The Other of All Game Protagonists

by Zen

Two games came out on the NES with the same design goals, but with different inspirations.  Both games were open-world action games that emphasized the hero's gradual mastery over an environment, but while The Legend of Zelda attempted to capture the spirit of adventure of a young child playing in the woods Metroid was inspired by the solitude and anxiety of the film Alien.  Understandably, this led to two very different protagonists.  Zelda's Link as the chosen hero, guided by destiny to rescue his princess, is a trope that even as a child I couldn't stomach.  His rise to victory is pre-ordained, a series of formalities the game, like its world, is obligated to bestow.  Metroid's Samus shows up similarly under-equipped, and similarly unlocks the secrets of her environment to gain the power to achieve her goal, but the game inherited Alien's emphasis on its heroine's personal struggle.  Even after awkward world-building was forced into the series Samus retained her potency, her desperate strength.

Metroid 2's only indication that Samus is a woman

It is mercifully mundane nowadays to note that Samus, like Ripley who inspired her, is a woman.  At the time it was something we talked about at recess.  "But the manual calls Samus 'he'!" Those of us who knew the code for her second quest (of course we couldn't beat the game ourselves), where the armor came off and her hair came down, knew the translators had just made the same assumption we had.  Seeing this made me think, probably for the first time, about where these assumptions came from.  But in the end Samus acted as a glorified peep show, rewarding the player with a flash of skin for completing the game quickly.  The positive impact of this representation was overwhelmed by objectification.

A few years ago I read a story about a man whose daughter loved playing Zelda games but wasn't interested in playing as another boy saving a girl.  He hacked the game script for Wind Waker so that it was a story about a young girl saving her brother, and it ended up working perfectly.  This is a really sweet story, one that highlights many of the imperfections to which "typical gamers" have the luxury of blindness.  There was a time I'd have sworn that gamers would cling to this anecdote as being indicative of video games' universal applicability, that the girl's desire to play Zelda at all meant vindication that games were more than mere focus-grouped novelty and had genuine cultural value, for everyone.  I now know better.

The backlash, in a smirking equivocation that has become all too familiar, came in the form of a version of Metroid hacked so that Samus is a man.  Neither hack was a high-profile event, but the audacity of this absurd rebuttal presages GamerGate's core tenet: that even one heroine is too many.  That young girls should stay out of the treehouse.

How powerups are acquired in Other M

This juvenile tantrum presaged something else: Nintendo itself rescinded Samus's heroic status, releasing a new Metroid game whose only purpose was to retroactively excise all agency, power, and courage from its once ground-breaking protagonist.  This game, Metroid: Other M, is the most aggressively sexist game I have ever played, made all the moreso by its determination to undo the barely-progressive "mistakes" of its forebears.  Its purpose was to reassure us that Samus, while she may have done cool stuff once, is ultimately nothing but a pretty vessel for male will, delirious with her desire to procreate.  Her newfound weakness illuminated a path of unconscionable derogation.

At the center of the most important moment in gamer culture right now is a series of videos made by Anita Sarkeesian on the representation of women in games.  A lot of nerds have responded with threatening vitriol, and while no video she could possibly have ever posted to YouTube justifies death and rape threats, I was somehow still surprised by how calm and careful her videos are. All she does is follow a trope from its origins in other media through the history of video games and then point out that, while these are mostly very good games that she can enjoy despite their problematic elements, those elements are still troubling enough to warrant attention and discussion.  It's the product of someone who clearly has a great love of the art form and wants to see it rise above its shortcomings.

For any element of the gaming community to react badly to this is confusing on many levels.  First are the obvious ones: I don't like to think about how people in our society could ever be this morally bankrupt, and that anyone could watch this video series and not only find fault with it but feel the need to make a "rebuttal" that attempts to invalidate rather than engage her points takes an uncomfortable degree of dishonesty and intellectual laziness.  What keeps me wondering, though, is how wrong I was about gamers' priorities: I have always known gamers to be so obsessed with the art form that they see as "theirs" that they want it to be all things to all people.  It isn't just that they like games, it's that games are the best.  It's that a higher class of people like games, smarter people who see the value in something the rest of the world doesn't understand.  There's a smug pretense about it all, and I always found this overcompensating myopia to be constitutive for gamer culture at large.

