THE UNIVERSAL APPEAL OF PAPERWORK

Sorry, guys. According to the Arstotszkan Border Authority, 4 of you are not allowed to enter the country. That's including you, Blond Dave.

There are some games that everybody likes. Well, maybe not EVERYBODY, per se, but there are games that have that deep appeal, hitting the right notes for hardcores and casuals alike. I remember the night we got a Nintendo Wii, my entire family was in the living room hot-potato'ing a pair of video-game controllers. These were just the out-of-the-box Wii Sports Bowling and Boxing apps, and they were a smash hit at my house. Or take Candy Crush. Every time I see somebody on public transit with that focused frown as they stare down at what's obviously some kind game on their smartphone, I'm shocked to see it's Candy Crush in such a person's hands: old biddies, fatigued salarymen, meatheads. These games feature basic interfaces, yet boast intuitive controls & causal relationships. They epitomize gaming, in a sense, offering the most pleasure for the least up-front investment in terms of rote memorization and skill fluency.

Among my friends, I've seen customs official simulator Papers, Please make a huge resurgence recently -- especially among my gaming friends' non-gamer girlfriends. And that is awesome. To me, there can be no greater success for a game than to capture the imagination of its most improbable player. Seasoned gamers truly take for granted the massive baseline barrier to entry against getting into most video-games. We understand that the RT button fires our weapons; we, the inveterate players, know to reach for WASD, or QWER, before gameplay even begins. But these are hard-won intuitions dating back through decades of personal experience and game design tropes. Gamers carry with them a sprawling lexicon of input and output algorithms, controller schemes, and menu hierarchies. Most of the time, we're in so deep we don't even realize the assumptions we're making when we jump (Spacebar, duh) into a new game. 

And then a complete oddity like Papers, Please comes along, equally unprecedented to both the amateur and the super nerd. From the start, the game draws you into its weirdness through the simplicity of its design: check passports for discrepancies before allowing or denying passage through your pseudo-Soviet border crossing. Make a mistake, and your daily pay will be docked, preventing you from feeding and housing your family at home. However, before long, amidst the increasingly deep dossiers you must shuffle through in order to process each traveler, ethical considerations begin to interfere with your pencil-pushing efficiency. Do you translate the spy's encrypted message? Detain the innocent for a cut of the guard's commission? Let your uncle starve, so your wife and son may eat? Papers, Please succeeds for so many players, because its deepest challenges aren't located in its mechanics, but in the weight of the choices you must make within them. These moral challenges become increasingly muzzled by the anxious monotony of the too-short workday, in much the same way it likely would for a real Russian customs official. Through the drudgery of a thankless job, the player may realize opportunities to influence change in his own life, in those of others, and in the fate of his nation -- or he may never see past the paper-thin labyrinth surrounding him. Papers, Please is a game that not only stays in your head long after playing, but has probably been with you since long before. It deeply evokes the frustrating experience of working life itself, and the emphasis on this particular depth is its throughline to such a wide range of players.

As a side-note on universal appeal in games & its obstacles, isn't it interesting how the games with the most complex control schemes also have the most violent and potentially offensive content? Why is it that stringing together a 4-level interchange in Mini Metro is something anyone can do, while gunning down a platoon of undead zombies is a privilege reserved only for more fluent gamers?

PEAK EXPERIENCES IN PSEUDO-PROGRAMMERY

I recently helped my partner build a gaming PC so she can play Overwatch. She’s hesitant to get into games because she knows how intense she gets when fully immersed. Video-games - especially shooters - are an intense experience. She enjoys the visual style and gameplay of Bioshock, but the constant shrieking voices and sneak attacks emotionally exhaust her within minutes. I knew a kid in grade school who got Half-Life 1 for Christmas, and proceeded to play for 14 consecutive hours, interrupted only by the spontaneous need to vomit. I remember when I’d hit big killstreaks in Dota 2, I’d get tremors in my chest and throat, as if my body could barely contain the visceral thrill of gameplay, walking that razor’s edge between death and glory. But I’ve learned just today that a game’s capacity to overwhelm needn’t come from the sensory overload of real-time violence; I just told myself I had to take a breather from a programming game.

