I’m working on this problem for a design doc I’m writing and am leaning towards a (ultimately biased) system that keeps track of things carefully to award a more realistic number for peoples actions, mostly prompted by how fake score systems in multiplayer FPS are most of the time. Kill Death ratio, one used by a lot of players (this being a socially propogated idea that has now been taken up by devs for stat tracking) and now games, isn’t a very good measure either.

An interesting analysis of game audio in World of Warcraft (with specific focus on the Battlegrounds). Here’s my critique, which I think is focused on the sort of simplifying distinctions a lot of game studies people make (especially in assuming a sort of average player when referring to the player). Part of my difficulty in critiquing this piece may be that I have limited World of Warcraft experience and therefore cannot contribute deeper examples from my own experience (however I have played it enough to understand the basics).

“Players do not need to know how a specific named spell sounds like — it is enough to understand whether one is being attacked, or a friendly avatar is attacking an opponent (Jørgensen, 2007a)”

That may be true of the average players experience, but I’d bet there are WoW players out there who gain an advantage from being able to tell such things. And if not audible, then certainly the visual clues of what spell is being cast are identifiable by players. And the difference between such spells is integral to countering them (dispel, heal, remove curse, etc.) or at least understanding how they will change the combat situation. It is this ignorance of the depths of gameplay and player experience that often makes me annoyed by academic game studies.

“When a fanfare signals the assault of a base in AB at the same time as the player is engaged in defending another base, the player automatically groups and filters all present sounds according to relevance. The player is therefore allowed to ignore the fanfare and attend to the most urgent sounds, which in this situation are responsive sounds from his avatar and the interface, and urgency sounds related to the enemies he is fighting. However, if the player is in a less urgent situation defending a base, the fanfare may move into the foreground compared to responsive interface sounds. This also explains why the functional roles of sounds are judged with different urgency in different situations even though the sound is exactly the same.”

Here again the intelligent player will likely register, even in the midst of heavy fighting, the sound that means another base is being assaulted, updating his mental conception of the game with the knowledge that there are enemies assaulting the other base, and responding appropriately tactically (perhaps by running over to the other base after finishing his current fight, perhaps by running over there now to help, knowing the other situation is more critical). It’s possible of course that he may not register the sound given all the other sounds he’s paying attention to; here the foreground-background distinction makes more sense (although I’d argue it has to do as much with fundamental attentional limits than a conscious choice)

“Gameworld generated sounds, however, are non-dynamic by having no such direct relevance. Interpreting a sound as generated by the gameworld, the player dismisses the sound as having secondary relevance for his choice of actions. An example of gameworld generated sounds in Battlegrounds is the sounds of wood chopping at the lumber mill resource. The sources of these are non-interactable non-player characters, and the inclusion of the sound has no operational function besides identifying the lumber mill and supporting the sense of presence in the gameworld. It is, however, important for the player to be able to identify these as gameworld generated sounds in order to understand that they have no proactive or reactive relevance for his actions. Having no direct relevance for gameplay, gameworld generated sounds are left out of the analysis.”

What a surprise! These sounds, like every other property of the game, matter. They contribute to background noise which may make the above-mentioned interpretation of other sounds more difficult. (even if selectively ignored, there is probably some neuron dedicated to processing taken up by ignoring sounds, though perhaps at less cost than of distinguishing them) There are also gameworld sounds which do have relevance: the plane flying over in de_train in Counter-strike 1.6 which indicates locational shifts (or the lightning in de_aztec which does the same). I am nitpicking here, but there are perhaps situations in which even the wood chopping has direct relevance to players’ actions. A blinded character (or player) could pick out his location in relation to it (as he can with any repeating sound that fades with distance and has a rather definite direction). And I do think, however selective hearing and memory, that the player remembers locations in some way in relation to all their properties; the lumbermill without the woodchopping would not be quite as well remembered and thus played in.

In this case the usability is not fixed, every one of these possible consequences depends again on very specific details of game situation which are interpreted by the player. While these may be relatively realistic in a very general case, there are often situations where a DoT means death and direct damage may not, or where the other player being attacked is more important to the outcome of the fight than you are (or where you are healing him and thus keeping him alive is important), etc. etc. blah blah blah.

