Renzu blog

I’m bored at work without anything to do, so what’s a blog for right?

ART KARMA
A friend of mine is high on what he calls “art karma”. In the span of a month, he went from having no art supplies (he was planning on saving up for a $2000 Wacom Cintiq) to magically landing a free airbrush & air compressor from his neighbor, a large set of high-end markers from some estate thing, and a brand new airbrush by going to the local chicago company that produced his old airbrush. They sold him a $250 airbrush at-cost (~$30). Also, his airbrush allows him to plug in his markers for use as a paint source.

GARAGE KITS
This man is going resin kit crazy with his new airbrush. He’s doing a Kushana (Nausicaa) for himself, a Kiyone (Tenchi Muyo Mihoshi Special OAV), and a Nakoruru (Samurai Shodown) for me. While he brush-painted kits, gundams, capsule & PVC toys in the past, this time I’m forcing him to document the whole process for the sake of this blog. His paint style is somewhat unusual in that he likes to emphasize gritty, worn textures– he learned several paintbrush techniques in order to achieve those surfaces. It’ll be interesting to see what he does with Kushana in particular.

HOIHOI-SAN
is a single-volume comic series, a PS2 game and a very short anime OAV. In the near future, insects are immune to pesticides, resulting in the need for household bug-killing robots. A popular robot model series called “Hoihoi-san” is taking Japan by storm. It’s a cute, doll-like combat robot with swappable costumes, weapons and accessories.

The comic chronicles the Hoihoi-san phenomenon through the eyes of a hopeless fan, a retailer, the fandom itself during a fan convention as well as the inner turmoil of the company that designs and produces the household appliance.

WHY AM I WRITING about such an inane-sounding series? It’s a distinctly Japanese comic that lightly parodies their culture of rabid consumerism. The comic often highlights how the fanboy protagonist blows his wages on the latest Hoihoi-san doo-dad, as well as pays for costly repairs and replacements as he damages and otherwise bricks the firmware of his toy.

The comic also parodies consumerism from an industry perspective as Hoihoi-san execs pitch concepts for accessories as well as deal with their competitor’s “Combat-san”– in one scene, the fanboy buys a Combat-san dreaming of a bug-killing tag team, only to later discover that his Hoihoi-san disposed of it overnight.

The comic also follows the characters as they attend a Hoihoi-san convention, where they buy and sell unofficial home-made accessories and costumes. Anyway it’s a cute comic series… the anime is basically a fan suppliment for it, which animates a few of the scenes in the comic. The PS2 game has you playing from the perspective of the Hoihoi fanboy, blowing your wages on the latest weapons and frivilous costumes (too bad she can’t fight in that kimono I saved up for).

The whole mini-franchise is a simultaneous parody and celebration of Japanese consumerist culture. The original comic has been published in the US, and there’s a new spinoff being published in Japan. I might get it commissioned for an unofficial translation at some point… dunno yet.

3D PRINTING & HOIHOI-SAN
This is all tentative, since I only end up doing a fraction of the stuff I plan to do. Shapeways is a highly accessible 3D printing service, where you send them a 3D model (i.e. polygons), specify a size and the materials to use, and they send you back your printed, prototype product. While Shapeways is new, 3D printing services have been around for a while for use in prototyping. I often wonder if any garage kit (resin kit etc.) hobbyist creators in Japan make use of that technology.

Something I want to do eventually is model up a pair of Hoihoi-san kits– one static statue, and another movable figure along the lines of Figma, Revoltech etc. toys with all the accessories and whatnot. If I get ambitious, I can mold & distribute a whole bunch of them (maybe even fly to a Japanese convention to do so?)… anyway I’m not going to get started on that for a while though, since I have a backlog of other projects to finish.

Simulation in Games

    In the period of time between 1992 and 2004, we’ve seen exponential gains in graphics technology, as some games transitioned out of the realm of iconic abstraction and into the realm of realism for the first time.  However the escalation of graphics technology proved to be a stagnating force upon the innovation of games, particularly during the late 90s to the present day.  As budgets expanded first into the hundreds of thousands and now into the tens of millions, innovation was compromised as “triple-A” titles were obliged to capture massive sales in an underdeveloped, poorly understood market.  Similarly, as development teams expanded into the hundreds, the young industry suffered the growing pains of mismanagement, causing many over-ambitious projects to fall short of their goals and overshoot their budgets and schedules.

    This created a conflicted atmosphere of simultaneous hype and pessimism in the game fandom.  As the graphical sophistication of games continued to increase, it was hard not to notice the (sometimes humorous) disconnect between the photorealistic graphics and the circa-1993 gameplay mechanics & AI of modern games.  Gamers, again and again, latched on to the “next big thing” that promised dynamic gameplay mechanics and living worlds populated by sophisticated AIs… However the vast majority of these games fell short of their goals due to simple mismanagement or an obligation to “dumb down” their product for a supposedly dumbed-down mass market.  All of the conceptually exciting game projects of late have shared one feature in common, something that has the potential to catapult gameplay out of the realm of predictable & “pre-scripted”, and into the world of dynamic & “alive”– simulation.

    A good number of games I’m going to talk about are single-player first person games, because they try to approximate human experience in a more direct manner by allowing you to look through the eyes of your game character.  These games, more than others, attempt to reach for realism instead of abstraction, thus making them better examples to illustrate the promise & peril of the tech-driven “western” game industry.  I will talk about RTS, RPG and “sim” games too though.

    It can be argued that two lineages were created in 1992 by two games: Ultima Underworld and Wolfenstein 3D.  Ultima Underworld, created by what would later become Looking Glass Studios, was an attempt to create a realistic 3D dungeon crawler.  While not fundamentally dissimilar to the dungeons crawlers that came before it, Underworld consolidated the primitive abstraction of the genre into a convincing 3D environment that can be navigated and manipulated at will with a drag-and-drop interface.  The player could pick up objects, talk to NPCs, fight monsters and manipulate the world with his simulated mouse-driven hand.

    Wolfenstein 3D was originally conceptualized as a sophisticated stealth action game, granting players the ability to knock out guards and steal uniforms.  During the prototyping stage, they found the game to be too convoluted for its own good.  They proceeded to whittle down what they had into a simplistic fast-paced shooting game.  ”Wolf3D” allowed the player to run around a (2D in nature) labyrinth and hyperactively gun down nazis while collecting ammo, keys and powerups.  The immensely popular game launched a genre of “first person shooters” (FPS) and set many of the conventions of the genre.  Its wildly popular successor, Doom, added gritty Alien-esque techno-horror environments and grotesque monsters to the list.

    The genre of fast-paced FPS games created by Wolf3D and Doom saw only negligible gameplay advancements throughout the next decade, despite the rapid advance of graphics technology and the scale of levels.  1996’s Duke Nukem 3D (“Duke3D”) popularized semi-interactive, semi-destructible environments along with featuring an array of offbeat weapons (e.g. the shrink ray, which can be used against yourself if reflected off a mirror).  1998’s Half-Life popularized the extensive use of “scripted” (pre-programmed) events in game levels, recreating the feel of a Hollywood film… or a Disneyland ride.  This emphasis would later be exploited in the infinity of WWII-themed FPS games created in the early to mid 2000s.  However, most of the advances in the FPS genre would be cosmetic.  1996’s Quake brought realistic, pre-calculated lighting (“shadow mapping”) to the table– however, the advanced technology had no bearing on the core run & gun gameplay.

    Some attempts were made to advance the FPS genre.  1996’s Strife integrated NPC interaction along with occasional story choices and sidequests in a non-linear, law-enforced city setting.  1998’s Battlezone attempted to merge vehicular combat, FPS, and the real-time strategy genre into a rather nutty but critically acclaimed game.

    The Thief game series launched a quiet revolution in the FPS world.  While mildly successful financially, enabling two sequels, the 1998 game popularized the use of “stealth elements” in the FPS genre (for better or worse).  In the game, you play the role of Garrett the thief in a medieval steampunk fantasy world.  The game questioned fundamental aspects of the genre by making the avoidance of direct confrontation the central game mechanic.  As you broke into mansions, prisons, cathedrals and tombs, you employed your arsenal of flash bombs, firecrackers, gas bombs, torch-snuffing water arrows and your KO-inducing blackjack to distract and slip past security.  Much of the storytelling took place in-game, as you poured through diaries and eavesdropped on numerous conversations.  While you do carry a sword and some arrows, lethal measures are often considered a last resort, as the screams of combat and the inevitable bloodstains that result draw attention towards your relatively vulnerable character.

