On Thumbsticks

(Sooo, it looks like WordPress changed a few things, and now my text won’t paste with the color and font settings I wrote it with, so I’m sorry about the inconsistency; maybe I’ll bother solving it at some point.)

To many people, Sony represents the cutting edge of consumer electronics and entertainment, with it’s high end televisions, video game systems, and dvd players, not to mention the fact that it is one of the largest publishers of both music and movies in the world. Sony even helped usher in the new age of optical disc storage devices, Blu Rays. Although, on a personal note, I feel as if Blu Ray’s victory over HD DVD had less to do with politics and more to do with the effect its language has on its auditor: the mental image evoked by the term ‘Blu Ray’ is something colorful and high tech – a beam of radiant blue light, whereas the term ‘HD DVD’ elicits… nothing. If anything, it conjures the mental image of just another plain DVD. What would you be drawn to? But, this is besides the point; what I really want to bring up are two poor design choices I see in the controls of Sony’s Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable.

Sony was one of the first to release a controller with dual analog sticks. These sticks not only offered players more precise control over anything a D-Pad would be used for, but the fact that two were added, one in addition to the D-Pad and a second to the right side of the controller, opened up a whole new range of inputs players were capable of; it essentially added more functionality and it expanded the potential complexity of games. (We should also note that Nintendo was close to offering two analog sticks with it’s 64 controller; instead, it had a D-pad and a single analog, but they were oriented in such a way that really only rendered one usable at a time, and, if a game were to allow a player to use both, they’d need to sacrifice usage of the main buttons, unless, of course, Nintendo expected players to twist their right thumb at an odd angle. Also, Nintendo was even closer to offering dual thumbsticks with the release of its Gamecube, although the little yellow C-Stick was hardly a fine tuned analog – it was clumsy and offered about as much control as if a small mammalian teet had been placed there instead.) But, one of the most important changes Sony’s twin analogs made to the interface between player and game world was bestowing the player with the power to dynamically control the camera.

Before these double sticks, the level of control a player had over their perspective on their game world was very limited, and there were two distinct ways designers would handle the camera. There were either fixed camera positions on the world – much like surveillance cameras, whose field of view a player could move around in, that, should the player move outside the realm of, would change orientation, or the other option was to have a camera following the player’s avatar. With this, there were a handful of views a button press could cycle through. Although, there were some games that enabled the player to move their view around 360 degrees with control of either the D-Pad or a single analog stick, but doing so would usually require the player to temporarily stop moving, as movement had almost always been controlled with that single D-Pad or analog. It was as if the player had just put a quarter in one of those pivoting telescopes you find on top of skyscrapers and other tourist locations, you know, the ones that give you just about enough time to find your focus before switching off. Regardless, the addition of the analogs, specifically the right one, freed players of their oppressed perspective and allowed players to position the camera nearly wherever they want (within limit), and, most importantly, they could do so without relinquishing control over their avatar’s primary movement.

It was a major step for gaming, as these analogs enhanced the intimacy between a player and his/her illusory world; examining virtual spaces became one step closer to feeling more like the way we move through and inspect our surroundings organically.

The Visual Nectar of Virtual Worlds

I am so sorry for taking as long as I did to get this entry out; not only did this entry change course fifty times, I have many other personal projects going on at the moment. So, anyway, here it is:

Color is something we take for granted these days; we go clothes shopping, and we can essentially find any color garment we’re looking for. We decide to paint our homes, and we’re given vast color libraries from which to choose from. But, things weren’t always this way; quests that had sent men and women halfway around the globe had been undertaken in search of color, and innumerable lives had been lost defending it. Of course, what I’m talking about are the rare and natural ingredients that had served as pigment to the various dyes of yore, but, regardless of how mindful we are to the suffering that went into creating color before today’s synthetic pigments, we’re all still aware that color undoubtably still plays an important role in our and every other culture on this planet.

