Is Dante’s Inferno a step forward or backward?

Every time I read about Dante’s Inferno I have conflicting feelings about it. Having only read about it, there are aspects of it that I both admire and question.  In this way, I wonder whether Dante’s Inferno is actually a step forward or backward for the game industry as a whole.  Here are some points I’ve been considering:

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9: The Videogame

I saw 9 over the weekend.  I’ll spare you the full review, but suffice it to say that it’s the first movie that I actually thought might be better as a game.  I’ve often been critical of the idea that games should try to adapt themselves into film form, largely because they’re entirely different media with different strengths and weaknesses.  I don’t know if the creators of 9 are gamers, though, because they owe an enormous debt to a whole variety of games.  Just a few of the striking similaries (I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum):

• The characters: the ragdoll-esque main characters are straight out of LittleBigPlanet.  The exact design, of course, isn’t identical, but it’s notably close, right up to the zippered front.  Compare Sackboy with 9.
• The world: I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that the resemblence is as obvious on this front, but I couldn’t help but think of a cross between the LBP and Bioshock (or even Fallout 3) universes.  One scene: where the characters are fighting a mechanical monstrosity in a wrecked, hollow futuristic shell of a factory while playing physics-based tricks with local scenery.  The scale of the ragdoll characters’ world, coupled with the abandoned, rotting sci-fi wasteland, is enormously evocative of the games.  I half-expected to see a Big Daddy.
• The plot: the plot of 9 is paper-thin, but the striking part is that it’s essentially a number of survival set-pieces.  Much like a platformer, the characters careen from one dangerous action-oriented encounter to the next, without much in the way of linkage between the scenarios.  I suspect that had I been controlling them, it would have been a more compelling experience.
• The story arc: Without giving too much away, 9 is about a problem that is almost self-created before being solved by the same protagonists that caused those issues in the first place.  There are a ton of game-related archetypes for this type of arc, although I suppose they’re variations on the Pandora’s Box theme.
• Inventions: Crafting has always been an important element of many post-apocalyptic RPGs, and 9 doesn’t disappoint.  Created items pop up regularly as key elements of the film.

There are a few other debts to be noted, but this gives you a flavor for just how much the contemporary game landscape has contributed to the game - in spirit, if not in practice.  (There are also a ton of similarities with Tim Burton’s last film, Coraline, but since those aren’t game-related I’ll let you consider them on your own.)  I’d bet there’s a solid game to be found inside the unremarkable movie.

Impossible Challenges

I recently hit a point in Arkham Asylum where I just can’t go any further.  I’ve beaten the game, solved all the riddles, collected all the trophies, and completed all of the stealth challenges.  But I can’t even get two medals on the very first combat challenge.  I just can’t figure out the combat system, which works very well, but requires an incredible amount of patience and effort to master to the point where you can string together combos and multipliers beyond the 5-8 range.  I can’t even imagine what it would take to hit the 18,000 point target in the first combat challenge.

But rather than continue to slog along, making no progress, I’m probably going to give up and accept my 88% completion rate as having “beaten” the game.  This realization made me wonder, though, why some gaming challenges make me play devotedly in the hopes of mastering them, while others inspire no interest whatsoever.

After thinking about it, I think there are probably three main elements to challenges that are of interest to the average player.

First, progress.  There has to be some way for a player to conceive of the possibility that he or she might actually accomplish their goals, and this is often achieved by making the player feel some sort of progress towards the objective.  At its most basic, this might simply be a checkpointing system; more advanced versions are trophies or medals, or a percentage counter on the screen.  Interestingly, the most frustrating games - the ones that make me scream in silent rage at the television - aren’t the ones I have no hope of beating, but the ones where I come so very close and yet fail anyways. 

Second, competition.  This might simply be competition with yourself, such as in Bionic Commando when you play a challenge room over and over again to perfect some combination of moves.  Multiplayer offers another aspect to this, where you can test yourself against other players.  And leaderboards are the ultimate version, because they give you a direct, tangible, and difficult goal.

Finally, reward.  Whether simply recognition (as in leaderboards or publication in a magazine or blog) or a tangible in-game reward (consider Shadow Complex’s gold guns), a player needs to feel that the goal they are working towards is worthwhile.  I suspect people are motivated by different things; if I get nothing useful from a challenge and don’t particularly enjoy the challenge itself from a gameplay angle, I don’t much care about it. 

I have to confess though that I am left with one big puzzle: the appeal of leaderboards.  I have absolutely no interest in leaderboards, mostly because of the progress angle: there is absolutely no chance that I will ever be the top player in the world at anything… so why invest a ton of effort to be player #58,203 at Call of Duty?  Yet a ton of players will play obsessively to do just that, wihtout any hope of additional progress.  It’s the great unsolved mystery of challenges to me.

Disturbing Batman Thought Of The Day

I find Mark Hamill’s performance as the Joker in BTAS and Arkham Asylum to be much more compelling than anything he’s done in Star Wars.