Zachtronics’ TIS-100 is their most thinly-veiled coding simulator to date. While previous releases SpaceChem and Infinifactory had an illustrative layer characterizing the puzzles as something more grand than “mere” programming, TIS-100 is literally a DOS-style text interface, and comes packaged with a PDF reference manual. The experience becomes about as self-reflexive as the very strongest overtures of The Stanley Parable. More than following the game designer’s breadcrumb trail, as we normally do, we follow in his footsteps in TIS-100; there is very little in the game besides it’s hideously exposed underlying mechanics. The game itself is understanding those mechanics and manipulating them in order to create increasingly complex algorithms.

It should be boring as hell - surely anybody with actual programming experience should find this game a chore, a dull joke. But when I understood how to nest conditional command loops within each other - such that my program has one usual thing it does, then another if some condition is met, before returning to the usual thing - I was mentally overwhelmed. The feeling of epiphany flooded my brain and I just had to step away. Suddenly, too many possibilities were available to me and I just couldn’t handle it - like finally understanding why four 2’s make eight. To be fair, I have a bit of a tortured history with programming. Even introductory University courses in simplified languages would have me weeping over my keyboard at 3am trying to generate a damned fractal. I’d get drunk at the campus bar before the handwritten mid-term exams, to calm my nerves. Didn’t do too badly, neither.

To a coder, a joke is nothing but an input.

But it’s reassuring, I think, when we can access real excitement through something abstract, something other than Hollywood sight and sound. There are still so many unplumbed depths in the gifts that games can give us!

HOW FAR: STEALTH EDITION

HOW FAR is a new column, exploring developments in design between Then and Now.

Outdated... but relevant!

When I look closely at Old Thief and New Hitman, it’s hard to say that game design, at its core, has grown significantly deeper over the years. In terms of mechanics the games are nearly identical. Hitman and its cousins have merely grown in breadth, with larger, more lifelike spaces, binders full of scripted interactions, and overabundant audiovisual fidelity; but in terms of how they actually play, nothing has changed. By many names, it seems like we’ve been playing the same games all our lives.

Here: let’s compare about 15 minutes of gameplay from each title.

OLD THIEF - BAFFORD’S MANOR

I’ve done a bit of sewer crawling, but haven’t yet been able to breach Bafford’s Manor. I meander in overlapping paths, not having any strong idea of my position relative to the goal without the aid of a whirling minimap, but my headmap is filling in and I’m started to case the location. I find my way to a small, square shed out back of the Manor with a single guard. He steps away to patrol and I slip up behind him and konk his head. I move to the building, but the door is locked. When I turn around to explore, I see the bright, shiny key at the guard’s belt. I take it, open the door, and break into the Manor.

This is a very typical problem in video-games by now: defeat the enemy to acquire the key to unlock the door behind him. But it’s no less an elegant interaction for its commonness, for it can be flubbed. If we already have the key when we arrive, or if we kill the guard before we know he’s guarding a door, there’s no drama. Seeing the location, solving the problem/fighting the enemy, being barred access, and then realizing you had already earned it, is basic, but good, design. Looking at the map, I found I could have learned about the locked door earlier, stretching this first mini-plot arc even further. Of the few words written, arrows pointed at one area (the map is a true map - no dynamic pinpoints) and signaled “Well leads to basement -- One Guard!”

NEW HITMAN - SAPIENZA

I start out in a safehouse with some remote detonation charges. I could creep into the mansion through a window across a rooftop which I can reach from my third-floor safehouse, but there’s a huge chunk of map to the right I’m curious about. I drop down and explore the beach. There’s a clown, whose performance I interrupt, to the annoyance of the audience, by standing on his carpet. I toss a coin into his hat as apology and some guy yells at me not to throw things. Continuing along the whitesand beach I find a sewer entrance. I case the sewers, knocking out a worker and taking his Sewer Key and Red Plumber disguise - no Mushrooms though. I follow the sewers through a ruined tomb and surface beneath the steeple of a church. I ascend to the top, grabbing a crowbar along the way, and make a mental note for a future run that I can cut the cable suspending the churchbell. I make my way down to the cemetery, lay in a coffin just for laughs, then double back across the beach to the targets’ mansion again. Time to focus on the mission.