    This new approach changed the way players interacted with their environment.  By putting the player in charge of how and when confrontations occur, the emphasis shifted from twitch-action to decisionmaking.  The shadow-mapping techniques first showcased in Quake suddenly found a purpose in the stealth gameplay of Thief.  In-game sound effects, also considered cosmetic in the past, became a way to locate hostiles and vice versa.  Some of the more tense parts of the game have you creeping across loud marble or metal floors.

    Rather than having the player simply respond to hordes of onrushing enemies, Thief asked the player questions and forced him to make constant risk assessments based on his environment.  What’s my visibility?  What are the patrol patterns of the hostiles in the area?  Is it worth trying to blackjack this guard?  Will I get caught if I walk across this marble floor?  Will I be noticed if I step out of the shadows?  Should I use my final gas arrow or save it for a rainier day?  Where can I hide if I get caught?

    While graphics and art/design tend to be purely cosmetic in a typical shooter, Thief demanded that the player be situationally aware at all times and examine every bit of the environment.  Since looting valuables was part of the game, searching every nook & cranny was something you did with pleasure.  The end result of the shift from combat to evasion was a greater sense of immersion, because the environment mattered.  Instead of a Disneyland ride with gun-toting zombies to shoot in a mockup setting, the world of Thief was a living, breathing place full of odd details to notice, stories to uncover, shadows to hide in and conversations to eavesdrop on.

    What set apart Thief from, say, 1990’s innovative stealth-action game, Metal Gear 2, was its approach to simulated realism.  While MG2 had impressive, creative gameplay mechanics for a 1990 game, its abstract  top-down perspective and approach to its game world persisted in three Solid sequels until it was somewhat revamped in 2008.  Metal Gear’s enemies spawned and respawned when you revisited an old area or got spotted.  Many of the game’s critical moments were scripted.  In contrast, Thief’s world was persistent and nonlinear.  Often the mission briefing simply told you to find and steal a certain valuable hidden somewhere in a gigantic mission area.  The AI NPCs could be toyed with, distracted, engaged in melee combat or stealthily killed.  Once KO’ed or killed, the body had to be hidden away from the patrol paths of the remaining security detail and other staff/residents.  Metal Gear’s gameplay focus was always to get you from point A to point B alive in order to view the next cinematic cutscene.  It never mattered what you did in between.  In Thief, each mission unleashed you, the intruder, into someone else’s private property.  The property became your house to play with and explore as you saw fit.

    The living world in each mission zone became every player’s favorite aspect.  For the sequel, they drastically reduced the number of zombie-infested tomb-raiding missions and stuck to breaking & entering.  Thief is one example of how one aspect in particular can greatly enhance the game: artificial intelligence– the simulation of, well, intelligence.  Rather than scripting, Half-Life style, what each actor will do the second Player One enters each and every room, Thief unleashed you into an environment full of other living actors to spy on and toy with.

    There have been numerous other projects that have touted aspects of simulation to capture the imagination of players (and the hype of the market).  However most of those projects have failed to fully realize their ambitious goals.  Among them:

    Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) was a highly ambitious project with a long, troubled production.  When the game was released, many of its ambitious aspects were unfinished and glitchy.  The fact that it ran poorly on even the best systems ensured mediocre sales and scathing reviews in the face of its wild hype.  In the game, your game character crash-lands on the fictional “Site B” island in the world of Jurassic Park– the original testing facility for dinosaur cloning.  When you arrive, the labs are abandoned and dinosaurs rule the island.  There were two visionary objectives in this game, both of which relied on simulation:

    1. Trespasser wanted to be a physically-based game.  There were no HUD elements or interface graphics at all (save for the morphing tatoo on your body that indicated your health).  Ammo was indicated by your character guessing the ammo count of the weapon in hand (“Almost empty!”).  You could only carry a couple objects/weapons at a time, as opposed to the limitless arsenal at the disposal of a typical FPS character.  With the mouse, you literally drove the hand of your game character.  You used the hand to open doors, press buttons, wield firearms, and pick & throw objects.  Instead of presenting an easy HUD reticle, you actually had to aim down the sight of the gun, an unusually realistic mechanic for the time.  The game featured an ambitious physics engine.  Its physically-based puzzles involved levers, crate-stacking (kill me), and the occasional opportunity to knock a weak structure over a hostile dinosaur.  This predated Half-Life 2’s much-touted physics gimmickry by almost a decade.  Rather than using pre-made walk and attack animations, the dinosaurs had AI-driven, physically simulated bodies.

    In practice though, the physics were glitchy, the stacking puzzles were nightmarish, and the virtual hand control was extremely awkward.  Often, your arm would get caught in doorways and tight spaces, causing you to drop your firearm.  The physically-based dinosaur animation was downright goofy to watch.  Overall though, the physics engine did serve to make the game more immersive, if not somewhat frustrating.  It made you aware of how cumbersome your game character’s body was and conveyed the sheer bulkiness of large firearms particularly in tight spaces, an immersive break from the typical “phantom gun attached to a floating camera” feel of  FPS games.

    2. Trespasser aimed to drop you smack in the middle of a simulated prehistoric ecosystem, with each inhabitant’s AI governed by simulated moods like fear and hunger.  In other words, not all carnivores were out to get you.  If there was a juicer herbivore around, they might go after him instead.  Some hostile dinos could be dissuaded with a couple of shotgun blasts.  In addition, the environments in the game were gigantic– big outdoor environments populated with trees and buildings complete with real-time dynamic shadows.  An innovative dynamic billboard placeholder system was created to keep the game’s performance up.  Anyone reading a preview would imagine a non-linear survival game in a persistent world, populated with herds of dinosaurs with simulated needs and goals, forming up into hunting groups to take each other (and you) down… just like in the movie!

    Of course the final product was nothing like that.  The dinos were stupid and predictable at best, barely elevating them above the sophistication of a typical FPS baddie, and the environment was linear and segmented, complete with invisible walls.  Trespasser, while neat and ahead of its time (to the point where you needed a computer from the future to play it), ultimately failed its promise of an adventure in a grand, simulated world.

    Assassin’s Creed (2007) was a game you either found to be fantastic, or fantastic for the first few hours until it fell into excessive repetition and tedium.  While being a stealth action game with a more than passing resemblance to Thief, the game took on a completely different environment.  Assassin’s Creed’s stealth aspects relied on your ability to blend into the hustle and bustle of a large city, track down your prey, strike from the crowd and escape in the ensuing chaos.  Or, at least, that’s how it was supposed to work.  Either way there were two exciting things about this game, both based on AI and simulation…

    1. Simulated crowds.  The game gave you the impression that you’re smack in the middle of a film epic like… well… specifically Kingdom of Heaven.  No doubt.  Crowds of commoners, beggars, merchants, thugs, priests and protesters flowed throughout the dense urban mission areas of the game.  As you wove and pushed your way through the crowds, careful not to bump into anyone that would cause a commotion, you used your character’s simulated intuition to locate targets (although this intuition aspect was abstracted into a HUD minimap and other elements).  As you pounced and drew first blood, the citizens would scream and scatter as nearby guards rushed in to investigate.  Occasionally, rebellious citizens would aid in the battle by distracting the guards.  After the deed was done, you could blend into a nearby group of monks or escape to the rooftops to find a hiding place, as law enforcement investigated and searched the streets below in the wake of simulated chaos.

    2. Much of the game character’s acrobatics were simulated through AI and procedural animation.  All a player had to do was hold down a couple of “free run” buttons and watch as his game character scaled buildings, lept from rooftops, swung from rafters and dove off buildings into soft stacks of hay.  In any other game, such a task would have been a maddening trial-and-error jumping challenge.  In Assassin’s Creed, the player drives an AI that accomplishes all the hard work of knowing how to climb, jump, land and swing on complex, unpredictable surfaces (much of the game’s impressive animation was procedurally generated during runtime as opposed to using 100% canned animation).  This made flying through the city both worry-free and exhilarating, with a minimal number of show-stopping deaths and injuries due to a mistimed jump.

