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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 8 declined, 19 accepted (27 total, 70.37% accepted)

Books

Submission + - Writing for Video Game Genres

Submitted by Aeonite
Aeonite writes: The third book in a pseudo-trilogy, Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG offers advice from 21 experts in the field of video game writing, pulled from the ranks of the IGDA's Game Writers Special Interest Group and wrangled together by editor Wendy Despain. It follows in the footsteps of Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing and Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, and in keeping with the trend offers the most specific, targeted advice for how to write for an assortment of game genres.

Depending on your particular poison, the authors of each chapter might be immediately recognizable or complete unknowns. Possibly most likely to be familiar to a general audience are Sande Chen (The Witcher) and Richard Dansky (Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Far Cry), but Lee Sheldon (the Agatha Christie series), Andrew Walsh (Prince of Persia) and David Wessman (the Star Wars: X-Wing series) might also ring a bell.

The important thing here, however, is not who the writers are, so much as that they deftly cover a wide variety of terrain. As the subtitle suggests the book covers everything from FPS to RPG, from MMO to ARG, and the entirety of alphabet soup in-between. Each chapter covers the particular challenges of writing for one particular genre, and generally offers specific tips on how to overcome those challenges when writing for that genre. The chapter on MMOs, for example, discusses the fact that MMOs have stories that never end, worlds with millions of chosen ones, and a complete inability to control pacing or quest flow. "Writing for Platform Games" emphasizes the need to provide a coherent narrative even while the player is generally busy trying to complete the next jumping puzzle. Other familiar genres covered along the way include Adventure games, Sports games, Flight Simulators and Driving games.

Several of the chapters also venture outside of what traditionally constitutes a "game genre." For example, Richard Dansky and Chris Klug respectively cover Horror and Sci-Fi/Fantasy, themes that are based on the shape of the narrative rather than any particular gameplay format. Later chapters also explore Sandbox games (which author Ahmad Saad indicates can include everything from Grand Theft Auto III to SimCity), Serious games (being "games that do not have entertainment as a primary purpose"), and Casual games. Chapters are also devoted to specific platforms: Evan Skolnick covers Handheld games, and Graeme Davis explores Mobile Phone games. The fact that some of these categories necessarily include games that might also fall into genres covered earlier is never a problem here, however; each chapter offers specific advice relevant to its particular subject, and there is little if any "what he said" repetition to be found, and certainly nothing like outright contradictory advice from different authors.

While a single numbered outline format is followed throughout the book, each author writes in a slightly different fashion. This means that some authors (such as Andrew Walsh, in his coverage of Platformers) present swaths of dense copy within each numbered section, whereas others break up their chapter with numerous subheads, a single short paragraph beneath each point (as with Daniel Erickson's chapter on RPGs). Further, while the format of the book's bulleted lists is consistent throughout, their prevalence is somewhat uneven; Lee Sheldon's chapter on Adventure games is chock full of bullets, while Dansky's chapter on Horror games nearly dispenses with them altogether (but for one single list of five items). Certain chapters contain many charts, tables and/or screenshots, while others lack them altogether. One particular design feature — a boxed "Special Note" that intrudes into the margin — is used only a scant handful of times in the entire book, which makes each sudden instance more of a "Hey! Over Here!!" than the "Psst, by the way..." which I think was intended.

None of this is in any way bad: in fact, Despain's Preface encourages skipping around, and specifically addresses the issue of inconsistency by saying that the chapters are "written as personal essays with the individual style of each author intact." However, it is a notable feature of the book and worth a mention; this is not a book you read from cover to cover in one sitting.

The larger consideration for the purposes of review is this: should you buy a copy? The book's intended audience is — as with the earlier books in the "trilogy" — geared towards professionals already working in the game industry. Quotes on the back cover specifically mention "those of us swimming in the murky waters of games storytelling," and the book's closing chapter (J. Robinson Wheeler's "Writing For Interactive Fiction") dispenses with any illusion altogether, saying "If you're reading this book, you're a writer..." Even the Preface says "we" more than "you" when addressing the reader. The assumption is that you're already "one of us," and while that's a warm embrace for me (since I am indeed "one of them"), it might come across as a bit of a lukewarm shoulder for someone outside the industry.

In short, this book — perhaps even moreso than either of the previous IGDA Writers SIG books — is by writers, and for writers. As a "starting point from which we (game writers) can work together to improve the state of the art," the book provides an excellent foundation, and deserves to be on the bookshelf of any game writer or designer, be they novice or veteran. As for everyone else... if you're ready to dip a toe in the chilly waters of game writing, you could do far worse than to check out the advice within.

You can purchase Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Game Design: A Practical Approach (courseptr.com)

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "As the title suggests, Game Design: A Practical Approach presents a practical approach to game design — one that is almost too practical in places. The book does a good job of covering many of the foundational elements of game design (called "atoms" by the author), but in places the level of practical detail — and the heavy focus on Lua code examples — is a bit hard to work through. Readers allergic to code may find themselves skipping over swaths of text instead of actually reading it.

Schuytema is a game industry veteran, perhaps best known for having worked on the original incarnation of Prey back in 1998 or thereabouts. These days it seems he's employed by the University of Illinois as an Extension Specialist, and it certainly seems to have rubbed off on him, as the book is written in a very scholarly, textbook-like fashion. The preface speaks of "foundational information," and while the exciting parts of working in the game industry are mentioned as well, generally the book's subtitle ("A Practical Approach") is precisely what you get.

The book is broken into three parts. The first, the aptly (and practically) named "Introduction to Game Design," consists of six chapters, covering the basic foundational elements of game design, game design documents, coding tools and the like. The advice in the first four chapters, in particular, comes across as a bit too practical, if not downright pedantic, as the author discusses things like listening, taking notes, and reading. In chapter 4 the author even covers the merits of breathing properly, getting enough sleep and not eating junk food (good luck encouraging that at a game company; we lived on Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at Perpetual Entertainment). One wonders if the current generation of whippersnappers, just entering the industry, really needs to be told to get a good night's sleep; if so, we're in for some interesting games over the next few decades.

Some of the advice here is genuinely useful and interesting, such as methods for helping inspire creative thought, brainstorming and developing memory. Chapters 5 and 6 are also more relevant to game design; the former covers game design documents, pitch docs, functional specifications, and the like, and is one of the tightest and most useful chapters in the book. Chapter 6 then dives headlong into the Lua scripting language, which is where the book's focus on game design sort of drifts sideways into the realm of game development. From this point on, the book is sporadically riddled with code examples, references to the example game on the included CD, and detailed explanations of variables, operators, functions and control structures. This is useful, if dry, but it seems to be directed more at the indie "casual game" industry where game designer, game programmer, game artist, game writer, and game publisher are all the same person.

The second part of the book, "Game Design Theory," covers high level design concepts are broken down into what the author calls "game atoms." Examples include things like: having a clear goal for the player; providing subvictories to the player; allowing the player to affect the game world; making the context of the game understandable to the player; and so on. These are insightful, and easy to understand and digest, and were the entire book filled with nothing but these I would find it all the more valuable. Sadly, this section is also the shortest in the book (spanning just over 50 pages), and although later chapters in this section do manage to dive into things like player perceptions and challenges, I find myself wanting more. In covering the concept of game "flow" and losing oneself in the moment, the section does earn geek points for citing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose name looks like catlike typing should have been detected. But I digress.

