I’m finally finished with my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree, so I’m out of excuses for not  posting more. I plan on getting back to my revision series that I started back in June, but first I want to put some stuff up that I worked on during the program.

One of my graduation requirements was to deliver a thirty minute lecture during my final residency the week before last. I decided I wanted to introduce my interest in video games as a form of storytelling, but wasn’t sure how that would be received by the program. Luckily, once I explained my idea to the program administrators and the faculty member, Robin Lippincott, whose novel I intended to use in the lecture, everyone seemed interested.

The lecture went well, though I was quite anxious about giving one to an audience of my colleagues and faculty members instead of a group of rowdy high school students. I read straight from my lecture notes, so it probably wasn’t the most engaging experience, but I used a looped video of Passage playthroughs so everyone would have something to watch. I also passed around my iTouch to allow everyone a few moments to play the game.

I used Corvus Elrod’s definitions for the game terminology in the lecture. I’m sure there could be some discussion on how I explained game dynamics vs. mechanics, and my interpretation of the game itself, but everyone seemed to understand the explanation. There was a moment at the end of the lecture when I asked for questions that I was sure no one had any to ask because they were so thoroughly confused, but then the hands went up, and I ended up having to talk to many people after the lecture. Hopefully I didn’t lead them astray.

So without further ado, here is my lecture, including awkward pre-written jokes that mostly inspired laughter (though it may have been forced and sympathetic! The one involving pirates and ballet dancers was met with silence):

Graduation Lecture – Travis Megill

But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.

Since I’ve recently started learning Inform 7, it seemed like a good idea to focus on an IF design that incorporates denouement. This design is beyond my abilities at the moment, but hopefully as I continue to learn the software, I’ll attempt coding this at some point.

Denouement as gameplay is the challenge for this month, so I decided to skip the other elements of dramatic structure and try to design a game that exists purely to unravel a plot. The player starts at the end of a high school dance, as the final notes of the last slow dance fade away. The lights turn on and the DJ shuts off the disco ball. Students, chaperones, and the few odd college kids still dating high school girls head for the exit.

All that remains are piles of glitter, scraps of shiny ribbon, and the aftermath of a complex web of teenage love, betrayal, and heartbreak. A cluster of girls comfort a crying friend in the corner. A young teacher holding ice against a black eye is glaring at a football player leaning against the doors to the locker room. The school principal is scrubbing graffiti off the wall behind the visiting team’s hoop. And so on…

The player exists outside of this situation, and is even described as “the player” within the game. The player’s inventory is located inside a large trashcan. The janitor, tired of kids and eager to get home, began sweeping up all the crap under the gym bleachers during the final dance. The trash consists of a torn love letter scribbled during Algebra class, two promise rings with matching initials, an unopened package of birth control pills, an empty can of spray paint, a deflated basketball with white powder inside, and “The End,” a mysterious object that the player can’t use until he sends each of the characters home for the night.

Everything has already happened, but it’s the player’s job to decide how the characters got there and how their nights will end. This may seem like a mystery game, but instead of figuring out what happened, the player will unravel the plot by setting up relationships between each of the characters and the various items in the trashcan. Here’s a relatively simple example of three commands the player might enter:

Jessica liked John, John gave Jessica promise ring, Jessica loves John.

After setting up the relationship, the player can ask each character about items or other characters, and examine characters and items for additional description. The information given is determined by the commands, so the player controls each character’s final state.

The easiest denouement for the game would involve pairing up all of the characters, and associating each pair with one of the items, but the solutions would become more interesting if the player complicates the web of relationships (also, undoubtedly, making the game increasingly difficult to program). At any time, the player will be able to use a history command with a character’s name or an item to see what relationships have been set up, and will also have the ability to erase the histories and start over. The order the commands are entered will affect the results.

So a potential web of relationships could go something like this:

Principal disliked John, John gave Principal basketball, Principal loved John, Principal found spraypaint, Principal hates John.

