Author: Milady

I'm writing this post in response to, or as an extension of, Doone's "The Ethics of Game Design," an article into which Doone poured a lot of time and thought, and might be one of his greatest.

In his article Doone discusses the ethical responsibility of developers in the face of the addictive side of video games, a side that we often withhold from discussion because it seems to belong to the laity, those unacquainted with our medium and unable to pass judgement. But addiction is not exclusive to young Asian men collapsing after a 28-hour session of WoW. In a lower degree, it affects almost everybody. Many games are designed with addiction techniques in mind. The language of addiction is lavished in opinion articles and reviews: "addictive mechanics", "time flies while playing this game", etc.

Doone holds the developers accountable for employing mechanics that are not meant to make the game "fun" but "addictive". I agreed with that diagnosis, but wrote to him that developers are not only able to do so, but also encouraged, because our society values that particular kind of entertainment. Or rather "entertainment" as a whole, a concept which I'd like to challenge.

Some weeks ago I wrote a personal post on how I struggled with my hobby because I realised the way in which I made use of it — not as a fun activity, but as something to keep me entertained, secured from my thoughts. When Doone discusses fun and notes the six characteristics that constitute a game, he then proceeds to assign some games the label of "something else", a "non-game", because their goal is not to provide fun, but to addict, and I venture: to entertain.

Etymologically, "entertainment" is something that "holds". Employment of addictive mechanics "hold" your intellect and reduce you to a passive engagement with the game, providing you with entertainment. My definition of entertainment diverges from the accepted one, or rather engages with it more consciously. To entertain is to provide amusement. Note the passive voice. In the same way Doone questions the concept of "game" that we have come to accept, and addiction mechanics as providers of fun, I question the idea of entertainment as a positive notion.

It is now commonly accepted that society conditions our identity and that we hold the opinion superimposed on us, until challenged. Common sense are those axioms that ought not be questioned: that democracy is the lesser of evils, that love conquers all, that you must indulge in entertainment. Period. What I propose instead is thinking that we must engage in rest periods of a limited duration in order to recuperate from high CPU usage: one cannot play Planescape: Torment for 28 hours. The problem is, entertainment is not understood as that, and we are encouraged, through addictive mechanics and other pressures, to misuse our leisure time, throwing it away at mindless dailies as our parents threw it away at the TV.

The addiction that Doone talks about is not the extreme, blatant case of twelve-hour daily sessions playing WoW. He is concerned with the pervasiveness of a design that focuses not on fun, and the intellectual engagement required for it, but on passive entertainment and artificial attachment, the fuel of MMOs. As proof of the effectiveness of the genre in creating dependence, RPG elements have now become the trend in non-RPG games, as a means to appeal to the subconscious desire of progress and achievement rather than immediate fun. Shooters with levels and hats.

I am concerned about the little value we give to our time, the little value we are told we should give it. In a little dosage, as rest, engaging and fun entertainment should be praised. What we get instead is long hours of numbness and detachment from our intellect in the form of artificial loops that, upon jumping, reward us chemically. And we comply because it is the easy way, the path of least resistance. A thoughtful engagement with reality is hard, production is hard. But its rewards are what constitute our humanity: reason, creativity, happiness.

Some weeks ago we installed Lord of the Rings Online. We needed a change of scenery for our roleplay, and I remembered the Shire fondly. I wanted to take my partner to Tom Bombadil's house and search the forest for Goldberry. Upon entering the game, I felt a dread that had something in common with the sight of a ringwraith. In order to explore their game, I would have to jump those "fun loops", and I might become conditioned to keep jumping them for more numbers and pixels of pretty clothing for my prideful elf. Why must I subject myself to that addiction in order to have fun? Is that the ultimate goal of MMOs, or will they ever challenge the Skinner box techniques and provide real fun? I don't want to become entangled in your game, I want to have fun for a while and get back to my life.

In 2010, Clay Shirky coined the term "cognitive surplus" to define the productive outcome of our leisure time. Wikipedia and Lolcats are examples of cognitive surplus. He uses it to account for collective products freely given away, but we could also add individual produces such as blogs. And if we stretch it more, any individual productive activity. Shirky believes that the internet has allowed us to become more productive. And yet most of us are eminently consumers. Most of us will seek to be entertained instead of seeking to create. There are so few John Galt's in our world. It probably has something to do with the perils of an active, intellectual population. Game developers introduce those maligned mechanics, but we ask for them and comply with them.

P.S.: I received some weeks ago a request for assistance with a psychological study on avatars and gender. This is what the research is about, if you are interested and would like to share your experiences:

“We are conducting an Internet based psychological study at Charles Darwin University and are seeking male and female participants who are over 18 years of age, are able to read and write in English fluently and who use avatars. The study will examine participants' identification with their avatars as well as explore why people may use, or not use an avatar of the opposite sex. The study will examine psychosocial functioning in the real world, personality factors as well as sex role identification of the participants' and their avatars, and will take around 20 minutes to complete. Please go to http://cduhes.asia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_brQ0uYKeagINqo4 for more details. You are not required to provide any identifying information in order to participate. All information given will be anonymous and protected. Ethics approval has been obtained for the conduct of this study. Thank you.”

This post is responding to Rohan's reaction to my previous one, and to some of the thoughts that caught my attention from the comments on our sites.

First of all, I think that the concept of 'failure' has not been clearly defined in relation to games. I ought to have been more specific in my previous post since this term is so commonly linked to game mechanics. Some commenters seem to have reduced my point to this type of failure, and even Rowan refers to failure as being inherently defined by player choice.

But games are innately adversarial, either player versus the rules, or player versus the game writer/designer. For failure to be considered valid, the player must fail because of a choice she made. Failure that is simply imposed by the rules or game designer is not considered valid, not considered fair.