I was actually getting really into my bussing career til I remembered I was here to murder people.

Now, take note of the 18 years separating the two -- which story makes more sense?

I don’t mean to belittle Hitman. I love the game, its rotating arcade of custom challenges, its  clockwork of looping level events, the tense yet articulate sequences of killing and sneaking. Hitman makes for great stories and unprecedented possibilities, just like Thief does. But for having come so much later in the history of game design, the game pushes few boundaries, beyond its Whoopie Cushion-meets-Gallows Humour emotional tone. All the graphical polish and dynamic sound and plausible-looking crowds of people and dozens of scripted, achievement-linked interactables in each level are just padding around what is, mechanically, the 1998 game Thief in third person. As another player wisely observed, Instinct mode isn’t there as a gameplay tool or character element; it’s a counterbalance against the game’s own obsession with graphical fidelity, to the detriment of visual clarity. Unlike the way animated figures blatantly pop out from the watercolour backgrounds in old Disney movies, Hitman’s high-fidelity housekeys and pipewrenches blur into their surroundings, obscuring their usability. Interactable objects may be indistinguishable from decorative textures without the highlighter-yellow silhouettes. Though Thief takes no pains to distinguish these tools through its UI, it really isn’t necessary, as these objects by their nature are interactable. Chests are for opening, levers are for pulling, fine china is for pocketing. That the opening and closing of all doors in a room strikes this player as impressive speaks volumes about the queer point we’ve reached in current game design. Hitman’s spaces are so sprawling yet full of walls, that level design itself is insufficient to inform the player of where the patrolling enemies are; minimaps and X-ray heat-vision is simply compensation for this unfortunate drawback of massive, sprawling in-and-outdoor levels in a stealth game.

Even the freshly retooled disguise system is just an extrapolation of the visual stealth mechanic in Thief. Disguises operate like small areas of personal shadow, obscuring you from detection except to a dangerous few, who can “illuminate” you through your disguise if they see you, depending on the disguise. Switching from disguise to disguise to gain access to new areas is not significantly more interesting than using the water arrows in Thief to create patches of shadow to creep through the level.

Oh, I guess Hitman has cover "mechanics.” That’s new. I don’t think I’ve been in a situation where wall-hugging would have hidden me any better than just standing as near to that wall as possible. It’s a strange and unnecessary conceit, an artefact of shooter design left in just because.

Though it looks like shit - charmingly so - or maybe because it looks like shit - Thief’s affordances, mechanics, and exposition are communicated deeply and clearly at every level of the game’s design. To a designer with about half the computational power that we play with today, the idea of devoting a team to illustrating an animated, inaccessible background at full clarity would be absolutely ridiculous. All they could afford to take seriously would have been the core design - the interactive component, the game - and that shows in how well it coheres, even today, with its dated graphics and interface. As much fun as I’ve had turning over every leaf in Hitman’s sprawling level designs, the challenge lists and purely scripted interactions ring out as more of an embellished tradition in the 1998 stealth genre than an evolution of it.

Can’t we go further??

HYPE PAYOFF: OVERWATCH OPEN BETA

My Blizzard odyssey continues with this weekend’s Overwatch open beta. In short, it is everything it’s been cracked up to be. Which is to say, really, really fun.

