Work is Fun: A Minecraft Observer's Review

“In every job that must be done there is an element of fun.” – Mary Poppins

It used to baffle me as a child. It seemed almost every weekend my parents wanted nothing more than to stay home and work around the house. My dad would mow the lawn. My mom would toil away on her hands and knees, grasping for weeds in one of her five or six gardens as a heap of roots and other organic detritus collected by her side. I, of course, thought that this was the most boring thing on earth. Who were these people? Why stay home when we could … when we could … we could go to the mall?

If you were to go to my parents' house today and observe the humble magnificence of their property, you might be able to understand — better than I was able to — why my parents preferred their weekend work. I think it's even nicer now than when I lived there. They've got a greenhouse. A pond. There are still a bunch of gardens and places to sit around during the nice summer weather.

But it's funny. If there's one thing that has remained true about my parents' two-and-a-half-acre spread of land, it's that it has never been static. Slowly but surely, it's always changing. Not only are the state of the plants and trees in constant flux (my parents' never-ending campaign against the creeping blackberry vines used to suffer crippling setbacks almost every year) but even the manmade features are impermanent. Once ambitious gardens fall to ruin while new ones thrive. Wooden birdhouses disappear, replaced later on by homemade bells. My dad's first attempt at a pond was for years just a gaping hole in the ground before getting filled back in. These were the types of gradual and sudden changes I didn't notice and appreciate quite as much until I went off to college and started coming home only every few months. My parents' work is never finished. The prominent features change over time as their resources and focus shift between various projects.


I guess I've noticed a sort of parallel phenomenon watching my wife play Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition. It's great. Every day last week I would come home from work and get to hear about all of the mini emergent adventures my wife had experienced that day. Her intrepid mining expeditions. Her taming of a huge pack of dogs and getting lost for hours in the wilderness. Better yet, I got to see the latest iteration of her ever-expanding “home.” I got to watch over time as her survival cabin at the top of a hill became more of a faux-house concealing her much larger bunker underground. Pretty soon her bunker had expanded to encompass most of the hill. Then one day I came home to find that the hill had basically become like one big cobblestone castle. And it all happened one block at a time, without an instruction manual.

I recently watched an interview snippet with Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization series and many other highly regarded computer games. He spoke in pretty plain language about the distinction between fun and work when designing games. If something in his games begins to feel too much like work, they have the computer do that for you. Imagine the tedium if, as opposed to simply commanding your Civilization workers to improve tiles, you had to somehow do that work yourself. Imagine if your peons in Warcraft required that you click continuously on each tree you were making them harvest. It would detract from getting to focus on the bigger picture, the satisfaction of the macro-management.


How interesting then to consider a game like Minecraft, in which almost the entire playing experience consists of simulated labor, and not the kind in which you simply command and watch your minions but rather one that has you play as your own lone minion in a world all your own (which encompasses both master and minion, I suppose). It's essentially a do-it-yourself game. It involves cutting down trees, shoveling dirt, hunting for food, tilling soil, building tools, and moving thousands of blocks from one place to another. I jumped into the game for a little bit the other day and helped my wife completely level half of a mountain. Talk about landscaping. We picked and picked and picked while the sun was up and retired to bed at nightfall. In human time it probably took about forty minutes or so.

What the playing experience doesn't include is the physical strain — the soreness of muscles, the shortness of breath. There's no cleanup involved, no tracking mud into your home at the end of the day. Still, I would wager money to guess that if Minecraft did not make the player “work” for those resources, so to speak, it wouldn't have the millions of players that it does. Minecraft is much more than a game of infinite legos. It really is about the work, or the idea of work.

Because the human species craves work! Rather, they crave the accomplishment that emerges as a result of the work. People enjoy Minecraft for very much the same reason they enjoy sweets. It's biological. A delicious fatty food contains so many calories in such a condensed form that it's almost impossible to pass up. It eliminates the need to forage, the need to hunt. What an incredible opportunity! This is why raccoons pick through the neighborhood Dumpster. It's why the squirrels load up on free food from my parents' backyard bird feeder. The intense desire for accomplishment through work is just as inherent to the human species as is the need for physical sustenance. But whenever an opportunity arises that appears to satisfy what we need, or which appears to eliminate the barriers separating us from those things that we need, that opportunity is very difficult to resist. Minecraft eliminates the unpleasantries of work while retaining its core essence, which is precisely what makes it such a near perfect substitute.