My example from Neverwinter Nights 2 was a type of writer-designed failure that does not interrupt the flow of the game in the way that some commenters think failure will do: because they are considering absolute situations in some cases (ceiling collapsing on your hero's head, or ultimate boss crushing you to a pulp), or because they are assuming the position of the almighty hero we have been accustomed to. In NWN2, the pinch of salt that I am advocating for was Bishop's betrayal and what it symbolised: even though you might be a hero, you are not entitled to succeed in every endeavour. Some of your followers will not agree with you. You cannot please both Sand and Qara (the level-headed mage and the volatile sorceress).

The impression I get from most AAA games these days is that you are cast in the role of conqueror, allowed to intervene in every political and personal issue for no disbelief-suspendable reason other than you being the PC. That is the feeling I get every time I play Shepard. How is it possible that one single human being might affect the destiny of so many species, with a few words? Traditionally, the scope of a player's influence upon the world was not as wide, and it required less words and more action. That is how heroism was justified. I am thinking of NWN 1 and 2, the Baldur's Gate series, etc. For me, it is easier to accept an omnipotent kind of heroism that springs from my combat prowess, because I really did earn that through countless save and reloads, than a galactic-wide parliamentary influence coupled with extreme displays of charisma in more intimate situations. Can anyone in her crew not fall head over heels for Shepard? Can we see any instances of real disagreement, perhaps leading to dissension or even betrayal? Mass Effect needs a dosage of this type of failure to make me identify with the heroine.

I want to acknowledge Dragon Age 2 here for what I believe are better-developed interpersonal relationships which allow for disagreement, even though their consequences are not as fully carried out as in older games (Baldur's Gate is notorious for NPCs free-will). There are great narrative experiments going on here in the gaming field, especially coming from indie developers. I believe that there is a specific language that only games are endowed with, and which we have not yet fully exploited. But I do not approve of dismissing the achievements of other media and engaging with games as a completely separate entity: that is very disempowering for the gaming industry. That is why I find it necessary to call attention to aspects of games that could benefit from the progress of other fields in the way that stories are told, so that we can devise how to adapt their rules to our own medium. Games are different, but only God creates ex nihilo.

Players can never actualize the role of a traditional protagonist which makes mistakes due to her human nature, because players are not engaging in a theatrical identification with their avatar, but using it as a vehicle of their will to explore and affect the world around them. Only deviant gameplay in which the player willingly allows herself to fail for roleplaying purposes counteracts this view. In any other instances, we tend to seek the best possible outcome, and we should keep trying to do so. There is nothing wrong about wanting to be heroic. What is wrong is the extremely pliable world that we are offered, where we can be archmages, master assassins, vampire-werewolves, and anything in between those and Dragonborn. Nevertheless, some silly unbelievable narratives such as what The Elder Scrolls offers are fine, as long as they do not constitute all of the hero-themed games out there.

A failure in the sense of player misperformance is also possible and can be narratively rich. Consider the death mechanics in Ultima Online, which involved much more than a corpse-run, or in Planescape: Torment; or even in palaeolithic WoW, which enabled you to talk to a ghost in Blackrock Mountain for a quest.

Finally, the idea of failure being anti-climactic, as observed by some commenters, is precisely what I do not advocate for. Failure can and should be embedded in the story in such a way that it enforces its themes. Casualties in war, the example of Ashley/Kaidan's death, is relevant within the themes that Mass Effect engages with, and has a climactic quality. I am sure you have read plenty of novels whose conclusion was not light-hearted but it was befitting nonetheless. Some characters, some plots, are destined to fail, and no other conclusion would have done them justice. I am not sure we can apply this as crudely in games for the reasons some Rohan and his commenters drew — players not accepting imposed failures, and seeking perfect 'scores' —, but it is worth considering in discussion to find how it might improve our games.

One of the reasons why I believe that the gaming medium is not taken seriously is that its narratives are in most cases immature. Another one is that the gaming medium suffers from cinema envy and cannot let go of conventions that were not tailored for it, and which usually work against its individualities (interactivity being the most cited).

I will focus today on one of the aspects that makes me regard the gaming narratives as immature: misunderstood agency that derails into omnipotence.

Agency was described by Janet Murray, professor of digital media, as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices" (Murray, 1998, p. 126). It is your capacity as a player to affect the text of the game. It is the apex of interactivity and the miscarried goal of Bioware. But Bioware's failings have more to do with an issue of player expectation and miscalculation of their own faculties than anything else, and they are not the subject this post.

I completed NWN2 again and rejoiced in one tiny little feature of that game that is missing from more modern MMOs: Bishop. Oh, I would love to see more of him, but not because of what you may think. There is going to be major spoilers now, but I need them to construct my argument. Like Marge in the Simpsons when the Halloween episode comes: take your children to bed before it is too late! Bishop's unavoidable betrayal is what interests me.

It signifies the end of the player's omnipotence to affect everything and everybody around her. It is a "nuh-uh Shepard, you can't have the cake and eat it too". My qualms with Mass Effect were not just related to the failure on Bioware's part to deliver consequences to our choices (even the big decision at the end of ME2 was cosmetic), but also the fact that Shepard was God. Nothing was denied to her, nobody stood in her way that could not be blow away with a shotgun, and she never made any mistakes. I call it immature because it is redolent of an adolescent fantasy or a fairy tale rather than a believable hero's epic. Of course the player, being detached from an emotional investment that would allow the hero to act in an irrational way (who would act as cowardly as Hamlet if there was a video game about it?), the player is not responsible for providing this humanity that leads us down the wrong path sometimes. But NPCs and the plot should. They should remind the player that she is dealing with powerful forces that might be beyond her control, like Bishop's betrayal is.