Using like/love, dislike/hate to indicate level of emotion will affect the outcome. After entering the commands, the player can ask the principal about John, the basketball, the powder, or the graffiti and the principal would respond with the appropriate sentences:

“I’ve always thought John was a bad apple, but he did a good thing bringing that deflated basketball to me.”

“Of course I had to find out what the powder was. It could have been dangerous. So I took a taste and suddenly I felt like a college student again.”

“I haven’t been that high since I spray-painted genitalia on the mascot statue the night before Homecoming.”

“You can tell I haven’t painted in years. That looks more like a peeled banana than…uh…just wait until I get that delinquent John in my office on Monday morning.”

Obviously different outcomes would occur if other relationships were set up (present tense would denote the character’s final emotional state):

John loved Jessica, John gave Eddie love letter, Jessica hates John, Jessica gave John unopened birth control, John hates Jessica, John found basketball.

So players could set up all kinds of romantic and tragic endings for the characters (apparently I prefer tragic, or comic?). Once all the character histories are set up, the player can either ask each character about the outcome, or simply examine “The End” object to watch the histories unfold in order. Based on which order the characters were given commands, the denouement could change, with one history affecting the next, which would build to a final conclusion (if feasible).

Since each of the characters positions are set as the dance ends (the falling action is complete), the player’s options are limited to a certain extent. The amount of back story available to the player by examining the scene and the characters before setting up relationships could be altered based on whatever constraints are needed to actually program the game. The player’s ultimate goal is to provide a denouement for the scene set at the opening of the game. For the game to end, all of the conflicts suggested by the scene must be resolved.

Hopefully this counts as both denouement and gameplay. I’m sure it could be argued that the player is setting up the entire plot, but the initial scene would be set up in a way that both allows the player a certain amount of freedom and also suggests a dramatic structure that simply needs to be finished.

Please take a look at the other entries submitted to the Round Table this month using the dropdown box below.

Arkham Asylum is a hellish place–a collection of every stereotype that exists about treating the mentally ill. Electricity used as punishment, violent, inhuman patients, and a focus on captivity vs. treatment. Batman’s job is to make sure all of the villains contained in the Gothic structure stay there, where they can’t hurt anyone, even themselves. For a game released in 2009, it contains ideas that seem archaic, but no one seems to be bothered by them.

I made some statements on Twitter the other night about feeling uncomfortable while playing Arkham Asylum because of its depiction of mental illness. My friend Justin Keverne and I debated for a while, and then he suggested we write about it in a longer form. He wrote a post about the issue at his blog, Groping the Elephant, which I’ll be referencing. I’m not interested in comparing Arkham Asylum’s treatment of the mentally ill to Resident Evil 5. That doesn’t seem very productive, and my previous comment about Batman being “worse” than RE5 was based entirely on the fact that the enemies in that game are zombies, while Arkham Asylum doesn’t have that excuse. The only thing that makes Batman’s enemies inhuman is their mental illness.

Justin says that “the history of the treatment of the mentally ill has not been consistently just or humane, [but] it does not carry the same associated cultural cachet so played upon in those initial trailers for Resident Evil 5.” While I don’t want to make any comparisons between racism and how people with mental illness are treated, I think there is a significant “cultural cachet” associated with mental illness that is tragic because it isn’t recognized and brought up for discussion nearly as often as race, probably because those suffering from severe mental illness are in no position to defend themselves, and people with less severe forms of mental illness are ashamed of it and don’t want to talk about their experiences. There’s a tendency to associate mental illness with only its severe forms, while illnesses like depression and anxiety, which almost everyone deals with at one time or another, are ignored. Arkham Asylum does a very poor job of addressing the stigma of mental illness by contributing to the myth that people experiencing it are “other.”

