The roots of horror excellence

It's one of the things we completely lost lately. It is that feeling that might have decided the console war between Saturn and PsOne. It is one of the things that makes games look like art, and art like games. It is the primordial need of fun and fear, it is what action daily tries to neutralize, and sometimes impinges upon.

What if I told you that a game with no ending, no social, no artistic direction, no weapons might be the best of the year? The peak of this gaming span?

In Slender you're a person lost in the woods, in the dark. Equipped with a flashlight, you wander with the task of finding 8 different papers. On the first you read "NO NO NO NO" and see a drawing representing a man with long limbs and a pale face. On the second "Face, No eye". Once I picked it up, my game ended, the Slender man was inches away, facing me, making my vision blur over a broken television effect, getting closer until the game quit and came back to Windows.
That was my last game, I'll never launch it again. Every deep enough person should do the same. Slender gets easily under your skin, uses your deeper feelings of loneliness, fear and curiosity to shake your perception of what is playable or not.

Analyzing Slender is easier than playing it. Game play is shaped in a way that your enemy will never appear if you don't turn around, so you may just keep going one way, touring the structures you find in the forest in search of the papers, and get away with it. You're not going to do that, even if you knew about this feature. The environment reacts to your success, adding noise every paper you get (as I verified on Youtube). Steps and wind sum up to an incredibly growing feeling that you are going to get caught. Slender is implacable, there is no way to harm him, no way of freeing the woods of his presence.

In a similar fashion to what Silent Hill did with its first three releases, Slender convinces you that there is no way out of your nightmares, and when your feelings are compromised, you have no chance of getting rid of loneliness and the absence of hope, your mistakes or the weights others release on you are not possible to overtake. You are haunted by the slender man, you are alone, you have no hope. You turn around, you die, you go back to Windows. When you finished the first Silent Hill, were you sure that there were going to be happy moments for you and your daughter? When you finished the first Resident Evil, did you really think it was the last tyrant you'll ever face or that humanity still stood a chance?

Speaking about Slender, the game, it is fair to notice how it perfectly fits in this generation. It is both an elementary game like Dear Esther or Journey before it, and a perfectly crafted horror game like Silent Hill was. It rides both waves. Representing this intersection, it sounds obvious that a game with no ending, no weapons, no tactics, no online features, no plot twists will be, by some fair reviewers, labelled as a masterpiece. Because it stands where we needed someone to step up. It might just be the most important game of this year.

1 Million dreams

I often brag about my collection of games. I have a Master System II, a Saturn, a Dreamcast, a Playstation 2, a WII. I may have around 150 games in total. That is absolutely nothing, since a couple of days ago an unbelievable collection went to the highest bidder on eBay for 999.999,99 USD.
Yes, 1 Million dollar. Let's try and make an evaluation of this load of fun.
The collection has ALL games ever made for Sega systems, ALL for Nintendo consoles until Gamecube, and ALL Nec games and consoles. That sums up to a stunning 7000 games, and 22 consoles. Most of them are factory sealed. Let's focus on the games alone. If you paid 1 Million dollar for 7000 games that would mean you bought each of them for 143$, which can be considered a bit high, but considering that a sealed copy of some of those games is worth even 3000$ for collectionists, the 1 Million seems just an investment. Reason would suggest we'll see most of these games re-sold in hours. The buyer could just throw the consoles away and he would get much richer anyway.

The collection is, on a pure gaming standpoint, a one of a kind opportunity. There are rare games, but the number of cartridges and disks is too high for them to be played. Last year the same collection sold for about 1.200.000 USD. That means a loss, which becomes explicable if we think that nobody can ever play 7000 games. That's just too much, if we played 10 year for 8 hours a day it would mean 4 hours a game. You don't even START playing Final Fantasy 4 or Shen Mue in 4 hours. Let alone enjoying them. Selling game per game is the only way these games can live on, the only way this collection has any meaning other than a financial asset which price is going up and down.