    While the animation and control system was indeed impressive and fully realized, the same cannot be said about the crowd simulation.  While Assassin’s Creed presented many “blend into the crowd” modes, they rarely found much of a gameplay purpose, due to the fact that there were no long-term repercussions to causing a commotion.  You’d think after killing the 30th guard in a sector, after haphazardly running and bumping your way through crowded streets, after flamboyantly spidermanning your way across the city all day, the law enforcement detail would have so many search parties after you, your ability to “blend in” would be entirely compromised and the mission aborted.  This was not the case, so the numerous stealth elements seldomly found gameplay use, and the crowds had negligible effects on the core gameplay.  Most of the game involved haphazardly racing from one city checkpoint and predictable minigame to the next, and assassination could be achieved just by running up to your target with a sword and slashing your way to victory.  In other words, much of the game had little strategizing and risk-assessment possibilities, and the crowd simulation was rarely ever more than cosmetic.  Rather than being an adventure in a dynamic city simulation, the game was little more than a series of tedious hoops for the player to jump through.  The “virtual memory-reconstruction experience” context of the game’s story, while brilliantly covering for the game’s disjointed gameplay and things like deaths and reloads, also made it difficult to care about the world and your actions (i.e. it subtracted from immersion).

    For those who have played the game: what tipped me off of its unrealized vision was the fact that, during horse-riding segments of the game, you are given a few “blend in with the crowd” options that seemingly have no gameplay purpose whatsoever (what stops you from racing all the way to the next city?).  The development team probably had to cut their ambitions short to make a deadline.  That, and the repetitive nature of pre-assassination “investigation” smacks of underdevelopment.

    Remember when I said there were two lineages created in 1992?  RPGs were brought into the realistic 3D realm with Ultima Underworld.  However, both the RPG and shooter lineages of first-person games have a lot of overlap.  Trespasser for instance featured a very Underworld-like virtual hand interface, while Thief and Strife showcased progressive RPG-esque storytelling and nonlinear environments.  The Ultima Underworld games lead directly into the sci-fi horror shooter/RPG hybrids, System Shock (1994) and System Shock 2 (1999).  Both of these games integrated aspects of RPGs into the shooter genre– nonlinear level design, interactive inventory items, modifiable armor and weapons with various attributes, customizable character development, “spell”-casting, storytelling (via diaries and other things discovered throughout the labyrinth), and hackable systems like turrets and vending machines to break up the typically brain-dead FPS formula.  System Shock 2 in particular, using the Thief engine and sharing its environmental emphasis, is personally one of the scariest and immersive games I’ve ever played.

   This hybrid FPS lineage also encapsulates games like the Deus Ex series, Vampire Bloodlines, Mass Effect and Bioshock.  Bioshock in particular is worth discussing because it was, at first, touted to be a game based in a simulated world.

    Bioshock (2007).  ”[At Irrational Games (now known as 2K Boston)], we think emergence is the future,” touts the director in a preview that discusses a very early concept of Bioshock, meant to be a successor to System Shock 2.  The concept describes an abandoned WWII-era laboratory ruled by an “AI ecology” of experimental creatures harvesting genetic material, working together and fighting for survival in a type of food chain.  The ecosystem would be composed of harvesters, predators and protectors.  Their idea, inspired by nature documentaries, was designed to promote so-called “emergent” gameplay, where the player decides what to do to survive in a dynamic world.  This vision highlights a break from dominant game design thinking– the kind where the designer sets up a series of pre-determined hoops and holds the player’s hand through them.  Instead, Bioshock would allow players to write their own stories, so to speak.  Unfortunately, this game was not realized.  In a “post-mortem” analysis of the production, the director discusses the disconnect between the game originally touted in early previews and the final product.

    In other interviews, it was more bluntly stated that they felt pressure to produce sales to match the game’s triple-A budget.  Rather than being a successor to the System Shock / Thief lineage, the end result was a fast-paced “Doom clone” with a lot of funky, Duke3D-like weapons with environmental effects (e.g. lightning  zaps water, fire melts ice and catches oil, etc.), a few tricks right out of System Shock (hacking, spellcasting), and some vague remnants of the original project (“big daddies” and “little sisters”).  However, the simulated ecology, the dynamic world and therefore the “emergent” gameplay was nowhere to be found, despite being the very things that put the game on the map in the first place.  There were no decisions to be made, only scores of generic, predictable baddies to be killed in a world of linear hoops.

    On one end of the Ultima Underworld lineage lie hybrid FPS games described above.  On the other end are 3D CRPGs, more along the lines of, well, the Ultima series except in 3D.  Ultima 7 and 8, while being isometric games, were interesting in the degree of freedom they give the player to manipulate the game world, despite the fact that everything in the world was meticulously placed and scripted in advance.

    In Ultima 7, a friend & I spent a day parading around in a wagon we managed to mount a cannon on in an attempt to perform medieval drive-bys on monsters, and otherwise attempt to creatively kill Lord British.  In Ultima 8, players will nostalgically recount the ways they’ve managed to break into people’s residences and otherwise be up to no good.  Both of these games, just by their sheer scale and meticulous non-linear world design, challenged  players to discover the ways of the fantasy world and creatively subvert it.

    The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996) was among the more ambitious games to come out of the first-person RPG lineage.  Daggerfall offered… not as much a dynamic world as a generated world.  The game offered an astoundingly gigantic game world filled with a countless number of cities, towns, islands, dungeons and castles.  Crowds of people walked the city streets by day while thieves stalked the streets at night.  There were plenty of guilds to join– murdering or stealing, provided it didn’t land you in prison, would grant you invitations to the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild for instance.  In other words, the game gave you the freedom to travel a vast, generated world. performing good or evil, getting on a faction’s good or bad side, participating in or ignoring the main storyline/quest, concocting original potions and writing original spells, buying houses and boats and horses and so on.  Of course the downside to this generated world was– it’s generated.  The dungeons in particular were no fun to explore due to their often nonsensical design, and the rest of the world, along with its guild quests, was repetitive and arbitrary.  Still, Daggerfall gave gamers an exciting amount of scale and freedom for the time in a 3D game.

    TES III: Morrowind (2002), despite being my favorite in the series, took a break from simulated, generative worlds and instead opted for a densely packed hand-crafted world (at the cost of scale).  It was fun to walk in a random direction just to see what you’d run into provided it wasn’t a Cliff Racer.

    TES IV: Oblivion (2006) seemed to go back to the roots with a fractal-heavy world, this time with vague aspects of simulation and some degree of AI.  However, the game suffered from a lack of vision and integration all over its production.  Oblivion is an interesting project to look at as a case study for a game project gone subtly wrong.  It was obviously a tremendously large project with a terrifying amount of graphical assets, a substantial amount of middleware, and hours of voice acting in a world populated with cities, dungeons, guilds and quests.
    Despite its scale and middleware, it suffered from quality control and integration issues, along with a general lack of vision.  Just to name a few things, the procedurally generated forest terrain (brought to you by SpeedTree), while impressive in promo videos & screenshots, carried no interactivity and served no purpose whatsoever in the game.  Similarly the game’s random forest wildlife (deer, monsters etc.) had no purpose either.  I mean, if the game simulated any survival aspects like health and hunger, then the trees would make nice shelter from the sun and rain, and maybe I’d climb one to see if I could spot any deer to hunt.  With Oblivion’s Point-of-Interest teleportation system, and the fact that there was hardly anything interesting to see in the game’s generated landscape in between POIs, gave the player even less reason to embrace the great outdoors.  The surprise-free, cookie cutter dungeons didn’t help.

    The game also touted some advanced AI.  Guards would patrol outside looking for monsters to kill.  People would go about their scripted daily lives from sun-up (to work in the fields or tend a store) to sun-down (back to bed).  While it was somewhat interesting to observe the mundane lives of the citizens, with one quest even enticing players to do so, the system otherwise served no gameplay purpose.  Perhaps if there was some underlying dynamic economy to the game, which would give some kind of AI motivation for the townspeople to work, then such a system could be justified, and would allow the player to manipulate it and observe the outcome– read: change the world.  Isn’t that what we want to do in our games anyway?  Early in the game, I robbed all the shops in the capitol of their goods.  Upon daybreak, the shop keepers diligently opened their stores (with all the display cases open and empty!) as if nothing happened.  Things like that highlight the artificiality of the game world, serving to make it much less immersive and substantial.

    I could go on about Oblivion’s nonsense game design and unbalanced production for several more paragraphs, but the overall point is that it used several simulated aspects (touted often in previews) without really giving them a gameplay purpose or relevance.  If the world is one big uninteractive facade, how can you make gamers care about it, much less believe in it?  Why bother to make deer and trees if you can’t interact with them on even a basic level?  Are the game’s busy-looking townspeople in practice any different from those that just stand in one spot eternally waiting for Player 1 to arrive?  The studio is now working on a 3D adaptation of the Fallout game series, which will be a blend of Elder Scrolls-like RPG and FPS.