Part 3, approximately half of the book, is devoted to "Real-World Game Design," which moves away from "theatrical underpinnings" and into more (you guessed it) "practical" issues. Here, specific "atoms" such as UI, inventory, power-ups, puzzles, conflicts, and the like are covered in some depth, each presented with code to show how the relevant "atom" might be programmed (examples taken from the sandbox game named Eye Opener, included on the accompanying CD). In places the density of code calls to mind the BASIC game programming books I owned in the late '80s, where if I had 6 hours to type I could make a rocket blast off the top of my Apple IIe monitor. In fact, one of the most interesting comments is on page 336 where the author discusses early games on the Apple II, where "(r)eplay of the game meant going for higher scores, since a single pass through the game was maybe 20 minutes tops." Schuytema speaks as if these are games from a bygone era, but it seems to me he's basically describing the modern casual game, of which there are many, many thousands in the wild. Much of the latter material, alas, seems to drift back into the realm of the "overly practical," with the author covering storytelling atoms such as outlining, writing, revising, and working with a writer. The final chapter, "Next Steps," then presents the ever popular "how to break into the industry" section, which covers very practical, but again somewhat obvious topics such as going to school, networking, and following game websites.

Each chapter ends with a summary and a series of "Chapter Exercises" that hammer home the feeling that this book is really more of a textbook, complete with homework assignments, rather than a casual read. Even the index is almost TOO complete and practical, with entries for brief, passing mentions of Barnes & Noble and Yahoo!; I was surprised not to find an entry for Mountain Dew, since it's mentioned a few times more often in the text and seems somewhat more relevant to the game industry. The book also offers a number of "from the trenches" sidebars throughout, each featuring veterans espousing on various elements of the game industry. These are interesting and often insightful, but their overall impact is somewhat reduced considering that fully half of them (11 of 22) feature the author himself. It seems that a broader selection of insights and examples from other designers in the industry would have served to balance the book a bit more.

Also worth at least a passing mention is the issue of the postage-stamp-sized images and screenshots that pepper game books these days. Many of the pictures in this book are difficult to make out due to their clarity and size (Figure 1.1 looks like some guys from Home Depot are about to encounter the Blair Witch), but most can be puzzled through. Even then, although they generally have relevance to the subject being discussed they often don't really reinforce the concept at hand in a useful fashion: Figure 3.1 is a picture of a marble notebook and some pencils, as if the book were written in a future time when knowledge of writing materials was lost; Figure 3.4 is captioned "Use your finger as an eye guide..." and contains a picture of a book with a finger on it; Figure 10.3's caption mentions "the samurai sword" weapon in Shadow Warrior, yet the screenshot apparently depicts a grenade launcher. The capper is probably page 194, which is supposed to illustrate multiplayer gaming, but instead (as far as I can tell) depicts two mid-'90s Inside Sales reps playing Solitaire instead of phoning clients. Possibly they are car salesmen; it's not clear.

Warts aside, as a whole Game Design: A Practical Approach covers quite a lot of terrain in quite a useful fashion, and hits all the major foundational points about game design. Though it does contain quite a lot of Lua code, this is admittedly not as irrelevant as it could have been, since Lua is used in a wide assortment of games, from Far Cry to Natural Selection 2, Warhammer Online to The Witcher. The book is a few years old at this point, but it seems that it will remain relevant as long as Lua remains a viable programming language in the game industry. Left-brainers in search of a fairly crunchy and quite practical book about game design AND development (and in particular those who want to design and develop their own games, rather than work for someone else) will be quite happy with the material here. Those right-brainers more comfortable amidst the fluffier bits of the game industry, however, may find themselves checking their watches halfway through the second act."
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Vintage Games (armchairarcade.com)

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "Featuring a subtitle that is almost longer than the preface,Vintage Games: An Inside Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time offers a retrospective look at those games which authors Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton feel were, in their words, "paradigm shifters; the games that made a difference." As the preface points out, these are not necessarily best-selling games, innovative games, or novel games, but rather titles that, "in their own special way changed videogames forever."

The book itself features 25 chapters, each devoted to the study of a particular title that best stands out as "vintage" in its particular genre. Those games chosen as particularly "vintage" are (in order): Alone in the Dark, Castle Wolfenstein, Dance Dance Revolution, Diablo, Doom, Dune II, Final Fantasy VII, Flight Simulator, Grand Theft Auto III, John Madden Football, King's Quest, Myst, Pac-Man, Pole Position, SimCity, Space Invaders, Street Fighter II, Super Mario 64 (covered in tandem with Tomb Raider), Super Mario Bros.,Tetris, The Legend of Zelda, The Sims, Ultima, Ultima Online, and Zork. In addition, nine additional "Bonus Chapters" are available online at the book's website, covering Defender, Elite, Pinball Construction Set, Pong, Robotron: 2084, Rogue, Spacewar!, Star Raiders, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

Though listing the titles here seems a bit tedious, it does serve two purposes. First, it demonstrates the broad range of game genres and titles covered in the book, with selections made from across four decades of gaming history. Worth noting in this regard is that each chapter is not solely dedicated only to the titular game; related games that both preceded and followed the selected title are also discussed, and although I didn't keep count many hundreds of titles are at least mentioned, if not covered in some depth. Indeed, this broad range leads to one of the minor issues I have with the book, which is a slight feeling of imbalance and inconsistency between chapters.

By way of example, the first chapter on 1992's Alone in the Dark begins with a two page look at the title itself, followed by a brief peek back at other "horror" games such as 1981's Haunted House, 1982's Dracula and 1988's Splatterhouse. The chapter then dives back into a detailed overview of the introductory scene of Alone in the Dark (along with illustrative screenshots), followed by four pages covering the game's sequels and some brief mentions of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Chapter 2, covering Castle Wolfenstein, follows more or less the same formula of focusing on the titular game, as do Chapter 7, covering Final Fantasy VII, Chapter 9, covering GTA III, and Chapter 15, on SimCity.

However, this "formula" is not followed in many of the other chapters, which makes reading the book from cover-to-cover a somewhat uneven experience. Chapter 3, covering Dance Dance Revolution only really devotes about four of the chapter's 11 pages to DDR itself, instead choosing to spend more collective time (and screenshots) on related subjects like Dragon's Lair, Video Jogger, the Nintendo Power Pad, Sega's Activator, and Karaoke Revolution (among others). Chapter 10, covering John Madden Football goes for over a dozen pages before it truly covers the title in question on five entertaining and screenshot-packed pages. Chapter 14, covering Pole Position and Chapter 17, on Street Fighter II are other notable examples where the focus is not as tightly aimed at the vintage title in question.

This is not to say that the writing is flawed; on the contrary, it is always entertaining and interesting, and frequently illuminating. Loguidice and Barton cover a lot of terrain, and they are not afraid to point out the warts as well as the beauty marks in their selections. For those who grew up with video games in their house starting with the Atari 2600 (or before), the book is like a trip through time, giving the reader a chance to reminisce about days gone by while also learning about the many titles he or she didn't even known existed. All of this material is written in an informative yet casual style that never feels stilted or pretentious, nor too fanboyish. Indeed, the only awkwardness is the inconsistency in coverage from chapter to chapter, which sort of feels like the authors — rather than co-write each chapter — sort of divided the book in half. I have no idea if this is the case, and there are certainly no glaring stylistic differences from chapter to chapter; all are equally entertaining.

The above chapter list also demonstrates that the titles are arranged in alphabetical order, as opposed to release date or genre. While this certainly makes a sort of structural sense, it does feel a bit awkward while reading the book cover-to-cover, as the reader is constantly dancing back and forth through time, from 1992 to 1981, followed by five titles released in the '90s, a title from 1980, and then 2001's GTA III. In addition, the decision to alphabetize The Legend of Zelda and The Sims in the T's, rather than the L's and S's respectively, does feel a bit odd (especially since the titles are listed under L and S in the index). Whereas Ultima and Ultima Online, and Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Bros. are in adjacent chapters, The Sims and SimCity are separated by six chapters. This is an admittedly minor quibble, however.