So, please start splitting this package, dear buyer. It will be tough to sell all games, but if every game is sold at 1000$ (1/3 of what we said before), you'll just need to sell 1000 of them. The rest you can keep it for yourself, or you can open a museum and raise money with it, letting children play with 'New Zealand Story', 'Toshinden' or 'Wonder Boy' . Don't waste this big electronic inheritance.

Hitting the last walls standing

If it was 2007, anybody would be amazed with what the biggest brands presented at E3 these days.
Microsoft introduced the new Halo, the new Gears of War and bragged about third party games such as Resident Evil and others. Sony showed a convincing demo of the new Naughty Dogs title, postponing The Last Guardian yet again. Nintendo had his "hybrid generation" device set up and running a few Mario and Pikmin sessions. Electronic Arts talked about the new features of Sim City (5), and Ubisoft tried to innovate with Watch Dogs, probably the biggest impact game of the show.
But, in 2012, this expo is nonetheless disappointing. It seems like everybody is exploiting the last resources AAA games have to offer, scratching on the bottom of digital entertainment as we are accustomed to know it.

Let's start from Nintendo. The big N was the most anticipated company, we were all expecting figures about WiiU, both technically and regarding games. What we came up with was the substantial absence of a lineup for the new console launch and a series of trailers shattered here and there. Pikmin looks good, as well as the Mario games, and the new tablet controller allows for a bunch of new behaviours like coordinating the co-op sessions or editing strategic approaches.
Come back to last year's WiiU trailer: do you remember the golf game which featured the rendering of the ball on the tablet, laying on the floor, and the player swinging standing above it, looking at the screen just for the outcome of the shot? When we saw that, we were excited. But this year conference lost momentum, lost that grapple on us. There was a social hub and social interaction in games. WiiU seemed new last year, seems already seen this year. Nothing made us think "OK, they know exactly how to make games match their control system", and that was exactly what we were looking for.

Widely regarded as the best producer of E3 2012, Ubisoft had quite an impressive outing, with Assassin's Creed related news and Watch Dogs, a sort of free-roaming adventure where the protagonist can hack "any" sort of device to achieve his missions. In the demo shown, he caused an accident to find and kill an enemy, and  he distracted a security guard directing a call on his mobile. The dystopian Chicago in which the characters interact is believable and the overall feeling is that we are seeing a killer application in the making.
What is not clear is how this game is going to innovate the genre. Quite frankly, it's not so easy to state that such high level of interaction will translate to a good range of choice. That's what free roaming usually grants: go there, take on a mission, try and achieve it, on your way back do some secondary mission or subquests. That is where freedom has always been, not in the main quest. That's why GTA-like games are avid for subquests, and are able to follow a straight and rewarding plot; of course, leading to different endings, but not to different narrative twists. It remains to be seen whether Watch Dogs will be able (or just brave enough) to change that.

The Sims and Spore left Sim City in the background for ages. The last episode is dated 2003, and that game was a major disappointment because it lost any kind of gaming appeal after crossing every neighbour cities competition out of the feature list. The whole World was given to the player, forcing him/her to split resources amongst different cities. That created "monsters", like towns filled with power stations with not even one residential area. And, at the end of the day, no rewards for creating huge regions.
Sim City 5, called simply Sim City so far, made some heads turn these days in L.A. Aside from obvious curvy road construction or advanced animation, improvement largely due to nowadays technology, we'll have social neighbours, towns built by our friends creating a big net of cities interconnected. The most intriguing aspect is that agreements can be made between two different towns and they will be all regulated by players. There are going to be involuntary exchanges, such as crime spreading from one town to the other or disasters (a trademark of this franchise), likely unchained when both mayors are online.
Everything will be under control, not only on spreadsheets like in the previous instalments, but visually as well. That's where our worries rise: this feature will require the flow of the game to slow down a bit, since you have to identify which are the most troubled blocks or where the fastest growing areas are by looking at the screen.

