I am super looking forward to game designer Jonathan Blow’s upcoming game The Witness. Playing his surprise hit platform puzzler Braid gave me enormous respect for him as a designer and innovator in the medium. Reading that he is essentially gambling all the money gained by Braid’s success on bringing his vision for The Witness to life just increases that respect.
But to be clear, what excites me about The Witness is the prospect of learning its game play, working the puzzles and seeing how they interact towards the game’s climactic elements. What I’m not looking forward to is the game’s writing, by which I mean anything in it that you read or is read by an actor. Because experience tells me it just won’t be that good.
Here is a random sampling of the writing from somewhere around midway in Braid.
But to be fully couched within the comfort of a friend is a mode of existence with severe implications. To please you perfectly, she must understand you perfectly. Thus you cannot defy her expectations or escape her reach. Her benevolence has circumscribed you, and your life's achievements will not reach beyond the map she has drawn.
All I can get out of that is a contrived and badly overwritten comment about how expectations in a relationship can limit you, but what it means doesn’t much matter anyway. It’s sole relation to the game’s plot (such as it is) is it communicates the idea that Tim’s relationship with The Princess has Issues. At the point in the game this text occurs, reiterating this idea is completely superfluous. Indeed, everything you need to know about it for the sake of playing is communicated in the first line of formal text in the game:
Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake.
This is a decent bit of writing, it is brief and direct and it plays with your sense of the usual dynamic of the barest of bones videogame plot (the bad guy took your girlfriend and you have to fight your way through to rescue her) with that little twist (and it was your fault it happened).
Two things make Braid great. The first is the wonderfully engrossing game play of solving spacial/temporal puzzles with its combination of traditional platformer skills and time-manipulation mechanics. It is absolutely this, rather than moving through the “story,” that keeps you playing Braid. And that’s fine: nobody plays a classic Mario for the story (spoiler alert: the Princess is in another castle, until she’s not).
But Braid rises above this tradition not solely through its innovative gameplay. It adds the icing of a genuinely satisfying game-narrative arc, by which I mean the whole experience of play from its fantastic, beautiful atmospheric opening scene, through the very effective temporal dynamic of the final levels, culminating in the superbly effective final boss. That last involves a narrative touch that I could easily sum up in a few simple sentences, but no need for spoiler warnings here. All I need to communicate is that this touch is surprising, simple, easy to understand, and it wraps up the game in perfect sync with its play dynamics and minimalist, referential narrative.
And then there is the text. Not to belabor it but the basic reality of the text is that it is just not great. Obfuscated, overwritten, generally delivering a tone of contrived artiness. Above all these deficiencies though is that it simply adds nothing of real substance to the narrative. Braid would play exactly the same with almost all the text removed. One pithy sentence on par with the opening line per level would manage the same effect.
When you add the fact that everything not-great about the text is present in spades in the game's dénouement level, I have to say that the writing actually detracts from the game. It sucks energy out of the great climax and renders the small, quiet puzzles of the post-ending’s interstitial world (which are conceptually a great element in and of themselves) less satisfying. The only proper reaction to these final textual elements (that isn’t motivated by frankly slavish, uncritical devotion to the game as a whole) is to go “What?” and “Huh?”
I feel like I have to stress before I go on that the writing in Braid isn’t terrible. It is merely not great (okay, probably even not good) which is a shame because the game is great. It is great game design, great art, great music... and mediocre writing.
Bad writing in videogames is practically canonical, setting you up the bomb and so forth. Bad writing in independent, experimental, innovative games is a pet peeve though because damn it, the designers of these games ought to know better.
Braid has a great game narrative because Jonathan Blow is a great game designer. Braid has great art because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great artists so he went out and hired an artist. Braid has great music because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great musician so he went out and searched for great music by musicians. Why doesn’t Jonathan Blow know he is not a great writer?
Why do video game designers not know that they are not writers? Do they think that game design and writing are the same thing? They don’t narrate their own product when it’s time to record the audio for the game, they hire a professional voice actor. Which is good because you have to be a professional to even marginally pull off something like this:
Just to review that text...
I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I’ve been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come together.
This is gobbledygook, a mishmash of metaphors couched in ostentatious prose (wait is the paper a boat, or a cage, or you’re the paper and you’ve folded, and it’s an airplane? Sorry an aeroplane? And about this... fibre? The pulped vegetation? We’re talking about, like, paper again, right?). I’m sorry, and I’m not saying I could do better, but that is just what it is. The game looks beautiful. The music sounds beautiful. But the sum total of the narrative scope I get out of the paragraph (aside from feeling like I’m in for another beatin’ from the Art Stick) is that The Princess is in Another Castle.