If there is a more-than-minor flaw with the book, it is the same flaw that seems to beset all books covering the video game industry: the screenshots, and their inconsistent placement throughout the text. Occasionally, a screenshot will actually fall on the same page where the game it depicts is being mentioned, but in many cases screenshots appear a page or two away (a mention of Second Life comes to mind in this regard. In several cases, screenshots actually overwhelm the text (most notably on pages 312-313), and fewer would have served better. There are also a number of "back of box" shots, which hardly seem as interesting to the reader as an in-game screenshot would be; in one case, almost an entire page is given over to a blown-up back-of-box shot of Maxwell Manor, which otherwise barely gets a mention in the main text.

Also worth mentioning is that screenshots do not always guarantee title mentions, and vice versa. In some cases, the vintage title being covered in a chapter is given many screenshots, whereas in other cases there are only one or two devoted to that game title. Some other mentioned titles are given a lot of text but no screenshot, such as Resident Evil, Metal Gear, and Half-Life. Other screenshots depict titles that are not even mentioned in the text (though they are still relevant to the subject at hand, as the captions generally make clear); examples include Silent Service, Blades of Steel and Mario Kart: Super Circuit. In places it often feels as if the authors are "making do" with the art resources available to them, rather than placing the images that would best suit the topic.

Whatever the reason for these sorts of issues, they present only the occasional bump in what is otherwise a very smooth and entertaining ride. The somewhat inconsistent coverage of titles means that readers looking to read about their particular favorite game may be in for a treat, or may be disappointed, depending on which particular game they're looking to read about. However, this is not that book. What Vintage Games is, is a four-decade retrospective on 25 games that have truly made a difference, and readers who expect just that (as you now do) will come away wholly entertained."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - The Ninja Handbook

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "Equal parts ninja geekery and pop-cultural satire, The Ninja Handbook falls into that odd category of book that presents fiction as reality. Numerous Guides to Piracy have been published, and more than a few authors have taken a crack at Zombie Survival Guides, the most popular spinoff being the zombie novel World War Z, which is now on its way towards Hollywood. Of course, the creators of the Ask a Ninja website have taken the opposite tack here, having first staked their claim as an Internet video sensation before moving on to "old media."

Ask A Ninja is not the first Ninja website to turn bookish; the first "Ninja Handbook" to hit the shelves was Robert Hamburger's Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book, published on July 1, 2004 based on the website which hit its peak of popularity way back in 2002. Then there was my own Ninja Burger Honorable Employee Handbook, published in late May of 2006 based on a website started as a goof in June of 2000. Both of those books were published by Citadel Press, and in that light also worth mentioning here is the New York Times bestseller The Alphabet of Manliness, written by one Maddox, purportedly a pirate.

The Ninja Handbook, however, is entirely about ninja. Branded as an "Official Product of the International Order of Ninjas," it's an exploration of the lessons a non-ninja, or nonja, needs to learn in order to become a ninja. Of course, the book is subtitled "This Book Looks Forward To Killing You Soon," so one might expect that the lessons to be taught aren't quite so easy, or ordinary.

The book is nominally broken up into seven sections, although the content is random enough, and the humor fluid enough, that any attempt at organization seems futile at best. In many ways the book's sense of humor drifts about in the same general area as the Real Ultimate Power Book. However, that book's focus on what might best be called "12-year-old humor" (i.e.,guitar-wailing, excrement jokes, and Hippos) is decidedly different from the Ask a Ninja book which never breaks character. Ninjas are not "sweet" and "totally cool" in this book; they are savage killers with a made-up ancient history of the sort likely to send Wikipedia editors into reversion-driven nervous breakdowns.

Section 1 offers introductory advice and information about ninja, including how to form a ninja clan and make a clan flag. Section 2 teaches the Path to nearly ninja-hood, broken up into subsections that cover (in turn) the Nonja (non-ninja), those who are Ninjaish, the Ninjalike, the "Whooooooooo," (the sound of a gentle breeze) and then the I.T.A.N. ("Is That A Ninja?"). Along the way The Ninja teaches (or at least briefly mentions) the ninja basics: the ninja code, requirements to being a ninja, safe sword use, shuriken, pirates, mythical beasts, invisible scrolls, and smoke bombs, among many other topics. There are also plenty of sidewise pokes at Google Maps, Vampire Pumpkins, Fox News, A-Ha, Billy Joel, Woody Allen, and the like, the pop culture references sometimes plain to see, and at other times buried beneath in the subtext.

After a very short Section 3 (almost entirely comprised of Ninja Merit Badges, which as one might expect are all solid black), Section 4 teaches Ninja Skills, including Jumping, Spinning, Punching, Stabbing and Kicking, the latter illustrated via a list of 100 different kicks including "10 Piggies of Pain," "Driving Miss Daisy" and "Palace of Endless Toes." The book then dives headlong into the realm of the bizarre, with Section 5 covering "The Worlds" as in other dimensions and realms of existence, as well as magic and myth. The latter section does manage to clamber back out of the primordial stew onto solid ground when it looks at ninja movies, with a particularly hard look at Batman (not a ninja, as it turns out).

Since the reader has survived this far, Section 6 welcomes him or her to the International Order of Ninja, covering the top brass of the organization, ninja internships, and a bit of ninja rap music. Section 7 then introduces the new ninja to their Mission, an endless quest wherein they follow in the footsteps of the many ninja who have come before them. How many? There is an illustration of a ninja riding a pterodactyl, if that's any help. A lengthy timeline and a one page non-glossary close out the book on an abrupt note.

Obviously, this is a book designed for people who like ninja, but more than that it's a book for those who enjoy a mix of intelligent humor and surreal, near-stream-of-consciousness nonsense. The book is not for everyone; it does have a very scattershot feel in places, particularly if you're not prepared to read it all the way through. While there are jokes on every page, this is not a Mystery Science Theater 3000 sort of book where you can turn it on in the middle of an episode and immediately fall into synch with the humor. But while any individual joke (or page) on its own might be somewhat hard to swallow, taken as a whole the entire piece allows you to immerse yourself in an imaginary world somewhere next door to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In that regard, the general tone of the book is best compared with the likes of a John Hodgman, whose book The Areas of My Expertise included a list of 700 Hobo names which he dutifully recited in the audio book version (N.B., The Ninja Handbook is also being released in audio book format). On its own, out of context, such a list is merely awkward and possibly irritating to read (or listen to). But in context, as a part of an entire book full of similar ludicrousness, it's the sort of thing you can just immerse yourself in, and appreciate on a ninja Zen level. The same might be said of the Ask a Ninja video series as well: watch one episode, and you probably won't "get it," but give yourself time to watch them all, and it all suddenly makes sense.

Unless you're a pirate, of course, since pirates and ninja don't get along. As I write this, it's the eve of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19), and I'm beginning preparations for the opposing Day of the Ninja (December 5), entering its 6th year. What is it about pirates and ninja that attracts fans and sells books? Whatever it is, there's obviously something to the whole "ninja vs pirate" thing, and The Ninja Handbook represents a strong argument for the continuation of the funny fad. Obviously Three Rivers Press agrees; according to Publishers Marketplace, the book was sold to Crown Publishing (a division of Random House) for "six figures." That'll buy a lot of shuriken.

You can purchase The Ninja Handbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Quests

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "Quests have always been a part of fantasy gaming; from the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons to World of Warcraft's myriad quest lines, quests have given players purpose beyond button-pressing and mindless grinding. Jeff Howard's Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narrative is an exploration of such quests in both literary and gaming contexts, comparing and contrasting their appearances in each medium and striving to bring the two worlds closer together by imbuing game quests with more meaning.

In his preface, Howard first attempts to define quests, both in his own terms and with respect to the likes of Campbell and Frye. In short, a narrative quest is a "journey to attain a meaningful goal," such as one might find in The Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, or The Quest for the Holy Grail. Such quests are romantic, archetypal, and laden with meaning and purpose. On the contrary, a game quest is in Howard's words "an activity in which players must overcome challenges to reach a goal." The disparity in the language used here is clear, especially when Howard goes on to clarify game quests as being "about action that is meaningful to a player on the level of ideas..." Narrative quests are about meaningful goals; game quests are about meaningful action. Howard quotes Auden as saying that "the search for a lost button is not a quest," but is this not exactly the sort of quest we find in MMOs like WOW? Time-filling quests to give the player some sort of activity, to provide "meaningful play" in the absence of meaningful goals.

