Game Design Roulette

hu·brisˈ(h)yo͞obris/  - noun

excessive pride or self-confidence.

     2. declaring a return to writing, and then not posting a damn thing for two weeks

Part of the reason I haven’t done anything in this space is that I've just finished a week-long binge of League of Legends. I've finally come up for air thanks to a particularly bad streak of losses (thanks but fuck you very much ARAM for making me roll tanks five games in a row). I have spent way too much time thinking about League, and I wanted to touch on a few things about League and Diversity. For today, let’s talk about this guy, Lucian:

League got it’s first Black champion! Or at least, it’s first inarguably Black champion, as opposed to champions like Twisted Fate or Taric, who might be if you squint at their poorly gamma-balanced intro screens for alternate skins. His origins are fairly obvious; he’s explicitly got bits of Grammaton Cleric, Revolver Ocelot, and Edgar Davids (!), as well as a strong link to the Blade and Matrix movies. Visually and thematically, he’s everything I wanted, with inspirations from both Black and non-Black sources.

And he’s pretty great! Due to his being a bit overpowered on release, Lucian was adopted pretty quickly by the player community; he had a high pick rate during the 2014 League Championship Series, and was considered to be "God Tier" early on. As per the trend with new champ releases, Riot Games has had to reign in his power, but he’s even more mobile than at release and is still a high tier pick. He still feel great to play, and he’s a solid addition to the ADC lineup. His design fulfills the intended player experience of "highly mobile gun templar." So all in all, he’s a slam dunk, right? Unfortunately, not 100%.

I’m no lore-nut, but Lucian’s backstory contains, I believe, the only explicit fridging out of 120 champions. For those of you unfamiliar with the term Women in Refrigerators, it’s from a list written by comics reporter and writer Gail Simone about the proliferation of female characters written solely to being injured or killed horribly for the express purpose of motivating or creating angst for a male character. This robs the female character of any agency and relegates her to the role of a mere prop in the story of the male character

It’s lazy writing, and made even more dissonant because the murderer is another Champion, Thresh. Hilariously, Thresh and Lucian have great in-game synergy, and there’s nothing stopping them from being on the same team.

Other champions may have rivalries with other champs, and a few are even explicitly enemies due to differing factions or goals, but Lucian’s entire character is based on burning revenge for the murder of his wife, perpetrated by someone with whom he plays a glorified arena sport. It just makes no damn sense to keep in this hackneyed, regressive, anti-woman story line.

So having taken two step forwards, Riot stumbles one back by relying on a troubling writing trope. Here’s hoping that when they finally proceed with their promised lore update, someone will reexamine this and create something better. Lucian wouldn't be the first champion have his lore redone. Until then, I’ll keep complaining.

Ok, been stuck under a mountain of stressful stuff for the last two months, but I think things are under control now. Let’s get back into this game design thing.

Information and Cover taken from Mobygames

Ecco the motherfucking Dolphin Published by SEGA Enterprises Ltd. Developed by Novotrade Software Kft. Released 1992 Played on Retrocopy .960 and Picodrive for PSP

This is the other reason I've been stuck for so long. I want to like Ecco the Dolphin, I really do, but honestly it feels like I've reached a point where it’s actively kicking me in the groin. The real tragedy is that if Ecco was just a useless steaming pile of kusoge, I could just shelve it and move on, but that’s not the problem at all.  Ecco gets so many things right: it’s gorgeous, it has an innovative control scheme, and it even sneaks some sci-fi stylings. It certainly doesn't fail due to a lack of ambition.

At it’s core, Ecco is a fine adventure game about exploring the unfamiliar world under the waves. Within the first two levels, the player is taught non-bipedal travel and how to use sonar to navigate their surroundings. It’s a credit to the programmers that moving along both the horizontal and vertical axes is a joy, rather than cumbersome. Some of the best moments come from discovering how to circumvent obstacles like rushing currents and jerkass octopi without the benefit of hands.

Seriously, just look at this guy....Jerk.

Unfortunately, the tweet below from Ecco creator Ed Annunziata sums up why I stopped.

For a game about a *spoilers* time-traveling magic space dolphin, Ecco is very willing to punish the player for even the smallest of mistakes. Air supply and health are balanced in a manner that demands the player make no wrong turns (It isn't helped that for some reason the health and air bars are logarithmic, so as you get more injured, it appears like you lose more bar).

Ultimately, I stopped when it became clear that Ecco had no interest in respecting my time. Screw up, and you’re mostly likely dead and back to the start of the level because of how fragile Ecco is. Ecco has almost no post-hit invincibility to speak of, and running out of air is pretty much lethal if you aren't within spitting distance of an air pocket. I’m reminded of an article from Shamus Young’s blog, “Do it Again, Stupid.”

The OTHER type of game, the kind that has always perplexed me, is something my brother and I refer to as a “Do it again, stupid” game. The game will pose a challenge, and the player is almost certainly doomed to fail on their first attempt. And the second. And maybe a few subsequent attempts as well. Usually we’re talking about a “mission” of some sort. As in, “do something quite difficult before the time runs out”.

It becomes clear when you do this that the designers never intended for you to succeed on the first try. They intend for you to do the mission over and over until you meet some arbitrary goal or time limit. Often the mission with have some sort of surprise “gotcha” moment that foils you. You must then remember this and plan ahead on your next attempt.

Much like my objections to many of its contemporaries, Ecco provides a world for exploration, but the controls and hazards are geared towards breakneck movement. The adventure elements do not mesh with the exacting action elements. As a contrast, games like Dolphin Olympics 2 or Miami Shark do a much better job of designing levels around similar movement controls by focusing only on the action elements.