Batman doesn’t kill, but he beats the patients of Arkham Asylum into submission so they can be returned to their cells. He’s a hero because he keeps the streets of Gotham City clear of “normal” criminals (though many of them are possibly suffering from mental illness) like the enemy types imported from Blackgate, Gotham City’s correctional facility, as well as those admitted to the asylum. The illnesses the villains have in the game are never identified, they’re just “crazy,” a term that stigmatizes mental illness. One of the enemy types is simply called, “lunatic.” Why doesn’t the game identify what these people are suffering from? Probably because it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying to repeatedly punch and kick an enemy type called, “John, a person suffering from bipolar disorder,” or “Jeff, a person suffering from schizophrenia.” This may seem ridiculous to bring up, after all, it’s “just a Batman game,” but the same kind of stigma is attached to people in the real world, and isolates people with these diseases.

My discomfort with the game would not be alleviated by giving Batman a stun dart to eliminate these enemies. The entire environment the game takes place in contributes to the stigma of mental illness, and lacks any sort of depth or commentary that the comics may or may not supply (I haven’t read them). I’m also not satisfied with the argument that Batman’s violence is simply self-defense. His attacks are not intended for self-defense, they’re intended to harm, whether the victim is listed as “unconscious” when he’s disabled or not. The action sequences would be much less entertaining if Batman only used approved methods of self-defense to subdue his opponents. I rarely let the enemy approach me and attack first, to make sure that he didn’t just want a hug. Instead, I threw a razor sharp Batarang at the patient to knock him to the floor, and then pounced on his back and slammed his head against the concrete floor. The distinction between patients from Arkham and the criminals brought in from Blackgate is meaningless because the player’s approach to neutralizing them is the same.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is not alone in its disturbing depiction of mental illness. In Condemned, Ethan Thomas brutually dispatches violent homeless people, many of them may have a mental illness. Even Psychonauts, one of my favorite games, has an area where Raz “cures” various characters of their mental illnesses by solving puzzles in their minds, a hopelessly naive method of treatment for someone suffering from a severe mental illness. The paranoia exhibited by Boyd, the security guard at the asylum, is logical and easily fixed. Other characters simply need help overcoming an issue in their past, and magically their problems disappear. But at least Psychonauts attempts to de-stigmatize the characters suffering from mental illness, and Raz is trying to help them instead of keep them within the asylum.

I’m not interested in making people feel guilty for playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, or stirring up some controversy to make people avoid playing it. The game simply presents an opportunity to bring up an issue that doesn’t get enough attention. I plan to continue enjoying the fantasy of inhabiting the character of Batman, and would recommend the game to others. I would suggest, however, that anyone interested in finding out more about the stigma of mental illness visit NAMI’s website for more information.

My game design idea for this month’s Round Table addresses mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, and the ways it dehumanizes the person suffering from it. I initially intended to deal with something that wasn’t as sensitive to me personally, and at first, I couldn’t identify anything that I both had insight into, and felt strongly about. Sometimes, however, the most troubling issues are so close that they are easy to overlook.

Mental illness is definitely a taboo subject in our culture, though many of us will experience some degree of it during our lives. People experiencing mental illness are often discriminated against, both blatantly and in countless other more subtle ways. People dealing with serious mental illness are often feared and isolated, even by their own families. A large portion of the homeless population suffers from undiagnosed or untreated mental illness. Unfortunately, because of the nature of many serious mental illnesses, the people experiencing the diseases are unable to even comprehend that they are sick.

Schizophrenia is particularly misunderstood in popular culture, where people experiencing the disease are often depicted as violent murderers, or are said to be “schizophrenic”, but are actually experiencing multiple personality disorder. The word “schizophrenic” itself is misused to describe things that have very little to do with the actual disease. I wanted to attempt a game design that humanizes someone with schizophrenia instead of trivializing the disease.

My family has a history of mental illness. Most of my family members, including myself, deal with depression and anxiety. My uncle was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager. The fear of, and fascination with, serious mental illness is something I’ve dealt with for much of my life.

The short story collection I’m working on explores various facets of mental illness and the way it affects a family over three generations. It is based on my grandmother’s life, and her influence on two sets of brothers: my father and uncle, and my brother and me. I decided to use one of the stories as a model for my game design, to see if I could convey the meaning of the story through game mechanics instead of words.