My first Play of the Game may not necessarily be impressive, but it offers an accurate snapshot of Overwatch’s obvious appeal. The setting is Route 66, a Nevada desert-themed payload map, in which the attacking team needs to stand near a vehicle - the payload - in order to inch it toward the finish line across the map’s main highway, while the defending team assails them from the mine tunnels, cliffsides, and Spaghetti Western-style buildings adjacent to keep them off the thing. I was on the defending team, and we weren’t doing particularly well. The payload had pushed its way to about 10 metres from our spawn point, a sort of interior hangar bay area with lots of nooks and hallways for the attacking team to strike from. Up till that point I had been playing Widowmaker, a Femme Nikita sniper, to abysmal effect. I don’t think I landed a single headshot that game; fortunately, her weapon has a semiautomatic alternate fire and I was managing to contribute something. But now that they were bottlenecking to their victory condition, I needed to change it up. On my last death, I swap characters to Junkrat, the peg-legged Australian demolitions expert, and leap into the fray just outside our saferoom. Strafing madly from behind my team’s frontline, I lob ricocheting bombs off of walls, behind cover, and into the enemy team, each ballistic ringing like an alarm clock before exploding. I drop a concussion mine at my feet and pop the remote detonator as soon as it appears in my hand; rather than hurt, the explosion rockets me straight up into the air, a sweet angle for raining hot TNT onto the attackers. Inside of 15 seconds, we wipe out most of their team, with less than a minute on the clock. We swarm the payload to get it crawling, crawling in reverse, until we hear footsteps pounding through a corridor on the left. Three enemies crowding in to flank us. Our Reinhardt, Schwarzenegger in silver armour, drops his barrier shield and advances on the doorway to hold them off. From behind him, I’m giggling deviously and chucking wee grenades over his head and shoulders until, FWOOSH, my Ultimate finishes charging. I activate it and Junkrat rips a chainsaw cord on his spiked, explosive tire, sending it rolling past Reinhardt’s shield. I control the tire now, instead of Junkrat, and bounce it right between the suckers in the hallway. Tick, tick, boom. All dead. Victory screen. Play of the Game. It takes confidence to offer up a hotly anticipated release in open beta. Getting my hands on the game sealed the deal; I’m gonna be playing a ton of Overwatch this year.

It has every little detail I look for in battle arenas. There’s a killfeed, but no score screen; they give you enough information to know who’s balling out of control - they are on fire - but not enough to kick off the blame game. Contribution level is unpredictably summarized as top records just for that match, which are randomized at the end of each game. Players can all vote on which record-holder had the most impressive performance, and that user gets a few extra points as recognition. There are so many metrics of performance in this game that it’s hard to be left in the dust every game - Blizzard battles toxicity not by muting it, but by drowning it out with positive feedback, and this just feels right.

The characters, even at their 2edgy4u-est, are delightful. You can play a wall-running Brazilian Jet-Set Radio Future guy; or a cybernetically-resurrected Japanese ninja; or a butch Russian woman with a gun that shoots black holes; or a floating robo-Buddha who occasionally achieves Nirvana in the middle of combat. The maps, too, span the near-future globe, from Hollywood soundstages to Egyptian ruins to snowswept Russian munitions factories. The international cast echoes the vivid uniqueness of the Street Fighter characters that drew me into the game as a kid. They have unique voicelines and interactions based on their lore relationships; they say useful things audible only to the players they matter to, like “Look out behind you!”

Though frenetic, Overwatch’s visuals and HUD read extremely clearly. Enemy heroes are outlined in red, and their voicelines and footsteps are markedly louder than your allies’. There’s no minimap, but you can pinpoint your friends through walls based on little blue arrows over their heads. With a chatwheel, you can quickly access a tactical commands. Markers on the ground delineate important zones and pathways.

Perhaps most importantly for me, given my background in MOBA games, is the lack of any true snowball effect in Overwatch. There is no leveling up, no XP, no gold, no gear. Every player has access to all the same resources, barring skill, and this makes a comeback always possible. Maps are clearly designed to allow dramatic comebacks, with chokepoints becoming increasingly defensible as they near the finish line. When you can’t break a line, you can briefly wait for your team to respawn and regroup, which rarely takes more than 10 seconds, or you can swap out your hero to attempt new techniques. Unlike my hundreds of wasted hours in unsurrenderable Dota 2 losses, a match of Overwatch rarely exceeds 10 minutes, within which time, anything can happen. You can always fight for overtime or try something new; you can always have fun.

Overwatch releases May 24th for PC, PS4, and XBox One.

CONFESSIONS OF A TERRIBLE GAMER: FILTHY CASUAL EDITION

I have a confession to make -- and no, it’s not that I’m a terrible gamer (I will never admit to that). It’s that... well, over the past week, I think I'm becoming a Blizzard fanboy. As someone who writes about a variety of games, I guess I thought I should give full disclosure.