For a time, it was thought certain colors possessed magical, metaphysical properties. The native americans would encrust their bodies with ochre colored paint, believing it had the ability to ward off evil spirits. But, in our modern societies, the ‘magical’ effects once attributed to color have simply been reduced to ‘psychological’ effects. The walls of asylums are coated in a pale blue in an attempt to keep the erratic neuronal signals of its patients to a minimum, and hospitals are often painted white or with very light, desaturated colors, giving the sense of stark cleanliness.

Color is everywhere; our eyes cannot escape it. No matter where we look — at our hands or into space — photons of various wavelengths are wiggling their way through our corneas and tapping our retinas (closing your eyes doesn’t help), and, often times, the colors we see in our man made habitat had much planning behind them. A lot of forethought and design go into the colors that plaster all the various products lining the shelves of every boutique and supermarket and the signage that covers nearly every surface we interact with. Most of the time, colors for things like these are used with hopes of catching our attention, like a flower whose brilliant petals attracts the insects so as to spread its pollen, but sometimes these items are designed with colors whose psychic effects (we think) parallel the kind of actions we take and moods we associate with regards to the item or service.

But, what about the colors used in art that’s intended to be savored, not the art that ends up on some packaged, disposable, single serving wrapper? What kind of thought goes into the use of color there? This isn’t an easily answered question; artists use color for a variety of reasons, and it depends on what they hope to achieve with their art. Not to mention, given our limited comprehension of the brain and the inescapable subjectivity of sense experience, the effect achieved with a given color can end up being completely different than what an artist or designer had intended; but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Game worlds are no exception; the digital spaces we explore are replete with colors of various hues, saturations, and values, though how often are the colors chosen to create something more than a believable and enchanting veneer?

As I write this, I begin to notice more and more that the aims I’d had for this entry about color isn’t so much deviating as it is expanding towards something more along the lines of metaphor and symbolism. I was concerned with trying to discover a reason behind the various colors we see in games; I wanted to know if they meant something or if they were just designed to be visually alluring. But, as I continue to think about the subject matter, I realize I want to know how metaphor is presented in games and how we can go about locating it.

Metaphor is something so powerful, yet so ephemeral. If our eyes aren’t cutting through the words of a novel with the utmost attentiveness or both our ears and eyes aren’t as open as we think while seated in a movie theatre, there’s a good chance we’ll miss any of the metaphor that’s present. Metaphor is what makes the high brow critics of art deliberate if a work is even worthy of being considered ‘art,’ but does the fact that few critics consider video games an art — ahem! Ebert — really mean they lack any metaphor and substance? Do they truly fail at commenting on our curious condition out here in space or in demonstrating a high level of skill in the purposeful crafting of a world and its inhabitants?

Most of us are aware of what metaphors are: a form of figurative language that portrays one object as being equal to an other in some way. Essentially, they compare two things without using ‘like’ or ‘as,’ and the comparison is often between two very different subjects. For example: her apple eyes. (Things can be contrasted, too. For example: time is not a thief.) But, there are many times when novelists don’t make these relationships so apparent. Instead of making an obvious connection through the words of a single sentence, a writer could construct a metaphor more slowly, more meticulously, and more subtly; some metaphors could even take half the book to finally materialize. Most of the time, these delicate mechanisms hinge on description, with the descriptive words — adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions — creating correlations between multiple characters, multiple objects, or both characters and objects. For example: within the words of a scene, an author may describe in detail the beautiful redwood finish of an old grandfather clock and, within the same scene, describe the ruddy complexion of a man. To a close reader, this would establish the first fine thread of a link between the two subjects, the man and the clock (a ruddy, old man would be an even more apparent connection). From now on, any information the author decides to reveal about the clock — its finish or its interior or its history — could suggest that it somehow parallels what’s going on with the inner workings of either the man’s physical body or mind or his own history.

Asking if we see things like this in games is a good question, but we need to keep in mind that games are a very different medium from novels, and, even though things like symbolism, metaphor, and subtext can be created in the same way for games and movies as they can for novels, noticing them requires skills we haven’t necessarily been trained to develop, whether naturally or through education. (Considering how games come in all different shapes and sizes, I think it best for me to clarify what kind of games I have in mind. Even though the simplest of two-dimensional game spaces can be rich enough to be considered art by the less pompous critics, the kind of game world I’m referring to is a fully navigable, three-dimensional, virtual space — the spaces that have had thousands of man hours go into constructing them — the universes with multi-million dollar budgets.)

