Rick Letters.

It’s like a “hipster” graveyard in here. 

By the way, when I said “go digging” 2 sentences ago, I really meant “pick at random”. Or rather, “whatever sounds weird enough to keep my interest”. If you are a discerning reader, there will be quite a lot to learn here. Shall we?

Number 1: Jim Henson’s Muppet Adventure No.1 - Chaos at the Carnival

Year of release: 1989

Developer: Micromosaics

Publisher: Hi-Tech Expressions, Inc.

Genre: Strawberry Throwing Simulator

I need to be transparent here. Apparently this is part of a mini-game collection involving other Muppets doing things at a carnival. But as I already said, I’m going in blind so this is what I deserve. Considering the collection doesn’t have Rowlf the Dog, Beaker, or Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, I can’t be bothered to check if the other sections are available. 

In Muppet Adventure No. 1, you play as Kermit with an infinite supply of strawberries. He takes these strawberries and throws them at the ducks. This constitutes as hunting. More ducks continue to spawn from the background and try to get past you. Feed 100 ducks and the game crashes. Let 10 ducks get past you and the game also crashes. I can only imagine this is a result of being chopped from a larger game, but it’s quite the experience to hear a deafening noise after the silence of the game. I’ve had to make my own story as a result of being a cross-section, and I’ve decided it shall be a nightmare:

Behind the ducks is a horrific foie gras farm. Behind Kermit is safety. Kermit has become a duck farmer, a monster, and now we must also become the monster. Take your pick, will you feed the ducks juicy strawberries to make the quota or let them go? And now we know the importance of context.

Number 2: Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood

Year of release: 1985

Developer: Sierra On-Line

Publisher: Walt Disney Personal Computer Software

Genre: Adventure 

Holy shit look at Pooh’s Face. After the title screen this is the first thing you see. I’m terrified. His face is actually the Lenny face:  (  ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ). And I could talk about how in the game you need to search through the Hundred Acre Wood to find objects that characters have lost which you then return, but I’d rather talk about this exact screenshot. For instance, that Pooh Bear is sitting next to a book about him, which I imagine feels like waking up in your single bedroom apartment and on your nightstand is your biography. Yet you live alone and were not told a book is being written about you. Surprise!

Before I move on, I’d like to bring up what has now become a reoccurring theme of the importance of context. When I saw Winnie the Pooh in the title, I assumed I’d be playing Winnie the Pooh. Or at the very least, playing Christopher Robin. But that isn’t the case here. Rather you play as someone else who starts their adventure in Christopher Robin’s playroom. At the age of 7 this might feel perfectly normal, because of course I’d be playing in my friend’s playroom. But as a 23-year-old, I feel like either I just woke up after a 36 hour bender and somehow ended up in a different country in a small boy’s toy room, or that my character needed to introduce himself door-by-door before moving into the neighborhood.

Number 3: Beyond the Titanic

Year of release: 1986

Developer: Scott Miller

Publisher: Apogee Software, Ltd.

Genre: Interactive Fiction

Everyone remembers the stories of that fateful night the Titanic left from San Francisco to go somewhere else in the Pacific. My favorite part of that mediocre James Cameron movie is seeing Alcatraz in the background as they leave port. I’m lying. This didn’t happen. But as you can see from the text above, the game seems to think so. I hate to be that guy, but the ship was never even in the United States. That’s kind of the tragedy of the story.

But what about on a smaller scale, where the scope is constricted but incredibly refined? Here indie game developer Zack Bell steps in with a wonderful little platforming experience in Ink. Created in the aftermath of Ludum Dare 32 over the course of three weeks, Ink focuses on one concept, as most game jam games do. In this case, the critical knowledge of what’s coming next in a platforming level is removed from the player. Instead, every screen starts blank and you’re forced to try jumping with the hope of landing on a platform, instead of falling to your death.

