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.

My Game of the Year is Mirror’s Edge

Hurtling full-tilt over and under obstacles, dodging enemy gunfire and leaping off rooftops in Mirror’s Edge was my most exhilarating game experience this year. Once skeptical of its first-person approach to running and jumping, I was surprised by its vantage point. I felt viscerally a part of the game world. Each blind leap cued real fear. Pride surged with each soft landing. I was present in a way few games have managed. I felt the weight of Faith’s virtual body as she staggered away from an ill-timed fall, the rush of locomotion as she sprinted through the world and the game’s gentle coaxing that convinced me to play by its rules. Never before have I so gleefully abandoned weapons — which hamper Faith’s sprightliness — in favor of environmental problem solving.

Would my experience have improved with a deeper storyline and better acting? Yes. Could a few bouts of frustration be avoided with cleaner level design ? Certainly. Do I wish there was more to the experience? Of course. But despite Mirror’s Edge’s weaknesses, no other game this year evoked such a sense of accomplishment upon completion—or such a desire to dive straight back into its world.

In other news: It was great to be included in Kombo’s Game of the Year round table. It brought me back to the year 2002. I was in school and was spending all my free time working for a little site called GameCube Advanced. It is awesome to see the site evolve from those dark days.

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: Part Two

Me: Why Africa?

Clint Hocking, creative director, Ubisoft:The main reason is Far Cry is a brand that’s all about going to places you haven’t seen before. It’s about places where you can feel really displaced, where you can feel really out of your element.

What themes were you hoping to explore with Far Cry 2?

What was important to me was to explore themes of trust and betrayal, and friendship and dependency. I really wanted to make a game where—it’s a first-person shooter, you shoot people in our game, t. That’s what you do—but I wanted to make a game where there would be people that you shoot or you might need to shoot where you might have to think about that decision.

It’s not just like Duck Hunt. It’s not just put the little dot over the duck and pull the trigger. It is more like, “I hate this guy, and I’m going to spend many, many hours of the game trying to get the opportunity to shoot this f***ing guy because I hate him. Because he’s a bad person.”

And there might be other people who are your very very close friends who might be lying there bleeding on the battle field and you’re surrounded by the enemy and they’re coming in trucks and they’re coming in jeeps, and you’ve go to leave. Your friend is just lying there wounded and can’t move. Your choice is to just leave him there to be picked up by all these guys who are closing in or to shoot him and spare him from being torn apart by dogs and tortured by the enemy.

How do you take that element [of shooting people] and make it meaningful, or more meaningful than it is in a typical game? How do you at least make sure that sometimes when you shoot someone it’s for something that you really care about or for something that really matters?

Why should games have meaning? Why should decisions about who you kill be difficult?

I’m not 22 anymore. I’m 36 years old. By the time my next game ships I’m going to be 40. And the next game after that I’m going to be 45 years old. That’s not a lot of games I’m going to make in my career if it takes me four years to make a game.

The person that I am is changing a lot and is changing quickly. If I want to make games that I personally still care about, I can’t continue to make games like a 21-year-old. I have to think about what I care about when I’m 30 or 45. You know giant two-headed cyclops monsters with guns that shoot chainsaws out of them—who gives a s*** about that, really? What does that have to do with anything? It doesn’t mean you can’t make a good game, or even a meaningful or important game, with two-headed cyclops monsters with guns that shoot chainsaws, but you have to at least say why. The Romans had Cyclops, but why? What did it mean to them. What is this concept of a creature with one eye? How do you mix something that’s meaningful and important out of the concept of a monster? How do you make something that’s meaningful and important out of the conflict of a monster?

We’re making stuff for a real audience, we’re not making stuff exclusively for 18-year-olds any more. There are 70-year-old people playing games. What do they care about?

It’s not just us being weirdos — there’s this whole convergence towards games being richer and more meaningful.

What sort of demand is there for meaningful content in games?

What I think—and I don’t know, I haven’t looked at the numbers and studied or anything. My feeling is there’s this generation of guys who are about my age—between 30 and 40. They didn’t stop playing games like generations before them. They stopped because they didn’t have time for that. My generation continued to play games. We get a little bit frustrated and a little bit bored with games with big monsters in them and games with elves and all same old s*** that we’ve been seeing for the past 25 years.

We want more. We look at movies and we look at books and we look at other media out there and what all these other people are doing. How come they get to make these movies that move all of society and we’re making games with monsters with two heads? It’s stupid. Why aren’t we also doing the same thing? I think there’s this whole generation this second or maybe third generation of game developers who continued playing games and to us games are very important. To the people who are a generation behind us, games are really important. It’s not just us being weirdos — there’s this whole convergence towards games being richer and more meaningful. That’s what we’re trying to do.

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

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.

Hooked on Sonics

That 16-bit speed freak Sonic the Hedgehog has an identity crisis. He used to be cool. Now that he’s all grown up, he’s turned into an asshole. He’s got a bad attitude, he’s always crashing into stuff (three dimensions doesn’t agree with him) and he continually disappoints his loyal friends.

Some might say he can’t stop reliving his glory days.

Simon Jeffrey, president of Sega of America, says it’s the other way around.

“Every Sonic game sells to the same audience, Jeffrey explained to me at the annual videogame industry confab, the Electronic Entertainment Expo. (I was, of course, on official duty at the time). “It’s mostly kids and a few insane fanboys who then spend the next three months of their lives writing us letters and complaining about it.” [Emphasis added]

That’s why he’s so excited for BioWare’s take on the Sonic franchise with Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Jeffrey’s hope is that the game will introduce the blue hedgehog to new audiences and help rebuild his street cred. It’s a pet project.

“Sonic has always been a recruitment mechanism for the Sega brand,” he says. “I guess back in the Genesis days Sonic was the mascot, but I don’t really believe in mascots in the business today. Sonic is absolutely a recruitment mechanism.”

With Sonic Chronicles Jeffrey predicts a mess of folks who would never dream of buying a Sonic game will pick it up because it’s a “cool role-playing game.” “They’re going to realize that, ‘Hey, Sonic is not so bad after-all.” He has high hopes for the title and is expecting sales of around 1.5 million units in the United States. The typical Sonic game, he says, sells about 600,000 copies.

But it’s the kids who wind up falling in love with Sonic. “They love the character set, and the whole attitude and speed thing. Once we’ve got them hooked on Sonic (not in a bad way, but a good way),” jokes Jeffrey, “then hopefully we can hook them and their families on other Sega products and Sega lines.”

Getting hooked on Sonic worked for me.

With that said, I couldn’t resist asking Jeffrey about Smilebit.

Jeffrey says the developer was responsible for some of the company’s most successful games, but noted that Sega has had “mixed success” revitalizing its classic franchises. Nights comes to mind.

Nevertheless, “pretty much everything is on the table,” he says. “We’re looking at our arcade portfolio from the golden days and, absolutely, at Smilebit.” He says there’s nothing (well “probably nothing”) in development, but they’re “on paper.”

“Jet Set Radio is the most requested [franchise] update we get,” he confides. “I’d love to see another one too. If Samba de Amigo works for us, Jet Set Radio has a pretty good chance of coming back too.”

Also see:

Sega’s Quest for Cool
Sega Q&A:’We don’t want to be Activision’