The controversy over Anita Sarkeesian, as well as GamerGate, highlight the shameful truth: that these gamers are more interested in abusing women than they are in video games.  Rather than wanting to see games eliminate those qualities that lead to justified derision, rather than shepherding a fledgling art form into true cultural relevance, they lash out at anyone who suggests they overcome their deep and protected bigotry.

Of anyone who still thinks this is an example of "boys will be boys", or of a vocal minority, I ask simply to consider the example of Samus Aran.  An already-problematic character, she nevertheless blazed a trail of representation that, if supported, could effect real change in how young boys are taught to think about women.  I have already written about the power this art form can have over the way that we care; to not only shout down any attempt to listen to women about how our art affects them but to find whatever meager sprig can grow in the wasteland of mainstream representation and pull it up by the roots represents a degree of hatred and willful oppression that nobody can afford to ignore.

Kotaku's Gamecenter CX Localization: It's terrible and it's a crying shame

by K1

Sins of Our Fathers

by Zen

As an avid reader of German philosophy, I so often find myself at the mercy of translators to properly understand the material. Even if I, like Heidegger, refuse to concern myself with fidelity to the philosopher's intent, a poor translation can obfuscate or even completely cover over useful nuances and enlightening tricks of meaning. This problem is as much present for novels and music as it is for philosophical works, and I've found it applies to video games as well. Masterpieces like 7th Saga, Final Fantasy V, Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu II), Chrono Trigger, and even parts of Final Fantasy VII suffered from having poor to nonexistent translations that hid their greatness from view.

Fortunately, Japanese publishers started to catch on that not everyone in the US is a drooling moron around the time the original PlayStation came out. Instead of dumbing down hard games and not even releasing games that were too complicated, Japan discovered that gamers in the US were thirsty for true works of art. For me, the turning point was a game called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and after the opening scene I knew things would never be the same again.

What follows is an annotation, a sort of recreation of my own thoughts as I relive these precious moments today. You are encouraged to click this YouTube link first, so that you can appreciate these lines as I first did all those years ago.

Richter: "Die, monster! You don't belong in this world!"

Dracula: "It is not by my hand that I am once again given flesh. I was called here by... humans who wish to pay me tribute."
Richter: "'Tribute'?! You steal men's souls, and make them your slaves!"
Dracula: "Perhaps the same could be said of all religions..."

Richter: "Your words are as empty as your soul! Mankind ill needs a savior such as you!"
Dracula: "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets! But enough talk... have at you!"

The Phantom of Akihabara - Part V

by alzabo

The Phantom of Akihabara

by alzabo

Beyond the Sea

by Zen

Holy crap, it's a Star Ocean renaissance! I just bought Star Ocean! Not the old FF7 ripoff that turned out to be awesomer than it had any right to be, or the new one from a couple years back that dripped diaper gravy all over its legacy, but the original Super Nintendo classic that, along with Tales of Phantasia and Seiken Densetsu 3, represent the peak of the old girl's technical prowess. The SNES version of the game was so awkwardly crammed into a cartridge, with zany data compression, some voice acting(!), and a somewhat unfinished-feeling campaign. It felt a lot like a planar version of Tales of Phantasia's linear combat, but at the end of the day that's not what distinguishes it.

If you've ever played any of the fifteen brazillion versions of Final Fantasy (that's Number One I'm talking about), you may have noticed that it had a lot of unique items and side quests that did more than just add to numbers on your stats window. This is mostly due to its proximity to the old pen and paper RPGs, and even their early computerized imitators. It was trying to give a sense of complexity, maintain some pretense of roleplay even though most of it was a farce (hell, most of the spells didn't actually even do a God damned thing). Even though it wasn't doing much, this level of imagination contributed to the sense of adventure in ways rarely recaptured nowadays.

Star Ocean is mostly your typical JRPG, but it deviates from the norm in ways both good and bad. The bad first: if you don't like missing things in your RPGs, like really useful items and characters, you should either stay away from the series entirely or always use a walkthrough. Star Ocean, and in particular its sequel, are infamous for making you regret things that seemed innocuous when you did them.

The good stuff is mostly the things you can miss or not notice. Part of what makes Star Ocean games great for me is the skill system. Instead of just combat skills or thieving skills or... cliches from that one movie, it gives a list of very general and mundane skills you can develop as your characters' numbers go up. Things like "Eye for Detail" and "Sketching". Sometimes they'll have immediate reward, like stat boosts, but other times they'll unlock abilities, like making artwork to sell or publishing books that can teach skills to other characters. Some of these abilities are necessary to get the best stuff in the game. Most of this is impossible for any player to know on his or her first time through.