“The priority levels should not be understood as absolutes, but as different points of a continuum, not least because context decides the interpretation of a signal’s degree of urgency. Negative notifications could therefore also be seen as part of this continuum. However, notifications distinguish themselves from urgency messages by not demanding an evaluation on part of the player.”

He saves a little face here in his explanation of the table, but again underestimates how much player interpretation is going on. If the fire mage hits your teammate for 11000 damage instead of the 6000 he has been hitting for, something is up. And that something is again a relevant piece of information which may be critical in winning a fight against the frost mage.

“Ally generated sounds have no proactive or reactive relation to player actions, and provide therefore notification information to the player. Even though allies are important in accomplishing the final goal of a Battleground, ally actions rarely have direct influence on an individual player’s actions.”

This guy doesn’t really get it, does he? Teamwork is all about paying attention to your allies actions and reacting appropriately in order to win. And teamwork is what wins games in many cases. Maybe Kristine Jørgensen plays Battlegrounds selfishly and unaware of her teammates, but despite a large population of players who play this way, there are many for whom teamwork is a virtue constantly practiced.

“An example is audio produced when allies mount their horses or move around. The most important informative role of such sounds is to provide spatial information, by informing that allies are present.”

Nope. The difference of capability between a mounted and non-mounted character is huge. An ally mounting thus indicates an important state change which will register in the players actions, if he is a good teammate. I don’t see how this is spatial information, as the presence or absence (and specific location) of allies is also key to what sort of actions a player undertakes.

“Another important point is that while visual information can be shut out by closing the eyes, audio has no equivalent shut-down mechanism.”

Turning off the speakers, playing music, etc. Many game players, to signal that they don’t have the advantage of audio, change their in-game names to indicate it. (ex. [nosound] playername or [music]playername)

The conclusion of the article really hits home some of the fundamental distinctions she is making that I don’t agree with.

“Thus, learning what generates a specific sound is learning important gameplay elements, in the same way as learning how to play a game is learning what the different auditory signals mean.”

Seperating these two functions is strange. Learning a game is a continuous process that involves association of audio and visual. Continued association of sounds and visuals lead to a model of results which is applied when playing; learning the meaning of a sound is not independent from learning what generates it (and there are intermediate steps in the continuous process of learning which sounds mean what). Essentially I think this whole article could be much more nuanced, but presents an interesting overview of how game audio works.

On the other front my reading so far in game studies/play theory is really good and I’ve finally found a dude I agree with: Torben Grodal. His approach to games and narrative really mirrors my thinking on the subject so far, but we’ll see how that develops as my course of study continues.

From: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4243

I’m taking this quote out of context because he’s a talent scout for the industry and obviously trying to burnish it’s image, but it illustrates a common fallacy that people make when talking about games. I’d like to name this the Freedom Fallacy in honor of our great nation’s founding principles (oh wait, it took us nearly 100 years to abolish slavery). This one is right up there with the Immersion Fallacy in my list of fallacies that even people in the industry make. There’s the sentiment in the game industry that we should be giving the players what they want all the time and that what they want is more control and more choices. That the game space has no place for games that are like films.

It take a second of looking at what’s on shelves to prove this wrong. JRPGs are extremely popular and up until a few years ago didn’t even change character art when equipped with a new piece of armor. Most games have extensive cutscenes, which, get this, are little non-interactive breaks in the interactive action. Metal Gear Solid is a 3 hour long movie interspersed with game sections. And hand most average consumers Garry’s Mod and they’ll quit out of boredom or confusion in an hour or two. Consumers don’t want freedom so much as they want their tastes pandered to in a way that guides them along. Most games fall into this middle segment between the extreme of Garry’s Mod at one end and an interactive movie at the other. There is a lot of room in interactive entertainment for things that aren’t very gamey; interactive movies with good and slightly deep interaction involved should be one locus of industry expansion (see Indigo Prophecy, any old school adventure game, etc.).

I also find that this mindset is the reason the industry panders to the lowest common denominator. ‘We’ll just give them what they want’ results in games like BMXXX. And it’s ironic that he distances games from film when the industry borrows so much from Hollywood. I think the industry needs director-types (or auteurs, however much its a BS concept) making games just as much as teams of collaborators. Suda51 and others remain the exception rather than the norm despite their outstanding successes.While I think it will be a while before things (technology, economics, preconceptions) even out, I’d hope that people would believe in the power of authorship in the games space given how well it works in other mediums.