This inherent problem with quests in games is further touched upon in the introduction to the book, which explains that its own goal is to prove quests out as a bridge between games and narratives. "[I]nteractivity is a prerequisite of enactment but is not sufficient to produce it...," says Howard. "[E]nactment requires active, goal-directed effort, often in the form of balancing long-term and short-term goals." Campbell, Frye, Auden and Propp are all consulted and cited here, exploring their own takes on quests in terms of their place in the heroic monomyth, medieval romance, subjective personal experience, and a "sequence of defined transformations," respectively. However, the most enlightening point comes after an exploration of the history of quest games (from D&D through WOW) where, quoting Tronstad, the author explains that "the paradox of questing is that as soon as meaning is reached, the quest stops functioning as quest." The profusion of more-or-less meaningless quests in MMORPGs "causes the 'main quest' to disappear" according to Howard, who cites the "bleak scenario" of WOW as not being conducive to meaningful gameplay.

Given that challenge, the main portion of the book serves as a sort of lesson plan towards the creation of better, more meaningful quests in modern games. In Chapter 1, "Introduction to Quest Design," Howard asserts that designing meaningful action is key, and ample examples of symbolism and spiritual analogy tied to the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are offered. The following chapters each cover a different element of quest design, more or less aligned along the same breakdowns as one might find in a MUD codebase: w(or)ld, mob(ile), obj(ect) and the like. Each one is broken up into two sections: theory, and practice, the former covering Howard's thoughts on the topic, and the latter delving into practical examples of how to create that quest element using the Neverwinter Nights Aurora Toolset.

Chapter 2 covers the "Spaces of the Quest," providing a sort of primer on level design and world design, from dungeons and labyrinths to dreamlike allegorical spaces. Chapter 3 then focuses on "Characters," both NPC and PC alike, including a discussion of encounters, dialog trees, archetypes and some minor venom spat Fable-wards due to the presence in that game of characters literally named Mentor and Hero; perhaps worth mentioning in Fable's defense is that both Hero (of Hero and Leander fame) and Mentor (Odysseus' sagacious friend) are both legitimate names derived from Greek myth. But I digress.

Chapter 4 explores "Objects," specifically those quest items that players seek out and gather on their quests. "[T]he drive to acquire objects in Everquest challenges literary understandings of games because players do not seek to interpret these objects," Wesp is quoted as saying here. The assumption seems to be that quests should strive to contain objects laden with meaning and symbolism, whether they be "rods of eight parts" that one must piece together or symbolic tattoos such as those found in Planescape: Torment. Certainly, many MMOs could learn a few lessons from this chapter, being as so many have players running around collecting feces, offal and skins. Indeed, the quests that send them off to do such things are explored in Chapter 5, "Challenges." Here Howard covers fetch/collect quests, kill quests, escort quests and the like, providing a somewhat awkward apology for kill quest proliferation by trying to compare kill grinding in games like WOW with the intense violence practiced by Odysseus. Of course, Odysseus was never sent on a quest to kill 12 Cyclopes to collect their eyes for a healing potion; once again, the difference between meaningful action and meaningful goals rears its ugly head. Indeed, Howard provides a somewhat telling example of an attempt to rectify this disparity in his scripting example, wherein he has King Arthur bestowing Gawain several keys to use on various chests so Gawain can open them in sequence to find objects hidden inside each which will help him on his quest. Surely there are examples of this sort of rote quest sequencing to be found in folklore and mythology; Russian mythology in particular is full of things done in threes. Yet one cannot help but feel that it makes the whole thing somewhat less epic in the retelling when a knight of the Round Table is reduced to playing puzzle games.

Chapter 6 of the book closes out the lesson plan with "Quests and Pedagogy," an example of how Howard used The Crying of Lot 49 with his own students to explore the nature of quests in a video game setting. This rather short chapter is followed by a Conclusion, summarizing what's come before, and then several lengthy Appendices: a guide to the Aurora Toolset; an excerpt from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and an excerpt from The Faerie Queene. An excellent Works Cited page (nearly as long as Chapter 6) and an adequate index close out the book. In total, the book weighs in at 248 pages, although 46 pages of that is introduction (15 more if you count Chapter 1) and over 80 pages is composed of conclusion, appendices and endmatter. Thus, about half of the book is either introduction or conclusion, frontmatter or endmatter, and this makes the book feel somewhat imbalanced, taking a long time to introduce and then back up the topic while spending not enough time (in my opinion) actually working through it. Howard's writing style is excellent and the subject matter worthy; I wish he had spent more time in his book's Act 2; perhaps he would have been able to extend his ideas even further than he does, striving not only to infuse quests with meaningful activity but with meaningful goals as well. Too much of game quest design is derived from the Latin origin of the word quest (which Howard tells us comes from questare, which means " to seek,") and not enough on the purpose of the quest, which is to have a heroic journey with a "Happily Ever After" at the end. Yet MMOs almost by definition require that many millions of players walk the exact same heroic path; would the epic tale of King Arthur be so epic if his round table had 10 million chairs, with ten million knights forever searching for their own copy of the Grail?

"Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest," says King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail."

"Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he will be very keen," replies a French soldier. "Uh, he's already got one, you see."

Therein lies the problem: he's already got one, and so does everyone else. Because everyone has done the quest, and furthermore everyone wants to keep grinding for the +2 grail, which will no doubt be available in the next expansion, or perhaps in the Player's Handbook IV, or as an exclusive Dragon Magazine feature, available to subscribers of D&D Insider. Many (if not most) fantasy games can never have meaningful, magical quests where you get the vorpal sword and slay the Jabberwock and save the world, because their Sisyphean stories can never truly end; the Horde will always be at war with the Alliance, and the ring will never, ever make it to that volcano, and there will always be another supplement or sequel, another dungeon to raid, another hamlet of Hommlet to rescue. One telling Neverwinter Nights module is called Infinite Dungeons; the solitary hero has turned into the solitaire hero, ever grinding away. Sure, Odysseus had his wandering Odyssey as he searched for home, and Galahad took years to quest for the Holy Grail, but in each case they eventually found what they were looking for. Unfortunately, right now much of the game industry seems to generally be following the example of King Pellinore, endlessly pursuing his Questing Beast.

What Howard attempts to do with Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives is truly worthwhile, and I look forward to the dialog his book will inspire. He would have us re-examine the game quest in terms of the narrative quest, and apply those lessons to gaming. The book is well worth a read, both as a lesson plan for making the activity of questing more meaningful, as well as a first step towards giving games that rely heavily on quests — especially MMOS — more meaningful goals. If the game industry can pull that off, it will be an impressive feat, worthy of Sir Galahad himself. If not... well, there's always another 12 wolf pelts to collect.

You can purchase Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Dungeons and Desktops

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games chronicles the rise and fall of the Computer RPG industry, from Akalabeth to Zelda and everything in between. While the bulk of the book is devoted to the genre's "Golden Age" in the late '80s and early '90s, author Matt Barton explores the entire history of CRPGs, from their origins in the mid '70s to the very recent past. While not entirely comprehensive, the book covers not only the major players and award-winners, but also dozens of obscure "also-rans" as well as notable games in related genres.

Barton first defines the genre, insofar as one is able to do so, explaining that a CRPG generally includes elements such as: a system of statistics to track characters (ability scores and skills); the ability to advance characters via experience points; and randomized combat. Barton further attempts to define the genre by comparing CRPGs to what they are not, including JRPGs (Final Fantasy), MMORPGs (World of Warcraft), Adventure Games (Zork), and Strategy Games (Warcraft). A bit later, he explores the origins of the CRPG, listing Baseball Simulation Games (such as Strat-O-Matic), Tabletop wargames (Chainmail), Tolkien, Colossal Cave Adventure, and (of course) Dungeons & Dragons as having had an impact on the creation and evolution of the genre.