That's really what a lot of video games do so well to begin with — reward the player with a sense of accomplishment. Usually, however, both the reward and the means of obtaining the reward are completely arbitrary. It could be doled out however the designer sees fit. Complete a level, advance to the next one. Defeat a boss, enjoy a cutscene. Solve a puzzle, gain a collectible star. Earn a set number of experience points and level up. Minecraft, by contrast, does not seem nearly as concerned with having to impose a set of goals and objectives upon the player (other than staying alive, perhaps). It says to the player, “This is your world. These are its rules. Do what thou wilt.”

My wife could just as easily venture off into the wilderness, perhaps go exploring the mysterious nether world for the first time. For now she still seems to find just as much enjoyment staying close to home, steadily improving the scenery within rendering distance of her glimmering tower, plucking away at her ever-changing list of pet projects. So much work to do!

It's pure indulgence, sure. Isn't any game? But there are things that Minecraft and other games allow us to experience that we would not otherwise, at least for the foreseeable future, get to experience. Take owning a house, for example. My parents might have had the benefit of purchasing property in the 1970s. They were able to actually build their own home. They have a real landscape on which to sculpt their improvements. It's a little different for my wife and I. At least, the barriers standing in the way of us doing the same thing are significantly greater, 30 years later. My wife's heart literally aches for owning a puppy (well, a very specific pure breed of puppy). We don't currently have the setup to make that particular dream a reality, but you should see how excited she is while playing Minecraft and coming home to her pack of blocky, domesticated wolves. I guess what I'm saying is simply in answer to an internal question bouncing around in my head: Why not enjoy a bit of harmless indulgence when it helps you cope?

(Final thoughts (which are not my final thoughts): There is a lot more to talk about with Minecraft than this piece gets into, especially considering the Xbox version is still rather primitive compared to the latest PC version. I've specifically used the word 'review' here, because my posts titled 'review' seem to get more hits than the ones that don't. I'd definitely like to talk more about my experiences with this game once I've had more of a chance to play it. This game is worth trying out at least once just for the experience of getting lost.)

Images were borrowed from mine craft.wikia.com.

Choose your own Super Amazing Wagon Adventure

We'd just made it beyond the Great Plains when, as a token and confession of his love, Flynn gave Poopface a flower. Soon after that Flynn got syphilis. Then, in his weakened state, Flynn died. I think he was devoured by a wolf. Anna died too, although—honestly—I don't at all remember what caused her demise. I'd been through so many different versions of this adventure already, it could have been any number of things. But our story didn't end there. Somehow, against the odds, Poopface survived a river raid of sorts and made it to the coast. And I finally completed the Super Amazing Wagon Adventure.

To say this game is a parody on The Oregon Trail would be both obvious and insufficient. Yes, the game has you shooting buffalo (lots of buffalo … sometimes flaming buffalo) and fording rivers (or, if you prefer, jumping them). It's utterly zany, completely hilarious. But Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is also just a really good, well thought-out game.

The game splits between two primary modes of action. There are the wagon driving portions that involve side-scrolling shooting and dodging. And then there are the segments during which one of your party members sets off on foot and the game becomes a dual-stick shooter. Your journey across the wagon trail is broken up into a bunch of semi-random episodes that last no more than about 30 seconds each.

I say semi-random, because the game actually has a really nice structure that gives the adventure some overall grounding and consistency. Each play through—depending on how long your party survives—will involve a trek through the Great Plains, a mountain pass, a couple of rivers, and more. The precise obstacles you encounter along each stage of the journey, however, will vary. A side quest for exploring a cave might trigger a battle with giant bats during one adventure and giant spiders during the next. Or you might not encounter a cave at all.

Devote a little bit of practice to the game and you might start to develop some strategies. Each animal carcass, if picked up, can potentially be traded for extra health and munitions at certain points in the game. But because some weapons, such as the ray gun, decimate a carcass completely, there might be times when you choose to avoid that particular power-up.

I first got a chance to see this game in action during the Seattle Indies Expo on July 29. And I had a brief chat with the game's developer, who goes by the name sparsevector. Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is actually his first game, and the expo was his first chance to observe the experience of first-time players.There were a lot of interesting games on display, many of which were much shinier than this one, but I think Super Amazing Wagon Adventure was my my personal favorite from the show. It had a kind of instant, mass appeal, mostly attributable to its sense of humor.

