puzzle – Interactive Digital Narratives

External Context and Zelda’s Magic Circle

As I mentioned in my last post, the music and sound design of Ocarina of Time has been an element of the game I have noticed and appreciated more and more the more I play through the game. One interesting phenomenon with the game that I have discovered, however, is that the current near-meme status that some of the sound design elements have achieved in gamer and internet culture have altered the associations I make with the sound effects, which alters the feel of the gameplay itself. For instance, I have heard Link’s spin attack yell used as a sample in songs, and have done so myself when making music. The “secret discovery” sound effect is another that I have heard so often in other Zelda games and outside of the context of a video game that I am somewhat dissociated from the game world when I hear it. It makes me wonder if the magic circle created by the rules of the game can eventually be worn away as the game becomes more of a cultural artifact than an immersive gamic experience and the player becomes increasingly distracted from the gamic experience by the constant sonic reminder that they’re playing a Zelda game and not actually exploring the landscape of Hyrule and fighting monsters to rescue the kingdom. To extend this line of thought, I also wonder if this phenomenon may mean that it is impossible to create a convincing magic circle with the continuation of a successful series. As the series gains a following and its own place in gamer/internet/general culture, it becomes impossible to disassociate elements of the game from their appearance outside of the game. Nintendo, however, seems to have wholly embraced the relevance of their games outside the context of the digital video game world, with games like the Super Smash Bros. series creating a context-collapsing post-modern mashup of the most popular Nintendo characters.

Messing With Time

The mechanic that I found the most interesting in Ocarina of Time while playing was the day/night cycle that triggers when the player enters certain non-narrative linked areas and the ways this was used to add and alter the content of the game in ways that add depth to the game in a remarkably impressive way for such an early implementation of the mechanic. Searching for some discussion on day/night mechanics in games I stumbled across this reddit thread in the large (700k+ subscriber) /r/gaming subreddit about day/night mechanics in games (https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/24igkc/weekly_rgames_mechanic_discussion_daynight_cycle/). Nintendo games were some of the most frequently referenced in the thread, Zelda and Pokemon being the main two series. Because these were the earliest games referenced in the thread to my knowledge, I was interested in the history of day/night mechanics in games. This led me to this DigitalPress forum thread from 2006 on the subject (http://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?89524-First-game-with-a-day-night-cycle). Despite some uncertainty, it seems that the game Red Alert from 1981 is the earliest game mentioned with a day/night mechanic and in-game clock that changes as the player progresses through the game (video of gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iHMzi86KuE). Many games use the in-game clock or day/night mechanic to add difficulty during the night-time, with Minecraft being the most notable modern example of this that comes to my mind. In Minecraft the player must try to gather enough resources, weapons, and/or shelter in order to survive the flood of monsters that come when the sun sets. The nighttime and darkness in the game is something the player grows to fear almost as much as the sound of a Creeper about to explode. This seems to be a fairly common experience with day/night mechanics in video games as noted by many of the posters in both threads. Ocarina of Time eschews the notion that the night has to be a bad thing in the game, offering certain night-time-only opportunities to the player like the grave-digging minigame in Kakariko Village.

Zelda Nostalgia

Having played a lot of Zelda on the Gameboy Advance as a kid (A Link To The Past, Oracle of Seasons/Ages) but very little on any major consoles (my parents never let me have a game console more than the gameboy my grandparents gave me when I was growing up) I was really interested to play this game. The puzzle-based game mechanics that I loved in the previous Zelda games I had played were clearly present and apart from a few differing mechanics and graphic differences (the largest being the 3d/2d difference between GBA and Nintendo 64 games) I felt very much at home in the world of Ocarina of Time. I found the ambient nature of the graphics, especially in Kokiri Forest where the player starts, to be very relaxing and nostalgia-inducing at the same time. The music and sound design are the elements of the game that I have been most consistently impressed and awed by, with a music-based puzzle mechanic and music-based story elements fitting perfectly with the atmosphere of the game and story. I can recognize many of the sound effects from both my time playing other Zelda games but also from music and more general recent media, as the sounds in Zelda have become such recognizable cultural artifacts that they’re maybe even more commonly heard in digital media now than when the game was made. From a 2016 retrospective perspective, it’s very impressive to see how many of the Zelda games were constructed in a way that would let them age well. Despite improving graphics, physics engines, audio quality, and general game mechanic and technological improvement, I have found Ocarina of Time incredibly enjoyable to play and personally believe that it is still very much worth playing in 2016.