It's been a sad cliche saying that videogames are moving very slowly. With the ever growing casual markets, AAA are left in a limbo where innovation doesn't necessarily mean better experiences for players. The new era has the looks of the previous one, with WiiU acting as Wii, PS4 as PS3, Xbox720 as Xbox360. Nintendo hopes WiiU does not turn in a new Dreamcast, Sony  is in economical disarray and for them innovation necessarily means debts, Microsoft cannot count on a wide spectrum of creative talent.
Third parties seem to be burning the midnight oil working around concepts already seen and played a thousand times.

We are slowly approaching the end of the tunnel. The last gameplay resources are being currently used. For what concerns AAA projects, simply there is nothing left to invent. We are hitting the wall of innovation, hopefully we won't run out of fun.

A meaningful game

The so-called "motion gaming" hasn't been a reliable resource so far. The technical aspect seems to be ages ahead of the gameplay part, leading to games which may stupify initially only to disappoint in the long run.

That's the reason why casual gaming was born and the general audience has widened in recent years. The reason why there are just a few good games in this generation, and not plenty as it used to be.

In my first dissertation, entitled "Applications for WiiMote and perpspectives of use", in 2006 I analised the first games coming out on Wii. Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, Trauma Center, Wario Smooth Moves, Zelda: Twilight Princess. Some of them succesfully managed to create new gaming experiences, but to me that was disappointing as well since the elements added to the gameplay were not able to deepen how the game was enjoied.
In Metroid, for example, we could pull a lever by pulling the WiiMote towards us, and that was something new, but the consequences on that specific gameplay element were null, since we could have pushed a button instead without losing anything at all.
Hardcore players couldn't find any reason to prefer Wii to the HD consoles, and usually settled with one of those two, leaving Wii to the masses of casual gamers, even tough there are amazing games on Wii, too.

Anyway, Nintendo has had a big economic boost from this generation, allowing them to think about the future and develop new consoles like 3DS or the next WiiU. Economically, there are a lot of reasons to follow Nintendo in this new adventure, gaming-wise there shouldn't be many.
The new hardware, coming out at least a couple of years before the new Sony and Microsoft consoles, promises to be far from them in performance as it was the case with Wii, but there already are completed games for WiiU and the development kit is all over the gaming most important studios.
Crytek already declared to be elated with the WiiU dev kits, as well as Sega, while EA and other companies are helping Nintendo in estabilishing performing online features. UbiSoft have a game in store and many more to accompany the debut of the new console as it was with 3DS.

They shouldn't be that eager to jump on this train, given the way Nintendo treated Wii abandoning it in its prime, when games were needed to prolong Wii's lifespan to be technically realigned with the other hardware companies once this generation was over.
The reason which is pushing them is one game. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Perfectly crafted, Z:SS is the classical game which could have been a masterpiece also on N64. There is nothing revolutionary in the gameplay. No Ico-like take on two characters story, no genre reinvention, no new impersonification measures. It just an action RPG, with the same greatness as the saga previous chapters, the same visionary stages and dungeons, the same secrets and enigmas.
Anyway, the sword Link brandishes seems to be the key to carry us over the storm of this flat generation into the next one. Thi WiiMote is used, for once, as a mean to enlarge pre-existing features rather than inventing new ones. Trivially, it is your sword. In the first dungeon the player can cut a spider web however he wants to, to pave his way through it. The first boss needs to be attacked from a specific point, depending on his stance, directing WiiMote in that particular fashion.
Multiply this for all the dungeons, all the creatures, all the enemies. You'll come up with thousands of ways to defeat villains, compared to one button of the past.

Gamers are, slowly, getting smarter, they will soon realise that too many games resemble each other. And the solution to this eventual behaviour is exactly what major companies are looking for in Nintendo. Finding the genius behind the constant progress of games. They want to jump on this train, they don't care about how many figures Nintendo can line up; that's just good for the japanese company.