With controls mirroring Super Meat Boy (slight stick to walls and mid-air control) and the addition of a double jump, the game controls well for the time put into the project. And that’s plenty for the game, because it’s real shining moment isn’t in the platforming feel, but rather how the game treats the player. If we look back at Super Meat Boy, beyond it’s controls and difficulty, the game’s quickness of respawn after a death was a huge necessity to the game. Die, start again, die, start again. What’s gained through each consecutive attempt (prior to getting too frustrated and messing up on parts that were easy before) is knowledge of the next part of the level. In Meat Boy’s wake are meat splatters from where he’s been. The end of the level is the high point of reward for the player, with every small victory within the level being quickly met by death or the entire level’s completion.

Ink tries something different. Instead of making knowledge the only benefit from death, it also introduces exploration and art into the mix. The player must explore the level to begin the process of completing it, and while doing so paint the walls in a rainbow of colors. I never got frustrated while playing Ink because every death was part of a greater work of art that I was building. Instead of quitting out of frustration, I was enjoying the view of what I helped to create. The rewards are split: die and keep painting or complete the level and start again.

Secondary rewards seem like something that can vastly benefit games. Of course, nothing can beat actually finishing the level, and that shouldn’t change. But for those that have difficulty with game mechanics (or even those that don’t and still can’t beat Super Beat Boy), giving every player some small reward doesn’t hurt. Of course this can very quickly get insidious, as in every pay-to-win game that abuses the mind of the player - see Danny O’Dwyers recent episode of The Point for more analysis of games like this. But with games that respect the players, experiences like Ink open up a new space of enjoyment for games traditionally focused on the end goal. Ink let’s you enjoy the destination and the journey, and I can’t wait to see its final state considering that it has just been greenlit for Steam.

Download Ink: http://zackbellgames.itch.io/ink

Follow the dev blog: http://zackbellgames.com/author/zackbellgames/

Before I say anything about this game, it’s important to establish context. This was made as a first year game art school project by creator “blakemwood” in 16 weeks. With that information, Dolly biggest strength is its appearance. Aiming for a minimalist aesthetic, the setting in the 10-20 minute game left me happy to stare for a few seconds. Nothing abuses the eyes, making it extremely easy to play through without wanting to look away. I have to admit that I’m a sucker for games that take a digital look and let it degrade as if naturally occurring, such as Transistor did (you should play this). Dolly does this in its own way successfully.

Mechanically, the game is nothing new but what it does, it does well. Connecting in many ways to the movement of Super Meat Boy (which is never a bad thing), the avatar controls well, leaving space for error correction with mid-air adjustments and variable jump amounts. If a mistake is made and the avatar dies, starting again is almost immediate, which is a must for games of this type.

The greatest issue Dolly has (and once again, individual student project excluding music) is the intersection of aesthetic and mechanics. The game is based on a grid, but the art isn’t quite as structured as the strict programming. This leaves the most frustrating points not a result of the player making mistakes based on what they are seeing, but rather erring because of the slightly off hitboxes. But honestly, it is easy to see that as a player and adjust quickly.

For a short experience that costs nothing to play, Dolly is worth the few minutes it takes to beat. There is a narrative to experience within the game, but like the art is very minimalist, so I’ll refrain from mentioning its details. So take a few minutes of your Hearthstone time and play this instead. You know you have the time to do it.

It may be personal, but I found myself growing attached to the character as though I was actually connected with her. At this point in my gaming career (ha) I’ve grown careful to grow attached to game characters (hearing Aerith’s story arc 4 hours into FFVII made my head explode), but it seemed genuinely impossible to avoid establishing an intimacy between myself and Hannah.

Don't mistake it though – this intimacy isn't reciprocal. Although it is easy for the player to slip into inhabiting the position of detective in the dialogue between Hannah and the police, one of the largest strengths of the game is to point out this is not allowed. The game dates itself in interface and recording dates, putting over 20 years time between the player and the time of the crime. Additionally, provided the low-glare mode isn’t turned on, a face is visible during the game at key information points. It’s a profound moment to be extremely engaged with a story only to see the reflection of another person in the screen where yours should be.