The JRPG As Genre

I share Michael Abbott’s fond recollection of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV (III in the US), so his post got me thinking recently about the JRPG.  The stagnation and repetitiveness of these games are undeniable, but the JRPG actually interests me the most because it seems to have carved itself out a niche as an actual discrete genre, separate from the RPG as a whole.

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Castlevania’s Soul

Is it just me, or is Lords of Shadow looking an awful lot like God of War with a Belmont?  I don’t really have a big problem with that, but it seems to me like Castlevania has somewhat lost touch with its roots of late, the SotN-style adventures overtaking the erstwhile linear style that marked the first four games in the series, but the newest iteration looking like neither. 

I have liked almost all of the games to date, but it makes me wonder whether or not there’s really a core “Castlevania-style” gameplay any more, or if it simply involves a main character, Death, Dracula, and some other enemies.  I think there’s a good case to be made for a remake or some other title that tries to define more clearly what a Castlevania game really means, before the brand tries to be everything to everyone.

An Embarassment Of Riches

I should really leave the country more often.  The summer is ending with a fresh load of new games that I’m excited to try out, from Shadow Complex and Arkham Asylum to Overlord II and Civilization Revolution on my iPod Touch.  I’m also intrigued by Voxel Kingdom, which seems reminiscent of Super Mario RPG on the Super NES.

I’ve often written about what I consider to be a glut of solid games around the summer and Christmas periods, which I think crowds out smaller, newer, and often more innovative titles in favor of high-profile sequels.  However, you’ll note that only one of the above games is a sequel, which is a refreshing change of pace.  I don’t have the aversion that many people do to sequels, since they wouldn’t be made if people hadn’t liked the originals.  But it’s still nice to see so many smaller games getting such a warm reception.

Skepticism And Marketing

I’ve spent enough time around marketers at this point to have a healthy skepticism of a sector that is notoriously difficult to track with any degree of accuracy.  A lack of solid data, reliable and accurate metrics, and a heavy reliance on correlation over provable makes me somewhat dubious of claims that marketing campaigns have been the most important factor in any game’s particular success.  So like Tracey John, I don’t doubt that the RE5 campaign had a lot of effort behind it… but I think I’m a little more skeptical than EEDR appears to be that it was the deciding factor in its popularity.

RE5 has sold about 5 million copies worldwide, including 2 million in the US.  But if you look at sales figures for RE4, which was the most recent breakout title in the series, you can see that it sold 3.6 million copies, despite being released on just the Gamecube and, much later, the PS2.  Needless to say, the GCN didn’t have the greatest reach in the world, while the late release for the PlayStation meant that it was obscured by newer and higher-profile titles.  There was enormous publicity around RE4, which no doubt spurred a lot of awareness of the series’ new direction at the time.

So it doesn’t seem like a huge reach to say that a large-scale and simultaneous release of the next game on the 360 and PS3 should probably get a boost as well.  The fact that it was reasonably high profile probably helped… but the increase doesn’t seem that improbable when accounting for the above, even without a brilliant marketing campaign.  I don’t want to minimize the efforts of Capcom staff, but Resident Evil wasn’t exactly a sleeper series.

If You Don’t Like Sonic, It’s Your Fault

Or so seems to be the gist of Sega’s latest messaging.  In short, the company would like you to know that the poor reception of Sonic & the Black Knight was mainly due to the fact that people over the “age of 12″ just don’t get the character. 

I actually started this post to lament the fact that gamers over the target age are far too harsh on Sonic titles that come after the Genesis era (I actually really liked his first Dreamcast outing).  But reading the Kotaku post referenced above, I just can’t bring myself to do it… the excuse is just too silly.  It seems to me that the main problem gamers have had with Sonic games is that they haven’t been very similar to the first three titles (and a few others, like the Game Gear iteration). 

What Sega doesn’t seem to get is that people don’t really love specific characters, per se - the Sonic vs. Mario angle they play up is probably misguided.  Rather, people loved Mario because they enjoyed playing his games - they liked the style and energy and emotions that it conveyed.  If you put Mario in a really bad game, people wouldn’t like him either.  Similarly, just because Sonic had specific characters doesn’t mean that people will want to play any game with those characters… rather, they need to feel connected to the same emotions that game initially sparked in them.  Gamers who are older and have fond memories of the original games don’t like the latest games because they’re too different from that original experience.  

The fact that Mario fans are able to separate their interest in him from the game styles in which he appears perhaps belies the supposed maturity of some Sonic fans.  But that hardly is reason to complain that they’re to blame, rather than the company whose job it is to cater to their interests.

Burnout

Mitch Krpata of Insult Swordfighting argues here that gamer burnout is a function of gamers getting too into a game, rather than not enough.  I would tend to agree that burnout is often a function of the length of playtime.  That said, I think that perhaps Krpata is confusing the technical definition of work with what we typically mean by the term in this context.

Undeniably, it takes a great deal of effort to get through many games, like Fallout 3 as is cited in the post.  That said, I got burned out by WoW in a way I never did by Fallout, because when I say that the former felt like “work” I meant that it became harder and harder for me to find the intrinsic value of my labor.

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