Last summer I was preparing my other dissertation, on Kinect. When it came down to find something to program on it, I was taking into account too many options, and fortunately my teacher chose for me. That's basically what programmers do: they have this heck of a hardware and need to get a game out of it.
That is why motion control is always a couple of steps behind regular controls, the lack of previous gameplay engineering turned designers in newbies, finding a natural use of the peripheral instead of an "hardcore" one.
Anyway, you should be wondering why they didn't conceive something like Z:SS in the past, to crash opponents before they even came out with their consoles. That is easily explained by, again, the obviously poor experience they had at the time and the technological woes such devices undoubtedly have. With a first generation WiiMote, deeper games were impossible to develop for the low sensibility of the device which led to the infamous "shake-and-win" users behaviour; then, when WiiMote Plus came out, it was still needed some time to properly understand the input sent to the console, and how to tweak it into something playable. In a way, it seems like Nintendo has the edge over its opponents because this tweaking has been already made, and starting from Z:SS the only way is up while Sony and Microsoft are still fighting to find a suitable hardcore veil for their creations.

This is the edge third parties want to exploit, as if sales figures would represent where users want to go from now on. If hardcore gamers don't want motion sensing controllers anyway, it won't be possible to bridge the gap no matter what developers try to do. If they are open to this possibility, Nintendo will ride the wave at least until further generations, 20 years from now, will prove that motion gaming is not a stable innovation.

Heavy Rain, so heavy!

 Warning: spoilers all over the entry!

When shipped in February, Heavy Rain brought a much needed fresh air in the PS3 catalogue. Sony sold console bundles themed around the game, and the reception for the Quantic Dream masterpiece was as warm as ever. But, what were the players actually doing, by purchasing that game? They were taking distance from interactivity, they were showing how tired of the usual games they were, they were just trying to mutiny to the hardcore gamers cliches which forced them to sink into a spiral of plain and old gameplay mechanics in order to play a non-casual game.
But, were they doing it the right way? Is Heavy Rain a real masterpiece just because it is so different from everything else around?

The game is an 8-hour adventure, which uses "on-rail" investigation sections alongside QTE sections to guide four different characters to the epilogue, which can vary based on what they do or achieve during the adventure itself, which lets the player go on even if he doesn't solve every aspect of each scene or also if the character dies or is jailed. So, there is plenty of freedom, and that's something Quantic Dream must be praised for, because granting freedom using such techniques is hard and the main reason why graphic adventures are nowadays abandoned. Identifying where you miss something or where your character mistakes is easy, and the player will always be aware of what to change in order to reach a different ending (there are like 5 different endings per character, and sometimes they are combined each other). Then, when he completes the game, he can take on his previous session from where he missed something and go on from there, completing the game in a different way.

The plot is good enough to make you come back and try to reach the perfect ending for anyone, but there is a series of flaws which is worth considering before evaluating the game as a gem in the market. First of all, let's say that out of 8 hours, you play half of it, or maybe 5, because cutscenes take a good share of playing time. So, if you replay 2 hours, you end up watching 60 minutes of cutscenes, changing half of them for a 30 minutes of new content. Next time you play, maybe the 30 minutes will be 20, then 10, and so on. You are basically forced to get bored, and constrains kill fun and the real replayability value of the game, which is now just relying on an amazing plot to survive.

Heavy Rain gameplay also decreases the chanches of it getting away with murder from this entry. For how well it is programmed, for how varied it can be, QTE does not guarantee identification, especially when you are set to play with 4 different non-evolving characters. The pair of exploring section are a good alternative, and fun, but the imaginary boundaries set spoil the experience. In conclusion, in movies you identify with a character that has your same behaviour, or profession, or mindset. The same happens in Heavy Rain, and if you are not an architect who lost his first son and has the second kidnapped, or a hot journalist who cannot sleep, or a killer, or an FBI phenom, you won't fully identify with anyone in the game.

