State of the FPS

I'm a big fan of shooters. A significant portion of my favourite games are first-person shooters: Metro 2033, the Half-Life series, Team Fortress 2, Metroid Prime, etc. Some of the worst games I've ever played are also FPS games. There are entire sub-genres I hate with a passion, and plenty of games that miss the point entirely.

In my opinion, the best FPS games are the ones that understand the strength of the first-person camera. A well-built first-person game is one of the most immersive entertainment experiences you can have - one that can make you feel the most like you're actually part of another world, rather than looking in or playing the puppet master.

State of the RPG

Modern Western RPGs are conflicted. Philosophy and mechanics are at odds with each other. A roleplaying game is ostensibly about shaping the characters and the story as a function of your choices, but the freedoms and limitations of many RPGs are shaped in such a way that they weaken the story or focus too much on the wrong elements to tell their story.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good RPG. I like building a character and seeing how different choices affect the story and the world. I have dozens of D&D characters and Guild Wars 2 builds I may never get to play. But I do feel that the RPG genre as a whole is having a crisis of focus.

The main issue I see is that many players and developers equate "freedom of choice" with "the ability to do anything you want at any time". I find it odd that a genre so focused on choice and consequences would make your choices so meaningless overall. If you can go anywhere at any time, you're not making meaningful choices. You're simply ticking boxes off the checklist.

Women and Gaming Culture

Comments are moderated. If your post contains any sexist or pro-harassment sentiment it will be deleted before it even hits the page, and no one will ever see it at all.

A few months back I was sadly not surprised to hear that women suffer a lot of abuse and harassment in the gaming world. What did shock me is that this abuse was widely defended as "part of the culture", and the chorus of "if you don't like it you should just leave". 

This is a subject that hasn't gone away and pisses me off more and more every time I hear about it. I have female friends who refuse to talk to me in-game because they don't want to deal with all the crap they get just for opening their mouths.

I'm going to address the second common argument first because it's marginally less moronic.

Mobile Gaming

Mobile gaming has become kind of a big thing recently. And I finally have a phone that will let me play those games. So I'm all over mobile gaming, right?

Well...

Here's my problem with mobile games in general. They're designed to be played in short sessions on the go, and have only the touchscreen for control input. Designing for short sessions means quick, relatively simple levels that don't hold my interest in a longer session. Touchscreen controls mean either you're obscuring a large portion of the display just to be able to play the game, or very simple controls that require little or occasional input.

So when my favourite games are rich, long, and complex, you'll see my problem with mobile gaming in general.

Mechanics and Narrative: MMOs

MMOs are a bit of a special case in how the game tells a story. Most MMOs are also RPGs, so I won't retread that ground. But one area where MMOs excel is telling the story of a world, rather than a handful of characters.

MMOs tend to have absolutely massive worlds to explore, with hundreds or thousands of non-player characters to talk to and hundreds of locations to visit. With all the effort that goes into creating this kind of world, you end up with enough lore to fill several books.

Of course, most people wouldn't actually want to read those books. Most people just don't have the interest or the attention span to read an entire history of a world, with very little to relate to in terms of personal stories. It's the same reason why most people wouldn't sit down and read a history of their own country.

Mechanics and Narrative: RTS

As a disclaimer before I start, I don't play many RTS games. I played Star Wars: Empire at War extensively, but only against the AI. I've played Heroes of Might and Magic III. I've tried Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, Starcraft, Achron, and a few Command and Conquer games. That's pretty much it. So this article won't be extremely long or in-depth.

But there's a reason for that. I like games with good stories, and as a genre, RTS games are terrible at telling stories.

Mechanics and Narrative: RPGs

I've covered horror and FPS, so now let's take a look at mechanics and narrative in RPGs.

Roleplaying games typically work a lot harder to construct a complex narrative than other video game genres. They also typically tend to focus a lot on the player's choices and how they affect the characters or story. But there's a balance here: giving the player too much freedom weakens the narrative, while not giving them enough makes a game that's supposedly about freedom and choice feel pretty restrictive.

Personally, I have a lot of problems with how many big RPGs handle choice - I find that they simultaneously offer too much and too little freedom. The very principle at the core of the RPG genre is the root of almost every issue.

Mechanics and Narrative: FPS

Last time we looked at how narrative and mechanics are intertwined (or not) in horror games, and today we'll take a look at first-person shooters.

At first glance the mechanics of FPS games don't seem to be terribly linked to the narrative except for the fact that you shoot things, which means that the story tends to be about shooting things. That's pretty much a given - they are called first-person shooters, after all. It's kind of like saying that horror games are about scary things.