Something about the design of Blizzard games has me gravitating toward them not strictly in and of themselves, but as preferable alternatives to similar titles. Over the past decade, each release seems intended to fill in successive slices of the genre pie: Real Time Strategy is what they’re known for, followed by Action RPG’s, but now they have a highly successful card-based puzzler in Hearthstone, a fun-for-all MOBA game in Super Smash Bros. Blizzard (Heroes of the Storm), and in June, Blizzard’s first Team Fortress 2-alike first-person shooter Overwatch comes out. I put Starcraft 2 down a long time ago - I found it literally too challenging to focus through a real-time, multi-battlefront resource management wargame - but these most recent 3 titles have become like safe injection sites for some of my most toxic gaming habits. Blizzard games are polished, generic, internally consistent, and low on time demand. A game of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, or Overwatch comfortably fits into the 10-30 minutes slot. Compared to rival games in these genres, where a match tends to take upwards of forty minutes, this is a really attractive feature.

I don't want this to have melted by the time my game is over.

Take my 2200 hours of experience in Dota 2. I worked hard at that game; I invested hours and hours of research to improve, always seeking opportunities and advantages. But regardless, a painful loss can take 60 minutes. SIXTY. MINUTES. There is no surrender. You can Abandon the game, but you get punished for this by playing against other players who’ve also abandoned, which is even more unpleasant. Ask me today which game I’d rather play, and I would tell you Heroes of the Storm nine times out of ten. It’s a “lesser” game, certainly. It’s simpler, smoother, more forgiving. Finnicky annoyances like last-hitting enemies in order to get gold, or micromanaging the precious, gear-toting courier, are condensed in order to make the game faster and more fun. Small variances matter less in HOTS than Dota 2; what matters more is the overall movements and tactics of each team. And that’s why I’d rather play it. Also, that your name goes on fire when you get a killstreak.

Ever wanted to play as Pandora the Explorer... in a bugcatching costume? What's that? You don't? 

Or look at Hearthstone. I’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering on and off for probably 14 years. I LOVE Magic: the Gathering. Sometimes I can’t find a friend to play with so I will wiggle my shinies in the light for a few hours, just longing to play. A MTG friend of mine recommended HEX to me, a game so similar to Magic it was sued for plagiarism, and yet different enough that many experienced MTG players prefer it over Magic’s digital counterpart. The funnest way to play these CCG’s is in a format called Drafting, in which you buy a few randomized packs of cards, and build a deck from them. Win games against other players who have done the same, and you could win enough packs to Draft again (and then some)! The legendary self-sustaining one-time investment is attractive to the smugly clever folk who enjoy these games. So I dropped $7 and drafted a pretty good Blood/Diamond deck. I had to *shudder* “pass a rare” - sometimes when drafting, you will forego using a rare, valuable card in order to pick less cash-valuable, but more efficient, synergistic cards - in order to make a better deck. I smashed Round 1 of my first best of 3, lost the second match badly, and in the tiebreaker, it was tough to call the winner before my internet crashed. I couldn’t get it going again in the 5-minute permission window, so by the time I signed in again, I had nothing to show for my $7 investment but a bunch of common cards that accomplish almost nothing beyond the Draft. Betrayed by about 90 minutes of gameplay which amounted to nothing by a fluke, I immediately uninstalled HEX and downloaded Hearthstone.

I might be new to the game, but I cannot even IMAGINE how these numbers got onto the board.

Like Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone balms the wounds left by wasted time. Hearthstone’s Arena drafting costs either $2 or some in-game currency you can earn just by grinding, and lets you play one 5-15 minute match at a time, whenever you want. So even though there’s the same risk of disconnecting I experienced in HEX, it’s less costly, and less painful. There’s no pain in passing rares, because you don’t keep the deck you draft; instead, you use your rental draft to rack up wins (you can play as many matches with the deck as it takes to lose 3 times) which translate into card packs and game currency. And while there is a strong incentive to sink money into the game for cards, with no buyout, the free-to-play features give you access to all the same resources, should you boast the patience to grind.

All told, my near-exclusive Blizzard fixation of late hasn’t stifled, but brightened my view of games today. I’m happy to have a client outside of Steam that reliably offers up fast, fun, & fair match-based gameplay.