I like how he justifies it. Even if you pursue the romantic path, which was left unfinished by the developers, by the way, he will not stick with you through the suicidal keep defence, nor through the final battle. In the end, as he gives you the longed-for explanation, he utters: "You see, for every West Harbour that gives rise to someone like you, someone great... there's a hundred of me, that end up going down the other path." That is a very insightful observation on your status as an accomplished hero. I think that it is quite clever in that it makes you realise he is more human than you are. Deeming the battle lost before its end, he escaped the castle to ensure his skin remained adhered to his bones. Plus the whole business of attachment-phobia.

Our avatars feel sometimes inhumane, despite the embodying act that we perform as we play them, because the game provides us uncontested agency, little resistance to our whims. I relished the bold decision of making Aveline unromanceable not because she is a half-orc or because of time constraints (well, perhaps this too), but because Hawke cannot have it all. But we are not quite there yet, and we seem to have taken quite a few steps backwards: enough Renegade/Paragon points, and nobody can resist you: the geth and the quarians can co-exist because you give Henry V-level orations. In NWN2, there were hidden unwinnable checks for Intimidate, Bluff, Diplomacy, etc; after all, did you really expect you could intimidate a dragon, or out-bluff a wizened politician? Or change the bad guy? ;)

I believe this is related to narrative maturity. If we want stories that can stand the test of time and can be justly compared to other works of fiction from traditional media, we need to stop building adolescent narratives and start thinking about the real struggles of humankind. I was once told by a dear friend that was once my teacher, that all the greatest stories engaged with transcendental questions. I add to that: such questions have multiple, contradictory, and ever-renewing answers, and thus humankind will never deplete the pool of themes that can be written about. Open any magnum opus and think: what question does it seek to answer? Do the same with Mass Effect - unity in the face of danger? How to deal with AI? Those are valid questions, but only touched upon very superficially (and simplistically). Read Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds; the Reapers were there (it is not such an original scenario), but they carried deeper philosophical enquiries on their motives which made you doubt the validity of your fight against them.

That is another reason why the medium is still immature narratively: it avoids profound observation of humankind. And it is such a pity, because the platform is capable of allowing a kind of exploration that novels and films could never dream of: self-exploration. What you choose now, not what the protagonist did then. And you, despite all the choices that are laid out for you, are no God, and will fail and suffer and despond. Even heroes ought to be flawed and powerless sometimes.

What question seeks Planescape:Torment to answer? What can change the nature of a man. This is the game I always turn to for inspiration, and which I believe should be -- story-wise -- emulated by modern developers.

PD: Speaking of Bishop - here's my WoW iteration of NWN2 Bishop. Just by the looks a friend of mine could tell that he was "fallen and/or evil"; working as intended.

PD2: Probably jumping on Darkfall:UW when it gets released. Anybody else will? Any suggestions or advice?

Lately I have been playing Neverwinter Nights 2, hoarding notes on various subjects for the dissertation and grudgingly enjoying my time. This is one of my favourite games... or I should rather say stories. The game itself is excruciatingly clunky. The camera is all over the place, party members have the intelligence of a comic book villain, and AI fireballs always manage to hit the smallest number of enemies.

The first few times I played it I was able to enjoy its gameplay without celebrating it. It was a distraction which later became a nuisance as the game difficulty increased to a ridiculous level, with a finale that nobody in his right mind would attempt to overcome without cheats or a dosage of something illegal. At some point in my multiple playthroughs the gameplay had to be flung aside because it detracted me from experiencing what I was there to experience in the first place.

In 1997, the first wave of IF (interactive fiction) theorists were still dealing with key concepts of narratology and other fields that could be useful in the gaming scene. Espen Aarseth, considering hypertexts as well as games, coined the term "ergodic literature", which he defines as "open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading." In essence, it is a type of literature that demands input from the reader/player. An amused theorist whose name I cannot remember baptised it as "constipated literature," and files all adventure games under this tag. It is true. They ask you to fight waves of anodyne mobs so that you can get to the next cutscene/dialogue/map. Imagine if you had to do the same while reading. Every fifty pages your book disappears and you're asked to punch the next person that shows up. The book deems your heroism worthy and lets you continue, only to discover that you've been reading Fifty Shades of Grey all along.

A clarification is required before I proceed any further. Under "gameplay" I coalesce the rules and mechanics of the game, not the experience of playing it. The story or narrative is in most games that which gives the gameplay a context, a casing; while in RPGs the story is the integral part of it.

And yet gameplay and story are rarely conjoined. They seem to work against one another most of the time. In order to identify when gameplay does not work, I would like to call your attention to when it does. And by working I mean when it creates a feedback loop between the story and itself, when your experience of the game mechanics affect your experience of the story.

So when did gameplay work for me in NWN2? For instance, when I tried to rob a giant red dragon of its treasure. In the safe environment of a combat-less game, a confrontation with a dragon only has two outcomes: victory by using your wits or insta-death. There can be no physical engagement with your enemy, you are never out of your comfort zone. When you are thrown into a deadly match against a dragon, your mastery of the game rules is put to test, and there is an actual physical reaction in your body, which pumps adrenaline as you are trying to force a particular outcome. Games take place in the present, where everything is uncertain and has to be driven forward by your will. In forming that illusion, gameplay can be very successful. I do not think there is any other medium at the moment which can tell stories in that particular way, thus games ought not be so easily dismissed.