The next nine chapters of the book are devoted to the history of the CRPG, which Barton breaks down into six phases, somewhat akin to Hesiod's Five Ages.

The Dark Age covers the period of time from 1974 through the end of the decade, and includes PLATO and Mainframe games such as pedit, Dungeon, dnd and DND (not to be confused with each other, or with D&D or D&D), Oubliette, Moria, Avatar and Orthanc. Also included here, somewhat out of chronological order, are a discussion of Rogue and Rougelikes (Hack, Moria and Angband) and MUDs all the way through to 1989's TinyMUD. The Bronze Age of the CRPG begins in 1979 with the publication of Lord British's Akalabeth: World of Doom (which would go on to sell thousands of copies, making it the first commercially successful CRPG, if not exactly the first) and includes a host of obscure titles, including Wizards Castle, Eamon, Space and Empire, The Tarturian, Odyssey: The Complete Apventure, and Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai. In 1983, Bronze turns to Silver with the appearance of the Ultima and WIzardry trilogies, games which truly began to lay the groundwork for all that came after. Also mentioned in this chapter are less well-known games such as Sword of Fargoal, Dungeons of Daggorath, Tunnels of Doom, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Universe.

The Golden Age dawns in 1985, bringing with it the refinement of prior ideas and the perfection of the genre's underlying systems. Barton divides coverage of this age into three chapters. The first covers the Early Golden Age, beginning with the console crash of 1983 and ending with the arrival of the NES in 1985. The CRPG market survived the crash rather unscathed, and in fact flourished thanks to games such as Phantasie, The Wizard's Crown, Ultima IV, and Autoduel. Most notable of all, of course, was 1985's The Bard's Tale, which spawned two sequels (three, if you count 2004's "spiritual sequel" starring Carey Elwes), both of which also receive some attention here.

It is here where the book's structure begins to drift a bit. By Barton's own admission, progress in the CRPG industry is "neither linear nor orderly," and in fact the attempt to align CRPG titles, trilogies and series along a single timeline almost necessarily breaks down. The Bard's Tale trilogy seems as if it would more properly be discussed in the next chapter (The Golden Age Part I). Instead, Barton calls it "The Dawn of the Golden Age" and places it about a third of the way into the "Early Golden Age" chapter, where it somewhat loses some of its impact. Further confusion surrounds the inclusion here of Might and Magic Book I: Secrets of the Inner Sanctum; published in 1986, it is not only followed by a discussion of Alternate Reality: The City (published in 1985), but is preceded by a lengthy discussion of several games which came after it, including The Magic Candle (1989) and Bloodstone (1993). While the author has thematic reasons for covering these games here, one wonders if a strict chronological order would have served better. Even Barton seems a bit off track when he invites the reader to "turn to the second half of the Golden Age," which runs from 1987 to 1993 (for those not keeping track, the first "half" only ran from 1983 to 1985). I don't mean to nitpick over throwaway segue lines, but in a book with a historical focus, the time-shifting is just a bit disconcerting.

Regardless, "The Golden Age Part I" covers the period of time that many consider to be the era of the CRPG, when companies like SSI, Origin, Interplay, and New World Computing dominated not just the CRPG industry, but the computer game industry as a whole. Ample coverage is justifiably given to SSI's Gold Box games, including Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, and Pools of Darkness. Somewhat curious (to me) is the omission here of any discussion of AD&D Second Edition, which was released in 1989 and officially introduced the concept of THAC0 (which appeared in Pool of Radiance). Other titles covered in this lengthy chapter include: SSI's Krynn trilogy and Savage Frontier games; the original Neverwinter Nights on AOL; Ultima V, VI and VII; Wizardry VI and VII; Might and Magic II, III and so on; Neuromancer; and Interplay's Wasteland.

The next chapter, "The Golden Age Part II," is devoted to JRPGs and groundbreaking CRPGs with real-time 3d graphics that appeared alongside the aforementioned CRPGs. Covered here in the JRPG category are games such as: The Legend of Zelda and its sequels; The Dragon Warrior series; Final Fantasy; Chrono Trigger; Super Mario RPG; and the Phantasy Star series. The chapter also covers Sierra On-Line's Quest for Glory series; the SSI Black Box games (including Eye of the Beholder); Dungeon Master ("the most successful Atari ST game ever released") and its many clones; and other notable genre-bending games including Beyond Zork and Star Saga.

Here again, we fall into a small hole in the timeline, for The Golden Age ends in 1993 and the next age doesn't begin until 1996. The chapter covering this black hole is called "The Bigger They Come," as if suggesting that Barton was unwilling to give a name to this second Dark Age of CRPGs. Here we see coverage of a variety of bad CRPGs, including Interplay's Descent to Undermountain, Ultima VIII and IX, and the Gothic series (which surely deserves more than the two paragraphs it gets). Covered in more depth is SSI's fall from grace following the publication of an assortment of sub-par D&D titles (including Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Al Qadim, and others) and the ensuing loss of their license with TSR. Some attention might have been paid to the "fall from grace" of TSR itself, which suffered financial ruin in the years that followed and was ultimately purchased by WOTC in 1997.

Ever the optimist, Barton instead moves rapidly into The Platinum Age, which covers the period of time from 1996 to 2001 and includes "the best CRPGs ever made." Covered here in some depth are games such as Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and its sequel, Dungeon Siege, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, Might and Magic: The Mandate of Heaven, Dungeon Keeper, Arx Fatalis, Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series, Interplay's Fallout and Fallout 2, and Troika's Arcanum. The bulk of the chapter, however, is devoted to two games and their sequels: Blizzard's Diablo and Diablo II, which the author treats with noteworthy disdain, and Bioware's Baldur's Gate and its sequel, which Barton believes is "the best CRPG ever made."

While both games receive more or less equal time, it is a bit hard to swallow Barton's dislike for Diablo in the context of a historical overview; nowhere else does he editorialize quite so much, or so vividly. While at first he simply declares that Diablo's consideration as a CRPG "remains a divisive subject," he quickly moves on to less thinly-veiled potshots. At one point, he refers to "hordes of badly behaved teenagers (and middle-aged men, no doubt) scampering to Battle.net, 'pwning' each other and seeking out the latest cheats and hacks to gain an unfair advantage." Later, Barton expresses a "pang of regret over the overwhelming triumph of (the Diablo) series, since it seems to have come at the expense of the older, more sophisticated CRPGs of past eras." He insists that Baldur's Gate "offers much more strategy than Diablo," and argues that Baldur's Gate's multiplayer "helped the game compete against Diablo, whose Battle.net servers had become a swirling vortex for Daddy's money." I don't even know what that means — how can a free service be a vortex for money? The entire argument smacks of something one might find in a Penny Arcade comic strip, such as this one or this one. At the end of the book, Barton goes so far as to predict that "the real-time Diablo and Morrowind-style CRPGs that were so popular throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s seem fated to extinction, usurped by World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs." In the wake of all the buzz surrounding Diablo III's announcement in recent days, this prediction seems slightly premature.

Barton ends the book with a discussion of the Modern Age, "which we are in today." The chapter covers Neverwinter Nights and its sequel, as well as Vampire: The Masquerade and Bloodlines, and Knights of the old Republic and its sequel. After a mention of Fable, Oblivion, more Final Fantasies and Zeldas, and a discussion of why console-based CRPGs seem to be winning out, Barton closes out the book with a look at MMORPGS, from Meridian 59 through WOW and DDO (and every major title in between). He notes (quite properly, in my opinion) that an MMO like WOW has trouble handling a central story and plot as adeptly as a CRPG can, and points out several "emerging trends" concerning CRPGs, including the rise of online gaming, the tendency to announce the death of the standalone, single-player CRPG and — just because we can never have too many digs at Diablo — a mention of the increasing emphasis on action over strategy. "Whereas Ultima Online stressed role-playing, Diablo emphasized roll-playing," says Barton.