Even though at the end of the day you just max out the important skills for everyone, you get to have some fun working it so that each character has a specialty. Maybe JRPG Character Archetype #2 is really good at composing music, Archetype #7 is your best pickpocket, Archetype #5 is learning to paint, and the whole group together has a pretty good orchestra and is learning to cook. They have varying reward in terms of the game system, but they're a handy aid to imagination and go a long way toward breaking up the monotony of the otherwise traditional gameplay.

Everything else about the games is completely standard. Their stories work well enough, their settings are sometimes irritating and sometimes just fine, and the music is actually kind of excellent its own quirky way. They're completely unapologetic, and worth experiencing. That said, I can only recommend buying these games, and their remakes, if you're really fond of their particular eras. The first came out at the end of the SNES days, and its remake and sequel (and its remake) are classic PS1 look and feel. Just don't miss out on that Eternal Sphere or you'll be so mad you'll stop playing.

If Star Ocean were a philosopher, it would be Hegel. Both understood that things had changed and how, and in attempting to make it all work together and synthesize everything that came before they managed to achieve no small degree of halfway-impressive mediocrity. Neither really works alone, but taken in terms of their places in history either can be enjoyed on its own terms. Also, bringing up either is a great way to end a conversation.

Sonic 2008

by Zen

It's that time again! Sonic Team has made another Sonic the Hedgehog game, and when they're not working out the appropriate anglo-saxon-derived hedgehog equivalent for "werewolf" or arguing over the continuity of the Sonic storyline, Sonic apologists are going to start coming up with arduous and ornate explanations for why this new game deserves an 8 out of 10.

Leaving aside the already-too-late aspect of lying to convince yourself the game you're playing is merely "not terrible", there's a legitimate and compelling sadness to the history of this franchise. Everyone will talk about the glory days of Sonic and you know they're talking about the Genesis games. Sonic Adventure was compelling, especially for its time, but it can hardly be recommended now. The sequels have each spread another layer of sadness on Sonic fans' hearts, culminating in the absolutely abominable 2006 game that was simply, blasphemously tarted around as some kind of replacement flagship under the title of Sonic the Hedgehog.

That Sonic Unleashed is an improvement is effectively tautological. Don't let fans' relief of this mundane fact fool you into spending dollars on this new entry. Over the years much effort has been spent getting to the bottom of A: what made the old games so great and B: what makes the new ones so execrable, and while answers vary one thing remains constant: Sonic Team is not interested in answering either question.

At first people thought they wanted a game where you go as fast as possible, since Sonic games' claim to fame was always that they were really fast-paced, but over time this has been proven completely wrong. Going as fast as possible means either barely interacting with the game as it holds your hand through automatic sections or constantly losing because you can't react to what's happening on the screen. The former is pleasant but quickly unrewarding, and the latter is absolute hell. Both issues have plagued the series in 3D for so long they can now be considered hallmarks.

Some people seem to enjoy Sonic and company as characters, and show an interest in what happens in the plotlines. I'm pretty sure this is just a byproduct of their apologism, since this world was founded on the simple lie that Sonic somehow has "attitude". It rarely occurs to people that Knuckles was added to be an edgier character, and that when that didn't work Sonic's Shadow counterpart was added to the mix. When he wasn't enough, Shadow was given a dark version as well. Now Sonic has a dark side at night. The entire setting, plot, and characters of Sonic the Hedgehog are a series of attempts to out-dark the last one. Even nostalgia for childhood cartoons can't justify staying on this sinking ship.

The truth is that, speed aside, there was never anything fundamentally different about Sonic as a game. He runs, he jumps, and sometimes he gets special abilities (most of which, you'll note, have little or nothing to do with going fast). What made the games stand out so much on the Genesis was that the levels were absolutely spectacularly designed. Sections of the game seemed to play themselves, but at any point the player could break away and use the game's physics to launch off to another path through the level. This was more than just branching or separate paths, it was a level full of ways to move forward and a player empowered to find a way among them at any time. It was fast because you were always playing, not because Sonic was moving quickly.

