Boom Blox, for Ages 60 and Up

Boom Blox was an unexpected Christmas miracle. It brought the whole family together—as its members fought for control of one of the household’s two remotes.

As seen on TV, guided demos and on paper, Boom Blox is a stupid idea. You could be cruising around Liberty City shacking up with ladies of the night or slinking past giant mechs as a geriatric soldier of fortune. Why would a game player waste her precious hours smashing up virtual Jenga towers?

Most would choose not to. The game sold a mere 60,000 copies at its debut (although anecdotally it performed well in the long tail). Blox was a victim of marketing: How do you convey this game to the masses via cheesy video? You can’t. Because you have to play Boom Blox to grasp its appeal, the game is easily dismissed.

I dismissed it. I only gave it a second glance because Steven Spielberg was attached to the project.

And because my parents got a Wii for Christmas.

They don’t really play games. In fact, they did their best to run a videogame-free household. Beyond one parental unit’s obsession with Goldeneye and Civilization, and the other’s obsession with electronic Bridge, they abstain. So I raided my library for games that might get them hooked on their new system:

Mario Galaxy: No
Wii Sports: Yes
Raving Rabbids TV Party:: No
Tiger Woods All-Play: No
Boom Blox: A resounding yes.

It was amazing. My brother, bored, tossed Boom Blox in the Wii. Within minutes, my father was practically leaping from his seat to snatch the controller away. My mom was content to observe—at first. Soon she was offering unsolicited advice—commanding he pluck a particular block from the tower or blow up a certain bomb. Soon she too could no longer stand couch-side quarterbacking.

The kids relinquished the controls and sat back to watch the pair bicker as they attempted to solve the game’s puzzles.

When they found out they could play against each other, it was practically all they did for two days. Then they discovered they could instead work together—they’d be awake long past the hour the kids had retreated to their rooms, laughter and cursing ringing throughout the home.

Word is they still play it. You might even call it love.

So why isn’t there more software aimed at older players? Much of the drivel rolled out onto the Wii may be age agnostic, but that makes it neither accessible nor appealing to my parents. They both golf, but Tiger Woods is too complicated—despite the All-Play moniker. They don’t understand Raving Rabbids. And a games like Wii Music and Zelda hold no appeal.

I don’t know what Boom Blox’s secret is, but I’m glad that it has some legs. I do not the rents to give up gaming, but right now there’s nothing else to give.

Boob is the Word

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Why? Because EGM writes terrible headlines.

Games are in the Kavalier Age

Against the din of assembled videogames industry folks and an aerial acrobatics show starring a prince with painted-on clothes I asked Ben Mattes what Age it was. While historians like to assign Ages and Eras to periods of time long passed, I wanted Mattes to predict how we’d look back on this stage of game design. Was it the Golden Age? The Renaissance?

Mattes, who was slumped in a chair and nursing a bottle of Fiji water, cautiously leaned forward. He bit his lip. “I don’t know he murmured.” Prince of Persia producer gave it some thought. “Have you read Kavalier & Clay?”

I hadn’t. He launched into an abbreviated telling of the tale. The comic book creators Kavalier and Clay have an epiphany while watching Citizen Kane. That film opened their eyes to a range of thoughts and themes—they realized that comic books could be about more than the rock ‘em sock ‘em battles so typically found in their pages. They could be innovative and meaningful.

That, says Mattes, is where the games industry is now. “We’ve just seen our Citizen Kane and realized that games can have meaning,” he says. “Right now, we’re Kavalier and Clay”

Clint Hocking Can’t Shut Up: Ground Zero

But that’s because he has a lot to say. It is 11 PM in Shanghai the day before Far Cry 2 hits retailers. Clint Hocking is presumably delirious from a worldwide promotional tour for his new game. That’s the only explanation for the hour-long question and answer session that netted some 4,500 words of text.

That’s cool, though, because Hocking is a vision man. He realizes the games industry needs to grow up. It needs to embrace older gamers—whether they’re players who have graduated from rote shoot-em ups to grandmas. Games should share the same mind space as books, movies and HBO shows. They should make you think.

Since the old HQ can not get away with running long ruminations from game designers, I figured—in some bastardized form of radical transparency—I’d post Hocking’s defense of why games should be meaningful in many, many parts.

Me: Howdy. I am working on a story about morality in games—or more directly, about the sudden injection of moral dilemmas into videogames…

Clint Hocking, creative director at Ubisoft: I wouldn’t call it sudden at all. I think there are numerous examples over the last decade or more and those early examples have inspired the ‘second generation’ of game designers to build on the experiences they had growing up. It, has, however, gotten a lot more attention recently.

As far as I understand it, Far Cry 2 is not injected with these instances…[Ed. note: I am an idiot]

Whoa. Wrong… not to give you spoilers or anything but you may be asked in Far Cry 2 to euthanize your best friend with injected medication rather than abandon them to be captured and potentially tortured to death… holding them in your arms they might potentially beg you to put them out of your misery… and I don’t mean in a cut-scene in the second act climax or something, I mean in the normal course of systemic play.