    Let’s put RPGs and FPSes aside for a look at a game from the, well, sim genre!  This one just arrived last week riding an immense wave of hype and anticipation:

    Spore (2008) is the lastest game from the innovative studio that brought you SimAnt, SimCity, and The Sims.  The majority of Maxis Software’s games, often management games, put players in control of a simulated, dynamic system, whether it’s the workings of an entire city or the satirical depiction of mundane life in a simulated household.  In SimCity, it was the players task to create a functional city.  This required smart city planning, and the balancing of budgets versus the need for city projects, services, utilities and infrastructure, a strong economy, low pollution levels, traffic control, waste management and disaster preparedness.  A friend of mine, a big fan of the game series, once dubbed it “I Want to Deal With It: The Game”.

    In a recent lecture at the Technology, Entertainment & Design Conference, Maxis founder Will Wright explains his inspirations behind his simulation-based games– he sees them as educational toys.  Not academic education, but something that allows us to understand the world at a deeper level.  Simulations have a lot of power in illustrating the complex dynamics that govern our world (even through imaginary worlds).  In the video, he touts his then-upcoming game Spore, several years in the making, as a grand simulator of evolution and ecology that illustrates life and natural selection at every scale from the microscopic to the galactic.  In it, everything from the food chain to entire planets could be toyed with, their simulations and governing dynamics explored and revealed by the whimsical pushing and prodding of the player.  Those anticipating the ecological version of Sim City might’ve envisioned being able to cast disasters and paradigm shifts upon a simulated ecosystem (such as a meteor strike or a transition to an oxygen-based atmosphere from a methane one) and observe its drastic effects.

    As usual, the final product was not what it was hyped to be.  Again, the game suffered from a Player 1-centric gameworld that diligently awaited his arrival.  The simulation, particularly through the tribal and civilization stages, were very thin, predictable and rigid.  When player 1 was the only force capable of negotiation and evolution, one does not get the impression that they’re penetrating a living world.  Rather than a serious simulation, the game played more like a facade of a simulation in the shadow of SimCity, with simplified elements of other game genres filling in.  A simulation of ecology, natural selection and evolution was nowhere to be found in Spore.

    Are you growing tired of the emerging pattern of this article?  Is simulation really the next frontier in game design?  Is there a game in this world that both touts simulation and delivers?  There is one… an unexpected title that’s also somewhat inaccessible due to its unintuitive UI and overall learning curve, so you’ll likely have to make due with my description:

    Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (2001) and its sequel, ArmA: Combat Operations (2006) is a series of first-person semi-realistic military combat simulators, able to simulate immense land & air battles involving hundreds of AI and up to 32 human players on a persistent battlefield several kilometers long, consisting of dense forests, open fields, cozy villages, military forts and small cities.  Rather than being a pre-scripted Disneyland ride, the entire battle (and sometimes the simultaneous battles that comprise the full scale of the war campaign) are dynamic and in control of the players and AI in a chain of command.  The Gamespot review describes both the awesome promise and peril of this game series:

   ArmA depicts a living, breathing battlefield with players and AI making tactical decisions on how to best approach an objective.  At its best, it depicts how you’re just one little soldier in a vast, chaotic battlefield.  Less than half of the gameplay depends on raw twitch-action shooting.  Instead it depends on situational awareness– knowing where the enemy is, and anticipating his movements.  Will he engage or fall back for reinforcements?  Will he try to flank you, or can you flank him first?  Should you keep your squad together or tell them to scatter?  Does the risk of defeat outweight the reward of victory?  If you’re close enough to the squad leader, you can hear him barking out real orders to his men.  If you can catch him off guard then he’s finished.

    Riding a tank (it takes 3 to operate one effectively, and the game illustrates why through its simulation) or flying an aircraft will present a different set of sophisticated tactical decisions.  The game almost never gets old for me, and I never stop learning new tactics and strategies because every battle can play out in a million different ways.  With every new major patch or game release, I find myself re-entering the world I discovered back in 2001.   Because it’s based on simulation, the game offers many game modes, each one presenting a different style of play and a different set of tactical/strategic considerations depending on what your objectives are, what units/weapons you have at your disposal, and what kind of environment you’re in.  An ArmA game mode introduced in a recent patch blends RTS-like base building with resource collection points (the island’s many towns and cities become capture points) in a hybrid package that’s not unlike a grander, more sophisticated version of 1998’s Battlezone.  The game is surprisingly immersive and engaging, not only due to its scale and depth, but also the fact that the battle is truly alive.  Very little is a pre-scripted facade, the battles and decisions made by the AI and the players are real.

    In other words, ArmA is one game that actually fulfills the promise of simulation in all its dynamic, immersive glory.  Some of the most fun I’ve ever had was in the game’s map editor, pitting armies of tanks, planes and infantry against each other in immense urban battles.  My scenario would play out in a radically different fashion with every reset, with my game character smack in the middle of a hectic firefight.  Unlike any other tactical shooter I’ve played (and I’ve played a lot), ArmA actually gives me some insight into in real-life military engagements.  Future versions of ArmA will enable RPG elements by adding active civilian factions that will take part in a dynamic war simulation.  The civilian faction will present trust-building opportunities, avenues to expand your intelligence network & security forces, and expand the strategic dimensions of the game.

    While it’s not Falcon 4.0 or anything, its somewhat clunky graphics and animation, unintuitive UI and steep learning curve prevent it from being the mainstream breakthrough hit that will deliver simulation-driven immersion to the masses.

    If ArmA/Flashpoint sounds too convoluted to reach the mass market, what kind of game will it take to deliver immersive, dynamic gameplay to the masses?  Does simulation necessarily create overly complex, inaccessible games?  Not necessarily.  One way to consider the possibilities of simulation is to apply their benifits to existing game genres.

Concept Games

    The concepts for Trespasser, Flashpoint and Bioshock illustrate how simulation can increase the dimensions of gameplay in the game world, but how about on a much smaller scale like, say, player control and interactivity?  FPS games and first-person RPGs are plagued by the abstract “floating camera with a weapon attached” feel with, often, an even more abstract on-screen reticle to interact with gameworld objects as if they were icons on a desktop.  Despite the increasing graphical realism of the game, the “simulation” of your game character and his interaction with the world has remained largely the same since 1992’s Ultima Underworld.

    One way to break out of this persistent paradigm is to employ more realistic simulations of the game character’s body.  One animation system (sold as Euphoria / Endorphin) is now making its first appearance in some games**.  It uses a neural network motor control system AI to drive a physically simulated body, allowing game characters to navigate rough terrain, react to world forces, and exert their own forces upon the game world in a realistic, intelligent fashion.  Trespasser demonstrated an initial rough attempt at this idea of physically simulated bodies, and Assassin’s Creed demonstrated an impressive AI-driven “free-running” system, but something like Euphoria can take this form of next-gen interactivity to greater heights.

    Similarly, GPU-accelerated physics engines (PhysX) as well as advanced software implementations (Havok) are now commonplace in games, though not being used to their full potential in terms of being able to depict physically detailed ballistics and entirely destructible environments.  Let’s first combine these two technologies into an imaginary FPS game.

**though its usage so far has been unimaginatively limited to “ragdoll version 2!” implementations.

The Physically-Based FPS

    Using a physically modeled body, this game will make your character feel like a real person with weight and balance holding a bulky weapon, rather than a hopping combat segway.  If there’s a bunch of debris in between point A and B, your player character will attempt to walk and climb over it in a realistic, physically modeled fashion using his arms and legs (in other games, you’d slam the jump button all pogo stick style). If you hold down the run key while navigating uneven terrain, there’s a chance your player will trip and injure himself, which may hamper his ability to move until he can find a safe place to treat his wounds.  He can also grab onto the surrounding terrain to pull himself back up or, if the situation is particularly dire, drag his body to safety.  If the gun he’s carrying is too bulky, he’s also going to be hampered by it, in addition to not being able to aim it wherever he wants in tight spaces and cover.  If you tell him to run, there’s a chance he might drop it for greater speed if he perceives a grave threat, or he might even drop it on accident in the scurry.  He’ll also have to look down the sight of weapons and line up the shot, rather than relying on a totally abstract HUD reticle. He can press himself against cover in a more intelligent, more dynamic, less segmented way and creatively figure out how to best position his gun over it while keeping most of his body in cover.

    Individual aspects of these mechanics have been simulated in previous games… for instance the unsteadiness of aim was simulated in early Rainbow Six games through a HUD reticle that depicted the radius of error.  While realistic from a simulation standpoint, it comes off as overly abstract today as modern games opt to simulate it in a more direct fashion.  Games like (say) Rainbow Six Vegas allow characters to get into pre-defined cover positions.  However the characters still lack basic self-preservation AI, so if a head or an arm that happens to be sticking out gets into the line of fire, they won’t intelligently tuck themselves back into cover.