It works when it forces me to stand by my decisions: killing a companion is not an abstract thing when you carry and execute the in-game commands to crush him. In Bastion, [SPOILERS] when I relinquished the hammer so that I could carry my friend, and pressed on, defenseless, through that corridor, and I was filled with arrows with every step I took, I was physically in pain, and cursing, hand-on-heart. [END OF SPOILERS] No comfortable cutscenes for you. The gameplay can have a very powerful effect, and it is a pity that game developers would see it as separate from the story, or rather the story as a necessary coating for a game about shooting stuff. Shooting stuff is perfectly fine, but why should it need a story at all, if it is invariably hackneyed and adds nothing to your game about shooting stuff?

In NWN2, I found the gameplay faulty. By gameplay I mean mostly combat, its most common manifestation. It threw too many enemies at me in brainless encounters. There is a reason for this: RPGs are pesky little hybrids, game-stories or story-games, as the critics call them, which combine two different drives without actually mixing them: the drive to play a game about advancing levels, acquiring gear and overcoming challenges; and the hero's journey, the story layout for 99% of the RPGs out there and most fantasy literature. The player enjoys those encounters from the perspective of gameplay, if said gameplay is enjoyable, but they add very little to the story experience.

My problem is there is way too much meaningless combat, mostly poorly done because these games are stories before they are games. We have games about advancing levels and gaining bigger numbers, and those are called ARPGs, and have been quite successful. They do not need much of a story, they can do fine with a few lines and some spatial narrative (game world). It actually detracts from the dungeon crawling if the story is enforced on the player (Diablo 3).

In story-games, the ideal state would be that the gameplay reciprocates with the story. Those hell ponies are not just there for you to gain a few levels before the boss; they are part of a plot which takes you back to painful memories of devoid-of-ponies childhood. A more relatable example: Amnesia: The Dark Descent works as an interactive fiction of horror because it relies on the player's actions to tell its story: what you did against the monster coming down that corridor (where you ran to, where you hid) is gameplay and story, as is your heart pumping wildly along with your avatar's. The example of the dragon is my favourite: a real challenge for a decision that cannot be made lightly. Also the little encounters along the road, like that with Zevran in Dragon Age: Origins, or any random bandit encounter, can signify in the story level as well, contextually giving out that the world is dangerous.

Hugely successful games with very little tacked-on gameplay features have been made in the past: Planescape Torment. It is not that it lacked combat, but that it was meaningful and in many cases optional. It was not entirely skippable, a decision which I laud; after all, not all conflicts can be solved with words.

PD: On Myst, one of the first commercially successful adventure games, one of its creators, Robyn Miller, said that artistically Myst was a frustrating project. He later stopped making games because he felt that the game format was too much in conflict with storytelling and character development (Aarseth 2004). What do you think about this?

Last Saturday I read something scary at Scary Worlds. His narrative is not a new one: aspirations never achieved, because they were never reached for when the time was right. I believe that all of us are on the same life quest, but on a different stage: Scary, in his mid-life crisis, looks back disappointed in his complacency; I look into the future afraid of reaching back and feeling the same way. That is why this is a difficult time for me, the time for choosing who I want to become. And that choice is grounded on many different expectations and inner and outer pressures.

I listened to an emissary of the American Dream who told me that one should never give up ambition, and I am inclined to agree with him, even though the Dream has been proven fallacious since The Great Gatsby. Ursula LeGuin, a writer I just recently discovered and that I begin to admire above our forefathers, once said: "Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty." But what my dreamer friend told me stroke true as well. It was a long conversation whose essence can be summed up as: "if you do not reach for greatness, if you settle for contentment, your work will be mediocre."

One of the key things that held me back from working hard on my dream (writing THE novels I had planned since I was a teenager) was gaming. One of my greatest passions, but also one of my most ravenous tempters. I do not blame gaming in particular, but entertainment as a concept. Mass, dulling, lulling entertainment. If it had not been gaming, it could have been the TV, but I doubt that would have held the same appeal to me. Gaming provided me with almost everything that I lacked in real life: a strong bond to dad; a welcoming community for a confused teenager; easy, reachable goals which made real success too much hard; a ravishing world I could inhabit when my working class environment seemed too poor when held against my science fiction fantasies; also a creative outlet through which I rp'ed, and so I deferred the other non-transient creations. But there are net-positives in my experience as well: I met lots of people that have been instrumental in my life, and my current partner. I could not ever resent my journey, but I do resent the fact that I have a hard time letting go of an entertainment that saps the energy out of me. These ephemeral dreams of social life through raiding, of accomplishment in execution of an irrelevant skill, of grind for a virtual item... No more.

My dilemma is the following: I enjoy games, but I fall into their Skinner box traps, their virtual-as-real successes. Thankfully, it is only these routine-like games like MMOs that drive me to such mind state. RPGs are safe. Not all entertainment is dangerous.

I know that what I have written will rub most of you the wrong way. It feels fascist to claim that entertainment is dangerous and thus it should be banned (although Huxley spoke of entertainment as oppression and he was much more spot-on than Orwell). That is not my meaning. What I want to expose here is the mechanism which has trapped me and some others into passivity. The way easy pleasures take over your inclination for something higher, if you ever had it. Which reminds me of the recent conversation about 'fun' and 'accomplishment' feelings. In the game context, we talked about games which felt like easy fun and games that required you to work to achieve something. You can apply the same concept in real life. But looking back into the gaming conversation, I have this question: "Is achieving something in a game a real achievement?"

In games there is no failure. It is the American Dream. Work hard enough and you will be on the top, or near enough that you feel accomplished. If your guild could not progress through T5, change guilds. There is no such thing as unemployment, competition, gamble. It will trick you into thinking yourself successful, while turning failure into a momentary lapse towards victory. But wipes occur in real life too, and they are much harsher, and not always lead to victory in the end. That is why we enjoy this Dream so much, and why we cower in the thought of undertaking a real enterprise. Human beings are irrationally afraid of failure. I think we should take a lesson from MMOs here and think of it as a progression raid: there will be wipes, and you will learn and become a better player thanks to them. Success is not guaranteed, but failure is whenever you stop trying.