Quantic Dream made a great game, shipped it at the right time on the right market, created a legend because Heavy Rain is so different from the rest that users will end up adoring it. But, besides the huge scripting effort and a remarkable cinematic flow, fails in being the beginning of a new era. The title will remain unique, don't expect anything quite like that. A single sparkle in a land of shallow fun and involvement. But it is actually nothing really revolutionary, and has too many flaws to pave the way for clones. Since the same happened to much better games like ShenMue or Fumito Ueda's works, there is no reason why Heavy Rain would succeed in this particular aspect.

Future and words

Last month I had the opportunity to attend, as a student, the "Go Go Games" convention. It was about mobile gaming, a growing market which must be of some interest for everyone involved in the industry. Actually, mobile gaming is still far behind, for revenues, compared to the console and PC market, despite the incredible number of applications and different types of devices to exploit. Such figures were introduced by Renate Nyborg, the head of business development in a London-based multimedia company. We also found out that the U.S. are the main market for mobile applications and that the usual difference between number of female and male users is narrowing over time.

But, more than this, the part of the convention which got my attention was the last one. First, there was a presentation from the so-called "chief Wonka", an amiable guy who owns a small startup which produces iOS applications. His motto was trapped into a single word: "succailure" which means "success + failure". He showed the audience his personal journey into the mobile gaming market, started with some fun applications like a cartoonesque mouth that moves according to the users voice. The income from this kind of tools was around 0. To try and avoid "laying eggs", he tried with a game called ".", in which the player must guide a point inside side-scrolling levels towards the end. ".." followed "...", which was eventullay followed by ".....". 5 dots, don't ask where the fourth game ended up.
Anyway, chief Wonka wasn't earning a penny out of it, even if production times were narrowed to 48 hours in order to avoid wasting time/money into the programming phase. He finally found a way to pay the bills by publishing a collection of interactive children tales on iPad, a still growing application since he has so far received a lot of requests from users. Parents will be able to tell their children stories remotely.


That's what the mobile market is right now. It's like the Klondike for Scrooge McDuck. You go there, you try your best, you might come up with a great idea (luck) or you might be back home without nothing to show off. Anyone can dig in this first phase. There is no advantage for who is already in the business, as "Angry birds" shows very well.

The following lecturer was Mark Rein, one of the pioneers of the FPS revolution before founding his own AAA studio called Epic Games, which would eventually dominate the market, even thanks to its own engine, the Unreal Engine. Rein is a celebrity in the videogaming sector, and the possibility to attend one of his rare talks is something really precious.

Obviously, he is the exact opposite of chief Wonka, his company takes a lot of time to publish the next "Gears of War" and makes seven (eight) 0s revenues out of it. But Epic Games cannot stay out of the mobile market, it has to cover the possibility that consoles and PCs will fail in a couple of decades. With the growing capabilities of mobile devices, which will eventually reach consoles (*), Rein assumes that AAA developers will be the only ones to be able to publish compelling games, leaving people like Wonka behind. Rein's talk was broad, covered technical as well as marketing aspects, and was very interesting, but the real essence was that AAA, and his quality titles, will keep on staying on top of the selling charts.

But, as usual, a doubt popped up in my mind: if the difference between handhelds and consoles is going to get really fleeting, will we end up playing "Uncharted" in the metro instead of in our living rooms? Is the videogaming experience going to change in what seems to me as a complete abomination?

Uncharted on the NGP.
You'll be playing it on the metro or on the aircraft, with people chatting or children screaming around you. Not exactly the experience you wanted when you bought it.

Of course, I approached Rein after the conference, to speak with him about a series of topics. When I asked: "Do you think the new empowered way of mobile gaming suits the AAA usual titles, like Gears of War or adventure games like Uncharted or others?", he answered that we will be playing such titles on a tablet at the university bar. This vision scares me, as well as it should scare anyone aiming to get into the industry. The reason is that if I invent a videogame, I set a target, and a possibile environment for it to be played in. With markets colliding each other, one target melting one into the other and unpredictable ways in which a game will be played, the risk is to totally lose any artistic direction, with AAA titles, that now stand for "quality titles", losing a big part of their appeal.