    As environments become more and more destructible in games, the ability for players and AI to realistically negotiate rough, dynamic terrain will become more and more important.  Similarly, as environments become more dynamic, the demand for body simulations like Euphoria will increase.  A game physics demo I came across depicted a character on a rickety old bridge.  The physically simulated game character attempted to keep his balance on the bridge by holding on to the sides and bracing himself for the bridge’s exaggerated turbulence.  This kind of AI/physics-driven design is not possible with contemporary FPS mechanics.

    All of these core improvements to the fundamental “simulation” of the FPS experience will enhance the immersion of the game to the point where there would be no turning back to the segway-esque mechanics of derivative FPSes.  They will also bring the environment to life for the player by opening up new ways to interpret and assess the game world, much like what Thief did to the FPS formula back in 1998.  Will I hurt myself trying to dash across this rough terrain to that new cover point?  How much longer will my cover hold up against hostile fire?  Should I drop my bulky weapon first?  Can I afford to do that?

    A pair of promotional animations for Bioshock (1, 2) demonstrate a level of physical interaction that the actual game did not duplicate.  The animations start to illustrate the concept I’ve described above.

The Physically-Based Dungeon Crawler

    In the days of tabletop RPGs, attributes such as a character’s strength, dexterity, agility, skills with certain weapons and disciplines were abstracted into statistics, which made things like how much damage Character A will do against Character B with a broadsword easier to simulate with some basic math and a few dice rolls.  Humorously this simple architecture is still used in sophisticated, triple-A titles like Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2.  As on-screen characters mechanically swipe each other with their swords, the game spits out random “dice rolls” to determine if hits are taken or evaded and how much damage is done against a player’s “hit points” (a single value that represents the entirety of a character’s health).  As game characters defeat enemies and overcome obstacles, their learning, growth of muscles and development of skill is abstracted into “level ups”, which allow character attribute values like strength and broadsword skill to numerically increase, tilting the dice roll formula in the character’s favor.

    What a physically-based RPG can do is kick all that absurd abstraction to the curb with simulated bodies and realistic damage models.  It will not only supplant abstract attributes like strength with realistic simulation, it will also supplant simulated learning with actual learning on behalf of the player.  Like a smarter, more AI-driven implementation of Trespasser’s virtual hand, the player will drive his character’s sword in fencing in a more direct manner.  He’ll have to learn how to dodge, parry as well as find openings and deal critical blows.  A physics model will not only simulate the strength of his attacks (simulated muscles) but also the damage dealt to his foe’s armor, and the seriousness of injury if his sword penetrates his foe.  Similarly such a system can be used to simulate destruction upon inanimate objects like chests, doors, wooden structures and so on in a stunningly realistic fashion.

    As the player trains, his character’s simulated muscles will grow, allowing him to hold heavier objects and swing them with greater ferocity.  His quickness increases, allowing the player to discover new tactics.  His character’s performance will be affected by fatigue, hunger, thirst, injury and so on.  His speed and range of motion may be hampered by the bulkiness of his body armor.  Spells and potions will have an effect on aspects of the character’s body simulation, such as his rate of healing and strength of his muscles.

    With all these simulations in place, the dungeon ceases to be a place filled with iconic monsters to roll the dice with for “experience points”.  Instead it becomes a place of simulated character development, real learning, and creative survival as you take care of your character’s body and health in a harsh, physical environment.

Dynamic Storytelling in a Simulated RPG World

    Game designers like Warren Spector (Deus Ex) will argue that dynamic, simulated worlds diminish the game designer’s ability to tell a story.  In essence, this is true, but it is a fallacy to think that dynamic worlds diminish storytelling.  Instead, it merely hampers a scriptwriter’s effort construct a linear, pre-planned story path for the player to follow.  However games are not films, and they should not be confined to linear, pre-scripted stories all the time.  One method to bring dynamic storytelling to a game is to simulate the needs and desires of NPCs in a dynamic world.  Bare with me here as I describe this impossibly ambitious (but undeniably exciting) concept:

    Imagine a typical middle ages-like RPG fantasy world populated with villages, towns, cities, farms, kingdoms and castles.  It is a world that’s highly segmented and factionalized, always in a state of flux.  In the simulated world, factions will attack each other for gain, kingdoms will wage war (or enforce the peace), go through coup d’états and peasant upheavals.  Villages and towns will prosper and grow or fall under hard times and vanish due to economic downturns, natural disasters, poor harvests, or factional violence like bandit attacks and military annexation.  Every NPC in the simulated world will go out and earn their living, whether through farming or a trade like blacksmithing (at the end of every week, some NPCs may go to the nearest town or city to trade their wares etc.).

    None of these systems are fixed, it will all dynamic and simulated.  Even the personalities of each character will be simulated through an implementation of a personality model like the MBTI, which will determine the depth and scope of their trade/skills and calling, and personality– reflected in their dialogue, their ability to form relationships and network with other NPCs as well as raise families.  If the villagers perceive a threat to their livelihood, they may band together and decide to face the threat.  Some of them may decide to move to another village or town, or even try to tough it out in the wild or become a bandit/thief.

    Now drop Player 1 into this world, complete with all the physical simulation described in the previous game concept.  The possibilities are endless.  Because the world is entirely dynamic and meticulously simulated, he will have the ability to literally change the world or, if he wishes, live a humble life in it.  Every NPC he encounters will have a story to tell with life experiences that have shaped their character, and a personality type that will determine his or her, well, personality.  Perhaps the player will want to tough it out in the wild for a bit and see what that kind of life is like.  Perhaps he’ll find some way to strike it rich, go to the city, get on the nobility’s good side and find himself in a position of power, able to set the domestic and foreign policies of a state.  Perhaps he’ll instead join a rebel faction inside a city and take part in a violent uprising against the kingdom.

    Perhaps he’ll find a small tribal village to settle in and live out a Dances With Wolves-like adventure.  Let’s imagine that the player, through his travels, comes across a village falling under increasingly hard times.  The villagers offer him a place to rest for the night.  As he talks to one of the families, they reveal that bandit attacks and poor food stocks are two major issues in the village.  From there, the player offers to aid the village with his advanced hunting skills.  As the days pass, some villagers (calculated by their experiences with the player and their personality types) may grow less suspicious of the stranger and befriend him, telling him their life stories** and otherwise shoot the breeze.  As the village encounters the bandits, the player may try to track the bandits back to their camp.  As he informs the village of his discovery, he raises going on the attack as an option.  A couple of the stronger villagers who are more inclined toward the player offer their assistance.  During nightfall, the trio makes it to the camp and ambush the bandits in their sleep.  As the village gets back on its feet again, the player announces his departure.  One of the adventurous younger villagers, particularly close to the player, offers to join him in his ongoing adventure.

    This would be only one possible story of many that could take place in the game.  While it may not have the deep intricacy of a focused, pre-written work, it will have much greater meaning to the player, due to the fact that his story actually took place in a dynamic world, rather than being a pre-determined path a game designer held your hand through.

    **The rest of this description is technical, but some of you may be wondering how NPC dialogue and storytelling can be implemented in this dynamic world concept.  Basically, NPC dialogue will be constructed from a patchwork of Mad Lib-like templates according to the situation, the relationship with the player, gender, age and personality type.  The game fills in the blank for things like names, places, and so on.  ”Shoot the shit” type stories and details will likely be canned things that the NPC randomly spits out from a vast library of things to say, tagged by personality type and other variables.  The NPC can also talk about real gameworld topics like relationships with other NPCs, opinions of other places the NPC has heard about or has been to, and the difficulties and triumphs in the NPC’s life.  Opportunities to insert “figure of speech” type patterns, accents, and other quirks to personalize and define NPCs are available too.  Basically it will be a dialogue synthesizer pulling from a monstrous library of pre-written template content and speech elements.  YES IT IS POSSIBLE.  It may be difficult, it’s may be extensive, but it’s possible.