Of course, it is Barton's voice which makes the book entertaining; this is no dry history, but the enlightened point of view of a student of CRPGs, shared with the reader in a casual, accessible manner; in many ways, it is a bold manifesto in their defense. Says Barton: "CRPGs are not only the most fun and addictive type of computer game, but possibly the best learning tool ever designed." You may disagree with that, but you can never dispute the author's own dedication to that belief.

Despite the book's somewhat questionable chronological structuring (or, more correctly, its occasional deviations from that structure), the only major flaw worth noting is that the accompanying artwork is, to put it mildly, hideous. The original full-color screenshots look wonderful in Barton's Gamasutra column, but in the book they are mostly reprinted in muddy, blotchy black and white, making it impossible to determine what they depict even with the help of accompanying captions. The book does contain a color insert after page 208, but this 4-page, 8-picture centerpiece is at best forgettable — I flipped past it entirely while reading, and found that upon further review I hadn't missed anything by skipping over it.

Dungeons and Desktops is a mixed bag, somewhat akin to a sack full of Halloween candy. There are some genuinely good pieces of sweetness in there, as well as a great deal of hidden, forgotten gems and some bits you never knew existed. Despite a bit of a jumble towards the middle, taken as a whole the book is well worth picking up if you're a fan of CRPGs or fantasy games in general. Less die-hard fans might find themselves preferring to stick to Barton's Gamasutra columns, and Diablo fans might find themselves gritting their teeth at some points, but then every bag of candy's got a few pieces of black licorice in it, no?

You can purchase Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing is the followup to Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, and the second book written by members of the Game Writers' Special Interest Group of the 14,000 member strong IGDA. The book covers much of the same terrain as its predecessor, but offers a tighter focus on some specific points, covering more technical (as in technique) details rather than broader narrative theory; if the first book was a Google Map, this one would be the Street View.

Three authors from the first book — Richard Dansky, Rhianna Pratchett, and Andrew Walsh — also pen chapters here; they are joined by a dozen others, including three authors who helped edit the first book: Sande Chen, Wendy Despain, and Beth Dillon. In the interest of full disclosure, my own name appears beside a few quotes in this book; I am a member of the IGDA Writer's SIG, but I had no involvement in the writing or editing of the book itself.

When I reviewed Game Writing last year, my only reservations were that the book could have used some more specific examples from relevant games, and that it could have included a chapter on breaking into the field of game writing. It's nice to see that both of those issues have been addressed in this book. In fact, the latter issue is dealt with right where it should be — in chapter 1, "How to Break In and Stay In." Author Beth Dillon covers the importance of education, experience and a solid portfolio, but spends more time on the all-important notion of networking. Much of the chapter is also devoted to "how I did it" stories, which offer prospective writers a fairly good idea of the many ways in which one can get involved writing for games.

The next several chapters cover specific types of game writing documents and formats. Collectively they are in my opinion among the best in the book, even though they really can only touch the surface of the vast amount of documentation — internal and external — that goes along with the making of a game. As one might expect, the first of these — Chapter 2 — covers the broad issue of format in a discussion of "Interactive Script Formatting." Here, Author (and editor) Wendy Despain discusses the lack of a single script format, the standard screenplay format, the realities of using Microsoft Excel, branching narratives and the Neverwinter Nights Aurora Toolset. In the next chapter, Erin Hoffman offers a brief, concise discussion of the need for brief, concise pitch documents and executive summaries, two of the key documents found in the early stages of game design.

Chapter 4, by John Feil, then focuses on the types of Game Documentation that appear once game development has actually begun; he covers everything from versioning, wikis and source control, to the evolution of documents from pitch to treatment to game design document, as well as supplementary documents such as technical design docs and scripts. Feil also pens chapter 5, "Manuals, In-Game Text, and Credits", which has a fairly self-explanatory title. Worth noting in this chapter is the acceptance of some unpleasant realities of the industry, including the last-minute rush to get manuals done, the difficulties in working with various groups, and the fact that no one reads the manual anyway. Also mentioned is the issue of credits in the game industry — one of the primary reasons for manuals, and a constant thorn in the side of just about everyone who's ever made a game. The IGDA is working hard on a standard, and the book mentions their efforts, which can be followed on the IGDA website.

Several later chapters also cover specific types of documentation in some detail. Chapter 12, by Andrew Walsh, covers Tutorials, including issues of narrative models and the fact that tutorials are often added late in the development cycle. Chapter 13, by Alice Henderson, focuses on Strategy Guides, covering issues such as dealing with bugs, acquiring screenshots and maps, and dealing with drafts and deadlines.

In-between and elsewhere, the book also covers: the emerging industry of narrative design; the pros and cons of remote contracting versus working in a game studio; writing in a team; breaking writing up into "bite-sized chunks" to get the work done; writing for new intellectual property (versus existing IP); writing for different types of audiences; and working with voice actors in the recording studio. Some of these chapters drift a bit closer to ground already covered in the SIG's first book, but each does offer a degree of additional detail that readers will find helpful. Especially noteworthy is Richard Dansky's chapter on Script Doctoring, which offers a plethora of information and tips on how to do it well, along with plenty of exercises on how to practice your skills.

Dansky's piece is followed by Evan Skolnick's "Game Writing and Narrative in the Future," which looks at the direction the industry is going, and explores why writers are necessary, and how a theoretical game story system for future games might work (with a sideways glance at ELIZA and the Turing Test). After this final chapter, the book contains four appendices full of script samples, pitch documents, excerpts and other writing documents from games such as Bratz: Forever Diamondz, Pests, Food Finder and Call of Juarez. As is always the case when such gaming documents are presented, the lists of barks ("Great!" "Sweet" "Awesome!") are at once ridiculous and helpful to see in print, demonstrating quite a lot about the nature of game writing in their seeming redundancy.

Closing out the book is a list of author bios (there are 15, contributing to 16 chapters), including the likes of the aforementioned Richard Dansky (Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell), Chris Klug (Stargate Worlds, Earth & Beyond), Rhianna Pratchett (Heavenly Sword, Overlord), Anne Toole (The Witcher, Stargate Worlds) and Andrew Walsh (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Notable is the fact that 7 out of the 15 authors are women; in a male-dominated industry, it would seem that in the realm of writing, at least, things are a bit more balanced.

In addition to being filled with useful information and tips, most of the chapters also feature one or more exercises at the end, providing readers (who are presumably also writers) with ways to test their skills in a practical manner using the techniques and theories discussed in each chapter. In some cases the Exercises are a bit lackluster and seem tacked on, but many are quite comprehensive and detailed; Dansky offers five such exercises which resemble nothing so much as a final exam from a college course on Script Doctoring. Alas, it seems doubtful that Professor Richard will be available to grade everyone's work.

Professional Techniques is definitely a book by writers, for writers; even moreso than its predecessor. Insightful discussion of game writing issues is matched with many excellent examples and helpful exercises, and the whole piece is only very slightly marred by some odd chapter arrangement in the middle of the book. This arrangement places Chapter 5's coverage of Manuals and In-Game Help and Chapter 12's discussion of Tutorials further apart than seems logical, especially considering the wide range of topics covered in-between. However, this is truly nit-picking, and overall the book deserves top marks. Stylistically and informatively, it's at least on par with its elder cousin, and will serve as an excellent addition to the library of any game writer — current, or prospective. I highly recommend it.

You can purchase Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."
Books

Submission + - Second Person (mit.edu)

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "As we all learned in English class, there are three points of view one can employ when writing: first person ("I learned"), second person ("You learned"), and third person ("He learned"). You are about to read a review of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media , a book that addresses the use of second-person narration in games and related media. You are also likely to be eaten by a Grue.

