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Eric Schwarz at Critical Missive has a good article about Greg Zeschuk’s comments on RPGs. Zeschuk said:

“It’s funny because the RPG in the context of the current world is – well, it’s not specifically irrelevant, but it’s becoming less relevant in and of itself. It’s more a function of ‘hey, this game has a great story’. For us having that emotion but also having other great features like combat and persistence of character progression and stuff. [“The RPG studio for EA”] is kind of what we are, but more importantly we’re just about great games.”

As always, Schwarz makes a lot of very good observations in his article, but I think I ultimately agree with Zeschuk’s main point, although I do agree he phrased it rather poorly.

In the gaming world, there’s an ongoing debate as to whether Mass Effect 2 is a “real” RPG. Many say it’s “just Gears of War with dialogue”. I’m not enough of an expert to give a verdict on this, but in my opinion, it’s not a terribly important issue. I say that respectfully, as many intelligent critics of games have debated this, but I feel they are off-course in this instance.

My position has always been that you should try to make a game that is enjoyable, not one which conforms to some genre’s predetermined demands. It’s fine for people to go and sort games into genres if they so choose–inevitable in fact, since since if I enjoy a certain game, I will want to know what other games are like it–but for the game designer the question ought first and foremost to be: “How shall I make a good game?”

So yes, from the developer’s point of view, RPGs are irrelevant, as are FPSs, Survival/Horror and all the other genres. A game should be thought of, I believe, as an experience by itself and not as an “instance” of a “class” in order to be really good.

Given that, should we gamers quit sorting BioWare’s games as “RPGs” and instead sort them into some other category, such as third-person adventure? Well, I suppose we could, but personally I prefer to simply consider the game on its merits as a game, rather than how it fits into a genre.

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I’ve heard talk here and there that mobile games are the future of gaming. My instinctive response is that this is a bad thing, because I’ve yet to see a mobile type of game that seems like it has the potential to be Art in other than a purely visual sense–that is, to be a game which has strong literary qualities.

But it would be silly, not to mention hypocritical, of me to go saying “mobile games aren’t Art”, even with the “literary” qualifier, after I’ve criticized people who claim the same about games in general. So I am not going to make that mistake, but I do wonder how it could be accomplished.

I’m not a game designer, but I do wonder about these things, and as I think idly on the subject, I wonder if some sort of game that consisted of nothing but a long choose-your-response dialogue between two philosopher characters–one being the player–might be interesting. (I guess it would be Consolation of Philosophy: The Game, which wouldn’t sell.) But how to make a game that is on the one hand simple to play and yet addresses complex ideas?

P.S. Given the size of the gaming industry, there’s a good chance something like the game I described above already exists. Please be sure to mention in the comments if you know of something answering to that description.

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Here’s a good article wherein two Entertainment Weekly writers continue the video games/movies debate. It’s a topic that’s long been of interest to me, and I have, mostly because I feel games don’t get the respect they deserve, taken their side in the past.

However, in truth my opinion is always that neither medium is truly “better”, although I do think that there are more possibilities for video games, since they are newer. But the fact is that different stories require different media to tell them. It’s really more a question of what the piece is about that determines what medium should be used, which, by the way, is probably why books and movies have been able to coexist for some time now. People enjoy both.

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I enjoyed the first Deus Ex, but I couldn’t get into the second one at all. As a result, I’d pretty much forgotten about Human Revolution, but after reading up on it, it could be worth checking out.  From the trailers I’ve seen, it looks like a more graphically polished Alpha Protocol. (Which, in turn, a lot of people compared to the original Deus Ex, but they seemed pretty different to me. Both good, but different.)

In any case, after reading this Escapist article by Ben Croshaw, I’m thinking I need to do what I can to support the choice-based gaming genre.

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I’ve just finished playing Old World Blues, Obsidian‘s latest DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. It’s a brilliant game, and probably the most enjoyable of all the games I’ve played in the Fallout universe.

It set me thinking about a major element of the Fallout series: the frequent cultural allusions. I’ve only played New Vegas (four times) and its add-ons, Fallout 3, and a little of Fallout 2, but I’ve seen enough to recognize that little cultural references to movies, music or television are a big part of the Fallout world.