The Chain-of-Command RTS

    The problem with (and some will argue the appeal of) the RTS genre lies in the fact that it’s not “real time strategy” as much as “real time tactics”.  The units in RTS games tend to be impressively dumb.  They have no understanding of cover, tactics, or self-preservation.  They rely on you frantically clicking your mouse to grant them the intelligence to defeat, or merely run away from, an enemy.  While it may provide a level of frantic excitement, it also narrows your ability to command the battle to one area at a time.
    In real war, the general is not telling his soldiers exactly how to get into cover individually, or when to use his grenades.  In a game where individual units actually have some brains and decisionmaking ability, the player can concentrate on actual strategy and coordination rather than dissuading a lone infantryman from hopelessly engaging that heavily armored deathmobile, or standing in one place while eating bullets from a hidden enemy.

    In a real-time strategy game, units will be driven by a squad AI that coordinates squad tactics at the fine level and makes decisions about engagement.  Rather than instructing a bunch of units how to get from point A to point B without dying, the player will instead concentrate on developing missions, assigning units to them and managing the overall battlefield situation.  In mission design, the player can specify things like conditions and behaviors.  If casualties mount over a certain threshold for example, squads can be instructed to automatically collect their wounded and return to base, or establish perimeters, divert from mission goals to perform rescue operations and other complex, multi-layered tactics.  With AI, the focus of the game changes from tactics to deeper strategy, anticipation, pre-emptive and counter strikes, battlefield communication and control.

    While aspects of simulation have been implemented in ambitious and creative RTS games in the past, such as the chaotic Total War series of games or the highly bizarre Peter Molyneux game series, Dungeon Keeper, the real time strategy game I’ve described does not exist as far as I know, even though such a game has been feasible for over a decade.  The only thing that comes even vaguely close is a particularly well-coordinated multiplayer game of Operation Flashpoint or ArmA.

Creating a Dynamic World

    First, a disclaimer:
    While I’ve worked on a few tiny game projects in the past, one academic and another indie along with a game port in progress, I’ve never even come close to approaching anything like a triple-A game project.  I can only make assumptions based on the huge number of game postmortems and analysis I’ve read from publications like Game Developer, and lectures, presentations & classes from various people in the games industry.

Avoiding a Troubled Production

    The primary difficulty in shaping a dynamic game as opposed to a linear game, is the gameplay experience is at the mercy of the simulation itself (and the unexpected creativity of the player).  It’s much easier to plan things, shape experiences, and make gameplay elements work toward a goal when the course of the game is plotted out in advance.  In a simulation, you may have ideas and assumptions about how the simulation will operate and what the player will do, but it may turn out to be a totally different beast once you build it and press the go button.  In Jurassic Park: Trespasser, the designers envisioned their physics engine driving all the dinosaur animation.  However, their limited box-based physics modelling resulted in both a drastic performance drain and sub-par animation when applied to the dinosaurs– however they were too late in the production process to turn back.  Many of Trespasser’s production difficulties have stemmed from the late implementation and evaluation of gameplay mechanics & simulations.

    This illustrates some of the danger in using simulation in games and shows the need for a very lengthy, extensive prototyping stage in game development before building up a team for full-scale production.  If the simulation has fundamental issues that challenge the vision of the game project, it’s better to discover them earlier when the concept is still being developed.  This also means the game design itself must lend itself to a game development path where many of its core simulation and gameplay concepts can be implemented and evaluated early, before the web has already been spun past the point of disassembly.

    Either way, the development path of a simulation-heavy game will be a long one, since dynamic systems never work the way artists envision, and must be tweaked and re-evaluated over and over.  Operation Flashpoint for instance had a four-year development cycle.  If an extended development cycle is necessary for simulation-heavy games, it would make sense to begin such a game project with a small, focused team working out conceptual gameplay kinks in prototyping rather than employing a large team, wasting their time developing assets that may end up needing revision again and again as critical gameplay mechanics are found to fall short of their goals.  Many of the games reviewed above, along with other infamous examples like Peter Molyneux’s Black & White, suffer from obvious underdevelopment of their simulated, dynamic aspects, resulting in a disappointingly unfinished game.

** 2009 update: read Game Developer’s post-mortem of Little Big Planet for an account of how a relatively experimental game was successfuly developed by an unconventional team.

Making It Accessible

    Game designers and publishers often misunderstand their audience when they attempt to make their games accessible.  Making a game overly simplistic with an emphasis on twitch action are not the things, in essence anyway, that make a game accessible.  People aren’t stupid, and are not entertained when games assume they are.  By drastically speeding up the game and emphasizing twitch-action and reaction in Bioshock for the sake of accessibility, the team made a tremendous mistake, because it only served to make the game more bewildering to the uninitiated.

    Accessibility has nothing to do with speed or gameplay depth.  It has everything to do with the intuitiveness and intelligent simplicity of the control scheme, the logic of the game world (is it consistent and easy to think about, or do you have to memorize a lot of nonsense mechanics to win?), and the transparency of the interface.  A friend of mine, a long-time gamer, watched his roommate grow frustrated by the character sheets and convoluted inventory management of Mass Effect, despite the fact that, for the genre, they were pretty simplified.  This provides great insight into what makes a game inaccessible.  The idea of character “stats” and “classes” seemed completely foreign to him, along with having to haul tons of loot around a battlefield to be sorted through later.  Both of these things are too far removed from how people logically think about the world, since they stem from the archaic and overly abstract architecture of pen & paper RPGs.  In order to make games more accessible to a non-”hardcore” audience, designers have to be willing to challenge the abstract and often nonsensical conventions of their genres.  One thing Bioshock did well was reduce its reliance on abstract stat sheets and menus over System Shock 2, which often had the player playing Tetris with his inventory grid to make items fit.  Mass Effect neither had a transparent interface or logical game mechanics– instead it awkwardly jammed archaic RPG conventions into a Halo-esque shooter.

    Simulation can make games more accessible and appealing.  With something akin to Trespasser’s virtual hand interface, you can consolidate a countless number of possible actions into an analog controller and a couple buttons, rather than breaking out everything a game character can do with his hands into several convoluted commands.  Want to open a door?  Get your hand on the knob and push the door open at the speed of your choosing.  Want to fire a weapon?  Place your hand over a gun to pick it up, and press the use button to fire it.  Want to reload it?  Flick your arm all the way down (to steal a convention from arcade shooters).  Want to swing a sword?  Find one and get swinging!  Want to deflect an attack?  Hold the use button and push the enemy’s sword away.

    You may be thinking “Wait a minute, attempts at direct swordfighting in the past have all been clunky as shit.”  While that’s true, none of them had a sophisticated body simulation & AI driving that process… it was all “dumb” input data from the controller fed right into the game object.  Much like Assassin’s Creed’s “free run” mode, AI has to take part in translating the controller’s input into the sophisticated behaviors of an intelligent game character.  In Trespasser, which featured a “dumb” VR hand, pressing buttons on a numerical keypad in the game suddenly became an absurdly epic challenge of precision VR hand-driving.  However, with a game character that has some understanding of the world and can accurately read and perform the bidding of the player, these issues can be eliminated.

    To get back to the point, what simulation-heavy world interaction can do, outside of consolidating several controls into a few, is add an underlying logical structure to the game’s interaction.  When deep interaction can be performed by just a few game mechanics instead of several disparate ones, the game becomes much easier to think about, and gives players the joy of coming up with unconventional and creative approaches, styles, and solutions to the game’s challenges.  It avoids the “oh, I forgot my game character can do [x] if I go into the [y] menu and activate the [z] mode, and press [w] during combat” problem.  There are a countless number of games I’ve played (MGS anyone?) that featured a mind-boggling number of character actions mapped to convoluted, context-based button combos.  I hardly used any of them beyond the essentials because, franky, I couldn’t be arsed.

    Gamers want dynamic worlds and dynamic interactivity…  Ok, granted, not all of them and not all the time (we enjoy a well-written, pre-scripted narrative too), but given the sheer amount of hype that simulation-based game concepts generate, dynamic worlds are something that have granted several mediocre games big sales just by their sheer potential.  Even Operation Flashpoint, one of the few successes of simulation-based gameplay, has enjoyed tremendous sales outside of the US (which is a bit odd given the game’s US-centric subject matter & presentation).

    But why do we want it?  Games often tap into our desire to do something important and be someone incredible.  We love to learn things… not just develop twitch skills, but to understand gameworlds, take control of them and bend them to our will.  Simulation allows us to change the world.  Not the world, but certainly the fantasy world that exists in the game.  When a game character is merely following a writer’s script, gamers know they aren’t in the real driver’s seat.

(this article was transplated from an anime-centric blog I had)

…and by opinionated I mean all anime fans and college art students. That means you! Maybe twice!

