Dear Esther's setting matches its emotional push

The most memorable part of Dear Esther is its setting: an island off the coast of the UK containing a cave and some abandoned buildings. Walking through it felt a little like watching LOST--hope for some awesome, supernatural explanation, and disappointment with an ending that brought up more questions than it answered. And like LOST, the setting is a mysterious island often described in metaphorical terms. 

In my Western-American literature class, we often discussed the importance of the western setting. Wide open plains and awe-inspiring mountains evoke a fear and respect for nature, and feelings of freedom but also oppression (it's contradictory. It's literature). The island and cave had a different significance. The narrator explored his own feelings about being on the island and towards Esther, and such introspection seems even more fitting inside the earth. Climbing up the island and the final descent accompanied the rising realizations and letting go. The focal point of this game at every moment is the place, places which evoke memories and hasten death. 

At the same time, it's not just an island. It's hyperreal; it is more beautiful than real nature. And, like the setting, the story is better in my imagination than it is in the script. When I actually looked at the script, the story lost its mystery. It became an impressionistic, surreal kind of rambling, whose allusions shed little light on the actual events leading up to the narrator's arrival on the island. But at the same time, the experience of the game/hypertext was highly evocative of loneliness, loss, and confusion. The island is not a place in the physical world, it is a digital medium to evoke the bittersweetness of cold beauty that is completely unsentient, matched by memories of a loved and dead person. In this way, I believe Dear Esther succeeds in connecting its setting to its story. 

And, this is completely changing the subject, but if you're curious about how to classify games in the literary scheme of thigns, Aarseth has an interesting system:

Aarseth's ergodic literature chart, which you can read more about here

Some people have noticed that Dear Esther isn't really a game, or what game there is is purely evocative. The above chart comes from Aarseth's book Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. A branching path (even if it's not branching for very long) qualifies as explorative; if the text's appearance is in part chosen or created by the user, it is configurative, and permanent user additions make it textonic. 

The interesting thing to me is that, because of its randomized sections, Dear Esther is a configurative cybertext--less pre-determined than other games like Portal. The difference is that with Dear Esther, there is no puzzle or non-story part besides walking. Also, I don't really think the randomization of text improves my experience with Dear Esther. It seems like a gimmick to make me re-visit the game, which I will probably do anyway next time I miss seeing the ocean.

What visual novels should learn from sequential art

Recently I've played a few visual novels, or games with visual novel elements (999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Katawa Shoujo, Re Alistair++, and Trace Memory). I understand the focus on story and having lots of text is from the visual novel tradition. I just don't understand why it isn't better.

I think visual novels qualify as sequential art, and should start acting like it. Here's some things visual novels need to work on (I had ambitious visions of side-by-side manga and visual novel screenshots, but please do some imagining in your head):

-Visual and textual information should be complimentary, not redundant. 999 drove me crazy when a character would appear on-screen looking surprised, and the text itself would tell me this character was speaking and felt surprised. We're familiar with the convention that the person on screen is talking, or if there are multiple people on screen that their speech bubbles have their name on them. Even picture books can get this right--little tidbits of additional information should be contained in the accompanying illustrations.

can we please just show all the refinement and dignity in the artwork?

-Replace redundant visual information with relevant. Most visual novels are pretty good with showing people in a flashback. But how about more closeups of salient details (people were always eating in Katawa Shoujo and I almost never got to see the food)? I also like seeing what character I'm playing and how they react to conversations (Touch Detective uses the entire top screen for this, and it is darling). I like it when my character has his own ideas about choices I make, though granted many visual novels have limited options. I don't like seeing the same artwork over and over.

maybe a whole screen is a little much to dedicate to your character's reactions... but it's soo cute!

-Pace text faster than a novel. I know it's called a visual novel, but if I'm going to the trouble of reading on a bright screen, I want a polished, fast-moving story. Conversations and plot/action should alternate--my least favorite comic books are the ones with talking heads (and sometimes just one head, for those inner monologues that seem to be endless). Trace Memory did an excellent job of steadily revealing more and more information about the game's mysteries and alternating with action--a puzzle, or discovery of a person or secret passage (the best part was when a puzzle revealed something about the plot). If you don't read manga, think of Calvin & Hobbes--even if the entire comic strip is just a dialogue, at least they're sledding down a gigantic hill.

-Use animations resourcefully. If we classify animation as many static images linked together, it can still technically qualify as sequential art, and I think that qualification makes sense in the context of visual novels, which sometimes include small animations like head nods and toe-tapping. Animations in a character, when reused in the same contexts, make mannerisms. Mannerisms can be part of an interesting and dynamic character.

I know that many of my complaints are because of budget/time constraints on visual novels. But not all of them are! I like the idea of the visual novel and I think it is a genre that is a little neglected. It's possible that I should give up on visual novels and concentrate on finding a really good simulation game--do we have a modern Princess Maker 2, and is it something other than The Sims? I like my simulation games to have some story to them (edit: maybe Cherry Tree High Comedy has what I'm looking for? I'm stoked!)!

Let me know in the comments if you agree that visual novels need to reformed, or if I'm completely misunderstanding the genre! I love having conversations about this kind of stuff.

