I apologize for the length of this video. Halfway through editing it I realized it didn’t know if it wanted to be an essay on Sonic’s signature speed as a mechanic or a retrospective of a majority of the Sonic games. Sometimes it honestly takes that long to decide what I’m doing, and this episode is weaker for it.
Still, I think it manages to capture the overall arc of the franchise nicely, and manages to at least convey my key point – that Sonic was never really about speed originally, but is very much so now.
This is a video about games and violence, but it’s actually about the nature of games on computers in the abstract.
I actually had a whole part at the end that I cut out about psychology studies on the impacts of game violence, but it simply didn’t fit the whole “spacial” element enough to warrant keeping it in the video. I also didn’t want to accuse an entire branch of the social sciences of not understanding videogames (although, going by the studies they release, they don’t).
I really hope we see studies that observe the impact of violent imagery in a game. Most of the studies I’m aware of do this in really broken ways – by comparing a violent game like Mortal Kombat or Quake 3 to more passive, peaceful games like Myst or The Sims. And these studies usually show the same thing; that short term aggression indicators like blood pressure, heart rate, etc are way more common in so-called violent games.
But of course they are! Comparing the physiological impact of a highly competitive fast-paced game like Quake next to an almost passive, mostly cerebral, and non-compeitive game like Myst is like comparing the physiological impacts of an intense game of street basketball with a light game of croquet – one is by design going to get your heart racing and the other is not.
And while I’d never claim to be learned on the subject, I’ve yet to see any studies that really attempt to compare Quake 3 to a stripped down feature-less version of Quake 3, or a game that compares a traditional game of chess to Battle Chess. We need to make sure we’re taking the mechanics out of the equation for these studies or else we’re just comparing the impact of mechanics on human emotion and not that of violent imagery.
Ah, Doom.
Really, this video turned out to be more trivia-focused than I had really intended it to be. Which is sort of a shame – around halfway through editing it (after writing, shooting, and gathering tons of video and audio clips) I had a few additional thoughts.
First of all: colored keys, man. They were an awful McGuffin when every level had you looking for the same damned cards/skulls over and over. But at the same time, they drove gameplay forward mechanically – you were always in pursuit of a specific goal, be it a key or a door or an exit. It was the use of discreet, ludic indicators of progress that gave the gameplay context and purpose. We don’t have much of in the way of that sort of motivation in first person shooters anymore – we’ve shifted almost exclusively to narrative contextualization in order to press the game forward. And it’s not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily – I just think it’s silly to be over reliant on a single technique as a motivator for the player when we have other gameplay driven alternatives available to us.
Mind you, I’m not calling for a return of three primary colored keys. But too often in modern first person shooters I find myself placed in a tunnel lined with enemies and am told “Your character really wants to go to the other end of this tunnel – better get going!” I’d like to see attempts made to make progression not just narrative driven but somehow gameplay driven as well – especially in first person games where, if you’re not actively roleplaying, it’s nigh impossible to get any emotional involvement in the protagonist. “Master Chief really wants to save Cortana” doesn’t necessarily mean the player will find any inherent delight in chasing after Cortana. Ludic goals are goals that are intrinsically interesting to players- they require no narrative buy-in. We don’t see them enough.
I called the level design “playful” in the video, and I think that encapsulates what I think levels are lacking these days. Not in the “fun, cutesy” sense, but in the sense of design that provides players with a space to traverse that plays off of, inverts, or generally forces the player to explore the mechanics they’ve been provided. I’ve walked down too many hallways with a few offshoot rooms and a few too many boxy warehouses with crates for cover. Give me giant, hand-shaped levels or gimmick levels where only one type of ammunition or power up is available; give me levels that toy with my expectations of how mechanics are applied. It’s actually something Half-Life 2 did really well – the entire Ravenholm section was made scary in party by simply reducing the amount of health and ammunition available to the player any given time.
This might as well be subtitled “Chris attempts to defend his mangled misappropriation of a real word.” Still, I think it’s a concept worth bringing up with the gaming community at large. It’s something all gamers are aware of – the idea of visceral combat mechanics, really tight steering controls, or really rewarding jumping mechanics – but something that isn’t discussed by designers nearly enough. Kinaesthetic sensation is truly unique to interactive media, and only in games can it be fully explored.
One of the primary responses to my Half-Life video is that I just don’t like linearity:
“the way you speak of valve’s linear decision makes it sound like you believe that the pinnacle of a game would be an open world one”
“[Games] can give us open world sandboxes to play in and live out anything we desire; And they can let us interact with an expertly crafted story in a way that no movie ever could. To knock HL2 because it’s one of these and not the other is a tad idealistic. Yes, games CAN be that, but they don’t HAVE to be that.”
Now, I’ll concede that I didn’t articulate my point properly if so many people thought this. I don’t know why; I was probably too busy cramming that video with all of the awful unfunny jokes it has to focus on a coherent point. And since I really, really, really don’t want to play through Half-life again to collect more video to remake my original point in response to YouTube comments of all things, I thought a blog post would do just fine.