But first off I whacked together a short DJ mix, this time with R&B/pop mixed in. Pop is harder to mix than techno, simply because straightforward dance tracks are made to be mixed while pop is meant to stand alone. If you ever wondered why techno tracks tend to have long, boring lead-ins and dry, predictable progressions, that’s because they’re engineered to be mixed and manipulated by a DJ. Pop is tough though… I was lucky enough that Golden Diva happened to work so magically with Let it Go at the 6 minute mark.

download Sept 2008 DJ mix

I’m far from being (or wanting to be) a pro DJ… I just put a mix together every once in a while. It’s a fun way to explore your music collection. The set list is in the MP3 metadata comments field. Before you ask IS DJ-ING A LEGITIMATE ARTFORM?, let’s get this bloggish article going. I spare no parenthesis:

Anime, being an offbeat, alternative form of entertainment (from the perspective of the international fandom), tends to create highly opinionated, sometimes ghettoized fandoms. These fans have strict criteria for what they see as legitimate use of the art (popular pick: oldschool mecha anime) and what they see as empty commercial wankery (popular pick: moé aesthetics). The same tends to be true for any offbeat category of taste– music is a great example, where fans aggressively box themselves into genres and cling to obscure bands while shunning everything else as pedestrian, and any musician from the mainstream as a sell-out. This elitism goes as deep as piracy vs. purchasing, CDs vs. vinyl records vs. MP3s**, and even recorded vs. live. Also when new technologies (say, computers) enable new degrees of expression in an art form, traditional artists will often take an elitist stance and say the evolution is either illegitimate or cheapens the art form. When deeply embedded fandoms get involved in an all-out over-intellectualized flame wars, the issue often boils down to one question: What is art, exactly? What makes something “more art” than something else? People like to say that defining art is impossible, but that’s not true at all. There is a definition to art, but it doesn’t bring the black & white clarity that elitists need to justify their elitism.

Art Defined: Art is the application of taste with the objective of striking emotion. Art is taste applied. That’s the best I can essentialize it anyway. Emotion must also be defined in a very broad way. Any time you’re doing something and considering how your work strikes the emotions of you or anyone else, you are creating art. The more you are shaping emotion in your product (whether deliberately or unconsciously), the more artistic the work is. Why is this an unsatisfying answer to some? Because they’re looking to place a dividing line on a gradient. There’s no true cut-off point for “is art” / “isn’t art”. If it’s man-made, it likely has aspects of art. Where you place the dividing line is a meaningless, arbitrary gesture. With that in mind, these normally challenging, divisive questions suddenly become answerable:

Is a soup can art? Yes, since someone thought about whether or not it looks good when designing it. If it’s not aesthetically pleasing (does it make people think of tasty soup?) then it won’t sell.

Is a soup can less artistic than a song? Usually but not necessarily. You’d have to pair a highly technical piece of academic computer-generated music with a particularly awesome soup can to demonstrate the reverse.

Is advertisement art? Often yes… in this age of increasingly abstract advertising and branding, advertisements reach more for the heart than the rational mind. This shouldn’t stop you from hating on them though. A similar argument can be made for things like political speeches and emotionally-charged political editorials.

Is photography art? Yes. It may be, on average, less “art” than painting, but there’s still a man behind the camera using his taste to determine the best angle, framing, focus, lighting, shutter speed and so on… and usually he culls his output to a few of his best photos. There is a good amount of taste involved in that process, even if you’re doing something like journalism– e.g., how do I best frame this picture to immerse readers in the scene that is unfolding in front of me? That type of consideration, how to most powerfully and vividly convey an event, is art too.

Is Andy Warhol’s painting of a soup can art? Yep.

Does art need to have a literal meaning or message? Nope. It just needs to strike emotion, which can mean conveying an experience, even an abstract one. For films, having a strong storyline doesn’t necessarily mean it is “more artistic” or higher quality than films with a weak story. Story is only one path to strike the emotions of audiences, so to limit your assessment of art to “story” and “meaning” is a one-dimensional outlook.

Is recycling old art to make new art… art? Like what hiphop does all the time– sample old records and throw a beat, some raps, and a bassline over it? Of course that’s art because there’s taste and aesthetic consideration involved in doing that. The hiphop artist expresses his world by sampling and recontextualizing old art.

Is making a mix tape art? Yeah… not as much as making your own music of course, but making the playlist is all about emotional consideration. DJ-ing is, to a lesser or greater degree, a more advanced and creative version of that. On the higher end of creativity and virtuosity, you have things like scratching and mashups.

Now it’s time for the hard questions: Is talking art? People often talk to convey their emotions and experiences. As weird as it sounds, it is. Like a doorknob though, it usually isn’t the primary purpose of everyday communication to strike emotion and convey experience (instead it’s more often used to coordinate mundane activities and describe intellectual ideas), so talking is not practically thought of as art. Chatting however can very quickly get into informal storytelling, and that is more easily considered artistic. Even if you’re just trying to be funny, you are shaping your words to incite an emotion.

Is punching someone in the face art? I wanted to inspire anger after all. I guess I have to say yes technically, especially if your primary goal was to inspire emotion rather than get something out of it or defend yourself. Ultimately everything you do has at least some very minute amount of “art” in it, because you express your taste and personality through it.

Is erotica art? Is porn art? If arousal is an emotion then yes, there are all kinds of aesthetic decisions to be made in the name of heightening arousal. Vanilla video porn is pretty low brow in the sense that it only serves to strike one very specific emotion in an unsophisticated, unchallenging way, as if you had a 1hr video tape of Hollywood explosions all strung together… that doesn’t stop it from being, in essence, art though. If you’re unconvinced, the lines blur when you have otherwise sophisticated films and novels with erotic scenes, along with explicit illustrations and comic art that exhibit strong, creative aesthetics — which suggests there weren’t any lines between “art” and “erotica” to begin with. It’s all aesthetic to shape emotion, no matter what that emotion may be.

If a computer spits out a bunch of random numbers, is that art? If the numbers are truly random, then probably not, unless the programmer was trying to inspire something with his decision to write such a program. Again, it all comes down to control and emotional consideration.

Is a tree art? No. A tree is a very complicated, self-organizing system designed by an evolutionary process… but if you believe in some kind of emotionally intelligent creator, then necessarily the world would be “his” art (as an expression of “his” taste).

Is a whale song art? That boils down to whether you limit art to human intelligence or emotional intelligence. Whale songs likely try to convey an emotion or experience to fellow whales, just as humans do with speech sometimes. I like to consider whale songs and such as “art” on a technical level. Intelligence, after all, exists as a gradient too. There’s no “is”/”is not” intelligent, there are just shades of intelligence spanning more than one dimension. As the technological singularity quickly approaches, you’re going to see the advent of strong AIs gaining emotional intelligence and being able to create art themselves. The lines will become increasingly blurry (or rather it’ll become more apparent that there were no “lines” to begin with).

Is an anthill art? Not really, because an anthill is about as intelligently designed as a tree. Ants are pretty dumb. Even though the colony may seem intelligent, colonies are actually just self-organizing systems (in other words, no ant, including the queen, is making intelligent decisions).

Why is painting considered more artistic than photography? It has to do with degrees of expression. There’s more control, more things to consider, more ways to shape expression in a painting. Of course this is all very arguable, since none of that opinion is measurable in any substantial way.

The reason why is: art is subjective. Why is art subjective? The development of the brain is shaped by life experiences, thus people are wired to see the world and process information in fundamentally different ways. An aesthetic that may strike the emotions of one person may not have an effect on the other. When watching a movie, some people (like my blatantly INTP self) derive more emotion from “atmosphere” and the accumulation of technical details and background elements, while others like an ESFP friend of mine, derive more from the direct story and the plight of the characters (if we both like something, that means it’s off the hook guaranteed). This is the basis for subjectivity. It seems obvious, but people often forget about it when they try to assess a film solely on elements like “story” or “character development”. Singular aspects like those aren’t sure-fire routes to eliciting emotion. The best critics understand that and, rather than try to convey their subjective opinion, try to describe the aesthetics and the experience of the art in question. What is its emotional goal, and how does it meet that goal? Who will its best qualities appeal to? Who will be turned off by its shortcomings? If you see a critic spewing too much hyperbole and praise, or fixating too much on a few negative aspects, that’s the sign of a poor critic (or an industry cheerleader).