Classifying the Pointing of Broken Age

During my playing of Broken Age, I was interested in the way that the game’s format as a point-and-click game affected the game itself. As a point-and-click adventure game, Broken Age requires the player to use the computer mouse to interact … Continue reading →

During my playing of Broken Age, I was interested in the way that the game’s format as a point-and-click game affected the game itself. As a point-and-click adventure game, Broken Age requires the player to use the computer mouse to interact with the world. I found this method of playing to provide a new element to the game itself, slightly altering the games classification when using Roger Caillois’ four classifications.

Using Roger Caillois’ classifications of games from his work, “The Classification of Games,” I noticed that Broken Age is clearly an agôn game. According to Caillois, agôn games are competitive games in which the player seeks to prove their superiority, be it superiority of speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, or ingenuity (131). In Broken Age, the player seeks to prove their superior mind by solving the puzzles presented to them while progressing through Shay and Vella’s narratives. Solving the puzzles require the player to obtain objects and talk to various characters, all by clicking on them.

Broken Age does provide clues as to what objects to interact with and what non-player characters to talk to in order to gain the skills or objects needed to solve the current problem or puzzle. Through conversations with the non-player characters, Shay or Vella, and by extension the player, can hear helpful hints as to what type of objects they should be trying to find. While sometimes this is enough to aid the player, the game adds another layer of help.

This image show the gameplay of Broken Age. In this screenshot, Vella is attempting to obtain that golden egg, and must use the ladder she previously obtained that is in her inventory at the bottom of the screen.

As a point-and-click game, the cursor is an extremely important part of Broken Age as it leads to the completion of all the game’s actions. Typically the cursor looks like a normal mouse arrow. However, when the player hovers the cursor over an object that can be interacted with, the cursor changes into a starburst-type shape, cluing the player in to the fact that the object or character can be interacted with.

This image showcases the described cursor change in Broken Age. In the bottom left of the screen, the cursor can be seen in its starburst form, showcasing the ability of the covered dish to be interacted with.

This cursor changes provides the game with another of Caillois’ classifications: alea. According to Caillois, alea games are all about luck and chance, “winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary” (133). Thanks to the ability of the cursor to change and clue the player in to what objects are interactive, the player can simply wave the cursor around until they see the cursor change into the necessary starburst. This alters Broken Age from an agôn game that requires skill to pass through the puzzles to an alea game that affords the player the opportunity to wildly wave their cursor around until a solution appears, all as a result of the game’s format.

Works Cited

Caillois, Roger. “The Classification of Games.” The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. 129-47. Print.

Image Sources

https://portforward.com/games/walkthroughs/Broken-Age-Act1/Broken-Age-Act1-73.htm
http://www.gamezebo.com/2014/01/28/broken-age-act-1-walkthrough-cheats-strategy-guide/

Portal Insanity

This is the excerpt for your very first post.