The interesting thing about FPS games is the camera angle. 

The FPS camera simulates your character's eyes. You see what the character sees, from their perspective, and control where they look. The strength of this camera angle is the sense of immersion it can provide - you're not following some guy around, you are that guy. So, generally speaking, the FPS mechanics that have the greatest impact on the narrative are the ones that affect your sense of immersion.

Mechanics and Narrative: Horror

Horror games face a tricky conundrum: how do you make the player feel vulnerable and scared - and how do you do it without making the game seem unfair?

The most obvious method is to use darkness. Most people are scared of the dark at some point in their life, and for many people that fear takes a long time to fade. For some, it never does. The reason is simple: we can't see in the dark. Our intelligence and imagination are a weakness here: when we can't see what's there, anything we imagine could be there. For this reason, most horror games put you in the dark and give you a limited source of light - a flashlight or lantern, for example. 

Of course, just because everyone does it doesn't mean that everyone does it well.

Mechanics and Narrative

Yesterday I looked at how video game genres are defined, and how those genres tend to depend on the game's mechanics first and foremost. But game mechanics aren't just tied up in genre - they're also related to the narrative itself.

Video games are often used as an interactive storytelling medium. Granted, they don't have to be - see Tetris, Solitaire, etc - but the vast majority of games that are being produced now are intended to tell a story that the player is a part of in some way.

Given that storytelling is a major or even primary focus of modern games, it's important to have the game's mechanics - how it plays - reflect the story or themes of the narrative. If you link mechanics to narrative, you can tell a much stronger story by amplifying the content.

If that's a little abstract for you, here's a more concrete example. When you watch a horror movie, much of the story takes place in the dark. There are exceptions, of course, but the point is that just about every human being has been afraid of the dark at some point in life. Even if darkness isn't directly important to the story, it's still used to make you feel claustrophobic and nervous, reinforcing the scary elements of the plot by trying to make you feel what the characters feel.

A good video game plays the way a movie looks, if that makes any sense. A game about choices should offer the player a lot of choice: character customization, branching dialogues, and alternate endings. A game that explores themes of morality should include a way to track the player's actions and alter the story accordingly. A horror game should include systems that make the player feel vulnerable, claustrophobic, or isolated.

For this segment of Industry In Review, I'll have a few articles on a selection of game genres, discussing if and how they integrate storytelling with their mechanics. First up will be horror!

What is a video game genre?

Here's a weird question you may not have considered before: why are game genres different from film or literary genres?

You'll notice that video game genres tend to be defined by how you play them. You have first-person shooters, roleplaying games, real-time strategy, arcade games, and other similar classifications. These all address either the control scheme or the core mechanics of the game - FPS describes a game where you shoot people from a certain camera angle, RPG describes a game where you develop the personality and characteristics and story of one or more characters, RTS describes a game where you control many units in a large-scale battle from a top-down perspective, etc. 

What's important to notice is that these designations ignore the content and mood of the story - first-person shooters are described as FPS games first, regardless of whether they're sci-fi, historical fiction, horror, funny or serious, oppressive or action-packed.

Industry In Review

It's been a little over a year since I started reviewing video games. In that year alone I have played and reviewed 74 games, and that doesn't include everything I've played in the years before I started reviewing. My Steam library is currently sitting at 173 games (under a particular counting method), and I have a couple of shelves full of Nintendo and retail PC games. I play over 1,000 hours of video games every year.

I wouldn't call myself an expert by any means. Due to personal preference there are genres I mostly ignore - RTS, MMO, racing, sports, mobile/handheld. But I do think that I'm in a reasonable position to make at least some comments about the state of the industry and where I'd like to see it go.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be posting articles with the "Industry In Review" tag, exploring genre, mechanics, and some social aspects of gaming, and to wrap things up and bring the ideas together, I'll post some ideas for games that I've been mentally working on for a long time, but don't do me any good just sitting there.

Of course, I'll try to keep up with Wednesday reviews as well.

And here's a list of the Industry In Review articles as they update:

• Sep. 27: What is a video game genre?
• Sep. 28: Mechanics and narrative
• Sep. 29: Mechanics and narrative: horror
• Oct. 1: Mechanics and narrative: FPS
• Oct. 3: Mechanics and narrative: RPG 
• Oct. 4: Mechanics and narrative: RTS
• Oct. 5: Mechanics and narrative: MMO
• Oct. 6: Mobile gaming