The story describes a mother visiting her son at his apartment. The son suffers from schizophrenia, and the mother feels a lot of guilt for the way his life has turned out. She expresses that guilt through jealousy of the psychiatric workers that care for her son. She feels like their responsibility for her son represents her failure as a mother, so she tries to clean his apartment and projects her guilt onto others. My goal with the game design is to have the player explore the relationship between mother and son through gameplay, and to discover the characters, their relationship, and their conflict without revealing anything directly.

The game uses a single screen depicting a dark apartment living room and kitchen from an isometric perspective. The rooms are illuminated only by a small, fake Christmas tree with flashing lights and a television tuned to fuzz. The audio starts as television static, but faint Christmas music plays beneath, from a radio on the kitchen counter. A calendar on the wall lists the month as June. Only two characters, the mother and the son, are directly shown. Their interiority is represented by images that form over their heads. The mother’s image appears directly on the background without any discrete separation, as if part of the environment, but the edges of the son’s image are fractured.

The game starts with the mother entering the apartment and the son in the bathroom, which is not shown, but suggested by the strip of light beneath the door. The player can only interact by clicking the mouse on the environment. The cursor is a hand, but changes to signify objects the player can use on something else. The shifts in light and sound are the mother’s perception, not the son’s, and this is apparent to the player because their input only directly influences the mother.

The floor of the apartment is filthy, but a vacuum sits in its center, power cord tangled around its base. Cigarettes butts are piled on a pizza pan sitting on the kitchen table, and are spilling over onto the floor, but the trashcan by the refrigerator is emtpy. Dirty clothes are strewn across the living room, but a washer and dryer sit in a closet off the kitchen. Cleaning up any of the mess will bring the son out of the bathroom. The mother visualizes a tidy apartment with her and the son embracing, but the son visualizes his mother crying. The Christmas tree dims and the static’s volume increases as the mother continues to clean.

If the player selects the Christmas tree or the photo album on the coffee table, the object will enlarge and allow a choice between handmade family ornaments or photographs. The icon will change accordingly, and the image above the mother’s head will change to reflect the memory represented by the object. All of the memories will be subverted by the mother’s guilt, but if the player uses the object on the son, both of their memories will slowly merge. The Christmas lights will get brighter and the music on the radio will become louder. As the shared memory unfolds, the image will tarnish and the mother will refuse to select another memory until the apartment is cleaner.

As the mother cleans, the son’s image will darken and display memories associated with his illness, but as the mother and son share more memories, the player will gain the ability to directly interact with the image above the son, altering the negative memories by clicking their source and clearing away the darkness by swiping with the cursor. The fractured border will remain unchanged, as the player’s actions are not intended to represent alleviation of symptoms related to schizophrenia. As the player balances the mother and son’s mood, the Christmas tree will get progressively lighter and the Christmas music will replace the television’s static.

When the static is gone, the son will turn off the radio and pick up the guitar sitting in the corner. The mother and son sit on the couch together and the son plays her a song he wrote for her (this is conveyed through the now completely shared image above their heads). The song will incorporate elements from all of the memories, both good and bad, and the son’s portion of the image will retain its fractured edges, to show that the brain disease’s effect on the son has not been alleviated in any way.

The apartment is not fully cleaned, and the son’s song is not completely happy, but it is important that the mother has formed a connection with the son and is able to cope with her guilt directly through the memories they share. The mother is the only character that changes significantly, because the son is not at fault in the conflict. His willingness to share the song he has written for her is based on the connection she forms with the player’s input.

I hope my design managed to convey story through game mechanics. Developing a game that’s implicit rather than explicit in meaning is a little like walking a tightrope, especially when presenting a sensitive subject, since the intention can be misinterpreted. Even the visual representation of the mother and son’s thoughts could be offensive, considering the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. Hopefully, by making it obvious to the player that the visuals are an abstract gameplay mechanic that originates with the mother and not the son, the potential insensitivity is avoided. Please let me know in the comments, however, if anything in the game design seems to trivialize the situation I was trying to explore.