It was only upon purchasing the game from the Xbox Live indie games channel that I got to appreciate the actual playing experience. I kept dying and retrying, intent on getting through the entire adventure at least once. Pretty soon it was like something out of The Twilight Zone. Here were these three hapless digital versions of myself, my wife, and some stranger named Poopface, caught in an endless procession of inevitable death and destruction. Each journey, while different, was uncannily familiar. I watched and played as all of these facsimile versions of my party met their gruesome end, unable to stop myself until the wagon adventure gods smiled upon that one Poopface who had given Flynn an STD.

I could have been bitter. I could have turned away in disdain. But it was a beautiful moment. Life had found a way. The sperm had fertilized the egg. Also, I got to unlock the game's “shuffle” mode.

Here's my final recommendation. Buy this game if you:

• Like an old-school video game challenge.
• Still enjoy doing Mad Libs.
• Are looking for a new kind of party game to show off to your snarky friends.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is currently available on Xbox and will soon be out on PC.

Rapture is us

Rapture is leaking, and nobody seems to mind. Anyone who might have thought to point this out—and maybe do something about it—has already died by the time I arrive on the scene. And let me tell you, I'm seeing a lot of dead people.

Rapture was probably what you might call a boomtown. Talk about commercial enterprise, this place found a way to profiteer just about everything, even criminal justice! Did you accidentally get caught trespassing someplace you didn't belong? Just pay a quick one-time fee to shut down those frenzied flying death bots.

It seems on the one hand brilliant, and yet I can see just as easily how this automated economy will soon meet its end. Monetary transactions no longer flow between the hands of human beings, only into the dead-end deposit slots of these untended vending machines. After a while, as I venture further into new areas of the city, I find that even the money isn't sufficient to buy the supplies needed for survival. I'm literally scrounging through corpses and garbage cans looking for the raw components that will let me invent my own items. Random supplies could be anywhere, sitting on some high up ledge, hiding under a fallen slab of concrete. I feel like a skittish street rat.

I've discovered there's also a new economy, the economy of Adam. It's a cartel really. It ate up the old economy, the old way of living. In fact, it completely killed living and replaced it with something different, a kind of … sub-living.

This is my mental travelogue as I re-play my way through the first few hours of BioShock, and I must say, I'm really feeling it. Here is a shooter that doesn't feel like a regular shooter. It feels more like the old Resident Evil games (sort of mechanically clunky, but on purpose) only more immediate and immersive. As I travel, I have to make decisions about how best to approach my enemies—not only how to win an encounter when I come upon a splicer by surprise, but how to become more deliberate in how I move about, deliberate in how I kill. Before long, I find myself to be more hunter than prey. I'm becoming more dangerous than the crazies around me.

This is good stuff, right? Like, I wonder how this game experience might relate psychologically to a recovered (or not) drug addict. I really do! How do those first hours of playing BioShock feel to someone who might actually have experienced what it's like to go from upstanding citizen to a desperate and broken mess of a person, someone who pawned off all their crap when they descended beyond the means of legitimately obtaining cash and eventually had to resort to other less-than-savory methods of getting by. Burglary? Violence? Scavenging copper wire from abandoned buildings, perhaps? Go back and watch that animation of your player character popping a syringe needle into his vein. Feel that desperation!

But then, something strange happens. The game keeps on going … and going. I wouldn't say it becomes boring or unplayable, but that once foreign and engrossing experience becomes less engrossing and a lot more familiar. My simple, understandable motivation for getting the hell out of Rapture becomes a bit more convoluted. I notice how my once compelling need to scavenge for supplies becomes more of a compulsion. It's a mindless chore, wherein I search every available box and corpse, not to find things that I desperately need, but rather any item that I haven't arbitrarily maxed out.

A friend of mine told me he started playing the first couple of hours of BioShock and then soon lost interest. While I definitely don't have the same playing habits (I will compulsively finish almost any game I start), I can understand how that would happen. I told him he probably got the best of the BioShock experience in those first couple hours.

It's maybe the day after I start playing through the game when news of the violent massacre at a movie theater in Colorado sends shockwaves through the nation. It's terrifying. What's happening to our country, we ask? Then the national discussion immediately becomes another political debate on the issue of gun control. People argue about the need for more regulation. They say guns are deadly instruments that are too numerous and too easy to obtain. Other people argue that an infringement on the right to bear arms is an infringement on an individual's safety and personal liberty, the right to defend oneself from the violence of others.