I'm going to go ahead say that I don't think we need Sonic the Hedgehog, even in good games. What lessons about level design we can learn from the old games should be learned and we should move on to new franchises. I don't mean Sonic Team, since they obviously don't care about anything but their own bad ideas. I mean us. Stop hoping the next Sonic game won't suck. Stop even knowing when it's going to come out! Let yourself look back on it with a smile as that awesome series on Genesis with the simple, goofy setting and great levels.

A Man Once Dreamt that He Was a Rock

by Zen

I'll confess I've never been as up on the Mega Man phenomenon as I should have been. Growing up I got to play the original, but not enough to get good at it. At home the only gaming device I was allowed was my Game Boy, so I made do with a couple of the Game Boy titles until I could use an emulator.

Technically I've played through and beaten the first seven games in the series, but since I did it with an emulator I cheated like mad and never got very good at them. The first Mega Man on Game Boy, however, remains my bitch to this day; I can maul through it with my eyes closed from start to finish.

Despite my metered exposure, having played almost the entire franchise I can say with some certainly that Mega Man 9 is the best entry by far. I would not have said anything of the sort during my first few hours of gameplay, what with the constant falling and exploding and losing, but after skating through the game once on energy tanks and picking it up again something crazy happened: I declared my lordship over it.

Every obstacle in the entire game is an obstacle only until you make sense of it. There's a rhythm to every area in Mega Man 9, and once you get into it you'll find yourself stopping very rarely. Areas that seemed arduous at first become second-nature, and weapons that seemed useless become favorite tools.

That's something about Mega Man 9 that we haven't seen in a long time: useful weapons. This is the single biggest factor in Mega Man 2's greatness, where the Metal Blade achieved legendary status for its versatility, power, and forgiving use of ammunition. The unfortunate side effect in Mega Man 2 was that it was practically compulsory for you to take on Metal Man first in a game that should be all about leaving it up to the player. Mega Man 9 sidesteps this by having every weapon possess genuine utility. Even the tired rotating shield weapon doubles as Enker's Mirror Shield, and the fire weapon is more useful for its angle of attack than for any extra damage it does or the fact that you can charge it.

A fundamental fact of a good Mega Man game is that the weapons you receive don't affect how much damage you do so much as they affect how you play the game. Another one is that playing the levels in a different order should be a very different experience. Mega Man games are even more nonlinear than the old Metroid games, it's just that that nonlinearity is completely on the table from the beginning. You acquire the tools in the order you want, and rather than deciding whether you can pass through an area, acquring a new tool merely decides how you can pass through that area.

The result, in Mega Man 9, is a playground. You are given obstacles, and you are given a bunch of tools. Anything will work, so it's just up to you to figure out what you want to use. It gets written up in my book along with Final Fantasy Tactics, Super Metroid, and Mario Sunshine as a shining example of nonlinear game and level design. If I could, I would make out with it every day.

My Tanks Are Fight

by Tupperwarez

The real reason Metal Max Returns fascinates me is these goddamn tanks. The ability to customize your tank to an almost psychotic degree is hypnotic. Not only can you modify the tank chassis, but you can also tune the individual parts up or down. This in turn changes the overall weight of your tank, which you must carefully balance with your engine's load capacity. When I'm adjusting these tanks into unstoppable engines of destruction, I'm entranced like a goddamn stoner staring into a kaleidoscope.

To Begin Your Adventure, Turn to Paragraph 1

by Tupperwarez

While gamebooks are pretty much a forgotten medium, I find the 'what-if' scenarios amusing to think about. Would gamebooks have survived if computer and video games had not taken off like they did? I think they would have. I imagine various publishing companies competing with various rule systems. Pen-and-paper RPG companies getting in on the game with solo campaigns in gamebook form. Bootleg books made by home-brew writers, hastily xeroxed and stapled together. Open Gaming License analogues allowing independent writers to create, publish, and sell their own books that use existing rule sets.

Rise from your grave

by alzabo

A good place to look for examples of the genre's death this is LucasArts. After Grim Fandango performed poorly in 1998, the lackluster sales of Escape from Monkey Island caused LucasArts to abandon every project that didn’t have “Star Wars” in the title. Other companies were having the similar problems, Westwood Studio’s Blade Runner did poorly the previous year and Sierra Entertainment had stopped producing adventure games. In a round of layoffs Sierra fired a quarter of their workforce; including Al Lowe and Scott Murphy, who created Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest respectively. It was a sad time to be a PC adventure game enthusiast, some say 3D games in general and the proliferation of First Person Shooters specifically killed the adventure game genre. There are other theories about what killed the genre, but I’m not writing this to mark the 10^th anniversary of Adventure Gaming’s death, I’m celebrating its return.