For those of us trained to close read texts, we’re taught to look for things like repetitions, strands, and binaries, where the repetitions are — quite obviously — words that repeat, strands being groups of words all sharing certain qualities or characteristics, like natural, organic, and earthen, and binaries being words that oppose one another, like light and dark. These words act as the signposts that point us in the right direction; they allow us to more clearly see and understand the various and complex relationships being built by the author, whether intentional or not.

Let’s take a look at how games are currently designed and how they lend themselves (or don’t) to being studied with the methods we’re used to:

introduction

The pulsing woofers flooded the room with the sounds of gunshots, explosions, and empty shell casings clinking along floors of alien alloy, while the rhythmic, almost choreographic, flickering of the red, green, and blue pixels bathed the walls in vibrant light. A voice screeched through her headset: “Where the hell is the flag?”

The abrasive sounds of combat dwindled to where only the ambient hum of electrical currents and holographic displays were audible.

“I don’t know, but I’m in their base right now. They won’t capture it.” A muted explosion echoed through the computerized halls.

“Shit, they got me. Of course, they couldn’t kill me with anything besides the rocket launcher. I swear, that’s the only thing I’ve died to all game.”

“Whatever,” she said, “will you just tell me where they’re coming from?”

A third voice crackled in. “They’re comin’ in low, and I think – ” the supersonic burst of a high caliber rifle transmitted through the radio and drowned out the rest of his sentence. The bullet was well placed, shattering the enemy’s protective shielding and slicing across their shoulder, but they weren’t down.  A second shot was taken, although too late; the enemy had already taken cover behind a piece of the environment’s exotic architecture, and the bullet clattered to the ground after being rejected by the wall’s self-healing surface. “Damn. I hit one. He’s weak!”

There were twenty seconds remaining, and her team had the lead. Allowing the enemy team to score would have moved the game into overtime, and, given they were already down a man, it was something they couldn’t afford. Their fourth teammate had been having networking issues and was disconnected, leaving the team with only a ‘consciousless’ avatar ceaselessly walking into a wall. It was up to her.

Her presence caused the environment to shape and shift, writhe and deform, as if alive. Bounding her way through the machining mechanisms, she stopped after coming to the perimeter of a room whose both ceiling and floor swelled into what resembled the domed cavernous volume of an atrium. Hovering at the cavity’s airless center was a platform bearing the motionless enemy standard. It was here where the enemy flag carrier would need to reach in order to score, and it was here where she’d need to stop him.

Fifteen seconds. Preemptively, she tossed a plasma grenade searing across the chasm with near perfect precision; it landed in front of a door in the process of dematerializing to allow passage. She followed up with a burst from her rifle. The grenade exploded, and the swaths of superheated particles it released caused the shields to be stripped clean off of the surprised enemy soldier they surrounded. He fell back into the hall before the spray of bullets could connect. “Come on,” she thought, “those shots were so on.” But she didn’t have time to think, only react.

A second door dematerialized, and, this time, it was the flag runner who’d entered. With him came a rush of adrenaline; she immediately opened fire. Defenseless with the flag in his hands, he dropped it and returned fire, sending a hail of bullets to come crashing against her shields. The bullet impacts sent ripples of energy coursing along her shield’s surface, and any that hit in front of her face drastically reduced visibility. She kept on the move, jumping and rolling, side stepping and sliding. A moving target is always harder to hit.

She created distance between her and her new assailant by moving to the far end of the room, closer to where her initial grenade had landed, each step mounting her anxiety; the enemy she had hit with her grenade would undoubtably be returning soon and fully shielded, but she’d be ready; a plan of attack had already been formulated in her mind.