At first, I didn’t really like these little touches. They were often funny, to be sure, but it’s always been my opinion that in-universe, character-based humor is preferable to topical stuff. And many people won’t get the references anyway.

Playing Old World Blues made me re-think that a little. I think it was the Wizard of Oz reference towards the end of it. It made me see the use of these allusions in a way that is complementary to the post-apocalyptic setting.

I realized that while these cultural references are mostly played for humor, they also serve to underscore the decayed civilization aspect of Fallout. There is something about seeing a familiar cultural reference in a the middle of the bleak, war-ravaged landscape that is actually a little disconcerting. The placing of these familiar lines, scenes etc. into unfamiliar surroundings give one a sense of a scattered, but not wholly unrecognizable culture–just as we would expect after a nuclear war.

(It makes me think of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. That poem was also filled with allusions to works of art and philosophy, and created a similar sensation, as weird as that sounds. Though I think what the Bible and Shakespeare were to Eliot’s readers, Star Wars and Monty Python are to Fallout players.)

I don’t know if any of this was intentional on the part of any of the makers of Fallout, but it’s interesting to me either way.

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One of the things that always impresses me in a drama or tragedy story is the injection of humor. This is a remarkably difficult mixture to achieve, and this is all the more reason to value it.
You may well ask: “Why look for humor in non-humorous works? That’s why they have comedies.” Well, this is undoubtedly true—although the comedies I like are typically darkish comedies—but I have noticed that a really effective serious, tragic story often requires a dash of wit to make it believable.
Consider, for example, the film which I consider the best I’ve ever seen, Lawrence of Arabia. It has a rather depressing ending, and yet the penultimate scene ends on a line from Claude Rains to Alec Guinness that I always laugh at—and while it is a sardonic line, I can’t help thinking that most screenwriters would not have had the courage to put it something so drily funny in at such a moment. Yet, it works.
Another favorite film of mine is Chinatown, which has one of the darkest endings ever. But it also has some very witty lines an amusing scenes early on. The writer for that film, Robert Towne, described it as a“tunnel at the end of the light.”
I don’t deny that this mixture is extremely difficult to pull off. This is all the more important because trying to do it and failing leaves a much worse taste in the audience’s mouth than steering clear of it all together.
The movie Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (keep in mind that this is my favorite of all six Star Wars films)  fell into this trap a bit in the first third of the film. I suspect George Lucas was aiming to provide a “tunnel at end of light” effect, but what he ended up with was a lot of comic business with R2-D2 that didn’t fit with the dark tone of the film. (This is Lucas’ biggest flaw as writer in my opinion—he cannot do wit, he can only do jokes.)
This same concept of mixing humor with a grim overall story seems to apply in other media as well. It’s one of many, many reasons I adore the video games of Chris Avellone, which usually contain both considerable wit and  deep, dark philosophy, impeccably mixed together.
Of course, there is an alternative way of achieving this mixture: the black comedy. I tend to feel that dark subject matter lends an “edge” to humor, although the difficulty is that one man’s dark humor is another man’s appalling perversity.
That’s the danger with dark humor, that the converse—what I’ll call humorous darkness, awkward though the term is—does not have.  Inject too much humor in to something that is at its core serious and people will just not take it seriously. Inject too much darkness into something that is supposed to be a comedy and people will think you’re sick. 

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Every now and then, I like to write critiques of fiction genres. I felt the urge to write such a piece today, but quickly realized I had said pretty  much everything I wanted to say about the horror genre already. And about the epic adventure genre, which I also like, I had nothing interesting to say. Same goes for mystery and comedy.

So I thought I’d change things up a little. I’m going to write about a genre I have very little familiarity with: romance. And by “romance” I mean of course “love stories”. (There is an older definition which means something more like “adventure”.) The only thing even close to being a romance I can remember actually liking is Jane Eyre, which I read earlier this year. This shows how ignorant I am of the genre.

Now, it’s certainly true that almost all of my favorite books, movies, video games, etc. include at least one romantic sub-plot, but that does not mean they are of the romantic genre; they merely feature elements from it.