As I’ve played portal more and more, the level environment of the main facility in the game has begun to remind me more and more of a stylized futuristic insane asylum. The padding in the elevator walls and on some others in the facility, the flat lighting and Glados’ initially soothing voice being piped in from unseen speakers are all reminiscent of some sort of wild futuristic mental hospital complete with puzzles. The cameras placed around the facility to monitor Chell and the constant knowledge that Glados is watching you add to the sense that the player is trapped in an insane asylum. The back parts of the facility that Chell makes her way into later in the game are reminiscent of another different potential vision of a mental institution, with frantic-looking writing scrawled on the wall in various unknown substances. In fact, the entire facility that Portal is set in could be seen as a sort of asylum-gone-wrong scenario – but not for Chell, rather for Glados. By the end of the game it becomes fairly clear that Glados has gone crazy and had probably constructed many (if not all) of the levels as obstacles not to test the portal gun but as some sort of twisted test (or perhaps intended torture or killing) of Chell. Chell might not be crazy enough to be put in a mental institution but Glados is crazy enough to make an entire high-tech obstacle course just to mess with Chell for fun. It’s like a twisted version of the whole “mouse in a maze” experiment trope, with vats of acid and armed robots trying to stop Chell. In a sense, the entire facility is like a reverse madhouse, meant to protect the insane Glados from those who would try to reach the controller of the maze.

image source: https://brcondron.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/first-blog-post/

The Glados Dilemma

Glados, the machine fans of Portal know and… do not really love, has been with the player since the beginning of the game. And yet she is an enigma. And of course she became more complicated after our class brought up the idea that she might be the environment and not a character. True she feels … Continue reading “The Glados Dilemma”

Glados, the machine fans of Portal know and… do not really love, has been with the player since the beginning of the game. And yet she is an enigma. And of course she became more complicated after our class brought up the idea that she might be the environment and not a character. True she feels like a character, but she is hardwired into the mise en scène of the game. As I played Portal, my mind began its quest to solving the Glados dilemma, generating ideas that will hopefully quell debates on the subject.

Most people think of Glados as a character considering how she has all the dialogue Chell clearly lacks. As an aspiring writer, I noticed that she has qualities writing instructors discuss in outlining characters. Although her origin story is unknown, it still exists and affects her behavior in Portal. Glados has an objective to kill Chell, and possibly a super objective that guides her actions in the plot of Portal. Also, she something that resembles a body at the end of the game. As a character, she has an origin, an objective that motivates her actions, and a body of sorts. All in all, the argument for Glados being a character seems fairly air-tight.

Or does it? Glados is a super computer linked into every part of the Aperture Science testing facility. In a way, she is the Aperture Science testing facility. And as Henry Jenkins discussed in his article “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” game designers focus heavily the construction of the game’s levels. The commentary from the game designers of Portal within the Bonus Levels do not discuss character design, they discuss game mechanics and level design. Glados, controlling the environment of the game, providing a majority of the plot in the game, sounds more like mise en scène of Portal, and less like a non-player character.

So is Glados a character or the name of Portal‘s mise en scène? The way I see it, if the people who created Portal poured energy into both Glados as a character and as the set, I do not see why she cannot be both. I would also say that Glados is something no novel or movie could properly portray. Video games are the perfect medium for the enigmatic Glados, and similar entities in games will secure a place for video games in narratology.

Retcon Artists

PC-gaming purists love to argue that the computer is the superior system for playing first-person games, which benefit from the laser like precision of a mouse and keyboard. Meanwhile, console fan-boys and -girls will themselves insist that an ergonomic controller offers a more comfortable experience, or that the vibrating “rumble” feature adds to a game’s immersion. Tactile differences aside, playing Portal on a PlayStation 3 console is an objectively different experience from playing the PC version, for reasons embedded not in the hardware but in the game’s actual coded content. Granted, to even notice these differences one needs comprehensive knowledge of both versions of the game; indeed, on my own playthrough of the PS3 port, I had no idea that my game disc featured different content from the original, updated PC version.

I almost miss my blissful ignorance. Now that I’m aware of how the versions diverge, I’m left pondering a dizzying number of questions regarding digital authorship, the impossibility of locating (spatially or otherwise) the “original” Portal, and the point at which two branched works become their own entities. I’ll tackle of a few of these questions here. Full disclosure, though: if I said I could provide the answers, too, I’d be about as dishonest as GlaDOS promising cake to Chell.