A hissing sound emanated from her left; just as she’d thought, the door was opening again, and she turned her attention to her most immediate threat. Leaping towards the wall and placing her toes into a small detail of its anatomy, she used it to push herself high above the door. The enemy stepped through the portal, and just as his vision began to trace the bullet paths of his teammate, the butt end of a rifle came smashing through his visor.

She landed with the sound of fragmenting glass, not only from the destroyed faceplate, but from her shields. They had finally broken, and a few searing bullets pierced through the outer crust of her armor and penetrated the flesh of her hip. The suit’s internal network of nanomachines immediately began knitting the damaged tissue, and as she stepped into the hall for cover, she noticed the downed enemy’s positron rifle spinning out of reach into the flag room.

Ten seconds. A few last bullets came whizzing through the open entryway. The break in the assault could have meant  one of three things: if the enemy were reloading or had picked up the flag in an attempt to capture it, she would have the opportunity to step back out, even unshielded, to make a counter attack; but, if their weapon were still trained on the doorway, she would be killed and the game would move into overtime. She had to step out; there was no other option. She did, and, as the odds had predicted, the enemy had grabbed the flag and was running to make the jump to the capture point. She dropped her weapon and sprinted into the room, seizing the positron rifle.

Five seconds. On contact, her suit immediately linked up with weapon and projected a realtime video feed of the scope’s view onto her heads-up-display. Securing the weapon against her shoulder, she swung its barrel towards the airborne enemy, orienting its reticule in the middle of his helmet. She could see his head turn ever so slightly towards her as she compressed the trigger. The weapon released a screaming blast of high energy particles that ripped through the enemy’s helmet. His visor darkened from its new blood-coated interior, and his lifeless body spun to the ground with the flag following shortly after. Time.

One of her teammates came running in. “Glad you could make it,” she said.

“Seriously? Of course, I finally get this,” he said, pointing to the rockets equipped on his shoulder, “and the game’s over.”

“How about, nice job?”

It wasn’t always the case where one could complain about getting blown up or shot fifty-two times, or whine about the lack of healing spells being cast on them. We couldn’t always play a part in the death of a dragon or the unearthing and discovery of alien artifacts, and, even though books and movies have allowed us to peer voyeuristically into worlds where things like this may have happened, we’ve never had the authority to affect the people or places that have comprised those worlds. But, now, with our continued progress and advancement in the generation of virtual spaces and universes, we’re finally empowered to become the characters we’ve been stuck watching for so long.

I am The Virtunaut, and I’m here to share with you my thoughts on video games and anything electronic, although, if this blog is around long enough, there’s a good chance I’ll also be writing about things spintronic. In terms of games, I don’t plan to be a reviewer; I don’t wish to simply tell you my impression of a game after playing it for a few hours. If you want a review, there are plenty of sites out there eager to tell you what they’ve thought about a game’s graphics, its controls, and whether it’s even worth your time or money. What you’re more likely to find here are my feelings on the various mechanics and elements of gameplay we find in today’s most popular medium. I’ll try my best to figure out why these mechanics are the way they are, and what I think could be done to make them better, whether it be better balanced, more intuitive, more fun, or just more interesting.

I won’t only be commenting on what’s already out there, and you can think of this blog almost as an open-source version of my head, as I will often share new gameplay ingredients I’ve been inspired to think of. It could be a mechanic, a weapon, something environmental – whatever; it’s too often the case that I’m urged to think about how even the most mundane experience, like watching someone circle around a hedge of bushes in search of a cat, could be converted into a new and innovative gameplay experience; I’m tired of keeping them sealed away in tiny little notebooks. (Just to be clear, when I refer to, ‘mechanics,’ I’m speaking of anything the player/user actually does or interacts with – it could also be something that directly affects the way they play or interact.)

So, with that said, I will end this introductory post and begin preparing the next. I will do my best to keep my main entries on some kind of schedule, but, given a multitude of other factors, that may not be as easy as I’d like. There will also be intermittent smatterings of other ideas about essentially anything cybernetic. I hope you enjoy what I write here. And, I’m serious about the cat and the hedge. Really.