Academic Interlude: Attributes of Older Gamers

This time in Academic Interludes I'm summarizing and discussing "Never too old to play: The appeal of digital games to an older audience" by Bob De Schutter. It is available online here and I've uploaded the PDF here.

Interesting background: ESA estimated that about 24% of North America's digital game audience is over 50. We don't know much about this elderly game population (but I can tell you my dad is part of it, though I don't think of him as "elderly"). The article discussed "uses and gratifications theory," a theory that argues that we consciously choose what media to consume.

One study the article cited found that preadolescents prefer games that give them social and physical powers they don't have in real life, adolescents preferred games they could use to interact with their peers, and young adults "are troubled by the social unacceptability of the games among their peers and therefore revert to the less social motives" (I'd be interested to know what those motives are--fantasy?). The authors of the article continued to discuss motives, and generalized that females wanted games that appealed to their desires for inclusion, affection, and control (like The Sims?). They hypothesized that older gamers would have these same needs, would feel that video games weren't "socially accepted", and prefer technologically uncomplicated games. Basically, they predicted that elderly gamers would be more likely to fit the "casual" gamer stereotype and play simple browser-based kind of games.

Not actually a game, but a folk dance.

The Survey: The researchers surveyed Flemish residents over 45 who self-identified as gamers. The survey was online. They found that 80% were casual gamers who played puzzle games and games based on board/card games (specifically, Tetris, Spider Solitaire, and Zuma [Zuma came out of nowhere for me]. Oh and "Mahjong games" were most popular of all). Most participants played games on the PC or cell phone. The older people who played "hardcore" games (ones you have to download with a larger file size) were more likely to be male and in the younger set. They found that female casual players played more hours per week than male casual players. Respondents played for the challenge, excitement, and diversion of video games--not really for fantasy or interacting with others. Challenge was a bigger motive for females to play than for males, which the researchers weren't sure how to explain. Hardcore (yes, they used that term) players were more likely to play for fantasy and arousal motives (arousal as in excitement).

My discussion: As the researchers note, there are big limitations to their survey. I know at least two older people prefer the DS, but I wonder if DS players a less likely to web surf than older PC players (I suspect yes). I love playing on my DS, if someone randomly comes by I can just close it and I don't have to look like a huge nerd, but if I'm playing my PS3 suddenly being a gamer has to be like part of my self-identity (not that that's a bad thing, it's just how I feel about it).

I was initially surprised to find that hardly any of the players played for social interaction, but I often play by myself in games that have online modes--it's easier to play by myself, I can quit whenever I want, and no one will laugh at me when I mess up. However, I rarely regret playing with others, and I wonder if games had a better online matchup system if social gaming would be more popular with the 50+ group. We all have heard about the adolescent cursing and penis jokes of online spaces, and I think that scares a lot of people off, even if it's rarer in some spaces. I don't think I've been offended by any Little Big Planet level!

What would a video game aimed at an elderly population look like? I know older people are under-represented in games, but does it really matter if you're playing a puzzle game? Perhaps more games based on already-familiar games? It's hard for me to feel creative about it, since it feels like design-wise, puzzle games are pretty simple, but I know that coming up with a new puzzle game (that is easy to pick up but difficult to master) is actually difficult. Thoughts?

Anecdotal evidence for short-term cognitive effects of video games

This is the second part of my discussion of how video games affect how we see things, but I'm not sure if it's in line with the BoRT theme--instead of discussing how video games allow us to have virtual experiences we wouldn't otherwise have had, I want to discuss how video games can alter how we see the physical world.

Anyone who has played a Katamari game for several hours knows this feeling: you're on a walk outside and you imagine rolling up those fence posts and scooters, moving on to cars and dirt clods. You can kind of feel in your head how the fence posts would pop out of the ground and make the Katamari a little unbalanced.

Sim City does a similar thing: after a few hours of play, fans of the game start "seeing" the water pipes and flow of their own city's urban planning (the one they physically live in). Stealth games make me see dark alleys and twisty passages in an entirely different light. Games with diverse characters that show the personal side of the character along with their public persona helps me see other people as more complex individuals instead of the simplistic reductions I remember them as.

Have you noticed this in your own video game play? Even after playing Minecraft for a few hours I keep thinking I need to line my staircase with torches. :-)

Punching a Woman in Assassin's Creed

Critical Distance is doing a series for game bloggers called "The Blogs of the Round Table" (BoRT) where many people discuss the same topic (here's the post with some of the other posts). For their first one, the topic is how video games allow us to experience things virtually that we wouldn't normally experience physically. Yes, most gamers get to jump around and do backflips and kill hundreds, which they might not normally do in real life, but I'm more interested in two other ways video games introduce us to unfamiliar experiences: 1) the experience of being a different kind of person and 2) a transferable experience that enhances one's experience with the physical world. This post explores the first and I'll discuss the second next week.