About the Author: This month’s topic turns the literary focus from the medium, to the author. If you submitted a post to either the January or February topics, feel free to write about the process you underwent in converting literary themes into gameplay. Did you struggle with anything in particular? Are you satisfied that your game design(s) communicated what you intended? Have subsequent comments or idea made you wish you could go back and start he process over? And how much does your design say about you and your own interpretation of the themes of the source material?

Our first cycle of Round Table posts is drawing to a close, and I’d like to thank Corvus of Man Bytes Blog for encouraging a continued discussion on the translation of literary themes into games. Developing ideas over a series of posts and learning from  other Round Table participants has been a great opportunity. I hope that as we begin a new cycle of topics, we can pull more people into the conversation and develop the Round Table community into a continuous, thriving discussion.

The literary source material I chose for my January entries focused on identity. The theme of identity has always excited me while reading, and it is a important theme to develop in video games. Because games are interactive, and require the player to take on a role in order to participate, they can explore issues of identity in a way that traditional literature cannot.

A writer usually tries to create identification between a character and the reader, but seldom does writing attempt to place the reader in the role of character like a game does. The use of the second person perspective in fiction is rare, and is typically considered annoying or just “experimental.”

Video games, however, require the player to take control of a character, and the perspectives used in games don’t correlate with fiction. Whether it’s an FPS, an adventure game, a platformer, or even a puzzle game, players have direct control over their avatar’s actions (or the puzzle pieces) and their identity is linked by interactivity to that avatar (or to the interaction itself). The link between avatar/interaction and player is the fascinating part of identity in video games.

I’ll examine how I tried to look at identity in each of my entries from previous months.

Dhalgren

In the novel, Delany uses a bewildering, yet intriguing, series of unexplained symbols to create identification between the main character and the reader. Secondly, the narrative relies on keeping the main character’s true identity just out of reach, and casting doubt on the character’s relation to the author and the audience. The third element that defines Dhalgren’s narrative is its structure, which seems circular at first, but becomes much more complicated. It is possible to view events and characters from more than one perspective depending on the reader’s understanding of the structure.

I wanted to convey all three of these facets in my game design, while avoiding a direct translation of the novel’s plot. The game features a literal “Necker Cube” mechanic that allows the player to switch from one perspective to another, changing the characters as well as the methods the player uses to interact with the gameworld. The player controls the characters in different forms and different configurations, and at some points, even takes over the role of a character directly. The game would illustrate a number of potential relationships between character and player.

I chose the old-school adventure genre on a whim, however, and I think Jorge Albor’s reinvention of Dhalgren as an MMO captures the theme of identity in a way I hadn’t considered.

A Scanner Darkly

My interpretation of Philip K. Dick’s novel was disappointing. Sticking to the novel’s plot may have enabled me to represent the narrative accurately in game form, but I don’t feel like my translation of the themes sheds any new light. Instead, it retreads ground covered by the novel and doesn’t completely explore the ideas about identity presented by Dick. It does, however, develop the theme of paranoia from the novel nicely, allowing the player to understand the character’s situation through gameplay mechanics in a way that the traditional narrative cannot.

“Help”

Though “Help” was primarily intended to explore the idea of an unreliable narrator in a video game, the game’s genre trends nicely with my other attempts to investigate identity. What interests me about this type of ARG is that it bypasses the middleman of narrative in video games, the character, and sets up the player to interact directly with the game world.

Though the game itself is still an elaborate illusion, I think the choices the game offers the player have more impact since the responsibility for those choices isn’t mediated through a fictional character. The game space is set up to include the player instead of offering them a Being John Malkovich-style vantage point into a character’s world.

Overall, I think my entries to 2009′s Round Table were successful, and I learned quite a bit by thinking through the transition from literature to video game. I enjoyed reading everyone else’s contributions quite a bit, and I can’t wait to see what people have up their sleeves for next month! To read other entries on March’s topic, manipulate the drop-down box below.

Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table’s <a title=”Blogs of the Round Table” href=”http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/” mce_href=”http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/”>main hall</a> for links to all entries.