The Nintendo DS has become the new home for this timeless Genre. The first time I realized this was when I picked up Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in the Fall of 2005, the game is a classic point & click adventure that gained popularity via word of mouth and has had multiple repressing by Capcom. Phoenix Wright’s two sequels in 2006 and 2007 did equally well and I can say that the ending of the 3^rd game ties all three together into a fun and memorable trilogy that I enjoyed more than most adventure games I played on PC. Even though Phoenix Wright is an adventure game with some mature themes (almost all the cases revolve around murders that are somewhat grisly), the game has an “animu” flavor that is impossible to ignore. Luckly, there are alternatives made by the developer Cing.

After Cing’s first forgettable DS adventure game Trace Memory they developed the mesmerizing Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Hotel Dusk has the gameplay of a adventure game, a classic point & click interface with a FPS navigation twist, visuals that are mature and seem fitting (I love the whole “Take On Me” look) and a story that is right up there with the best PC games of yester-year. When I started playing, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing Icom’s Déjà Vu. The atmosphere of Hotel Dusk is so spectacular that I want to go back and play it for the first time all over again. I cannot stress the following enough: If you love adventure games you need to play Hotel Dusk.

Most people probably never expected Adventure games to make a comeback, the best part of all of this is that most of the people picking up these new games have never played a Adventure game before. It’s unlikely that they’ll go dig up old PC games to play on their PC, but the classics are available to them via another channel. One of the programs available to people who choose to hack their Nintendo DS handheld is ScummVM, a emulator designed to play adventure games by LucasArts, Sierra and other developers.

The reason I’m writing this today is because I finished Phoenix Wright 3 last night to clear up some of my game back-log to make room for both Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (a.k.a. Phoenix Wright 4) and Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village. While I know exactly what PW4 is going to be, I approach Prof. Layton with high expectations, the game is very popular in Japan and spawned two sequels. The visuals of Prof. Layton reminds me of the excellent 2003 French animated film The Triplets of Belleville. I’m quite excited about these new Adventure games, their arrival is another sign of the Adventure genre’s return to popularity.

Bad End

by Tupperwarez

The Speed Runner's School of Game Design -- The Circumspect, Heedful Everydayness of Metroid

by Zen

Another scourge of speed runs that hurts everyone is the forced delay. The freakish impulse to speed run every game ever made was savagely put down by the realization that a run of Xenogears would have seven hours of dialogue alone. I'm not making fun of the game for being wordy here (I'm in no position to, frankly), but rather for being unstoppably wordy. Four-thousand pages of shallow symbolism and mind-grindingly inane plot twists (spoiler alert: soylent green is people) are no problem as long as the text moves by at a good clip, but as in many games there is no control given to the player as the exposition grinds its way across the screen. I'm not just going out of my way to bash Xenogears here, either, since some of my favorite games ever are guilty of this--any Zelda game ever made has been full of slow text you can do nothing about, and I can't even count how many RPGs have had sluggish menus that make you wait for every input to register. A lot of thought goes into game flow, but at no point can I understand why it would be necessary to display text letter by letter rather than all at once, and when the majority of the notes on a speed run are there to describe the finely-tuned method of skipping text you know there's something very, very wrong. Voice acting has only aggravated this problem, as there are usually three second pauses between each line that make things take even longer than ever. Once again, an obstacle to speed running presents itself as an obstacle to casual, everyday play of the game.

A great example is Yakuza in Metroid Fusion. This boss fight is the bane of every speed runner's existence, and anyone who plays the game will feel their pain: Yakuza jumps around the room randomly until chance works in your favor and the game deigns to present his sole weak point. Most boss fights work on the mechanic of revealing a weak point, but ideally it is up to the player to coax it out, not the game. The beauty of fighting Kraid in Super Metroid is washed away when suddenly instead of forcing his mouth open you're waiting for it to open. These moments pull the player out of the situation, replacing challenge with frustration.

Modern arcade vaporware: The Act

by alzabo

Retro Games

by alzabo

They are endlessly fellated in print and frantic sweaty conversations between retro gamers and spastics in t-shirts with Nintendo and Atari joy pads on them that say things like “roots” and “Wizard Needs Food Badly.”

MOST OLD VIDEO GAMES SUCK.

