notes from underground

OK, so I have a well-documented love-hate relationship with the folks over in the Modern Culture and Media department. I want to hate them, but deep down, within the icy, granite bowels of their darkest, most deliberately obfuscated souls, they have some good ideas. Case in point: this paper, on Shadow of the Colossus, immediately irritates me by first off requiring a citation for the statement that game designers are artists, as if we need their permission, their endorsement, to be so! Add to that the simple fact that they’ve taken one of the most beautiful games I’ve played and broken it down into theoretical tripe, and you have a recipe for aggravation. That said, there is a quote in the article that I somewhat appreciate:

Scott Miller, […] co-creator of Max Payne, writes, ‘It’s time game designers grasp the power of creating games with emotional depth, […] and really – I mean REALLY – make them care about their game’s story’

Last night I played through part of Rainbow Six: Vegas II. In one level, your team fails to prevent hundreds of innocent hostages from being slaughtered by a chemical weapon. Here’s an instance where Miller’s point could have been taken more to heart. The fact that such a scene even exists in Vegas 2 puts the game a huge step above its much more traditional, linear and uncomplicated predecessor, but at no point in that level is they player made to feel that there is any hope of saving the poor souls inside.

Now, I don’t want to start an argument about the riskiness of creating psychologically traumatic situations in videogames. All I am saying is that for any game to make an impact on the art form (particularly a game in as formulaic a pantheon as Tom Clancy’s) beyond implementing more clever mechanics and better level design, we need to take more chances. Take risks with your players’ emotions. Taunt them with cake or something. The first time you take the cake away, they may cry. They may even slip up in their grief and get incinerated in a fire pit. But it’s a game. They’ll try again, and the second time, they will have learned something.

The folks I’ve met who have participated in Teach for America emphasized one thing about their experiences above all others: if you trust somebody to rise to a challenge—a kid, a gamer, whoever—they usually will. Even if the outcome of the story is predetermined, allow the player to think, just for a moment, that they have a chance to save those men and women. Let them sweat a bit.

Just a thought.