All the while, America is leaking. Infrastructure is deteriorating. The purchasing power of the dollar is plummeting while the people become more and more accustomed to an increasingly impersonal economy. The streetlights of bankrupt cities are being systematically shut down. The surveillance system is expanding. So many unsettling things are happening around us and yet we're more likely to hear people talking about the personal scandals and exploits of Hollywood celebrities (is it that much different from the meaningless jabber of those wandering splicers, some insane woman complaining about a tenderloin steak or a psychopathic religious nut babbling about “Jesus loves me” before he tosses you a live grenade?). Before long we'll hear about another episode of shocking violence somewhere else, and it's kind of like being reminded that we built our city at the bottom of the sea. Ours is a fragile and exposed society, an at-once impossible, constantly bleeding utopia. And I'd like to think that if we knew how to fix it, we would.

Images were borrowed from bioshock.wikia.com.

The Trials HD bunny hop and expressive movement

I made a breakthrough last week in one of my favorite recent video games . . . and I guess I'd like to tell you about it.

One small hop for a bike, one giant leap for precision gaming

The game is Trials HD, a downloadable title on the Xbox LIVE Arcade in which the player moves a dude on a dirt bike through an obstacle course as fast as possible while trying not to spill. The breakthrough involved the mastery (of sorts) of a certain in-game maneuver.

In my head I've been calling it the bunny hop. But when I think about it now, it seems more accurate to describe it as the forward hop. Or maybe the forward pop. It's kind of a snappy motion—a jerky left-to-right gesture of the left analog thumbstick that results in a sort of quick pop forward for the biker on the screen. The biker guy moves his body down and back, then springs his weight upward and forward. That sudden shift, combined with a careful acceleration of the gas (determined by the level of pressure my right index finger applies to the right trigger button), helps give me some much needed forward momentum to make it over protruding surfaces that would otherwise send me straight up in the air—or maybe right into a wall. It's … really hard to describe what I'm talking about. But believe me, it's something the Trials HD player will need to learn if she or he wants to finish the game's extreme difficulty tracks—a feat I now have accomplished, thank you very much.

You're gonna want to use the bunny hop here. Trust me.

Playing Trials HD, as a physical experience, reminded me of playing the guitar. I remember in middle school, back when I was still a fairly early learner. By this time I had gotten used to the basic chords. I could switch between a D chord and an A chord and an E chord handily enough. It was the F chord that really tripped me up. Playing an F chord—properly, at least—required me to stretch my left index finger all the way across the first fret. Not only that, I had to press down across that fret with enough pressure to ensure that each of the six strings would still ring clear and vibrant when picked or strummed. At first this was a real challenge. I could see clear as day what I had to do, and yet my hand and finger muscles weren't ready to cooperate. Stretching that finger felt awkward and strenuous. And when I strummed the notes came out all muted and smothered. This was the case for a long time until one day, lo and behold, I got it. I could do it! It sounded clear as a bell—well, almost, anyway. But it also felt comfortable! Not only that, I could now strum bar chords all the way up the fret board. It introduced a whole new mode of playing. 

I first learned about the Trials HD bunny hop while watching a YouTube video showing how to get through one of the the extreme tracks. The video tutorial got to the place in the track that had me stumped. Just do a little bunny hop, the narrator told me; push back and forth on the thumbstick and jump. This was easier said than done. I probably tried over a hundred times to get over that uphill bump, but my clunky back-and-forth motions did nothing to help the situation. I gave up on that track for a while.

I don't know what else to say, other than the guy in the video was right. My fingers may not have understood the instructions at first, but at some point—several weeks and thousands of spills later—it started to click. I can't describe what I was doing differently, only that somehow I was pulling off one successful bunny hop after another. I guess my fingers had finally learned the magic language. That was the first breakthrough. The second breakthrough was the realization that this bunny hop maneuver, or some variation of it, formed the basis for overcoming just about every near-impossible obstacle in the game. It was the secret ingredient.

The truth is I'm in awe of Trials HD, specifically its simulated physics. Trials HD is a game about precision—muscle precision to be … precise. And what amazes me when playing Trials HD is the seeming seamlessness with which my controller movements correspond to the visual animations displayed on the TV screen. Large, wild gestures (I'm speaking relatively here; these are thumbstick movements) translate to wild gestures on screen, and often result in crashes. Minute, articulated gestures result in equally small and articulated movements—which also can lead to crashes.