(*) This is actually not true, mobile devices capabilities will NEVER reach PCs or consoles ones, but we can be confident they'll reach comparable standards in 5-10 years.

Standardizing creativity

When we think about game design, we usually think about long brain-stormings, endless design documents and the constant research of a common direction all over the span of a videogame development. Actually, the work of a game designer is far from that. Yes, they still have the idea, they still decide how events unroll during the game and how to interact with the environment. But this, as I was told a while ago from professionals, requires just the 20% of the total working hours. The main task is to follow the production process and make sure developers, artists and programmers do not lose sight with the most important aspects of the gameplay, and that the original idea is always arranged for the better. No design document reaches the deadline unchanged from the first draft.

So, it would be a good idea to standardize the game design chain, so that designers can easily follow a series of steps instead than always improvising. But what about this kind of management getting in the way of innovation? What if this new behaviour dries off every creativity, standardizing the games themselves, instead of making them richer in content over the years?

We had the opportunity to follow a presentation from the team director of a Ubisoft studio last month. The way they adopt is a perfectly coded alternation of elements and measures to enrich the original idea. A little example: the initial input for the Assassin's Creed series was “a game where you can climb up buildings walls”; it eventually developed in an immensely deeper gameplay which allowed the game to become a franchise. They simply put things together by following their method.

Such method is common to all Ubisoft studios. They basically kidnap people who work for them, escort them to some kind of hidden location in France and teach them this way of implementing gameplay during a week long full-immersion course.

I really apologise for not being able to get in more depth, but Ubisoft policies are very strict and I can't see the point in getting myself into legal troubles. I can ensure that it's all extremely precise. Each element has its own name, each structure has its design, measurement systems are common. Suppose a game designer in Toronto is speaking with one in Shangai: they would use the same vocabulary to communicate and exchange ideas about their respective games.

The aim of this post is obviously not to teach you this system, but just a way to discuss how this way of working stands in the way of pure creativity and gaming experience provided.

First of all, are games born from this “method” different each other?

The most successful games for the company in 2010 have been “AC: Brotherhood” and “Just dance 2”. I can't think of the more different titles. The former have come out just one year after the predecessor, and considered how big it is and how different it is from ”AC 2” defining it a miracle is not exaggerate by any extent. The latter already has a sequel, “Just Dance 3”, just announced. In a huge reality like Ubisoft, with many teams working on many different titles, variety is not a problem. In a small company, that would be a problem. Ubisoft is also wise in avoiding to publish two similar games from the same genre in a relatively short span of time. This measure is going to keep them away from repetitiveness. So, speaking about numbers and figures, it's the right approach, but what about new genres, new ways of entertaining independently from the hardware?

How innovative are the new Ubisoft sagas? Not much. The first AC, for example, was very boring for its lack of variety, which didn't make it stand out. It eventually developed into a franchise, but more because of marketing and other secondary reasons than because of gameplay. Ravid Rabbits is fun, fast and one of the best third party franchises on Nintendo consoles. But it's not a new genre. The new project “Child of Eden” out soon, might seem a totally new way of entertaining, and somehow it will be so, but denying any resemblance with “Rez” would be unfair. So, the question remains... will Ubisoft be able to grant us brand new gaming experiences? Maybe not, even if they're pretty close.

Child of Eden is bringing new ways of using Kinect to the mainstream

In conclusion, systems like the one I just briefly discussed are very productive and can allow a whole worldwide company to keep a common style without sacrificing any creativity. Maybe they won't let us do the “next step”, even if they actually are used on each of the new hardware (Kinect, 3DS), but, as of now, “games come out by themselves” and, given the reality of the gaming market, just this will guarantee a lot of income.