So let’s get back to the old elitist arguments. First of all, what does it mean to sell out? It usually means to compromise an artistic vision in order to appeal to a broader audience. Does that make it less art? Not really, since there’s a lot of emotional consideration in going that route, so it’s simply a different route that requires different artistic decisions in how to shape the work. However, a lot of consistently bad decision-making in mainstream art, whether we’re talking about the homogeny of mainstream music or studio edits of otherwise great films, comes from underestimating the intelligence and sophistication of the audience. It’s not so much trying to get sales with your work that’s bad (a lot of artists work best when thinking about their audience), it’s assuming a dumb audience, because you necessarily make dumb art, with not much more sophistication than a 1hr videotape of Hollywood explosions. Going mainstream, or even reaching for the mainstream, is not necessarily a bad decision that cheapens the work. Sometimes artists want to break out of their shells and create things that can get large audiences excited, you know… where ever it is they find inspiration to produce good work.

Does the advent of technology X cheapen the art of Y? No, it expands it beyond its old definitions. This usually sends traditionalists in a scramble as they fail to understand the new dimensions of their art form. For example, music in the western world used to be all about sophisticated notation and virtuosity in performance. As recording technology advanced over the past century, mainstream music increasingly edged towards sound aesthetics (e.g. distortion, beats, etc.) because that became the new thing, and it carried greater appeal to audiences less familiar with sophisticated music theory. Of course the old-timers who understood music only in terms of notation and performance questioned whether things like synthesizers and sophisticated recording technology was an assault on the integrity of music. Instead it was an assault on their definitions (their dividing lines) on what constituted “proper” music. As dimensions expand, dividing lines lose their relevance. The advent of all this recording technology robbed the genre of orchestral music of its previously chart-topping status (as the only game in town), but I doubt it reduced the number of people interested in traditional music theory, notation and classical performance. It’s not like all those kids listening to Soulja Boy would’ve cared about orchestral otherwise, so no, the art form is not really cheapened by all that. The base of participants continues to grow as technology makes the art more accessible, and the dimensions of expression continue to expand. The world of music is much more diverse, interesting and accessible than it was in the past. The traditional values still survive, and they often mix, blend and collide with the new too. I’ve written more on this topic in The State of Art.

Everything that isn’t My Favorite Genre (X) is crap! No, you idiot. You in particular respond best to the aesthetics of Genre X, but Genre X is not the standard of which you can judge Genre Y, Z and so on. And what will you do when your favorite genre grows stagnant (if it hasn’t already)? You can’t cling to it forever… or well, you can, but then I pity your world.

What does it mean to be pretentious? This is a tough question, since hardly anything is pretentious if you think about it. Even The Matrix 3, with all its absurd comic book convolution in its thinly veiled attempt to appear sophisticated and profound, is arguably not pretentious. It may “pretend” to be sophisticated, but it does so in order to convey a sense of profoundness, which is a genuine emotional goal. It deliberately uses the “aesthetics” of sci-fi and philosophy to elicit emotion. Some people enjoyed it, fully aware of the illusion. If you don’t believe in the illusion of art, then all art is pretentious, as it tries to illustrate an experience that doesn’t actually exist. At best, you can criticize The Matrix 3 for failing to meet its emotional objective, or just being plain stupid and not very well thought out. As a more blatant example, let’s say someone has a blank canvas in a museum with an info card next to it explaining the profound meaning behind the piece (lame!). However if the artist was truly inspired to create such a piece, it can’t be called pretentious (it can still be called daft though). The only thing that can be called pretentious is when an artist goes against his sense of taste– he deliberately creates something terrible and uninspiring to him and his perception of an audience, something totally against his better judgment, and ships a consciously low-quality, no-impact work to audiences for whatever reason (outside of deliberately aiming for a negative reaction, which is indeed an emotional goal). That’s the kind of self-centered attitude that I find pretentious. It’s always sad to see a production that conveys the apathy of a headless production crew. If nobody cared about making a good product during production, why would distributors try to present it to audiences as if it were something worth seeing? If the artist (and the museum curator) placed a blank canvas that inspires neither of them, simply because it was the “in” thing for art exhibits to have, then that too is pretentious. It pretends to be art worth seeing.

The main lesson here is everything in art & entertainment exits in a multi-dimensional gradient. You can’t fence off an area and say everything on this side is A, and everything on that side is B. To make matters more confusing, art cannot be measured in a precise fashion, making artificial borders inapplicable to begin with. Its peripheral effects, like sales and viewership, can be measured… but that doesn’t carry a direct correlation to the quality or effectiveness of the art, because the fundamental objective of art is not to make money but to strike emotion. The best you can do is take highly generalized averages Rotten Tomatoes-style, but even those fail to adequately describe the work.

** BONUS ARTICLE: Which audio format is the best?

CDs, technically… or even SACD/DVD-A, but the “whole truth” is more complicated than that. CDs are measurably better than vinyl records in practically every aspect– CDs have a lower noise floor, less distortion, quicker response and aren’t prone to warping and degradation. Vinyl fans will often cite how records can theoretically reproduce frequencies above human hearing, but the sad facts are 1. Humans can”t hear it so no musician or recording engineer will utilize that aesthetically, 2. What’s the point with all that distortion, 3. You likely don’t own the necessary hardware to reproduce that freq. range, and 4. That theoretical level of quality is lost after the first playback due to degradation. After 10 plays, a vinyl record will be reduced to half the frequency response of a CD and beyond. Vinyl zealots will also talk about how CDs are digital so they lack the magical analog (mechanical even) phatness of a vinyl record. Here’s the deal: Vinyl records, due to their uneven freq. response and distortion, force their own character upon everything that is printed to vinyl. CDs don’t have a character at all. This means you can capture all the richness (lo-fi distortion) of a vinyl on a CD if you wanted to, but not the clean CD sound on a vinyl. Musicians and mastering engineers actually do something similar to this with distortion tools like harmonic exciters when producing a CD, so the idea of “lo-fi phatness” is already on the mind of anyone who wants to produce a good-sounding album. (Tube amplifiers accomplish this distortion on the playback end of things, if you’re wondering why some people have those) So does this all mean a CD will always sound better than a vinyl record? NO. You may have heard of the so-called loudness war which describes an industry-wide problem plaguing the field of mastering. In the absence of a loudness standard, pop CDs aiming for an aggressively “mainstream” sound will sacrifice aspects of its sound quality in order to obtain a louder sound. Vinyl records behave to “loudness” differently, which makes such foolish practices moot when mastering to a vinyl record. What this means is sometimes, a vinyl record will actually have a less compromised master of the material than the CD version. This is only beneficial when the CD master is tremendously compromised though, so it’s not _that_ common. All that being said, I have a few vinyl records. It’s a cool novelty format with its own character… I mean all is fair game in the name of touching emotion. I’m always blown away that a needle vibrating in the grooves of a plastic disc can produce decent levels of sound quality. If we lived in a vinyl record-less alternate dimension and someone described to me their concept for a turntable, I would’ve said you’re f—ing out of your mind, there’s no way that’ll sound good.

SA-CD and DVD-A are the failed successors to the CD format. They add a few new features and measurably improved levels of sound quality, but the problem is CDs already reproduce the full spectrum of human hearing. Nobody in a double-blind test on a high-quality reference system can tell the difference between CD and SA-CD or DVD-A. If you can’t hear it, then nobody on the recording side of things aesthetically considers it anyway.

MP3s and other audio compression algorithms all work by using the same fundamental technique: removing and simplifying sounds you can’t hear. MP3s gained an early stigma by implementations with poor or even flawed performance, turning the audio into a wishy-washy mess. However, the technology has come a long way in the past decade. Improvements to the algorithm and extensive tuning (via public double-blind testing) allows modern formats like L.A.M.E. MP3 and Ogg Vorbis to reach “transparent” levels of quality at bitrates that were once considered dangerous. Does audio compression damage quality? If you’re using a mature encoder at a decent bitrate (say 192 kbps VBR), then the answer is no. In fact, the better your audio system, the more transparent the audio compression will be (Crappy headphones with uneven freq. response tend to make it easier to hear certain compression artifacts). The stigma however still remains, hence the offerings of a tremendously wasteful 320 kbps CBR at certain stores. At least use VBR, FFS.

Here is IMO the order of things to do if you want to improve the sound quality of your system, things having the most audible effect first: Buy better speakers (try craigslist but watch out for speaker scams! Avoid things made before the early 90s), buy a subwoofer, place your speakers properly or differently in the room, put your system in a better room, treat your room with acoustic absorber panels ($ or DIY), buy a better amp & cables if they have audible issues, and select a better format if there are audible issues as well. By far, your speakers and the space you put them in make the biggest difference in shaping sound. However this is kind of an infinite area because, like art, it’s all about your taste and emotion. Isn’t it fun when the things that matter are subjective?