Scads of old games are fun, but then as now only a select few games are destined for greatness. Why are some titles held up as shining examples of game creation if they’re no fun to play. Mouth breathers will cry out: “Dragon Mother 2: Eternal Rapture is important! It shows the evolution of the genre!” That’s wonderful, but it doesn’t mean I want to replay a RPG from 10 years ago that has a poorly designed battle system just because it spawned 6 other similarly titled games that were more fun to play and don’t have onerous controls that makes me wish I could smash my hand with a hammer in lieu of continuing to play.

Despite the negative opinion of retro games expressed above I should point out that there are many worth playing, which brings me to Game Center CX.

Game Center CX is a late night Japanese TV show staring Shinya Arino, it chronicles his attempts to beat retro video games on the original consoles; no emulation, no save states, no refuge.

Game Center CX show should be viewed by all who claim retro gamer "cred," it will hopefully remind them of that some games are best left as memories. Most episodes start with Arino describing the game that is to be attempted in the episode, his whimsical & nostalgic descriptions often shift quickly to very real frustration as he proceeds to spend literally hours attempting to beat the classic game (in Ghosts 'n Goblins first level, he is killed countless times by the Red Arremer). While I can sympathize with Arino’s situation as he is forced to plow through over 60 "classic" games (including the Japanese JJ & FJeff [カトちゃんケンちゃん] and Takeshi’s Challenge [たけしの挑戦状] ), I must admit to enjoying his suffering as he plows through one game after another. I can’t help but think that most of these games are better left in the past.

Next time you have to suffer through some neck-beard telling you “retro games are the best. . . Mappy is the best game ever!” You can suggest they watch this show, maybe if they’re smart enough they’ll understand that Game Center CX is as much an indictment as it is a acclamation of “retro games”

To learn more about Game Center CX you can visit Wikipedia, or watch some of the episodes here.

Cosmic Balance

by Zen

A lot of games back in the day started making a big show of having "role-playing elements" worked in. In some cases this just meant there was an inventory that may or may not affect gameplay, but sometimes it translated into actual choices the player got to make. The phenomenon began long before anyone talked about it, probably most originally and elegantly with the first Mega Man. The levels could be tackled in any order you pleased, and the weapons you got along the way would make each level a very different experience from that had by someone playing in a different order.


There are more obvious examples, like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, that have already been talked about enough. In Mega Man, the opportunities given to the player to progress in any way he or she chose were an integral part of the gameplay, and in Metroid and Zelda they give the player an opportunity to experience the same areas from different perspectives as the game progressed. Aspects of these games could present themselves to players in ways that were determined by choices they themselves made. It was primitive, yes, but well-used, and another example of ingenious developers making the most of small games. Because this was an intentional decision made by the game designers, much effort was put into preventing the player from acquiring everything at the outset of the game and playing through the entire thing homogeneously.

In console RPGs this phenomenon became rather more mechanical. Leveling up was mostly just a means of satisfying a player's Progress Quest appetite, and while some gameplay complexity would arise from it, it was really just a way to keep certain powerful items and monsters out of reach until the designers felt they weren't imbalancing. Character progression became a way to put video games on rails, and players found that usually by the time they got that powerful spell or item, they only got it because it wasn't very useful anymore. Over time, the means of extending a game's duration have become the means of limiting the possibilities available to the player. Somewhere along the line this process became moralized.

It's a common bit of stubborn ignorance that people want everything about the world to conform to their own assumptions. Explanations of the world around us have a way of "fulfilling themselves". When Isaac Newton says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the observation becomes a moral proverb: actions have consequences. Soon we find people punishing others to teach them this lesson about the world. We call them natural consequences, but they are really imposed by people more often than by nature. The moral law set forth is that someone has to pay when something goes wrong; all forces must balance out or there can be no rest. "You can't get something for nothing."

There has never been as great an example of this warped and misguided ethical view as the Grand Theft Auto series. I'm not sure anyone has complained before that Grand Theft Auto reinforced traditional moral values to a fault, but I assure you it's the case. The games have toys and joys too numerous to mention, and the devoted player who overcomes their challenges will have a lot of fun with the bonuses he or she unlocks. But the challenges themselves are not fun by any definition of the word; they are punishments, ordeals set forth so that the player's fun might not accidentally grow out of control. The developers, when including a very fast bicycle or a well-armed helicopter, seem to have collectively decided that these things are too good to give to the player for free. The player must pay for the privilege, above and beyond the cost of the game.