But there's such a spectrum of available movement, broken up by such minuscule degrees of difference. So often it's the slightest, most sensitive variation in controller movement that makes all the difference between overcoming a track obstacle or losing balance and crashing. And while the most extreme tracks demand the execution of more precise gestures, there nevertheless are infinite ways with which an individual player can move through the virtual environment—be it gracefully or otherwise. Every run through a Trials HD track is like a snowflake in that it can't be replicated. I suppose that's similarly true even for more technologically primitive games, except that other games don't necessarily feel as genuinely physical or gestural. The input/feedback of attempting a virtual jump in Trials HD could be compared to the input/feedback of any real-life physical activity that demands skill and precise muscle control. Ever tried bouncing quarters into a shot glass? Sometimes you'll overshoot; sometimes you'll undershoot. Eventually you'll get it in. And after a while, with more practice, you might start landing it in the glass more often than not.

Arcade-style video games have always involved hand-eye coordination. As with anything skill-based, there inevitably are video game players who for certain games ascend to the realm of true mastery. I would not describe the original Donkey Kong as having a very robust physics system, let alone graceful controller mechanics. And yet there are a select number of individuals who have mastered the movements of that game on a level most of us never will. That's almost to be expected, really.

What I mean to say is that my captivation with Trials HD has less to do with the fact that there are people who can play as good as this (although, if you have played the game, you will be insanely jealous). You can find people who are really good at just about anything. It has more to do with my own experience with the game and how—looking back—I have a newfound appreciation for how video game physics engines and corresponding controller input mechanics have evolved. Here's a fun exercise. Go play five minutes of Pitfall on the Atari 2600. Then play Trials HD (or skip ahead to its recently released sequel, Trials Evolution. I haven't played it, but I imagine it's just as good). 

In terms of hardware progression alone—and through the console gaming industry's gradual movement from joystick to directional pad to analog stick to dual analog sticks and pressure-sensitive buttons—game playing can be more physically elegant, dynamic and expressive than ever. This perhaps is even more apparent when playing games that—like Trials HD—have scaled things back to a set of simple but refined core mechanics. Super Meat Boy is another good example of this. In a sense, both games involve little more than simulated running and jumping on a two-dimensional plane. But by honing and perfecting the underlying engines that drive that relationship of physical input and visual feedback, developers are rewarding players with gaming experiences that feel as revolutionary and exciting as ever.

Screenshot images of Trials HD were borrowed from ign.com.

5-10-15-25-30

So tomorrow is like my 30^th birthday. To commemorate the occasion—and to get something published on my blog for the month of June—I decided to put together a brief retrospective. Here is a snapshot of the games I remember playing at each of the five-year intervals of my life. (I've seen something similar over at Pitchfork.)

Age 5:

I don't really know what I was playing at around age 5, other than the games I started playing shortly thereafter on our family's Macintosh computer. But since I've already written a little about that here, I'm going to relate a different memory from my early childhood.

As a Generation Y'er, I mostly missed out on the golden age of the arcades. But I do remember them, particularly the arcade at the nearby mall my family frequented for the Learning World store and the Orange Julius stand. That arcade always intrigued me. The darkness. The sounds. The machines!

I vaguely remember one time when my dad took me into the arcade to … actually play some games. I don't know why. Maybe we were killing time while my mom shopped for Christmas presents or something. At any rate, after asking me what I wanted to play and not knowing how to respond, we ended up at the Pac-Man cabinet. My dad dropped some quarters and pushed me up to the screen. Now, I was not at this time an experienced gamer by any stretch, but I was smart enough to know I should avoid those little moving ghost sprites at all costs. I was terrified. Where should I go? How do I get away from those things? I couldn't get away from those things! Left, no, right, no, down! I died immediately and made my dad finish the game. It wasn't just that the prospect of failure was inevitable. It wasn't just my that failure was on display, as I imagined, for every set of eyes in the room. I was also acutely aware that my dad was spending actual money to facilitate this embarrassment.

Needless to say, I didn't spend a lot of time in the arcade growing up. And I owe it in part to Pac-Mac.

Memorable game — Pac-Man (arcade)

Age 10:

This was a watermark year for me and video games. Prior to age 10, my sole source for digital entertainment was either the black-and-white computer or my small collection of Tiger electronic games. Yeah.