And I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason for this is that it was written by Dan Pinchbeck and Dan Pinchbeck is a digital artist and a game designer. Dan Pinchbeck is Dan "not to be mistaken with the writer Daniel Pinchbeck" Pinchbeck, the not writer. thechineseroom game team doesn't have any writers. It has artists. It has a composer. Nobody has the title writer. Is it that they don't believe they need one? Or that they think they already have one, but that it isn't an important enough role to put it in an actual title?
Please. Game designers. You can be so good at what you do. It is exciting. It is a new medium. It is art. But text is text, it’s not game design and it is a different kind of story than the one you tell with games. There are so many great writers out there scrapping in a terrible market. Hire writers. Hire writers and explain to them what the game means to you and the story you are trying to tell and let them play the games and figure out how to properly tell that necessary allotment of text that you read or hear as you play the game. Let them do their job, let them amplify and perfect your vision the same way artists and composers and voice actors do.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
i me a river, adventures in electronic bookulation
Since I’ve been going on about eBook reader gadgets for a while it will come as little surprise that I finally pulled the trigger on acquiring one. I ended up going a little weird on the specific gadget, however, for reasons I’ll cover later. First off though I’ll note that this is not really a device review, because I have next to no hands-on experience with any other reader, without which my take on how the thing works lacks the context to mean much. Call it impressions.
So I purchased an iriver Story HD:
Which at this point I fear you could probably safely call an “also ran” in the reader race. The reason I feel like you can say this is, interestingly, also a big reason I chose this particular device: Target, where the Story made its exclusive retail debut, has by all appearances given up on the device and put the remainder of its stock on sale for 50 dollars. My local branch of the hipper-than-Walmart department giant had plenty on hand but given that they were at last look still on Amazon for $95 and people were trying to move them on eBay between $70 and $130 I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left dries up fairly quickly in the rush to take advantage of the price discontinuity, but who knows.
If you want to know what’s wrong with the thing, you know, look up a review. In a nutshell its design sense is a dowdy, its buttons-only interface is bare bones clunky for anything other than straightforward cover to cover reading, and its ergonomics are sub-par. What it offered on launch by way of compensation was a higher resolution display and built-in integration with Google Books. Showing up as it did in the midst of the majors adopting touch interface en masse, 3G connectivity and the undeniable fact that Google just does not have the profile as a media provider that an Amazon does (perhaps unfairly, as I’ll get into later) its chances were probably not great when it showed up at pretty much the same price as a the roughly equivalent Kindle or Nook. For 50 bucks, though, I thought it was worth the experiment.
I liked it as soon as I got it out of the box, but soon surmised that a lot of this was over reasons that aren't, maybe, very sensible... but are a lot like me. What I realized (on the heels of this essay) was that for once my late adopter ways had left me disappointed: I had left the electronic book go until well after the whole market was fully domesticated, and consequently not as magical and exciting. I suspect part of my hidden motivation in going off the path in this first selection was to get (or at least simulate) an experience slightly more out of the mainstream. As such its design issues are almost a plus to me - its terminally unsexy melamine-brown hospital tray back shell, it’s goofy little coffee-toned plastic chicle keypad contrasted with its up-level display and nerd-cool Google connection. I took undue pleasure in trawling the internet, over several days, for more winsome editions of free public domain literature, defying the lords of Amazon and their Whispernet as I loaded it all up on a gigabyte SD card I had sitting around, plugged into a little USB reader dongle that I also had sitting around. Bought a couple odd ball à la carte downloads for this library as well - including that Rucker short story collection I mentioned the other day (such a steal, now available in a straight .epub direct from the source). Finally to fingernail open the little door in the back of the reader to slot it, boot and just like that, a respectable library of 200+, and I got my magical moment with technology new to me, however swiftly it might be getting overshadowed in the march of the tablet paradigm.
Of course how I’m actually spending 95% of my time with the thing is reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde that I bought from Google for the same $14.99 the Kindle or Nook edition would run me.
The primary risk of all this is that I’m steadily locking myself into an .epub file preference which is currently incompatible with Kindle. All I can say about that is, you know, get with it, Amazon. Everybody supports .epub except you. EVERYBODY.