All of this cautious attachment, or rather false intimacy, to Hannah seems to be at the heart of Her Story's purpose. From this point I'm going to say spoilers again, although I don't find this to be that drastic of a spoiler to the narrative of the game. It turns out we the player aren't a blank face looking into old files simply because they exist, but rather we were playing Eve's (or Hannah's depending on how you interpret the story) now grown child digging through her mother's police files. This is brilliant. Not only does it give additional information about a piece of the story but it justifies the attraction built through the game. That attachment is still entirely voyeuristic, and it carries pangs of guilt for being so, but the important point is the genuine intimacy I felt because of a game.

Consider this: often games present situations and ask us to care because we must at some level to progress. Usually this is achieved through positive enjoyment. I say positive here because the idea that video games are for fun supersedes most other claims about the medium, at least in general public opinion. When it comes to creating something outside of the generalized realm of “fun”, “if your artistic vision doesn't allow for [your game to be fun to play] then you'll be fighting an uphill battle from the start”1. It is safer monetarily to create purely fun games because the general public expects as much and might not embrace a challenge to their concept of video games. So when most games ask us to care about what they are saying it is typically coupled with quick pleasure. Listen to our story about PMCs and we'll let you shoot more guns. The same could be said about Arkham Knight and its story, where the story twist is obvious from second one for anyone familiar with Batman, but was attempting to carry itself through mechanics and their expectations.

Yet with Her Story the promise is different: instead of play being tied as a reward to narrative, the rewarding aspect of Her Story is self-defined. There is no attempt being made to reach a lowest common denominator of fun; either you care about Hannah or you don’t. If you do, you continue to play until prompted with an option to quit. I found myself telling the game I wasn’t satisfied yet with what I’d learned not because I cared about the details of the crime, but because I cared about the details of Hannah. And prior to telling the game I was finished, I didn’t know the character I was playing in the game cared about Hannah’s story (I use “Hannah’s story” seriously here, I don’t mean the truth of the crime).

So what? It isn’t often that games leave me feeling something genuine for a character that is only because of that character. I think that is the importance of this game - divorced from enjoying interacting with the game, I cared about a character and felt like nothing was detracting from the care. Who would’ve thought an FMV game in 2015 could carry more power than anything else I’ve played this year? An FMV game. 2015. Wow.

Play Her Story. I fully expect it to show up on Game of the Year lists.

Buy Her Story:

Humble Store: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/herstory_storefront

iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id952658953

Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/368370/

But so many games are bogged down by ties to narration in other mediums, which can be unbelievably frustrating. Imagine watching a film where at certain intervals the screen goes black and the person next to you explains the next part of the film:

*Black*

“Okay so what happens next is Rocket Raccoon says they have to do some stuff to escape the prison, and he says they have to get a thing out of a box, but then Groot just goes to grab it without listening to the whole plan, and then the alarms go off, and it's so subtly funny, I laughed the whole time I saw it *ha ha ha* oh boy *heh heh*, and then... OH LOOK the picture is back, see how crazy it is in the prison now?”

That's hot garbage. It gets the job done to a degree, but it isn't the same as seeing it happen as it was intended. Roughly translate this into a game and you get the term “ludonarrative dissonance”2, where play (ludo-) and narrative intersect in a destructive fashion. The player is doing one thing, and the narrative of the game is telling them another. Imagine you are playing an open world  roleplaying game and decide to roleplay a pacifist. Wow are you so pure, you won't use violence at all. I’m surprised the Australian Censorship board hasn’t elected you president. But then the game tells you your character is a killer. Your character is a killer regardless of how you choose to play this game. And you say that's fine, I guess I'll kill people in this game even though I'd rather not. But for a moment you sit back a bit in your chair and remember this is all just a game. The play is broken because the narrative and the gameplay are going in opposite directions. (There is a second option here, and I experienced it playing Deus Ex: Human Revolutions. When I was told I could no longer play a pacifist, I decided it and I were done playing. I took my ball home and played Spelunky instead.)