So, I got this in my email today. On the surface, it reads like one of those sexist ads where "our game is so awesome you're gonna ignore your girlfriend because its better than getting some amiright bros!!@!11!!"

However, curiously, the marketing department at Warner Bros. chose to not only to make the ad gender-  and sexual preference-neutral, but also objectify the Green Lantern and his rockin' abs. And even not 100% necessarily in a "men are unrealistic fantasy objects too" false equivalence sort of way.

Is this progress? I don't even fucking know anymore.

Well holy crap, League of Legends might, might have finally done something about it's imbalanced racial representation problems. Unfortunately, the pic above was quickly taken down, so it's unknown if the champion was scrapped or if they had just not wanted to show their hand before further work was done.

If you read through my archives, you'll note that one of the first Diversity in Design pieces I wrote was on the lack of racial representation in LoL. If this champ is going live, then this is an important step forwards toward fixing that problem. If he's not going live, then what I wrote is more pertinent than ever.

(there are some major spoilers here for the Sly Cooper series, so please be warned. Also, it's been several years since I last played, so I'm taking most of the details from my memory and the Sly wiki)

There’s been a ton of focus on feminist and racial issues in gaming lately, so I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about a less-frequently mentioned group suffers from poor representation. Today, we’re going to be looking people with physical disabilities.

Physical disabilities among video game characters generally run a very narrow range, with the most common either being Genius Cripples (this is TVTropes’ term, not mine), owners of an fantastical Artificial Limb, wearers of an Eyepatch of Power, and Blind Weaponmasters. Typically, the latter two barely even count as disabilities, as characters that have impaired vision are often granted Daredevil-levels of sensory perception, and so are not really disabled at all. Likewise, artificial limbs are often more powerful than meat limbs, and any challenges from having inorganic body parts are rarely examined.

“Differently-abled” has never been more apt.

I’d like to focus on one of the rare times a disability is actually treated as such, with it’s challenges and limitations actually recognized and treated with dignity. To do this, we’re going to need to loosen our definition of “person” to make this work.

Don’t let the coke-bottle glasses fool you, cross him and he will mess you up.

This is Bentley from the Sly Cooper series of games.  While Sly may be the hero on the box, its arguably Bentley’s journey thorugh the series that is actually more dynamic. Also, Bentley is the only example I can think of that gains his disability during the course of the series and yet remains as one of the main characters.

Last time, I talked about how Stalker’s setting is its most salient feature. It’s interesting to note that Stalker is not a post-apocalyptic setting in the traditional "world-changing armageddon" sense, but for all intents the Zone might as well be.

From an realism standpoint, the art direction in Stalker is fantastic, with plenty of decaying buildings, abandoned vehicles, and other reminders that the Zone was once thriving with human activity.

There is no better example of this than when you need to wander through the empty streets of Pripyat. GSC did their homework, and abandoned Brutalist architecture is everywhere.

They even replicated the Pripyat Ferris wheel!

However, what’s most important about Stalker’s setting is how it contributes to the mood of the game as a whole. I unintentionally left it out of my one sentence description, but Stalker is also member of the survival horror genre of games. Much like other SH games like Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark, the primary mood that Stalker tries to convey is one of helplessness in the face of danger.

Information and Cover taken from Mobygames

Published by THQ Inc. Developed by GSC Game World Released Mar 20, 2007Platform played on: Windows 7 PC Version 1.0006 with Stalker Mod Compilation 1.3 Also, I really wish I had found this link before I started playing

I’ve been struggling for the last ten minutes trying to figure out how to categorize S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl (which I’ll just refer to as Stalker from here on out, because FUCK PERIODS). It's a modern day, alternate history, open world, sci-fi survival shooter...thingy. Based loosely on the Russian sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic and it’s later reworked into the movie Stalker, Stalker:SoC borrows the same setting while jettisoning the plots of both sources.

Stalker is relatively skimpy on plot and characterization. There’s a whole “missing past” arc that should be familiar to anyone that’s played KoTOR or Bioshock, but it’s largely window dressing. Your motivations for everything you do are flimsy at best, and while the various factions feel differentiated, individual character traits are nonexistent.

It's also buggier than a VW Beetle even with fan patches.

At its heart, Stalker's strongest feature is its setting.  Using the tragic events of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown as its basis, Stalker reimagines the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (referred to as “the Zone” in-game) as a place fraught with danger but containing otherworldly rewards.  In the Zone, it’s quite possible you’ll be killed by mutant animals, radiation, soldiers, deranged cultists, or opportunistic bandits. Even the elements themselves conspire to murder you in creative ways, as the Zone has patches of instability called “anomalies,” where an unwary explorer could find themselves set on fire or flung hundreds of feet in the air.

Ok, so I stopped writing due to some real life stuff, but also because I was stuck trying to wrap things up with this week’s Roulette.

So let’s not waste time, let’s get right into it.  

Yesterday, my wife and I attended the keynote for the Different Games Conference, which was all about building games for diversity.  The keynote speaker was Mary Flanagan of Tiltfactor.

Mary is super adorable.

Truth be told, I found her talk a bit scattered, but there were quite a few things to take away from it.  Today, I want to focus specifically on her experiences with designing and testing POX, a iPad/board game about fighting a highly infectious disease. If I recall correctly, the idea came to her after she asked a friend in the medical sector what the biggest problem is in America today, to which they surprisingly replied, “vaccination.” POX was designed to raise awareness about the value of vaccination, especially given the recent anti-science, anti-vaccination attitudes that have cropped up recently in first-world nations.