Corvus has given us another opportunity to delve into some game design without all of the real world limitations that actual design would entail. I’m sticking with science fiction again this time around, though I have a feeling more people have read A Scanner Darkly than Dhalgren (or at least have seen the horrible, in my opinion,  film adaptation). Philip K. Dick has been one of my favorite authors longer than anyone else I’ve read. I’m fascinated by the way his life is intertwined in his fiction, the way reading his biography is almost like reading one of his novels. His ability to create mind-blowing worlds and situations with relatively simple prose inspired me to become a writer. I think a game based on a novel that explores identity has numerous opportunities to play with crossing the fourth wall, but for this post I’ve decided to stick with  more subtle implications.

I’ll also stay much closer to the plot for this idea, so some details of the story will be spoiled, however, the novel is much more than a fancy “mind-fuck,” so I would encourage everyone to read it. The central novum of the novel is known to the reader early on, so the plot summary that follows spoils little. The main character, Bob Arctor, is a narc, but even his employers are unaware of his identity. He wears a “scramble suit,” which hides any distinguishing details. Bob takes a drug called Substance D on a regular basis, and as the story progresses, it causes a schizm between Bob, the civilian, and Fred, the law enforcement agent. Fred is assigned by his superiors to monitor Bob, much to his initial dismay, who they suspect is a big-time drug dealer, but as the split between the main character’s identities widens, Bob becomes suspicious of himself.

The game interface is “scanner” themed, after the video surveillance device Bob/Fred use to watch the inhabitants of the house he dwells in with a few friends. A perspective similar to The Sims is used, except the camera would be fixed in each of the house’s rooms. Outside, a birds-eye view is utilized, like a shot being filmed by a helicopter circling overhead. The view will rotate and shift, but the motion is slow and subtle, so the player isn’t distracted.

The gameplay evolves over the course of the game as Bob’s mental state changes. At the beginning, when Bob realizes he is Fred, the player’s goal is to keep Bob’s friends and officers unaware of his true identity. The player controls Bob, and must consider that anything seen through the scanner may be viewed by his superiors, so the player must position Bob out of the scanner’s view for any actions that may be suspicious. The player must also consider Bob’s friends, so keeping them occupied is important. This segment of the game will pass in realtime, and player’s can make suggestions to distract or get rid of their friends. If some of the characters are working on a car in the driveway, the player can hide a tool, or remove the car’s brake to send it barreling down the driveway when it shifts.

If Bob is caught by either his friends or the scanner, suspicion will cause their relationship “score” to lower. The player has to balance the levels of suspicion between Bob’s friends and the police by considering what the scanner sees and what his friends see. The player can also take action to lower the suspicion bars by talking to the characters (the conversations are one of my favorite parts of the novel), doing drugs with them, or helping with whatever task they’re involved in. The player can lower the police’s suspicion by taking Substance D, which the police consider something a big-time dealer wouldn’t do.

As the game progresses, and Bob takes more Substance D, the gameplay changes. The player starts to lose control of Bob and can interact directly with the world while Fred has control of the character. Fred’s thoughts will be revealed as an interior monologue that plays over the game. Other characters’ speech will be displayed as text during these portions, denoting their assumed inferiority to Fred. The player must keep Fred from finding out information about Bob or his friends by manipulating objects in the house or outside.

The player will regain control of the character whenever Bob is dominant (in control of the character’s mind). Bob is becoming increasingly paranoid, and believes that Barris, one of his roommates, is trying to kill him. The player will help Bob investigate Barris, but is also able to set up situations to thwart Fred during this time.

Developing relationships between Bob and his friends is an important aspect of the game because inevitably Fred will discover that Bob is himself and mental breakdown will follow. The player puts this off as long as possible, but the strength of the relationships the player develops determines whether Bob will be taken care of after his breakdown. Relationships are raised by spending time with friends and lowered by suspicious activity and Fred’s actions, so the player is constantly trying to balance the relationships with progressing the narrative.

The status of the relationships at the time of mental breakdown will result in a variety of endings based on which character the player chose to spend the most time with. If the player fails the game before developing a relationship successfully, they get the bad ending, death by overdose, but the other endings aren’t necessarily “good”.