What a monumental occasion when—in the fourth grade—my parents decided to buy me a Nintendo Game Boy. Here's the interesting thing. I was probably the only kid in America who had a Game Boy but didn't have the Tetris cartridge. That was a deliberate choice on my part to go with the non-bundled version. I'd already played a version of Tetris on our Mac computer. Been there, done that. Tetris was cool and all, but it was also kind of lame, not exactly the flashiest game with which to showcase this amazing new hardware. Let's not forget—before I got my Game Boy I was playing this! I distinctly remember pacing up and down the aisle of games at Toys R Us, trying to decide what would become the first real video game I would own. In the end I went with Mega Man.

I don't think I can properly convey how satisfying it felt to click on that Game Boy device for the first time and listen to that 4-bit musical score on the title screen. I savored it for about a minute. And then I hit start. Even at the time I knew it was the beginning of something special.

Memorable game — Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Game Boy)

Age 15:

Well, age 15 would have been an interesting year in my video game life. I was now five years into owning the Game Boy, four years into the Sega Genesis, and still a year away from getting the Nintendo 64 as a joint birthday present with my sister.

But in 1997 I was probably picking up whatever I could still find on the Genesis, such as Paperboy 2 and Mortal Kombat 3, the latter of which I acquired used from the video rental store that went out of business. That was an interesting one. It was like watching your first R-rated movie, or buying your first CD with a parental advisory sticker. I wasn't sure if my mom had gotten the memo on Mortal Kombat back when it had debuted. Did she realize that by letting me play this game I was going to develop antisocial or—who knows?—sociopathic tendencies? As far as I recall, I don't think she batted an eye. And so back to home we went, where I promptly started up the game and attempted to pull off my first of what would become many gruesome fatalities. Toasty!

Memorable game — Mortal Kombat 3 (Genesis)

Age 20:

My sophomore year of college. For me, a recently declared English major, 2002 marked the beginning of the most intensive reading period of my life. For my dorm mates, it was the year of Halo. I'd picked up one of those massive Xbox machines between my freshman and sophomore year. I remember playing that quite a bit at the beginning of the school year. My friends and I had some intense matches, but I was pretty good. I could definitely hold my own in a Hang 'Em High deathmatch. Pretty soon, however, those reading and writing assignments started really piling up. Whereas I had pretty strong willpower to abstain from the "one-more-game" addiction, it seems the other people around me did not. Actually, they probably just didn't care about their GPA as much as I cared about mine. All I know is those guys got good—like really good.

It was impressive to watch—demoralizing to play. And it just got worse throughout the year. Two-on-two team deathmatch? Forget it. Oh well. There was always the single player.

Memorable game — Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox)

Age 25:

Ah, bachelorhood. Age 25 marked the beginning of my relocation to a small town in rural Eastern Oregon, where I lived alone and worked for about 15 months as a newspaperman. I didn't have much time for games. When I did, it was for abnegation—a chance to unwind. I remember playing a bit of Dead or Alive Ultimate for precisely this reason. It was also the year I picked up a free hand-me-down Playstation 2 with a borrowed copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, a.k.a. the longest game I have ever played. I'd like to talk about that game some more in a future episode of “On The List,” so for now I'll just move along.

Memorable game — Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (Playstation 2)

Age 30:

Well, here I am, 30 years old and still playing games. I'm a married man. I just moved again to start a new job (which I should probably tell you about sometime). I'm writing this in an unfurnished apartment ... in a very uncomfortable chair. I need to wrap this up.

It's hard to say what will be the most memorable game of 30, so for now I'm going with Trials HD, another game I will be posting about very soon. Hopefully. 

Memorable game — Trials HD (Xbox 360)

Wonderputt - thinking around the box

When I was a first-semester freshman in high school I took a drawing class. It was the only art class I took during my entire four years. This was back when I still had tentative career ambitions to become a graphic designer.

There was one assignment I remember in which we had to draw an abstract isometric picture—a kind of jumbling together of boxes and rectangular prisms. The idea was to create something figurative from these bland three-dimensional renderings. It felt similar to a Rorschach test—interesting from a psychological perspective to see what different students saw in a mass of boxes.

A friend who was also taking the class drew his initial piece and immediately envisioned a gun. He rendered his final drawing as a complex weapon resembling an Uzi. It was interesting. Very utilitarian.

I had a more difficult time with the assignment. I looked at my initial sketch and didn't see anything practical at all. Quite the opposite. The best I could envision was a futuristic, utopian cityscape, or rather just a small block of a fantastical (completely impractical) urban environment. I made little shops and buildings out of the blocky shapes. I drew in people walking through the alleys, one guy pulling money out of an ATM.