A few negatives and a positive to wrap this up. I am not so convinced of the general superiority of the Apple Design Revolution but but really the ergonomics on this thing are a little off. Turning a page involves your thumb going either to the middle of the lower fifth or the bottom right corner, both of which just aren’t quite right. Of course it still beats wrestling with one of Stephenson’s 3.5 lb. doorstops, not to mention the vastly superior ergonomics compared to holding a conventional 200 volume library in one hand.
Still. Given that signing into your Google account can be a frequent necessity of trying to use it as anything other than read-only storage, given further that a solid 20% of the front architecture is given to the keypad, it’s hard to excuse said keypad’s lack of a numeric row and a few judicious symbol keys (. and @ and @gmail.com) - these offered instead as clumsily mapped alpha keypad alternatives visible only on a display-based “symbol” menu. Repeatedly entering my relatively strong password rapidly became infuriating.
That “repeatedly” brings in the second negative, though there is a distinct possibility that this one, or at least a large part of it, was on me. You access Google Books through your google account and actual content of these books live in Google’s cloud until you download them. If you pick stuff up via your computer they won’t show up on the reader at all until you refresh your library. Yesterday all my library refresh processes started to hang. The device didn’t crash - I could pull out of the hung update with the home button - but otherwise it would not resolve: left to itself, the reader would ultimately go into its sleep mode from which it would wake back at the home screen, library unrefreshed. I probably entered my gmail address and password 7 times fooling around trying to resolve this and experienced moments of hearty hatred for the thing in the process.
As I say this might be on me: I’d been fooling around under the hood in ways not obviously verboten but possibly (in retrospect) unjudicious: in the process of reading the box out of desperation with the glitch I discovered that it doesn’t actually support Mac OS (fucking seriously, iriver?). So the fact that I’d previously plugged it in via its mini-USB connection and been manually fooling around with files inside the drive menus that came up on my iMac might well have been what glitched it.
If not it could end up being an actually deal-breaking problem. I ended up taking it through the set-up wizard again, which wiped my settings, bookmarks, and everything in my download library, (though the latter didn’t matter because there wasn't all that much of it, and it is all in Google’s cloud). So early into owning the thing it didn’t matter much, everything was refreshed and downloaded within half an hour. If it were to become a regular occurrence however it would basically render the device unusable. Time will tell.
The only other bad thing to say is purely speculative: I’ve read enough reports about screen fragility to be concerned about it, though its clearly a far from universal occurrence. I’m crossing my fingers on that one.
An unexpected plus side is that I was basically unaware of Google Play. Early impression is that it is a promising and welcome addition to the digital media retail field. They have a lot of free stuff to boot and they’re running some interesting promotions (like the 25 cent “play of the day,” sufficiently enticing to get me to check in frequently, as is of course their intent). It’s interesting enough that it could even tempt me to stay in the iriver ecology. It remains to be seen of course if what looks like a basic commercial failure with the Story will push iriver out of the reader market entirely, or if they will rally with offerings that leverage the positives and exploit the Google relationship (bringing in Android and Chrome functionality seem like things that ought to happen). I hope they do because the Story has potential.
So I purchased an iriver Story HD:
Which at this point I fear you could probably safely call an “also ran” in the reader race. The reason I feel like you can say this is, interestingly, also a big reason I chose this particular device: Target, where the Story made its exclusive retail debut, has by all appearances given up on the device and put the remainder of its stock on sale for 50 dollars. My local branch of the hipper-than-Walmart department giant had plenty on hand but given that they were at last look still on Amazon for $95 and people were trying to move them on eBay between $70 and $130 I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left dries up fairly quickly in the rush to take advantage of the price discontinuity, but who knows.
If you want to know what’s wrong with the thing, you know, look up a review. In a nutshell its design sense is a dowdy, its buttons-only interface is bare bones clunky for anything other than straightforward cover to cover reading, and its ergonomics are sub-par. What it offered on launch by way of compensation was a higher resolution display and built-in integration with Google Books. Showing up as it did in the midst of the majors adopting touch interface en masse, 3G connectivity and the undeniable fact that Google just does not have the profile as a media provider that an Amazon does (perhaps unfairly, as I’ll get into later) its chances were probably not great when it showed up at pretty much the same price as a the roughly equivalent Kindle or Nook. For 50 bucks, though, I thought it was worth the experiment.