Entertainment, the dulling kind, does two things in my opinion: one, it distracts you from yourself. We demand to be entertained, to be separated from our overwhelming minds. If done when really required, after a tiresome day, it can certainly be healthy. When done as a routine, you are losing on the opportunity to engage in mental growth through good books, good games, and something that has never been more devalued: good thinking. Now every moment of leisure is occupied with a mobile device that fills our ears, hands and minds. It is as if we were scared of being alone with ourselves. The other thing that entertainment does is fill our head with the ideology of our current society, which goes unchallenged in our passivity. Do not underestimate the power of narrative. It is everywhere around us, and shapes everything. It puts words into our mouth which we have not thought ourselves (how many times I had to explain that protein comes as easily from vegetables as it does from meat, as I introduce myself as a vegan).

I am aware this is not a post for everybody. It took me some time to learn that there are lots of people who do not have such clear-cut ambitions, and which are content and happy with a 'passive' life, or which have done enough to lean now on the rocking chair. I direct this to people who have a boiling energy under their skin, and which they might have quenched with a downpour of games and series and silly things. Distractions from their frightening epic quest. Do not settle for grey-level quests, dear reader, when you can take the orange ones solo; as for the group quests, we are always here to help: friends, family, random strangers over the internet.

I'm leaving you this song, passed on to me by a short-term lover and long-term dear friend. I passed it on to my partner. I think it contains the simplest and most fundamental message that has ever been sung.

Catching up post was in order. I have been absent from the blogosphere because real life has been demanding more attention of me for quite some time: I moved to the UK, started my last year of English Literature, began working on my dissertation. Which, by the way, is related to this blog and to what you will soon see being published here: interactive literature, narrative structures of hypertext fiction and video games.

My intention is to replay an assorted list of modern and old RPGs and analyse their narrative elements, picking up the different ways in which the stories are constructed, paying special attention to the tools. In traditional literature, the basic and ultimate tool through which the world is constructed is the word, with all its nuances. In video games, developers are given multimedia tools of various sorts which would facilitate the creation of a very complex experience, but which are often mis- and underused. Even our basic societal tool, the language, is often underemployed in our medium, leading to the conception of video games as a lower art, if at all.

I would like to explore, in my dissertation and the ensuing, previewing posts, the ways in which narrative is construed in games, and how a better understanding of traditional media might help consolidate games - and also what traditional media could learn from modern interactive narratives.

My list of games is ever-growing. So far, I intend to discuss: Planescape: Torment, Mass Effect (not sure if all or just one of them), Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II, Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights 2 (probably 1 as well), Chrono Trigger (fantastic SNES game that plays with the concept of time), TES: Morrowind or Oblivion, Bastion, To the Moon, Dear Esther, World of Warcraft... Sadly, I don't have all the time in the world, or I would play and re-play these and many more. But, by all means, if you have any suggestions or know of a title that might be fertile for discussion, feel free to comment. For instance, I am not that well-acquainted with indie titles that would challenge the way in which video games are usually constructed, and would welcome any ideas in that department.

On another note, what I am currently playing: Mainly Mists of Pandaria, but in my usual unconventional way: I have avoided the abrasive LFD scene so far and I only do some dailies while taking my breakfast, when I am not yet person enough to be capable of mindful interaction with my environment. Thankfully I play on a PVE server. I am one of these people that Doone considers that play a sandbox in spite of the game rules. Quote: "The truth is that RPers bring something from outside of Azeroth *into* Azeroth. They bring their community with them. No I don’t mean they round up 100s of RPers and collectively subscribe to the game. I mean they have an idea of how to play the game despite the activities available. In this sense, the virtual environment is more of a canvas for them than an already painted landscape to navigate. There are other unique groups of players in WoW who behave similarly to this, so it’s important to emphasize the point here: these exceptional players aren’t operating under the rigid rules of Azeroth, but despite them." WoW, or rather Warcraft, is the medium of my own narrative and that of other players, and a world we inhabit in spite of all the changes. I can still enjoy Netherstorm, the Burning Crusade, within a new context that I bring to the game. I already went to Pandaria as a player, a plunderer; in the future, I will visit it with the spirit of a true adventurer.

Last note, on a more personal level. I feel like sharing with you, even though I had always strived to keep my personal life away from my blogging persona. But then I recalled how I love hearing other blogger's real life anecdotes and their personal experiences, because that somehow makes them closer to me. I think I could spare some personal thoughts from time to time, so here we go:

This being the last year of my degree, I began thinking about the future. Will I study a masters? What do I want to work as? I undertook English Literature for pleasure, and thinking at the time that translation would be an industrious endeavour, but I am no longer certain. It is a creative job, but very constricting as well. You would be arranging words always within the limits of another's creation. I want to make my own words. I would publish that novel that I've been working on for quite some time, but that is no job, not unless you get lucky. Teaching? Perhaps, to win the bread, for a time. I might even like it if I tried. But as with sushi, I tried plenty of times and I still detest it. But it looks so round and spongy... Well, where am I getting to? I thought I would try to work in the video games industry as one of those guys/gals that works on the game script, quests, plot. My boyfriend might start a degree in Video Games Development next year, in a very reputable university, and I would go with him, elbow my way into some company, indie or mainstream. Perhaps found our own. It's risky, but less than stepping into a classroom full of boisterous little rascals. It is the road less traveled by, And I must follow, if I can, / Pursuing it with eager feet, / Until it joins some larger way / Where many paths and errands meet. / And whither then? I cannot say. [The Road Goes Ever On]

Torchlight 2 got many things right, starting by the composer, Matt Uelmen, who came up with the masterpiece from Diablo I and II, that later got ravaged by the Diablo III soundtrack team. The same thing happened with the fey Morrowind theme from The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (one of my favourite game tracks) when it was adapted for Skyrim.