I don’t know if there’s a good way to introduce this, but I will warn you that it contains very minor, probably inconsequential spoilers for Persona 4.

Anne: My jaw is really hurting for some reason and I feel really worn out.
Me: Did Chie kick you in the jaw?!
Anne: Yes, she wants you as badly as you want her. Sicko.
Me: I just thought you may have tried sneaking into her tent last night.
Anne: I did! To kick her skinny high school ass!! But with those fancy shoes YOU bought her, I didn’t stand a chance! Her feet came out of nowhere!

Maybe playing Japanese RPG’s with my wife isn’t such a great idea. The sparks of jealousy are leaping! =)

Instead of competing with the vast variety of yearend lists, I’ve decided to comment on some of the games I’m playing during this holiday glut. The games aren’t necessarily new or even released in 2008.

Persona 4

I wanted to start with Persona 3, but I had a Best Buy gift certificate and decided to go ahead and grab the new one. My brother, wife and I have all been playing the game together (though my wife just watches). I probably would have avoided this game like the plague without the recommendations for it, since I usually avoid JRPG’s altogether because of the amount of time it takes to complete one. I actually don’t think I’ve ever completed one before, so hopefully I can end that trend with Persona. The fact that it has anime-style characters would usually be another strike against it as well, since I tend to associate that art style in games with mediocrity (this is my ignorance, not a fact).

What draws me in about the game is the relatively contained story. Since it focuses on a murder mystery instead of an epic, world-altering and completely asinine hero quest, the game feels unique and compelling. The high school simulation element is also refreshing, since I’ve never experienced anything like it. The plot and setting also intrigue my wife. She initially laughed at my brother and I for playing it, but was soon sitting on the couch watching intently. Now she begs us to play the game instead of Gears of War or whatever other high def monstrosity we happen to be fascinated with.

The only thing that puts me off a little about the game is the complexity of the Personas. I’m not really interested in learning the in and outs of combining the things, and would rather be able to focus on a single Persona for the main character and develop it in a unique fashion. Having to consider the day of the week, the weather, relationship bonuses, etc. in order to fuse Personas into more powerful entities is tedious for me. I’m not sure how important this aspect of the game is, but I hope I’m not shooting my Persona-playing collective in the foot by ignoring the entire thing.

Fieldrunners

I got Fieldrunners on the iTouch based on review scores and it has sucked away many hours of my time. It’s the first Tower Defense game I’ve ever played, but I completely understand the addictiveness of the “genre” now. Figuring out the best way to construct a maze of firepower to annilate a never-ending onslaught of enemies is immensely satisfying. The second map included in the game, “Crossroads,” threw me a curve when I realized I was defending two bases and had to completely rethink my strategy.

Fable 2

I’ve just started Fable 2, but I can see myself spending a lot of time on the game. My character just got married and had her first child, and I have to admit, I’m already considering divorce. My town crier husband is a bit of a jerk with his demands for sex and I’m unhappy that he sits at home draining my coffers. On top of that, immediately after giving birth (which is a remarkably easy process, I’m not sure what the big deal is), he gave me a stove, which I can only imagine is truly a gift for himself, since I don’t plan on being at home much.

Passage

Bought this on the iTouch and found it emotionally effective. If it hasn’t been recommended to you previously, I do so now. It’s free for the PC.

Rock Band 2

Still haven’t managed to tear myself away from this one. As a cooperative experience, it’s second to none. It’s also the best “casual gaming” experience I’ve had. Anyone that enters our home can pick up the instruments or mic and enjoy the game. I’ve never “practiced,” so I haven’t made it any further than Hard on any of the songs, but I’ve continually enjoyed playing it. I imagine our New Year’s Eve celebration will include numerous hours of rock.

Everything Else

I’ve purchase way too many games recently, and except for Persona 4, they’ve all been 15 dollars or less. Stalker, Rolando, Darwinia/Multiwinia, Contact, Amateur Surgeon, N+. The downloadable game is a curse, I’ve decided, worse than the lottery. I can see a point in my future when I’ll have to limit myself to games I can buy with cash. On the bright side, however, I think I now have enough gameplay in my library to last several years (and I wish I could convince myself to utilize it all).