For the first, I think my small experience playing Assassin's Creed is relevant. Short background: I'm female and I've never really beat up anyone before. In Assassin's Creed, beating up other guys was par for the course, but the moment I accidentally hit a woman who was also a bystander I felt a pang of real-life guilt. I think she cowered and said "I have done you no harm!" or one of the other set phrases, but in that moment I felt like I had abused the power the game had so readily given me. I thought about the incident for days afterwards, wondering how I could have confused "push" with "punch". I felt that I had done something wrong. 

no, I still don't know how to make screenshots on my PS3

Maybe with this experience I understood a little the desire to protect women, who while taking care of their families or getting water or whatever the women in this game do with the pots on their heads are often ill-equipped for battle. I think it also helped me see how some men see women as fundamentally weaker and easy to overpower, and maybe how that overpowering could be a power trip? It's hard to describe what it feels like to be a powerful man, but I think playing Assassin's Creed helped me see why it's a fantasy for some people.

Punching a woman in this game also helped me to understand how much the context of a violent act means to the perpetrator. If I'm killing a guy in the game who is making others' lives miserable, it feels justified (and I haven't finished the game yet, but I understand that knowing the whole story is going to be a big part of moral quandaries that make this game interesting). And if I randomly punch some bystander, that's not justified. Admittedly, the game's setup allows a lot of random violence, but my conscience does not. 

Academic Interlude: Alternate reality games for language learning

I'm starting a series of posts called "academic interludes" where I summarize an academic article on gaming and use it as a launch point for discussion. I'm more excited about discussing than reading, so we'll see how long this lasts. With any of these articles, feel free to e-mail me for a PDF of the article; my e-mail should be under my profile (experimentally, you can download this article from my Google docs. I say experimentally because maybe someone else might not see it as fair use).

This week I'll be discussing "An alternate reality game for language learning: ARGuing for multlingual motivation" by Thomas M Connolly, Mark Stansfield, and Thomas Hainey. The article focuses on the implementation of a language learning ARG in over 300 European high schools.

Previous Research of Note: A small pilot study found that 6 ESL students playing EverQuest II for four hours a week reinforced their learning. A university in Spain has an island in Second Life, assumedly to help with English learning. Tactical Iraqi, a government-made serious game to teach Arabic language and culture, "greatly increased the [experimental] battalion's operational capability."

The background section continues to cite evidence about how many educational video games lack actual research, and how much research on video games lacks an understanding of how video games work (i.e., one cannot generalize a result from one video game to all video games). There are some good studies out there, one of which found that mentally disabled individuals could learn to make decisions faster after playing a game that required a decision to be made within a fixed time limit.

I admit, when I think of ARGs I don't usually think of computer games, but obsessive people on forums and GPS coordinates. Unfortunately, in order to make an ARG that many students could use at once, it sounds like the researchers (?) had to settle for a glorified Blackboard-like interface, without hidden messages in water balloons under park benches. According to the authors, an ARG is not that different from an MMO game, but with ARGs, the player must be able to affect (in multiple ways) an outcome which is uncertain from the outset. One of the diagrams shows how ARGs use multiple ways of interacting with... the internet, mostly, and I couldn't help but think of how Glitch uses a lot of these same mediums--wikis, instant messaging, forums, Facebook, e-mail, etc. So that's how I see ARGs and MMOGs as similar--they both use multiple online formats to help players collaborate.  

With the ARG in this study, they had the usual pre- and post-tests about how effective/confusing participants thought it was. Most students thought it was interesting, and some were disappointed that it was basically Blackboard with assignments to talk to other students and google in their target language (I'm actually not very clear on this. I would have liked to have some of the assignments from the ARG in the Appendix, although the awesome hyperlinking in the article almost makes up for it).

I'm a little disappointed that they couldn't cook up something more awesome for their little study, game-wise, but I'm very excited that this research is happening at all. Something similar to this, like an MMORPG for foreign language learning, is basically my dream game. However, one of the things I would worry about in a language-learning MMO is that there would be a wiki and you could copy and paste your answers (i.e., the collaborative aspect of the game would actually encourage laziness instead of puzzle-solving). Although I suppose the programmers could introduce an element of randomness to quests so they wouldn't all be exactly the same.

I know this post was kind of long, but I plan to do more of them in the future (my goal is once a week). I'll label them all with the Academic Interlude thing, so if you're too busy you can skip over it (or would it help if I included a break, forcing RSS readers to go here to read the whole thing? I can't decide). Have you ever tried playing a foreign-language MMO? Do you think this kind of thing would be best for self-teaching or to augment school learning? I am happy to discuss these things.

Funday Friday: Let's Play Ancient Greek Punishment

Every Friday I'd like to highlight a short game. There's not really a language yet for shorter games ("browser game" seems inadequate), so let me know if you think of something better than "gamelette."

sorry this is just a screen capture and clicking will do nothing

Today's game is Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment. Not only can you learn a little about mythology, you can experience for yourself the sheer frustration of each punishment. All of them but Prometheus center around a frustrated goal, taken away at the last minute. Prometheus is a balance between prolonging the pain of having one's liver eaten and giving up.

These minigames (aha!) are different in that there is no way to win. They are an exercise in frustration, meant to be humorous. However, because of the title of the game, there is an expectation that the games will be torturous and unbeatable. So I think it shows that accurate player expectations are a good thing to have, especially when you are torturing players.