The result is that every mission has about a hundred ways to lose and only one way to win. Punishment is doled out liberally, and the bonus missions that unlock great things are the purest distillations of raw agony. Powerful, useful tools and games in GTA are withheld not to develop the game experience or to prevent a trivial completion of the game, but out of spite. And those who complete the challenges will tell themselves that it is worth it. That the satisfaction of accomplishing these meaningless feats of repetition and arbitrary precision make the rewards that much more satisfying. These people will grow up to deprive their children of joys and tell them it "builds character". After all, misery necessitates equal reward. It's a law of nature.

It's not worth it. Each entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is more dehumanizing than the last. As much fun as I've had flying around with a jetpack and a dozen kinds of weapons blowing up half of a fake Las Vegas, if I could return not just GTA: San Andreas but the entire experience I would. It's more fun to watch an expert play than it is to play. It's more fun to download a 100% save file off the Internet than it is to get 100% yourself. The game allows the player to engage in violent sex acts, murder national guardsmen, and commit a terrorist act on a hydroelectric dam, all in the name of profit and power, but none of those aspects of this game is as hurtful or socially base as the "challenges" offered the player.

The Speed Runner's School of Game Design -- Preamble

by Zen

I've been into speed runs for a while now. There's a lot to say about speed runs in general, but for me the best cross-section of the history and awesomeness of the practice is found when you look at the Metroid series.

Every Metroid game included a timer that changed the ending of the game depending on how quickly you beat it. This was actually pretty common practice in the NES days, but Metroid stands out because not only did it tell you what your time was after the credits rolled, but if you were extra speedy the reward was irresistible to my peurile fourth-grade mind: Samus would take off her power suit and reveal her hotness in her underwear. This was honestly better than any porn.

At any rate, speed running of Metroid really took off, especially with Super Metroid. The game was one of the most elegantly made in history, with a world that opened up as possibilities in an intricate environment rather than arbitrary barriers to linear progress. Even better than this, though, is that the developers included a few secret abilities that the player could use to bypass a lot of the game's "intended" progression. These abilities were intuitive yet difficult, and were not at all obvious; most players got through the game without learning them. On top of this, people learned to abuse the physics of the game in useful and consistent ways. These abuses seemed so natural they felt like intended moves, and terms like "spike jumping" and "mockballing" became part of the lexicon not just for speed runners but fans of the game in general.

When the series went 3D with Metroid Prime, it remained surprisingly easy to speed run. While most or all of the exploits seemed clearly unintended, the way players manipulated physics in the game still felt like it was "playing fair" with the game engine. Speed runs were just as interesting as ever, and continue to this day.

However, with the game's sequel the party ended. The developers of Metroid Prime 2 actually built the game deliberately so that sequence breaking, the way speed runners bypass chunks of the game to beat it in impressively minimalistic ways, would be impossible. When a game allows players to accidentally fall out of the sequence and get stuck or confused, it makes sense for the developers to program around it, but in this case it was simply that their vision of the game was completely linear. It was like a direct affront to the speed running community. The challenge was met, and the game was broken just the same, but it wasn't the same as before.

The main difference was that while Super Metroid and Metroid Prime placed certain areas legitimately out of reach to the player, it was possible to get there through arcane and inventive means without the intended ability or item. In Metroid Prime 2, they put invisible walls in place to make it completely impossible for anybody to get there who "wasn't supposed to". This sort of thing is now common practice, and raises the question: how much should game designers build their games with speed running in mind?

Older games were packed with glitches and abusable oversights that made speed running interesting, much like with the first Metroid. Nowadays, though, the idea of a game's design being elegantly open is generally forgotten, and games are "open" in very controlled ways. Developers don't seem to realize that a game can be conducive to speed running without being glitchy. When discussion comes up of whether a game is going to be interesting for speed runs, recent games are usually wrapped in duct tape, holding the player on set paths through brute force. This is usually to keep the game from being confusingly open, but it seems like developers have forgotten how to make a game open while still making objectives clear and progress rewarding.

Not every game has to be open and nonlinear, but this phenomenon got me thinking about how all games could benefit from being made with speed runs in mind, and as someone who's watched basically every speed run ever made I've got a few observations about how design decisions that get in the way of speed running can get in the way of the game's fun even in an ordinary play context.