It’s been a while since I’ve had a game I kept going back to as much as Splinter Cell : Conviction. In fact, I think the last one was GTA Vice City. It puzzles me that a lot of people keep saying that this installment is “more about action than infiltration.”

To me it’s the best by far, thanks to the The Mark & Execute system.

In the original recipe, the stealth gameplay was strictly enforced, to the point of absurdity: It was impossibly hard to shoot someone, and being discovered with your hand in the metaphorical cookie jar almost invariably resulted in Fisher bleeding out on the concrete – even when facing a single, isolated enemy.

I suppose the contrived difficulty was how the developers chose to force the players down a purely stealth path. In the end, it feels unnatural in terms of narrative (Fisher is a super-duper agent who… doesn’t seem to be able to dispatch a single enemy?), but also gameplay (the player feels incredibly potent in some situations, but utterly powerless in others). Also, I’ve never been a fan of stealth games where you can pick out guards one by one without their friends noticing anything. In my world, shit is bound to happen.

Now, fast-forward to SC: Conviction. Detractors have complained that the Mark & Execute ruins the spirit of the game. I can only agree to that if it’s used extensively. When used by a player willing to “play the game,” it makes perfect sense and fixes the aforementioned gameplay/narrative disconnect.

Specifically, I use it as a contingency plan: Say I intend to take down this one guard, but notice two others chatting not far from there. I mark both of them just in case, then perform a silent take-down of some kind on my primary target. If the pair doesn’t see me, then it’s onto the next one and I’m playing the way I would have in SC1. If I get spotted, I don’t die in an utterly absurd way. This strategic approach is (to me) just as important when playing a stealth game than say, creeping in the shadows.

In the end, I think designers always try to create a focused experience – and they should. But sometimes, giving the players some leeway instead of building strict constraints right into the game mechanics can add to the mix. A lot of players are willing to “work” to step into their character’s shoes, which results in a greater involvement.

Which is why I’ve always thought the whole our-protagonist-doesn’t-talk-so-the-player-can-relate-better was bullshit.

Found on Gamasutra:

Conscience Is But A Word: Why videogames need better villains, by Xander Markham.

Great article. Plenty of valid points are also made in the comment, but I’ll specifically second Jeffrey Wilson’s opinion: bad guys who do evil stuff just for the sake of being bad guys are flat out uninteresting  (and I’ll add, those who do it simply for their own good can get boring pretty quickly).

The audience needs to know enough in order to connect with them: understand what they want and why they want it, and then reject it.

A lot of people have been asking about why they’d put the boring stuff in Heavy Rain. I think the goal is simply to lower the Emotional Baseline: most games are all about the shooting (or the action of some kind). Now there might be some more subtlety in the storyline, but it’s usually told through cinematics or non-interactive means, so every time the player does have the controller in hand, he’s always right there in the middle of the action, killing dozens, business as usual. By resetting the Emotional Baseline to a lower (mundane) level, the developers made it so that when something out of the ordinary happens, it does feel like something out of the ordinary to the player.

Or at least I think. Can somebody get me a PS3 over here ?!

It’s actually done only every single time in movies: rare are the ones that start with action right off the bat; it always begins with the hero living his ordinary, everyday life, right before the terrorists/aliens/bad guys show up.

Are you scared of cinematics? I know I have been for years.

I’m not talking here about whether or not cinematics are a valid narrative medium in video games (although it’s a fascinating topic), but about the convenience of cinematics for gamers; when you need to pause a movie, you simply press pause, no second thoughts.

What if you’re playing a game?

Most cinematics are used to relay information, whether it’s mission-critical (briefings) or simply interesting. If an interruption occurs, you have to ask yourself:

• Am I in a cinematic or any kind of scripted event?

• If I press escape, what will happen on this particular game? Skip the sequence, or send me to the menu?

• What if it escapes it, can I restart it in any way? Or is the same information available in-game?

Which doesn’t exactly register as a “reflex action”.

Most games don’t offer the possibility to pause or rewind a cinematic, which violates a general user interface rule in software design: the software is supposed  to be forgiving to the user, especially when the response to a particular command (such as pressing ‘escape’ in a jiffy) doesn’t have the same effect everywhere.

So far, sticking a large “Interrupt me at your own risk” sign on my back has worked for me, but this can’t go on – close ones find it aggressive.

Game developer Infinity Ward has got to be running out of storage space for all the awards Call of Duty 4 has brought home! More than a year after its release, the game has just been awarded in  3 different categories at the UK-based BAFTA video-game ceremony, including Story and Character. Even though some might find surprising to reward a FPS with this distinction, I think it is some well-deserved recognition: writing in video games is still at its infancy and people are debating back and forth on what influence storytelling should have on the development of a game.

And in comes COD4, first and foremost a competitive shooter targeted at hardcore gamers; 10 years from now, most people will remember it for the dozens (or hundreds) of hours they spent playing online, and all those war stories they used to tell their buddies.

And yet , the solo campaign was a note-taking exercise for me, as it is a reference of what storytelling should be in shooters: it strikes a perfect balance between gameplay and story. Indeed, the later is remarkably non-intrusive: most of the story is unveiled either through briefings during load times or with in-game dialogs during combat downtimes; at no time is the player pulled out of the action to be briefed on something he might not care about – the Holy Grail of videogame storytelling.

When it comes to characters, a lot of work has been done on each member of the ensemble cast (5+ recurring characters): each of them has a tone, a personality and some quality voice acting to support them; with their destiny tied to the larger events at play, tension and drama remains very present until the end. I’ll take for example the chopper pilot that gets shot down at some point: I barely know her (in game space), but the urgency in her voice urges me to haul ass to the crash site.

Congratulation to writer Jesse Stern, as well as to the Infinity Ward team!

Now, nobody in particular said it was – that I know of – but with the increasing number of talks regarding emergent gameplay and freedom in games, I thought you might think so.

Just let me point out two of the best games I’ve ever played: Call of Duty 4 and Portal. Both were critically acclaimed, receiving numerous and various amounts of “Game of the Year”, “Most Innovative Design”, “Best Writing”, and “Best New Game Mechanic” awards (I’m probably even missing some). And yet, you can’t tell me of game that’s more linear than these two. So what have we there?

Historically, games were made by programmers and artists: they had an idea, tried it out and got it out the door if it worked for their friends. But of course, no matter how skilled they are at what they do, they’re not necessarily skilled at the craft of making games.

So what ways are there to expand the world of possible in a game? I see two of them:

• The cheap one: you write a game based on smart interoperable modules; an AI that’s responsive to the environment, a well-integrated physic system, a set of user inputs that lets the player free enough, etc. That’s how you get a sandbox-typed game, from which comes emergent gameplay. Deus Ex, GTA, there are plenty of other examples, as it is the easiest way to increase the quality of your game, because it uses the resources companies already have at hand: programmers (hence the “cheap”, which wasn’t meant to be pejorative).

• The elaborated one: you elevate the craft of making games to an art. You have people that are aware of the narrative technics specific to games; you integrate your linear storyline with your game mechanics. You might end up with something incredibly scripted and linear, but if it’s as immersive as COD4, how is that a bad thing?

I think this more elaborated way of making games is still a very young one, but let’s get ready for more: the game industry is maturing, and this is a sign of it.

PS: On a side note, if you’d ask me to name a company that’s doing this well, I’d have to go with Valve; they have a lots of interesting publications on this topic over here, notably Stylization With a Purpose and Integrating Narrative and Design.