Some of the differences between the two versions are truly minute and, I would argue, trivial. For one, the graphics and performance of the PC version are scalable according to the power of your machine. This means that a high-end “rig” can make this nearly decade-old game look pretty darn good by today’s standards, and will keep the game running smooth as butter start to finish. Meanwhile, the PS3 version is locked at a resolution and framerate suitable for the console’s relatively weak horsepower. I personally don’t think that the difference in graphical fidelity is anything to write home about, since most players would need to see both versions side-by-side to even notice a difference. Likewise, the difference between 30 and 60 frames-per-second is significant, but not enough to significantly impact gameplay (largely because Portal rarely demands time-precise inputs from the player).

So, Portal PC and Portal PS3 look and play similar enough at first glance. But PS3 players need not play for long before encountering technical issues and glitches that the PC version, which has received a number of online “patches” or updates over the years, is now largely immune from. During my first playthrough of Portal on PS3 (the only version I’ve played), I noticed a faint crackling sound in one of the early test chambers. It began as a soft white noise that I barely paid any mind to, thinking it was an ambient effect or else was coming from something besides my TV’s speakers. But as I triggered other in-game sounds, like firing my Portal gun or inciting new dialogue from GlaDOS, the static grew louder and sharper, until it matched the volume of the un-glitched audio. I stubbornly gave Valve (the game studio behind Portal) the benefit of the doubt and figured there was some deeper, narrative meaning to the static – maybe Chell was slowly losing her mind, or GlaDOS overflowing the chambers with noise to make her lose her mind. Well, within a few minutes I was starting to go a bit crazy myself, so I turned to the Internet and Googled “Portal PS3 audio static.”

It turns out that Valve’s port of The Orange Box (a collection of games containing Portal, Half-Life 2, and more) from the PC to the PS3 is ridden with issues; audiovisual glitches, framerate slowdowns, and long loading times are present in every game on the disc. What’s more, while Valve has released a handful updates for the Xbox 360 Orange Box and many more for the individual release on PC, they’ve left Playstation in the dust. Apart from one small patch in 2008 (which had unknown impacts on the games) the PS3 version plays exactly as it did on release.

This lack of support from Valve also explains the largest and most fascinating point of divergence between Portal on PC and Portal on PS3. I was suspicious when I overheard a classmate declare during our second game lab that their own game ends with Chell being dragged away, back toward the Aperture building. My own lab group had just cleared the game’s last chapter ourselves, and my PS3 definitely left Chell’s body motionless until the screen fades to black. Still, the alternate ending made sense with consideration to the game’s sequel, which has Chell still trapped inside Aperture. So, I turned again to the oracular Web and discovered that, sure enough, Valve slightly altered Portal‘s ending on PC in the months leading up to Portal 2‘s announcement. Of course, the PS3 never received the update, and thus still boasts the original (and somewhat more optimistic) closing scene.

Valve’s decision to “retcon”, or retroactively alter, Portal‘s ending points to, among other things, the studio’s conception of the fluidity of their game’s narrative and their own authority to mold it. That Valve opted to change the ending not through a tweet or blog post but with a full-on patch is particularly illuminating. I would argue that delivering the new ending with the same mechanism used to administer gameplay adjustments and bug fixes renders narrative in the same light as those elements. In digital games, narrative and gameplay elements alike are mutable, moldable, and never immune from being revised or removed entirely by their creators. Furthermore, Valve’s decision to overwrite the game’s closing moments (rather than offer the new scene as an alternate or supplemental option) is a serious assertion of their claimed authority to determine what is and is not “canon” for Portal‘s game-world. I have no doubt that many, if not most players have only seen one version of the game’s ending and are oblivious to the other’s existence. If not for the PS3 port’s functionality as an effective time capsule for the game’s original release, preservation of the “old” ending would rely on early players having backed up or otherwise documented their version of the game.

For a medium that so frequently emphasizes player autonomy, the modern, always-online video game places a great deal of power in the hands of the author.