The phantasmagoric theme of Diablo would of course not translate well into the more light-hearted Torchlight universe, but it still retains a touch that makes it reminiscent of the Diablo franchise. I would say that even more reminiscent than Diablo III itself. In that calculation enter the mechanics and the philosophy of the game as well. That boastful claim that TL2 is the spiritual successor of Diablo II is actually true, despite the atmosphere being completely different.

But that does not matter because the team behind TL2 got right the most important thing: a loot-based dungeon-crawler must lean heavily on the looting. It is more easily said than done, since for the loot to feel rewarding a fragile balance must be maintained. On this topic dad and I held countless discussions. He was expecting Blizzard to wave his wand and fix the game so that the loot would feel epic again. That cannot be achieved for as long as an auction house is present and the game balanced around it. 'Epic' meant for him, and I agree, that there would be unique affixes to the items, allowing you to be not-game-breakingly-but-almost overpowered; that a looted item would goad you to create a new character with a specific build to test out a different way of playing (such as a dot-based assassin in Diablo 2); epic loot meant being awesome beyond adding +50 to your primary stat. In Torchlight 2, very early in the game, I already completed a blue set that gives me +20% health steal, a stat that I have yet to encounter elsewhere, as its more common peer gives a set amount of life on hit. And I expect legendary items (the category beyond 'unique') to be much more interesting.

But you know what? If they are not, there is an easy solution to it, that Blizzard threw off the window: mods. Modifications to the game made by the players, to suit what the players want and to reduce the forum-crying. Mods will be the core element of Torchlight's success in the long run, as it was for Neverwinter Nights, and to some extent for Diablo II. I can say that about a third of my played time for Diablo II has been in fact spent in mods, and it would have been much more if I had picked them up earlier, and if I had not been so absorbed in vanilla Diablo II in my school and teenage years. Some Diablo II mods improved the game to such an extent that the original felt like a foundation for the amateur developers to work on. I am sure that many of you have felt the same way after you have tried a couple of mods for Morrowind or Oblivion, even for Skyrim, although there has not been yet enough development for the polished story mods to come out. Just to get a glimpse of what passion for a game means for the players, take a look at this Oblivion mod, The Lost Spires, which adds a beautifully crafted storyline with new areas, lore, npcs, objects - the whole array, put together so masterfully that it appears to be (better than) official.

I am loving Torchlight II so far, but always with an eye on what will come next. I suspect that the game, even on elite difficulty, will be more accessible than Diablo III Inferno pre-patches, as Diablo II was. But at the time of Diablo II, players had not yet been drilled into endgame submission, and they were (I was) capable of enjoying a goalless path. Azuriel voiced the same concern about GW2 not long ago, and I agreed with him that, for me, there is no more bliss in pointless pursuits. In Diablo II I could happily hoard for the sake of hoarding. Now, I look forward to making as effective a character as possible for the added challenge of the mods that will come out soon.

There is room for all kinds of playstyles in Torchlight 2, unlike in Diablo III, where the only favoured playstyle was that of the savvy economist. For collectors there are plenty of unique items with special affixes; for theorycrafters there are many viable talents that result in abysmally different builds for the same class (wand-wielding bersekers, that is definitely an option); for achievers such as myself there are means to bring yourself to the limit, and if they are surpassed, an unrestrained modder will come up with something tortuous enough.

Finally, a word on the lack of respeccing: it is brilliant. When I started up the game and found out that I had allocated my skill points in an ineffective way, I was enraged. Apparently I skipped the first stage of grief, denial. A couple of stages later, I accepted it and allowed its philosophy to seep into my brain, and understood: I had been playing that same way many years ago, and had found it delightful. I made three sorceresses in Diablo II, each one of them bringing me closer to my preferred playstyle. I remember the skill tree of each of them. They were individual and untransferable. With WoW and its track-on-the-sand talent choices and cookie-cutter builds, my character was no longer defined by the choices I made for her, but mostly by her gear, as it recounted what she had gone through. Since classical MMOs are so focused on the endgame, it would make no sense to prevent respeccing, as it would force players through another month of grind to get an endgame optimal character. But why does this mindset have to apply to ARPGs too? There is fun in creating a new character to try out a new build with that special set you had looted. There is less fun in making the same wizard with the same stats and build of every wizard out there (and your failure to comply can be easily corrected in five seconds).

In any case, if you do not like how it is now, be it the respec, the music, the dungeons, the colour of your pet, it will all be solved by our passionate modders. Blizzard, the players knew what they wanted from your game. You should have given them the tools to customize it to their liking, instead of trying to direct how your game should be played.

Great news for the RPG genre: Obsidian is back, and backed, for a new old-school-feeling roleplaying game. I believe that half of those day-one backers haven't even played the video before throwing their money at Obsidian (I didn't either).

Some fellow bloggers have already reported on it, showing a level of enthusiasm that I can easily relate to. Spinks wrote on it, as well as Roguekish on Cloak of Thoughts. If you're interested in game theorising and insightful views on modern games, do follow him! (That is an order).

Despite my trust in Obsidian, who had won me over with NWN2 and Kotor2, games which I consider much better than their prequels, I share most of the concerns that Roguekish voices in his blog, particularly on the story section:

Modern and older RPGs usually have tried giving us this promise that our choices in the game matter and change the story, but usually it ends up being quite the opposite. For example it has no real consequence in the game which choices you made in DA: O while recruiting the nations to your cause. You either kill one of the dwarven throne proponents or your elected King does, either you kill the mages by annulling the Circle or you save them etc. All it changes is which units you have at your disposal in the last battle and the epilogue at the end.