Arguably you can’t make games’ version of Citizen Kanewithout the game industry’s version of Orson Welles.

I use horror games as my example because the connection is obvious: a scary monster in a movie appears scary and threatens the main character (whom we have empathy/sympathy/identification for/with) to create effective tension, whereas in a game the monster must both appear scary and be scary in game mechanical terms. A zombie with 1 hit point will not create fear in the player.

When I talk about limitations in the  interactive medium I mean how do you describe love in game mechanical terms. The very nature of games is dependent on the fact that we know what is happening isn’t real (read Rules of Play if you haven’t already), but the model we have to work with is. Since interaction is a property of real life shared with games, and games always hang on their unreality, game interactions have to hit a narrow sweet spot to generate emotion. Games are too concrete to be metaphorical. More realistic graphics can make this problem worse. It’s kind of ironic that fantasy and science fiction have so dominated the medium when it is the medium most true to life in many ways. Of course escapism is the reason we play games rather than live life, but there’s room for documentary, real drama, and real meaning once we open up the play space and explore the multitude of possible interactions.

bland, uninspired gameplay. My experience was colored by playing it on hard mode, which essentially meant that I ran out of ammo all the time and just had to let myself respawn at the vita-chamber and spam magic until everything was dead, but even if I had had ammo the guns weren’t very fun to use. I have a feeling that it was better on easy or medium, but nonetheless shallow. About halfway through the game I started running out of ammunition all the time and just decided to stop saving and start using the automatic respawn machine (called the vitachamber ingame). While the vitachamber reduced my use of quicksave/reload, ultimately I was having more fun when I was using quicksaves and actually conserving ammo. After the initial “new game” headrush I quickly became bored with the gunplay, which was too inaccurate for skill to take much account. The use of powers to lay traps wasn’t enough of a focus and most of the abilities were generic “do damage” types. Hacking was quite fun and an actually decent use of minigames, but didn’t seem to be that important to overall progress. The character system was annoyingly mysterious; there was no way to tell what powers were good or what expansion slots to pick. Waiting for Big Daddies to have little sisters around was also quite annoying, not to mention that on hard mode they take your entire inventory and then some to kill.

What really undoes Bioshock is not so much its weak gameplay as the final boss and ending. All along the binary moral choice has been weighted to reward dogooders more than evildoers (Raph Koster, anyone?). But the final decision is not yours; you must kill your enemy rather than spare him or rule at his side. Why make a game about moral choice and then take it all away at the most significant decision?

7/10, just for the art and story (up until the final battle)

For now:

Reading Kotaku is a great way to start hating both the game industry and games journalism. They’re pretty much fanboys of the worst sort (the ones who don’t think they’re fanboys) and the only thing worthwhile about their site is the comments section (sometimes good, other times filled with retarded console warriors) and their frequency of updates. As the antidote to IGN, GameSpot and whatever else they are nearly as bad as the poison. The Escapist is sometimes good, RockPaperShotgun I should read more of, but overall I don’t think a good “games are art” journalism rag has sprung up, partly because there isn’t demand for one. Let me just throw in a little Metacritic hate here because apparently thats the standard by which publishers/developers judge their critical success. Obviously review scores are important, but the reliance on them as  a way of measuring your game is silly. Game reviewers judge against the industry standard which is generally crap. I’m not saying that game reviewers should start calling all games crap and comparing their stories to Hollywood movies or novels (rather unfavorably, of course), but that critics could be a little harsher, expect a little more than just a change of art style or a new level of polish of gameplay that’s been done to death. Strike a balance between pretension and the industry’s low standards for itself (or its economic realities, mostly). The reason to be slightly mean is that despite those economic realities the industry could still be making games at a creative level leaps and bounds above what it is. In discovering the casual user and his $$$ the industry still hasn’t made a game for everyman that’s truly good, and the Wii gathers dust in the corner. Pleasing both the hardcore and casual users while making a true next-gen experience is a great pitch to a publisher but doesn’t tickles the senses in reality. [/endrant]