I was reminded of that 15-year old drawing exercise while playing Wonderputt, a web-browser game developed by Reece Millidge of Damp Gnat Ltd. As much a piece of interactive art as an actual game, Wonderputt presents a surreal isometric landscape as the backdrop for a five-minute point-and-click putt putt adventure. Its 18 holes are linked together by a series of quirky animation bits; the little yellow golf ball travels by balloon, submarine and all manner of imaginative transport. It's a delightful sight to behold as the static backdrop unfolds, reveals new layers and otherwise comes to life with each successive hole.

The game itself plays handily and functions more like a virtual billiards game than golf, in that it's all cursor-based. Position the cursor in a certain radius around the ball and a trajectory arrow will appear. The thickness of the arrow, which changes with the cursor's moment-to-moment distance from the ball, indicates speed.

Wonderputt really is the perfect name for the game. There are no clubs, and while the course itself takes inspiration from miniature golf with its banked surfaces and puzzle-like setup, these holes abandon the notion of traditional putting greens altogether. But it's still a type of golf game at heart, a golf game with a generous standard for par (I was already 16 strokes under after my second time through). Getting a bogey triggers a playful chicken cluck. A birdie activates a pleasant chirping sound. And putting for an “albatross”—one better than an eagle in the land of Wonderputt—awards the player with a victorious squawk.

A cursory peak into the background of the developer reveals some interesting information. Prior to making Wonderputt, creator Reece Millidge had developed a very similar experiment of a game called Adverputt. Just as the name implies, this browser game mixes commercial branding with putt putt golf, with each hole individually sponsored by a different advertiser. While a decidedly colder experience than Wonderputt—not necessarily for the hyper-advertising but more for its comparative lack of visual and auditory character—it's mechanically the same game and an intriguing idea. He even made a micro version of the game that individual companies can use on their own websites, plastering the small game world with their own name and logo. He strikes me as a pretty innovative guy. You can read a quick interview with the developer at Gamasutra.

Needless to say, that whole visual art career path didn't quite happen for me. If it did, or if I had the technical talent to develop small games myself, I'd like to think I would be creating things like Wonderputt. Ever since I was a kid I've been drawn to elaborate, visual-physical contraptions. I loved miniature golf. I swooned over marble mazes and labyrinth games, even the digital ones (a lá Marble Madness). There's also something aesthetically satisfying to me in the conceptualization of basic isometric design as an interactive space. So it's easy to see why Wonderputt and I really click.

But enough about me, you should really check out the game (such as here). It's free. It's fun. You might be as surprised as I was to see how advanced and polished a modern web browser game can be.

On the List — Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell

I'm starting a news series on Knee Deep in the Game called “On the List.” The idea is that for each entry I'll write a little bit about one of my favorite video games, one that could potentially end up somewhere on my Top 100 Games list if such a thing existed. That or someone else's list … or maybe not all. I don't know. Let's face it, there are no hard rules here. This is fifth-freedom territory!


Sam Fisher: He's a real nowhere man
I’ve never read a Tom Clancy novel. I guess I’ve always assumed the world of shadow governments and international espionage is frighteningly real enough. Why fictionalize it?

I am a fan, however, of the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell video game franchise, which began as an original Xbox title back in 2002, developed by Ubisoft. In the game the player assumes the role of Sam Fisher, a Navy SEAL covert ops veteran whom we can probably assume has been through some serious shit in his day. Fisher has been called back into the field, recruited as the titular one-man “splinter cell” for the new ultra secret Third Echelon initiative within the National Security Agency. The idea behind the initiative is to gather info and intelligence from the most sensitive of around-the-world locations by means of physical infiltration and a compartmentalized support network of hackers, handlers and so forth.

The NSA basically needs Fisher to sneak into a former Soviet-bloc country to investigate some strange political shenanigans and the ominous disappearance of two CIA field agents. The information he uncovers has immediate, global consequences. Fisher then hops from country to country to track down new targets and throw water on all kinds of political living room fires that spring up from the fallout.