As Wikipedia helpfully points out, the second-person POV is not common in literary fiction, but it is fairly common in other forms of media, including the subject of this book; namely, interactive fiction (IF), role-playing games (RPGs) and other game-related fictions where the "reader" is generally an active participant in the story, either literally or virtually.

To that end, co-editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have collected 47 essays on various topics related to the second-person, dividing the lot up into three sections covering "Tabletop Systems," "Computational Fictions," and "Real Worlds" (the latter somewhat of a misnomer, as you will soon see). The essays range in tone from highly informal to quite technical, from practical to theoretical, and (in the tradition of old Infocom games) from terse to verbose, the sole uniting theme being the focus on You.

Roll For Initiative

Section One, "Tabletop Systems," contains 15 essays devoted to a discussion of traditional, old-school RPGs, including standout bits penned by the likes of Greg Costikyan, George R. R. Martin, Erik Mona and Ken Hite. It's the most accessible part of the book, and without a doubt my favorite.

Costikyan's "Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String," starts out with a discussion of the early days of the pen-and-paper industry and their influence on interactive fiction, and moves all the way to MMOs and the current indie RPG movement, spending some time on Paul Czege's My Life with Master. It provides a good overview of the IF industry in its entirety, and might have fit better as a sort of "meta-essay", but still works here as a good introduction and exploration of many of the issues surrounding game narrative, player freedom and IF in general.

Erik Mona and Ken Hite's pieces are more on target. Mona's "From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons takes D&D up to the late 70s just before it split into D&D and AD&D, providing an interesting historical perspective on the Gygax-Arneson years. Hite's "Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu talks about the evolution of language within various editions of the CoC RPG, as well as the standardized form of their adventures, and how these things serve to create a narrative tension that has helped the game survive and prosper.

One essay worth mentioning for its terseness is Jonathan Tweet's essay on character creation in Everway, barely managing two pages, and then only by the addition of four pieces of artwork. Another oddity is Rebecca Borgstrom's "Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design", which addresses Exalted's story structure; the piece is filled with numerous subheadings and language that occasionally makes it read like an outline or a proposal, rather than a finished piece (e.g., repeated references to "this chapter" such as "This chapter views gaming as a computational process."). Both pieces are written well and cover interesting material, but feel unfinished in their own ways.

Other essays in this first section discuss the World of Darkness and the Storyteller system, storytelling and collectible card games (in particular, A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu), Arkham Horror, Mystery of the Abbey, George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books, and the gamebook On Life's Lottery. Not discussed, and notable by their absence: Steve Jackson Games, and any edition of Dungeons & Dragons after 1980.

Eat Analgesic

Section Two, "Computational Fictions," is comprised of 17 essays by authors including Jordan Mechner, Chris Crawford, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. The material here is somewhat denser and more technical, but aside from some linguistic stumbling blocks it's also filled with excellent insights.

Mechner's essay on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opens things up with an excellent look at the making of a video game: rules, some broken; discussion of how dialogue works within the context of a game; even a sample from a dialogue spreadsheet that shows why screenplay format is inappropriate.

Somewhat crunchier are essays by Chris Crawford ("Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling") and D. Fox Harrell ("GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System"). The former discusses Crawford's early attempt to draft something akin to a programming language for IF, complete with flowchart diagrams and pidgin-sounding syntax, such as "Mom command Billy that Billy not go to lake." Harrell's essay likewise talks about "developing computational techniques for representing an author's intended subjective meaning and expression." Yikes.

The longest piece, "Writing Facade: A Case in Procedural Authorship" by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, discusses Facade, a game wherein the player can either break up or save the marriage of a digital couple. Ample screenshots and samples from the game accompany an explanation of the situation as it unfolds, with later discussion of the procedural architecture and subsystems behind the game. It's an excellent piece that nicely ties together what a player sees with what a developer has to deal with.

Aside from the generally less accessible language, the section's only major flaws are that the essays from Steve Meretzky (on Floyd from Planetfall) and Lee Sheldon (on the computer adaptation of And Then There Were None) are rather terse considering the rich subject matter. Surely Floyd and Agatha Christie deserve more than a couple of pages a piece.

Other games discussed in this section include the Flash storytelling game Solitaire, Book and Volume, Shade, Savoir-Faire, the somewhat surreal art piece Pax, the hypermedia Magritte-esque work The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard, the cinematic Mission to Earth, the audiovisual hypertext Juvenate, Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel, The Breakup Conversation and the multiplayer IF The Archer's Flight.

Everybody /dance Now

The third and penultimate section, "Real Worlds", focuses on shared, IF experiences, the unifying factor being a persistence that runs counter to the transience experienced in both weekly RPG sessions and most computer games. Despite the section title, virtual worlds and MMOs are also discused here by the likes of essayists including John Tynes, Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca. For the most part the material is engaging and interesting, if a bit esoteric at times.

John Tynes' "Prismatic Play: Games as Windows on the Real World" explores escapism and engagism in games as diverse as D&D, Millennium's End and his own Unknown Armies, concluding that engagist works are those that expand our knowledge through immersion in real world ideas and cultures as opposed to escapist frolicking in EDO (Elf-Dwarf-Orc) fantasy games. As an interesting not-quite-counterpoint, Sean Thorne covers John Tynes' Puppetland in the next essay, and discusses how he incorporated the rather escapist game into a writing curriculum for his eleven-year-old students.

Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca include an essay titled "Video Games Go to Washington: The Story Behind the Howard Dean for Iowa Game," which is about as self-explanatory as a title gets. The duo discuss the launch of the game in December of 2003, development challenges and time constraints, demographics and politics, and provide an excellent post-mortem on the game and its effects (or lack thereof) on Dean's campaign.

Several chapters in a row delve into fantasy MMOs, including World of Warcraft. Torill Elvira Mortensen's "Me, the Other" talks about role-playing in MMOs, the difference between IC and OOC and the controversy of role-playing (which seems somewhat anachronistic; aren't people more worried about GTA than D&D nowadays?). Jill Walker's essay covers Quests in World of Warcraft, and how they introduce and support the overall storyline. Celia Pierce and her alter-ego Artmesia discuss(es) social identity and persistence in exploring the case of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, an MMO that, when it shut down, caused its player base to propagate to other MMOs such as Second Life and There to keep the community alive.

The one odd bit here is a chapter on Santaman's Harvest by Adrine Jenik, an exploration of a digital performance piece from Desktop Theater that includes more sidebar than text as it reprints dialogue from the play ("sman:: Think Big; farmer #1: Big?").

Other essays discuss the use of role-play in prepping political canvassers, Nick Fortgno's A Measure for Marriage LARP, the evidently crass unexceptional.net ("Guy playing with himself," reads a part of one caption), the Boston-based Itinerant, the I Love Bees ARG, the basic rules of Improv Theater, the interactive play Adventures in Mating, and the collaborative work Eliza Redux, "an interactive telerobotic work couched in a virtual graphical representation of a psychoanalyst's workplace" as well as a revisitation of the Eliza program.

Go For the Eyes, Boo!

The book's rather sizable Appendix includes three playable tabletop RPGs: Puppetland by John Tynes, wherein players take the roles of puppets; Bestial Acts by Greg Costikyan, which is based on the dramatic theories and aesthetic of Bertolt Brecht; and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis, a tale-telling game written from the first person perspective of the Baron himself. This is followed by biographies of the contributing authors and a helpful index, always a good thing to see in a book of this size and density.

As is often the case, the book's back cover copy is at best misleading; though terse, it manages inaccuracy in saying that the book features "three complete tabletop role-playing games." However, Costikyan's "Designer's Note" for Bestial Acts on page 357 explicitly says "I've never bothered to finish writing up acts II and III." Not quite complete, then. The same error is reprinted on the front flap; a minor gaffe, but noticeable in a book with few other notable flaws save a few silly typos in obvious charts and tables: "Challange" instead of "Challenge", "real-rime" instead of "real-time." But this is nitpicking. As a whole the book is well-edited, well-laid out and amply illustrated to boot, with over 200 images; would that they were in color.