I had written before on this topic, stating that what Bioware promised regarding consequences to our actions was something that they did and could not deliver, given the tools and budget with which video games operate nowadays. Since "new school" RPGs are much more visual and cinematic than their predecessors, the former must work on a multiplicity of levels to convey one of those famed consequences, and thus drain much more of their budget and development time, and in the end they cannot really provide more than aesthetic, flavour changes to the core story. Or at least not through the same media that the entire game is conveyed through; that is, if an important consequence stems from an action, this consequence will not be delivered by setting an entire new storyline, with its own art, cinematics, audio, etc; it will be delivered through a low-end medium such as a recorded voice mentioning your race selection, as opposed to making your choice of race a factor, providing it with custom storylines or at least paths to solve conflicts (imagine you would have had more and better options to solve the dwarven conflict in DA:O as a dwarf). Another low-end medium, which Roguekish touches upon, are the epilogues. Yes, those are consequences, but they feel off because they are delivered only sideways, disdaining the tools that the game had used for the core story.

In the case of old-school RPGs, since the game does not require fancy cinematics to convey its story, the writing team is much more free to present a complex branching storyline. In Planescape:Torment (which I reviewed some time ago), you reaped the rewards of your legality, by accessing quests and options that were not available to neutral or chaotic personalities; your charisma and intelligence scores weighted heavily on the dialogue options that you had, thus influencing the final outcome of your mission. The game could be beaten in many ways, depending on what you chose even from the beginning of your playthrough, as everything was interconnected. It is difficult to appreciate the dimension of the tree from just one of the branches if you only play once, but if you like mildly spoiling yourself with guides, you will see the overarching implications of everything, and wonder why we are now stuck with unit-X-or-Y-at-the-end choices.

NWN2 and Kotor2 are not old-school RPGs in any case, but I still enjoyed them very much, despite the fact that there were little choices outside of the main storyline. Before interactive storytelling came into the spotlight, the traditional storytelling mode was hugely successful because it relied on telling good, creative stories. That is Obsidian's talent, and that is what is missing in the video games genre lately, with the notable exception of the indies. If Obsidian decides upon embarking on this journey towards player-driven storytelling, I hope that they do it mindfully, conscious of the failings of others who attempted it before. At least the medium is the most adequate: video games in the old fashion, not requiring full voice-overs nor action-packed cinematics for every nose-picking of the hero. I hope so not only because consequences are weakly delivered with those constraints, but because I wish that there are at least a handful of options for those of us who prefer a more literary than filmic experience, because the ultimately player-driven content is the imagination. If everything is chewed out for us in the form of voice-overs and cinematics, there is little use for it, and so it decays until we can call upon it no longer.

If Project Eternity remains a truly old school RPG, we should not be worried about their breaking promises in the story department. They will have much more liberty to create a profound story than if they were constrained by the requirement of cinematics and voice-overs. I believe they will deliver, and there will be no complaining about "I'm in the middle of some calibrations."

In the advent of patch five-something of WoW, an hilarious bug was found and smashed. For a day or so, druids in stag form could climb on top of each other and overpoweredly fly above the sky limit. Blizzard saw this as unacceptable and crushed the druids' dream to reach the moon. When the ruling hand of Blizzard smashed this flimsy bug, I felt a pang of sadness and disappointment, as if it had been a nerf. Well, it was, in some way: it nerfed the player's creativity. Here's the bug, if you're curious:

In the last few years, Blizzard has been nerfing here and there not just for balancing reasons, but for streamlining ones as well. In Diablo 3, game that brought me a lot of joy from its polished mechanics, and a lot of sorrow from its design decisions, Blizzard's hand has been as unwavering as if it were an MMO, if not more. The playstyle that I usually adopted since Diablo 2, the glass cannon, was made extremely inefficient through the rising of repair costs and nerfing of attack speed. It was not the intended way to play, mind you. Diablo 3, being a gear-based game, would prefer you didn't "cheat" by using a cheap 0-resistance DPS set. It is all business, you see, players are not allowed to progress through skill, they have to buy their way through.

But this was not the only thing they streamlined: farming Siegebreaker was too popular, so they nerfed the chests, the nearby dungeons and boosted Siegebreaker with some nasty reflect damage affix. Resplendent chests had been too lucrative for the effort they required (although they forget that in order to get to most of those, you have to fight your way through a couple of "real" loot-pinatas), so they nerfed the chests, and the community sarcastically baptised them as "supply chests" because they only drop potions and gems. Oh, and let's not forget the preposterous thought of weapon racks always dropping weapons - that had to go away!

Back to bugs. I don't see the reason why some of them had to be deleted from the game. Take for instance the glitch that allowed rogues to enter Karazhan Crypts with Shadow Step back in TBC. It did not harm anybody or destabilized the game in any way. Hyjal was also a touristic spot that the most dexterous players bragged about having reached. They did not only nerf (or more politically correct: fix) wall-jumping, but when the virtuosos of jumping still made it, they installed a teleport that bounced them back where they should be. Wall-jumping in itself is a controversial subject, since it was used for actual harmful exploits such as jumping off the battlegrounds' fences before the race began. But I can think of other ways of preventing that that do not involve hijacking an interesting game mechanic (raise the walls, make them insurmountable, make a faux invisible ceiling, etc).