What the player experiences is a finely tuned stealth action video game, most of which is spent crouching among the shadows, trying to get from one place to the next without being noticed or shot at. Obviously, this is not always easy, causing the player to rely on a repertoire of cool takedown maneuvers and a limited inventory of techno gadgets and weaponry—including sticky cameras, some grenades and a silenced combat rifle. Needless to say, more than a few unlucky or deserving bastards will end up knocked out or rubbed out for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Taking a cue from the likes of Deus Ex and I'm sure other predecessors, Splinter Cell succeeded as a game that encouraged a certain level of player choice and technique. A scrupulous player was free to put in the extra effort to minimize fatalities and/or confrontations. The more speed-minded player could perhaps afford to run through an area with less caution, soaking up the bullets and simply healing with medical kits later on. Stealthy progress depended, in part, on the speed and sound of Fisher's movement, which the player controlled by applying degrees of pressure to the controller's analog stick.

Something the first Splinter Cell did better than any other game that came before was to render dynamic and realistic lighting effects. Various intensities of virtual light could be projected in all directions of a three-dimensional environment. The game's levels and their scripted obstacles were designed largely around the staggering of light and dark areas, all determined by the deliberate placement of things like street lamps and other artificial light sources. Perhaps the neatest trick up the player’s sleeve was the ability to shoot out light bulbs and rely on night vision goggles as a means of evading detection.

Similar to games in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series—wherein an otherwise standard urban environment will be designed around the fantastical concept of grind-worthy edges and smooth, concave ramps built into virtually every utilitarian structure—the Splinter Cell games present a type of exaggerated environment suited to the mechanics of the game's genre. Most of the settings employ a contradictory combination of high-level security (patrolling goons everywhere) and incredibly poor lighting. The very halls of the CIA headquarters, for example, contain more predatory blackout spots than a mall parking garage.

Playing Splinter Cell invariably causes me to imagine a scenario in which Sam Fisher has to pass through my apartment at night while I'm at home performing some random task, like cutting an onion in the kitchen or folding my underwear in the bedroom. What path would he follow in order to pass through undetected? Or would he more-than-likely just grab me in a choke hold and pull me off into some dim corner of the room? Creepy!

These aren't my only questions. Sometimes, after finishing a level, I have to wonder ... what happens later? What happens in the hours after Sam Fisher has blown the proverbial taco stand and is back at home, drinking his morning protein shake, nagging his daughter to get out of bed for school? What happens when all of those guys who got knocked unconscious and dumped in storage rooms halfway across the globe start to wake up? Surely some of those dudes sustained physical injuries, if not brain damage! Are they going to be okay? What kind of a conversation do these baffled individuals have as they stumble groggily around trying to find one another, or when they start to sort out the living from the dead? What happens to the living guys who wake up underneath the dead guys because there wasn't any other convenient place for Fisher to quickly stash the bodies? Double creepy!

One narrative element I find interesting is the between-mission cutscenes, shown as quick snippets of TV news reports that sometimes present a revisionist spin on the events related to all of Fisher’s recent sneaking around. There's a moment at the end of the game when Fisher, watching a televised speech with his daughter, allows himself an amused chuckle or two as the president of the United States credits the spirit of “American tenacity” for what Fisher has almost singlehandedly accomplished behind the scenes.

What I find even more chuckle-worthy is the aspect of player complicity. People talk a lot about morality in video games, but that discussion typically is reserved for the games that bop you over the head with it, the ones that give you good experience points for helping the old lady across the street or evil experience points for pushing her under a bus. The interesting thing is that most players will go through Splinter Cell without a moment’s thought to the bigger picture of it all. Such as, is any of this Third Echelon business even legal?

At one point during the second level, Fisher’s remote handler Irving Lambert warns Sam about a military colonel approaching his specific location inside a foreign embassy building. “That’s detailed intelligence,” Fisher replies. No kidding! Sam Fisher is no idiot. He’s used to taking orders on little to no information, a so-called “need-to-know basis” if ever there was one. But, for God’s sake, what else are the folks in Washington seeing that we're not? And who's calling the shots? At multiple times in the game Lambert gives the call on whether Fisher is authorized to use lethal force, depending on the political stickiness of the situation. Lambert is sometimes explicit in telling Fisher his mission has not been officially approved by the Joint Chiefs. I'm sorry, did you just tell me we're working outside the approval of the Joint Chiefs? Suddenly, the idea of staying hidden all the time, of turning out the lights on everyone around you, becomes a much larger symbol. By the end of the game we may be wondering if the president himself has been privy to what's really gone on. Such is the way of things, I suppose, in the Tom Clancy universe. Just good fiction, right?

Images were borrowed from splintercell.wikia.com.