I should make it explicit at this point, for the sake of making my position clear, that I understand games need some sort of setup. If you are playing a game that sets you up as a cold-blooded killer, choosing pacifism simply does not work.  The issue arises when the background set by the game contradicts the gameplay itself. That’s ludonarrative dissonance. Now if the narration is defined by its unreliability, we get into an interesting area where the discovery of what was told to be impossible isn’t. But this is something else from ludonarrative dissonance that I’ll have to come back to at a later date.

Finally we can talk about Dark Souls!

So what about Dark Souls and what does it mean in relation to all this other stuff I just talked about? Well, it is one of those special games that aligns the narrative structure of the game with the gameplay itself. If I were more pretentious (maybe I am), I would call this ludonarrative harmony (maybe I have).

How does this work? Dark Souls stakes itself in the genre of high fantasy, which means epic settings, epic characters. Think The Lord of the Rings for a perfect example. As its core for game narrative, Dark Souls uses the traditional structure of one character going to save the world. There were gods but something happened to them, and now humans have a disease that makes them undead. And then the game starts. What's your job in the game? To find a cure, maybe. Eventually the player is told to ring two bells by an NPC. Can that character be trusted? Where are these bells? What exactly will happen when I do this? *Shrug*. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki doesn't give the player much more than this to work with, which opens up the door for the player to fill in the gaps. The details of the narrative emerge from the player, as well as the meaning behind that narrative. It’s also important to note that my summary above is poor, but effective I think. Watch here for the first cutscene of the game if you’re looking for the actual narrative setup.

Let's look at how the game begins once the character gains control. Your character wakes up in a locked cell with no direct indication of how to proceed. Nothing is told through voice over; nothing is forced on the player. Also, nothing is given to the player. Why? From what little there is to discern from the narrative, your character has nothing - no memories, no training, no friends. It’s a bare situation for the player, and although it is a well-used narrative trope to give a character amnesia, or something similar, here it works. There is no information of value to your quest in your past. Rather it is completely set in the now, removing any sort of narrative reveal (such as Bioshock or an M. Night Shyamalan film).

As the game continues, the combat feels obtuse, as there is little forgiveness with animations. Most of the time, once an action has been chosen the animation cannot be interrupted by anything except an enemy. Your choices are commitments, but that is tough when the choices seem impossible to parse. The very mapping of buttons (once you begin to understand how they function together) makes the player choose whether moving the camera or sprinting is more important as both us the right thumb. Once you’ve gotten a grasp on the combat and controls of the game, it becomes clear that an alternate styling of holding the controller is preferable. I like using my pointer finger bent like a claw to hold down the B button on my XBox 360 controller.  Although it’s a bit awkward at first, just like the game, learning it allows for a better understanding of how to engage effectively with the game world.

The build in difficulty for the game doesn’t follow a traditional difficulty arc as well, where it increases until the absolute end. Rather, what is publicly regarded as the most difficult point of Dark Souls occurs directly in the center of the game with the boss battle Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough, which I could talk about design-wise but I’ll refrain from doing so right now. In terms of overall narrative (again what I am assuming  is discernable to the average player) by placing the point of supreme difficulty in the center, the narrative of your undead coming to grips with fighting and then becoming the most powerful fighter fits in well. When the hardest part of the game is understanding its systems and not being completely at the mercy of percentage and number manipulation by the game, at a certain point it can only get easier. This is why I know plenty of people who have quit at the Smough and Ornstein. The likelihood of completing it on the first run is small leading to continuous attempts, but unless the player wraps their mind around the fundamentals of the game, only ridiculous luck will let them win.

But if the player does quit, then the narrative ends as well. There is no narrative purgatory in Dark Souls like many narrative games; the chosen undead isn’t in the awkward limbo that, let’s say, Batman is in Arkham Asylum. I still I have a save on that game that I haven’t touched in 2 weeks, and I like to imagine Batman is patiently waiting for my return so that we can finally finish up the game (which takes place over the course of one night). But Dark Souls continues on forever. The game goes in circles, which is established in the world. Engage with it and you build the narrative; ignore it and you let the narrative remain stagnant but cohesive. That’s its greatest strength. So go play Dark Souls already, sheesh.

1. Bissell, Tom. "Braided."Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. (New York: Vintage, 2011), 92.