I wish everyone a happy New Year and I hope all of your New Year’s resolutions are achieved.

PS: Braid is my favorite game of the year. Sorry haters!

Bethesda’s Fallout 3 provides an experience different from many other role-playing games. It gives the player the ability to create their own path through its world without a pressing main quest.

In Borges’ short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the author describes a book that attempts to contain the infinite labyrinth of possible realities. The book, which the story is named for, is explained: “In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others . . . [but in this one] the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.” The ever forking potential paths through life suggest realities closely nestled beside our personal experience—the possibilities we’ve left behind are lost to us, but still exist. Fallout 3 attempts a simulacra of the labyrinth on a smaller, interactive scale, allowing players to experiment with these paths without the true fear of lost potential—in a world that doesn’t pressure a character down a pre-determined path with only the illusion of choice.

In games like Mass Effect and Bioshock, as well as traditional Japanese role-playing games, players are confronted with choices that appear to define their character, but the choices are an illusion. If the characters could look in a mirror, another of Borges’ favorite symbols, they would expect to see themselves altered by their choices, but they would not. Fallout 3 does not provide a revolutionary leap in the potential of role-playing, but the way the narrative is structured removes responsibility from the player regarding the central quest. This allows the player to pick a path for their character that truly forks, though each character’s story may not end with credits.

The central narrative thread in the game beings with the character’s abandonment by his or her father. Though this narrative expands fairly late in the story arc, the player is free to rebel against the father’s abandonment and explore their own self-created story.

Does Fallout 3 create truly developed choice? No, of course not. After all, even Borges’ fictional book mapping the labyrinth wasn’t able to capture the intricacies of infinite reality. The game does, however, succeed in creating a world where the player’s choices have an impact on the interactive space that confines the character’s development. Early in the game, or more appropriately, close to the player’s starting point, the player has an array of choices to make regarding the town of Megaton.

The town is built around an undetonated nuclear warhead that defines the town and also serves as a sort of metaphor about Fallout’s gameplay—the ever present threat of danger. The player, through the role he or she plays, can choose many paths: detonate the bomb, disarm the bomb, ignore the town completely, use the town for its potential and then destroy it. The impact of these choices results in the loss of playable space for the player, but also, the destruction of people in a world that has already seen so much loss. These choices may have been unbearable in real life, but the player does not destroy the potential of another choice for themselves, only for the character they play. And truthfully not even the character, since loading a saved game permits the character to make another.

The idea of choices in a role-playing game, their weight and their ability to fool the player into believing the loss of potential is interesting. The ability to experience all possible paths is the great strength and pleasure of role-playing games, but without the significance of choice, the genre would be meaningless.

Fallout 3 gives weight to player choice using loss and benefit. Choices will always gain the player something, whether experience points, wealth, or a more subtle in-game benefit (like finding a certain Stradivarius), but also a corresponding loss, if only the loss of another choice. Since the game doesn’t weight the choices from the start by placing the character on a world-saving quest, the player feels the freedom to truly explore the gameworld, making choices based on the role they want to play.

Instead of every wannabe game critic like myself having to scour the weblogs for information on this whole criticism thing, I thought I would start a Google Notebook and list the resources in a centralized location that anyone could access. That way we can add articles and blog posts and published books as they are created or found.

I need your help, though. Please send me an e-mail, a twitter, or just leave a comment below with suggestions for the notebook. If you think something that’s already listed is worthless or particularly useful, comment on it below and I’ll summarize the information in a comment on the notebook.

If anyone has any suggestions, or this is already being done somewhere else in a better format, please let me know. Also, please don’t hesitate to recommend one of your own blog posts or articles. I want to collect everything and then I’ll work on organizing it somehow.

[EDIT: Let's make this even more fun. Give me links to actual game criticism that you think it particularly well-done and tell me why. I'll have a second notebook for those examples with comments about how they succeed.]