions on certain subjects as those industry subjects change over time. The one area that this post will focus on is the way they are covering the Wii and its progress so far, which is something close to my heart as a gamer and developer.

So as we all know, this particular industry is still small enough in most people’s eyes to consider our press as part of the “enthusiast” media. For those who aren’t familiar these are journalists who cover a very specific area with a very specific audience. Maybe Dog Fancy magazine would be another example. So the interesting circumstance here is that while the dog lover audience will probably always stay pretty much the same size, games will (and are) not. Case-in-point is the success of the Wii, obviously. However, for the enthusiast press this means that their very medium which used to be very niche is slowly becoming mainstream (for real this time). But where does that leave them? As I read and listen to them cover the Wii I have begun to worry about some aspects of the way they are reacting to the Wii and how it might affect the work we do with the machine itself. I admit that some of this is plain paranoia but some might be a prediction of some friction that won’t be alleviated anytime soon.

But first some bullets about the current state of the Wii:

• The system is hardly next-gen when it comes to power. It isn’t trying to be the 360 or PS3 visually.
• It doesn’t have a huge library of good games for the typical gaming audience. In fact, you might say it is even dismal.
• In a world where on-line gaming is becoming the norm for most products in some way, the Wii and its games are very far behind everything else out there.
• Nintendo is still trying to figure out how to support third party games and though they are doing better it is still fair to say that it sucks.

So with most of the knowns out of the way let’s get to my concerns. The enthusiast press are almost angry at the fact that it is doing well. Yes, I’m generalizing some seeing that obviously not all of them do. But every month that is continues to succeed over all other platforms (we won’t talk about the DS in this post) they seem to either be upset or confused or worried that the good old days of hard core next-gen gaming may be going away as a flood of Wii ports and uninspired content comes to the console with the most install-base (and no, we won’t talk about the PS2 yet either). Sometimes I even get the feeling that they are afraid of its success because so many soccer moms and grandmothers are buying it that they somehow think that the Ninja Gaidens of the world will all go away.

So at first I was kinda reactionary about this. We, as developers and publishers, want games to move into the “extended audience” as Nintendo calls them. We want families to be playing a video game with ALL represented generations holding a controller at the family reunions. We want every TV to have a console attached to it. We want the Super Bowl to be replaced by the interactive and virtual…er…Super Bowl. And the Wii is going to probably get the closest. So how can that be bad?! For example, the game Wii Play hasn’t been too well received by the gaming press. Every time they speak about it they seem to really consider it a failure from an enthusiast point-of-view but it remains to be one of the top sellers (yes, maybe because of the controller inside, I’ll admit). Like Wii Sports, which some reviewers don’t even consider to be a video game, Wii Play is meant for that extended audience alone. Of course, us Hard Core gamers won’t like it for more than 2 minutes but that is the point! It just seems like their blinders are too tightly fastened to their heads and they aren’t able to stop and take a look at the (yes I’ll say it) Bigger Picture of what is going on here and why it is so important and wonderful.

So, after calming down I took a step back and tried to look at some other preservatives. What if they are right about one thing? The good old hard-core games will become fewer and fewer as the years go on? What if this is sort of the beginning of the end of the Golden or Silver Age of video games. Is there a place in the Modern Age for Ninja Gaiden or will they become so expensive with not enough gain compared to what can be sold on the Wii that we won’t get enough of them per year to make us happy? Will Metal Gear Solid 5 or Halo 4 be looking to become Wii primary SKUs with a dumbed down interface for the “extended audience” and the opposite hard version will be the one farmed out to an external developer to be ported over to the PS3s or 4s? As someone who is still squarely in that next-gen space, I often wonder what my job will be like if the Wii wins beyond imagination. I have plenty of opinions and comparisons to the histories of other mediums, but if you are reading this and have your own opinion, feel free to comment.

Are the enthusiasts rightly worried or just being stubbornly myopic?

• WARNING: This post reveals the death of a certain character in the TV Show Deadwood. So make sure you either don’t care or have already seen the show if you want to read the entire entry. Or just skip it as I will mark it clearly before I give it away.

Why is death such an obsession with creative storytellers? Most seem to always use it as the main, if not the only, solution for creating interesting dramatic scenarios in any and all mediums. Kill a character off and it must make an impact on the audience, right? Is it just seen as an easy out when all other ideas fail to come to mind?

Ok, so lets get the obvious stuff out of the way. Yes, it is part of the human condition. Yeah, we all fear death so when a character we care about dies then we feel it that much more. Yes, it takes something away from us that the creators/writers know we really wanted and after that point can never have again, so we almost mourn it if the “life” of that character was well regarded. But without getting into the philosophical and psychological aspects of this topic, what about the creative decisions behind this line of thinking? Is it a cop-out to just “kill another character off” in order to boost ratings, shock the audience, or otherwise make your mark on the cannon in some way?

Being around creative decisions most every day of my week a decision like this is not an uncommon one have come up from time to time. When stories are being constructed, especially sequels say, a look at the past characters and which one might be able to be killed off is often one of the first devices brought to the table. It has always rubbed me the wrong way and I’ve never been able to put my finger on it. Sometimes it’s even me who brings it up! Hell, the last two games I shipped ended with cliffhangers where one key character was gone or possibly dead (ironically neither may ever see a conclusion to those cliffhangers).

• SPOILER BELOW

This really hit me hard when I was watching Deadwood. The show is quite good so far, and I look forward to continuing it, but one of the key characters, Wild Bill Hickok is killed in maybe the 3rd or 4th episode. They do a fairly good job, I think, of getting the audience to empathize with him via a few different story angles and the performance by Keith Carradine is a huge help as well, but then they kill him off. Now a bit of the irony here is that it is historically accurate to what actually happened to Wild Bill. The way they handle the scene is very well engineered for maximum impact and drama. But that is why it stands out to me as such a big hit for this topic. They knew that going in. This main character dies in the very beginning of a major TV series so it was obviously orchestrated from day one based on when they chose to start the time line for the town. I felt supremely manipulated. So it made me rethink my stance on this creative choice. Is there really anything better you can do to achieve the aforementioned goals? Shock, loss, longing, etc. I watch Deadwood now and I really want Wild Bill to be there. Are there no other devices that can stand up against the great cop-out that is “writing a character out?” There must be, right?

So, before I continue on I wanted to pose the question to the readers. What are our options? Can other devices make just as large an impact on the audience and get away with it or are we stuck with this one absolute question for our characters? Are some other devices even better in the long run? What would a show be like where no one dies? Plus, what are some of your experiences with this cop-out that have pissed you off before? There are sooo many good recent examples, but I won’t steal them all quite yet. Share your thoughts.