I liked it as soon as I got it out of the box, but soon surmised that a lot of this was over reasons that aren't, maybe, very sensible... but are a lot like me. What I realized (on the heels of this essay) was that for once my late adopter ways had left me disappointed: I had left the electronic book go until well after the whole market was fully domesticated, and consequently not as magical and exciting. I suspect part of my hidden motivation in going off the path in this first selection was to get (or at least simulate) an experience slightly more out of the mainstream. As such its design issues are almost a plus to me - its terminally unsexy melamine-brown hospital tray back shell, it’s goofy little coffee-toned plastic chicle keypad contrasted with its up-level display and nerd-cool Google connection. I took undue pleasure in trawling the internet, over several days, for more winsome editions of free public domain literature, defying the lords of Amazon and their Whispernet as I loaded it all up on a gigabyte SD card I had sitting around, plugged into a little USB reader dongle that I also had sitting around. Bought a couple odd ball à la carte downloads for this library as well - including that Rucker short story collection I mentioned the other day (such a steal, now available in a straight .epub direct from the source). Finally to fingernail open the little door in the back of the reader to slot it, boot and just like that, a respectable library of 200+, and I got my magical moment with technology new to me, however swiftly it might be getting overshadowed in the march of the tablet paradigm.
Of course how I’m actually spending 95% of my time with the thing is reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde that I bought from Google for the same $14.99 the Kindle or Nook edition would run me.
The primary risk of all this is that I’m steadily locking myself into an .epub file preference which is currently incompatible with Kindle. All I can say about that is, you know, get with it, Amazon. Everybody supports .epub except you. EVERYBODY.
A few negatives and a positive to wrap this up. I am not so convinced of the general superiority of the Apple Design Revolution but but really the ergonomics on this thing are a little off. Turning a page involves your thumb going either to the middle of the lower fifth or the bottom right corner, both of which just aren’t quite right. Of course it still beats wrestling with one of Stephenson’s 3.5 lb. doorstops, not to mention the vastly superior ergonomics compared to holding a conventional 200 volume library in one hand.
Still. Given that signing into your Google account can be a frequent necessity of trying to use it as anything other than read-only storage, given further that a solid 20% of the front architecture is given to the keypad, it’s hard to excuse said keypad’s lack of a numeric row and a few judicious symbol keys (. and @ and @gmail.com) - these offered instead as clumsily mapped alpha keypad alternatives visible only on a display-based “symbol” menu. Repeatedly entering my relatively strong password rapidly became infuriating.
That “repeatedly” brings in the second negative, though there is a distinct possibility that this one, or at least a large part of it, was on me. You access Google Books through your google account and actual content of these books live in Google’s cloud until you download them. If you pick stuff up via your computer they won’t show up on the reader at all until you refresh your library. Yesterday all my library refresh processes started to hang. The device didn’t crash - I could pull out of the hung update with the home button - but otherwise it would not resolve: left to itself, the reader would ultimately go into its sleep mode from which it would wake back at the home screen, library unrefreshed. I probably entered my gmail address and password 7 times fooling around trying to resolve this and experienced moments of hearty hatred for the thing in the process.
As I say this might be on me: I’d been fooling around under the hood in ways not obviously verboten but possibly (in retrospect) unjudicious: in the process of reading the box out of desperation with the glitch I discovered that it doesn’t actually support Mac OS (fucking seriously, iriver?). So the fact that I’d previously plugged it in via its mini-USB connection and been manually fooling around with files inside the drive menus that came up on my iMac might well have been what glitched it.
If not it could end up being an actually deal-breaking problem. I ended up taking it through the set-up wizard again, which wiped my settings, bookmarks, and everything in my download library, (though the latter didn’t matter because there wasn't all that much of it, and it is all in Google’s cloud). So early into owning the thing it didn’t matter much, everything was refreshed and downloaded within half an hour. If it were to become a regular occurrence however it would basically render the device unusable. Time will tell.
The only other bad thing to say is purely speculative: I’ve read enough reports about screen fragility to be concerned about it, though its clearly a far from universal occurrence. I’m crossing my fingers on that one.
An unexpected plus side is that I was basically unaware of Google Play. Early impression is that it is a promising and welcome addition to the digital media retail field. They have a lot of free stuff to boot and they’re running some interesting promotions (like the 25 cent “play of the day,” sufficiently enticing to get me to check in frequently, as is of course their intent). It’s interesting enough that it could even tempt me to stay in the iriver ecology. It remains to be seen of course if what looks like a basic commercial failure with the Story will push iriver out of the reader market entirely, or if they will rally with offerings that leverage the positives and exploit the Google relationship (bringing in Android and Chrome functionality seem like things that ought to happen). I hope they do because the Story has potential.
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