I think this is because an actual romance story is very hard to do, because a proper romance involves two people who get along well. And as the adage says “the essence of drama is conflict”, and therefore a successful  romance is necessarily devoid of conflict for the most part. This is–or might be–interesting because while a “horror” story derives its conflict from something horrible, and an “adventure” derives its conflict from adventuring, a “romance” needs some external conflict.

A popular source of conflict is that there are social or familial bars against the romance. This is probably the most common. Another one is to write it so the couple acts like they don’t like each other until they fall in love. (I have never liked this one.)

 I suspect this why romances today, at least in film, tend to be romantic comedies. Comedies don’t really need to have terribly plausible conflict, because they are comedies. So if you’ve got a romance in search of a conflict,  you can make it a comedy and invent one pretty easily.

Lastly, although I’ve never written fiction of any genre, it seems to me that romance must be much harder to write than, for example, horror and adventure. Very few people have ever seen or thought they’ve seen ghosts, or been sent on a quest to defeat “The Dark Lord”. Whereas most people probably have fallen in love at some point. As a result, the audience for a romance story is in a better position to spot false notes in the story.
 
Again, these are the observations of someone who does not actually read or watch much in the genre, so they may all be wrong. I am largely extrapolating based on second-hand knowledge and what I see in romantic sub-plots in works in of other genres.

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It’s… well, basically what I said here still applies, although overall it wasn’t as boring to me as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance was. It’s sort of like if you combined that game and BioWare’s Jade Empire. It’s by no means bad, but it just doesn’t quite work for me. It has many good ideas, but they don’t mesh together well.

The choice system is pretty good, although at times it felt perfunctory.  The writing was definitely above-average, but the story, though not bad in itself, was a little formulaic. Towards the end, one does get a taste of some of the themes from the fascinating Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer–small wonder, as George Ziets was a lead designer on both–but it seemed like those themes were not as fully explored as they might have been.

I know this all sounds pretty lukewarm, but I still want to stress that it’s still a perfectly acceptable game; it’s just that it seems somewhat flat. Bottom line, though: I’m not really this game’s target audience. I hate “hack and slash”, dungeon crawling, loot-collecting games. The fact that I could even tolerate this is, I suppose, to Obsidian’s credit.

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“Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”–Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

You can find my thoughts on this issue here.  

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As long as I’m talking about fiction, I thought I’d discuss a mistake that I occasionally see in fiction: the introduction of superfluous elements that needlessly confuse and prolong the story, weakening it overall.

There’s probably a real name for this, but I like to call it the “Prince of Monte Carlo syndrome”, after the character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Grand Duke whose presence in the story is–in my opinion–unnecessary. Now, the reason Gilbert introduced the Prince was probably because he was funny; in fact, many people (not me) think his “roulette song” is the best thing in the show. But, though he’s a good character, he just doesn’t fit in well in the story, and actually messes up the flow of it by his presence.

Of course, this sort of thing is easier to get away with in comedies. In more serious works, it’s worse. I love Mass Effect 2, but, as Shamus Young and many others have pointed out, the Collectors feel like a totally unnecessary addition that serves only to muddle up everything and, worst of all, weakens the main enemy, the Reapers. Maybe they’ll make it work in Mass Effect 3, but as it is now, it’s kind of a messy plot.

This brings me to my most serious, and probably most controversial example: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Or, to be specific, just the Deathly Hallows. That book has many problems, in my opinion, but if I had to point to just one, I’d say it’s the fact that, when the Deathly Hallows are introduced, it just confuses everything. There was already a perfectly good “MacGuffin” in the horcruxes, it seemed to me that the Deathly Hallows were simply too much to deal with. This flaw isn’t fatal to the book by itself, but it combines with some other issues to make it my least favorite Harry Potter book. It put me off the franchise to such an extent I didn’t even think of it when writing this post.

The thing is, all these ideas are good by themselves; the Prince is funny, the Collectors are scary and the Deathly Hallows are an adequate plot-driving device–but they just don’t fit in well with the rest of the story. It’s not a fatal flaw–as I’ve said, Grand Duke is one of my favorite G&S works, and Mass Effect 2 is still a great game–but it can be quite jarring.