..but having heard your developer rant at GDC I thought you would be a good person to lend insight…What is driving the inclusion of moral dilemmas in games? A maturation of the medium? A desire to “do more” with games, or present new challenges?

All of the above. For me, though it is a desire to move away from ‘reflex’ challenges to mental/emotional/psychological challenges. In ‘life’ executing on a decision is typically the easy part… making the decision is what most of life’s real challenges are. In games it is the opposite. In life it’s questions like ‘should I cheat on my spouse’ or ‘should I take my dads car keys away before he drives home after having maybe one too many drinks’… in games, instead of having difficult decisions, we have lava pits.

You are told explicitly to stop your dad from driving drunk and to take his keys and in order to proceed in the game, you need to jump over a bunch of lava pits to get his keys. Focusing on the external dilemma, or the physical or active challenge can be fun (and I am not saying we need to stop doing that) but the real stuff that matters to us as human beings is the challenging decision making, but very few games use this.

What is the appeal, from a design perspective, of putting moral choices into games?

For me it lies in making a work that is valuable to the audience over and above its role as pure entertainment. The best works in every other artistic medium challenge our preconceptions and open up new perspectives. They change the way we look at the world or at ourselves or both. ‘Pure’ entertainment tends not to do that - and there is nothing wrong with that - but in the end, I don’t want to make pure entertainment.

I want to make games that give people something ‘real’, something that matters to them, something that they can take with them forward in their lives.

What do you see as the biggest hurdle for designers who tackle this meme?

Figuring out how to do it well. It’s a really hard problem. We’re trying to graduate from telling dirty jokes around the fire to writing poetry, but the only language we know is the language of dirty jokes. It’s hard to take your expertise in ‘There once was a man from Nantucket’ and reassemble it into ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’.

Why do players gravitate to games that give them the freedom to behave however they want in the game space?

Do they? I would like to see the numbers on that. I think [Call of Duty 4] outsold [Grand Theft Auto IV] this past year actually. I think ‘go-anywhere do-anything’ freedom is a tough sell. At GDC you spoke about giving games meaning—how does the “moral dilemma” fit into that space? It’s not the same discussion really.

Or at best ‘moral dilemmas’ are just one tool in the kit for making more meaningful games. Just restate your question talking about books or poetry or painting. Is there a moral dilemma present in Michelangelo’s David that imbues it with meaning? No. It’s meaning comes from its statements about form and about man’s place in the cosmos or whatever. Casablanca has moral dilemmas within it, but it is not exclusively the moral dilemmas in the film that make it meaningful (and that’s not even a very good example, because in that case the moral dilemmas are really important).

What is the balance between a designer dictating the difference between good and evil (ala Bioshock’s cut and dry good versus evil decision) in order to advance their own message/commentary and letting gamers dictate the morality of their own play experience?

You used the words ‘the difference’, the same words we use for mathematical subtraction. There you go… you cannot escape distilling your value statements down to math in a game (unless you put them in the story, in which case we’re not really talking about games). But there is a difference between modeling (simulating) the value statements and being didactic. Bioshock is criticized for ‘favoring’ saving the little sisters, but I think the ‘favoring’ is so slight and imperceptible (unless you look it up on line) that they really were just trying to give you two slightly different flavors that were ‘equivalent’.

I don’t think rescuing was mechanically favored enough to support the claim that the designers felt that saving the little sisters was ‘the right choice’. And that’s the way I think it should be. I think the two outcomes of such a binary decision need to be mechanically equivalent so that the player is not making an optimization decision he is making a more personal decision. If I get 100 points for harvesting the little sister and 100 points for saving her then my decision about whether or not to save her is entirely based on my feelings about her, not on my ‘point schedule’.

Also see:
Gaming’s Morality Play
Clint Hocking: Think Before You Shoot

When Bodies Hit The Floor

Dead Space has all the ambiance of a blockbuster scifi horror flick: A ship left adrift in the cold heart of space, crew that may or may not be alive, grotesque creatures intent on eating human flesh, and plenty of false creaks and groans to keep hairs on end.

With all this atmosphere (and cool mechanics), why does Isaac trundle through dead bodies like they are nothing more than fluffy snow banks? Even if the scary things lurking inside the near-abandoned hunk of ship were not horribly reconfigured humans, would you really want to traipse through monster guts? At the very least, crushed skulls and oozing bits provide little traction. At the most, the bodies shouldn’t simply be brushed aside like puffs of dandelion seeds. The protagonist may be suited in an engineering rig that can withstand the vacuum of space, but he is no super-powered Master Chief.

Apparently it all comes down to technology. To make the scattered remains of enemies behave realistically—like rag dolls—they must lose all sense of matter once lifeless. I appreciate the artistry. I like that the bodies don’t instantly vanish. I like that Isaac can kick dismembered limbs around like soccer balls. But when you’re suddenly wading through corpses, it turns even the most terrifying encounter absurd.

Dead Space is still creepy. I’m only two hours in, and am enjoying myself mightily. But the dead nothings certainly kill the mood. I’m now on the look out for herds of mutant manatees flopping about the floor. Spotting a school, I’ll crack a smile—right before something else kills me.