Why such rapacious reaction against creative bug-employing (not exploiting, there is no benefit made from it)? I believe it goes hand in hand with Blizzard's authoritarian policies of hyper-balancing. The game is supposed to be played/farmed *this* way and none other, which leads to the ever-nerfing of out-of-the-box ideas that the players come up with, such as 5-man rogue tanking of Gruul in TBC. My rogue friends drooled upon watching this video, and dreamed about being able to do that one day. It bespoke of the classes' possibilities beyond what was "common knowledge." It was all nerfed, since rogues are not supposed to tank. Raid encounters have gotten a similar treatment as well. I remember TBC encounters as being much more tolerant of different strategies. No, I don't just remember, I have seen it in action just a few months ago: King Maulgar could be handled in different ways depending on your raid setup. Enough tanks, and there was little need for hunter-kiting. Fewer healers? Then you may kite Maulgar around instead of face-tanking the whirlwind.

On the other end of the spectrum, developers such as Bethesda, which will always hold a little piece of my heart, and will probably be mentioned in my testament, have taken a much more laid-back approach to bugs. If it is funny and not game-breaking, we leave it there for our players to smile. My favourite one so far was the skyrocket sabercat. I encountered a sabercat in the wilderness, drew my bow, shot an arrow at it, and it just blasted off to the skies like a veritable rocket, leaving me there agape and loot-craving. Such wondrous world, Skyrim. You can be anything, even an astronaut.

Summing up: This bug fixing triggers in me some reluctance, because it reminds me too much of other creativity-nerfs, so abundant these days with Diablo 3. When will they learn that the more unique a player feels through her actions and decisions, the more attached she becomes to her characters and her individual game experience?

This was before transmogrification.

Doone and Ahtchu had commented on the previous article that some people point out nostalgia as being detrimental to an objective discussion. I do not entirely discard nostalgia as having an effect on our view of the past games, even as we replay them, specially in the field of MMOs, given that those are much more dependent on the psychological marks that they imprint on us mainly through social ties. Still, when talking about individual features and the consequences they have on how we experience the game, I think that we can single out the nostalgic appeals and have a thorough discussion. In fact, what I consider that applies in this case is an issue of predisposition, rather than nostalgia.

If you tell the average Wrath-inserted player that she has to form her group through trade channel, and then work her way to the summoning stone, she will probably answer that she's got dailies to do, ciao. It could also be the case that she is interested in those revived mechanics because she has heard of the benefits of that artificial hurdle, and is willing to do the experiment. There you have it, willing. Veterans, when coming back to the previous systems, acknowledge those benefits in themselves or as opposed to the current system, and are willing to bear the short-term inconveniences. Precisely because most players required the antithetical view of the dungeon system in Wrath, they did not realise how successfully the previous system had been until then, which is why the returning experience can be better, or at least more mindful, than the original experience. It is not nostalgia, but the recognition of something that we have lost. Ee humans are keen on those sentiments.

That said, I think that it is in order to discuss those inconveniences that really were so, so that I stop sounding so nostalgia-addled. First and silliest, I miss my autoloot terribly. I have become used to holding shift while inspecting the loot by now, but then I hold shift in retail WoW and loot nothing, and that drives my perfectionistic self off a cliff. There is no inherent social gain on pressing another key while looting, and it could even be detrimental since I cannot chat while skimming the bodies of the dead.

A mechanic that I would like to pitchfork was actually the mp5 dynamic, albeit based on a personal dislike that may or may not be shared with other veterans. As a restoration druid in TBC, I never had the need to force myself into mp5-stasis, since my heals were rarely supernumerary as they were less potent and immediate but more long-term. I also had more mana regen than my envious priests. This is something I only realised after having played as a holy priest in Archangel, and having experienced the 'joy' of /stopcasting unless I was certain that the heal would land in full. On the other end of the balance was the unlimited mana pool that Wrath brought about, and the saddening consequences: healing would be less strategic and more jittery, reflex-based. It had some fun to it, there is fun in twitchy games such as Diablo 3, but I preferred the older model.

The design of the classes in vanilla is also double-edged. On the one hand, each class has a unique flavour to it, and hybrids are truly hybrids, being able to perform multiple roles almost simultaneously without excelling at any one. On the other hand, there is a very narrow range of choices for serious raiding: if you wanted to tank, you had to be a warrior. Bear tanks were rare, their gear being as uncommon as D3 legendaries; paladins were laughingstock, and forced to dress cloth to do what they were supposed to do, healing. It is a pity, because I wanted to play a blood elf *cough, vanilla*, a human protection paladin.

Then there is the "I could live without that" features such as transmogrification. Yes, it is nice to not look like a power ranger (see the early paladin tiers excepting Judgement), but from the perspective of a roleplayer who filled her bank with pretty dresses and weird tentacled staves (for Japanese e-rp, of course), it was never a necessity. I merely changed my looks upon entering the city, often on a daily basis.

Lastly, I cannot forget that WoW has also come a long way in the area of raiding. The early raids displayed mechanics that are now seen as easy and overused, and the bosses do not sport any fancy abilities that blow your mind. Compare C'Thun to the stepped-up flamboyance that is Yogg-Saron. And yet, how many variations of the "get out of the fire" mechanic are there in Cataclysm (dungeons, I haven't experienced the raids)? I came to expect one per boss encounter. In the early days, since people did not have telltale addons that informed them of upcoming shit on the ground, and since you could barely tell where you stepped on from the overcrowding of 30 active people and 10 afk bots, each one of this now requisite abilities (interrupt this, dodge that) constituted a boss encounter of its own. Now those are just the icing on the cake, because you are still expected to do a little dance while holding two gnomes on your shoulders, and keep pew-pewing yet another dragon.

What about you, what features do you deem indispensable now? What others are you willing to relinquish, for the sake of 2005 MMOs?