My only real complaint is not with anything in the book, but with the underlying assumption — prevalent in many places, touched upon here in the jacket copy, and assumed to some degree in many of the essays — that the gaming industry is still an "emerging field" that needs to prove its own maturity. While it might be true that not much in the way of academic discussion exists when it comes to games, it still seems all too comfortable to continue hiding in the soft golden field of "emerging." How much longer can the industry (of which I consider myself a part) continue to use that word?

Consider television in the '50s after it got through its own period of emergence and acceptance: shows like Candid Camera, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts and Break the Bank were on the air. And 60 years later, what do we have? Shows like America's Funniest Home Videos, American Idol and Deal or No Deal. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Pick any medium and you'll find much the same — for every Citizen Kane there will be a dozen Scary Movies; for every Empire Falls there will be fifty Da Vinci Codes.

Pong was emerging; Zork was emerging. We are no longer emerging — we have emerged. Sure, we have quests in World of Warcraft where you have to collect poop, but we also have Portal; we have the Hot Coffee mod in GTA: San Andreas, but we also have a Dystopian Objectivist narrative in Bioshock.

The 47 essays and 3 games in this excellent book show us where we've been, where we are, and where we're headed when it comes to role-playing games and interactive fiction. That's 50 pieces of evidence to prove the case that gaming is as deserving of attention, acclaim and criticism as any other medium. As an industry, we've been emerging for 35 years now; by my reckoning, that puts us squarely into adulthood. Let's start acting like it."
Books

Submission + - SPAM: Reading Comics

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "Let there be no doubt — Douglas Wolk loves comics, and his is a tough love, the sort of love that leaves comics out in the rain pounding on the door because they snuck out after curfew again and wrecked the car. I've never dived deep enough into the industry to form a strong opinion of it one way or the other, but Wolk is both a fan and a critic of comic books, and his insights make Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean an interesting, engaging read, both because of and in spite of his enthusiasm.

Reading Comics is billed by its publisher as "the first serious, readable, provocative, canon-smashing book of comics theory and criticism by the leading critic in the field." At the very least this is somewhat pretentious and misleading, insofar as it would seem to imply that all previous attempts at comics theory were apparently written by clowns; Will Eisner and Scott McCloud would no doubt take some minor umbrage at that assertion. This is not to say that Wolk's credentials are in question; he's written extensively for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Salon.com and other publications on the subject of comics. To see Wolk's thoughts coalesced into book form is a welcome sight, because this is how I tend to enjoy media: in large chunks rather than in installments, be it a graphic novel collection of Transmetropolitan, or an entire season of Buffy on DVD.

Reading Comics is broken into two-parts, with the first third of the book given over to an exploration of comic book history and theory, and the remainder consisting of a series of essays about specific comic book authors, artists and titles. The title of the book is accurate enough, since it does serve not only as a general guide to how to read comics, but as a chronicle of how Douglas Wolk reads them. The subtitle, however, is at best misleading; the book doesn't really offer a definitive answer to the questions posed, nor can it. Rather, this is a book about how Douglas Wolk thinks graphic novels work, and what specific examples of graphic novels mean to him.

All of this might seem to go without saying, but it's important to recognize that Wolk's voice is quite omnipresent throughout the book. This is especially true in the second part, where Wolk's essays deconstruct and interpret a series of comics through his eyes, but is also a factor in the book's earlier pages as Wolk offers his blunt and honest opinion of the state of the industry. This first part of the book — divided into five chapters — is devoted to "Comic Book Theory and History". Herein, Wolk attempts to first define comic books, and then to lay out a theory for how one might interpret and critique them using what Wolk dubs "harsh criticism."

Chapter 1, "What Comics Are and What They Aren't", briefly explores the progression of comics from their original golden age, through the silver age and the origin of the Comics Code, and into the current modern era of comic books spawned, it seems, in 1986 with the publication of titles such as The Dark Knight Returns, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, and Watchmen. Wolk declares this current age the real golden age — aesthetically, financially and commercially — and spends the remainder of the chapter more or less trying to support that assertion by definition, comparison to other media, and an extensive straw man argument that includes a few slapshots toward Scott McCloud's side of the ice.

Wolk doesn't pull punches in Chapter 2 either, where he discusses "Auteurs, the History of Art Comics, and How to Look at Ugly Drawings". In discussing style, content, expressiveness and plot he (perhaps deservedly) lambastes Liefeld ("a god-awful hack with no tonal range at all, and his flailing attempts at storytelling are inevitably derailed by his inability to think beyond the next dramatic full-page shot") and even takes aim at Jack Kirby, whose "final years were an embarrassing mess" according to Wolk.

"What's Good About Bad Comics and What's Bad About Good Comics" is the subject of Chapter 3, which sees Wolk first trying to sort out differences between comics, comic books, periodicals and graphic novels by comparing the argument to the difference between movies, films and cinema; this is to say, it's mostly semantics. Wolk also explores the culture of comics and the problems associated with it (bandwagoneers, nostalgia, sexism), and comes to the conclusion that he loves comics "because comic books are awesome," providing seven pages of personal "favorite" moments from the history of comics. Enlightening, but only as a window into Wolk's closet, rather than a vision of any universal truth.

Chapter 4, "Superheroes and Superreaders", attempts to answer the question of why Superhero comics have formed the baseline from which all other comic books seem to stem, but while it touches on the underlying themes and allegories involved I was left thinking that better (or at least more interesting) explanations and explorations have been provided elsewhere, as in Shyamalan's Unbreakable and Chaban's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

The final chapter of part 1, "Pictures, Words and the Space Between Them", explores the notion of what cartooning is and how it works, the difference between drawing and cartooning (static images vs implied action), and the importance of white space and gutters in conveying time. And what conclusions, if any, can be drawn at the end of part 1? Says Wolk: "McCloud likes to make categories; I like to make generalizations and excuses."

It is on that note that we enter the second part of the book, "Reviews and Commentary", a collection of 18 mini-reviews and essays about selected titles and authors, chosen for no reason other than that Wolk thought they were interesting to discuss. They are not presented as a recommended reading list, nor are they intended to be representative or comprehensive, nor are they presented in any logical order, such as alphabetically by title or last name. At first I thought that they were progressing in order of complexity (that is, complexity of the comic titles being discussed), but even this apparent structure falls apart towards the end, especially when one realizes that ranking comic titles by complexity is entirely subjective.

Books and artists covered in these essays include both well-known authors (Will Eisner and Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison) and titles (Sin City, Daredevil, Watchmen, Maus) as well as more obscure names, including David B (Epileptic), Chester Brown (The Little Man) and Carla Speed McNeil (The Finder).

Each one of the essays (several of which are reprinted from Salon.com) lays out Wolk's feelings about the works and the authors discussed, including both praise and criticism — ofttimes in the same paragraph. Most of the essays are accompanied by ample art that is relevant to the topic being discussed, but there are some cases where an essay is a bit art-light, which is annoying and somewhat maddening in a book about comic books — in particular, the essay on David B. doesn't have any artwork at all, and the essay on Chris Ware could benefit from a little more Jimmy Corigan or Final Report. Also somewhat questionable is the grouping of some subjects within or between essays; Will Eisner and Frank Miller are relegated to one chapter, while two successive chapters are given to Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez of Love & Rockets fame. I'm sure Wolk had his reasons of course, but as a reader the structure seems a bit random.

The book's Afterward gives some brief mention of online comic strips (including Diesel Sweeties and Little Dee), as well as newer anthologies and artists, and then concludes with Wolk's assertion that while there's not much further for comics to go as a medium, that's ultimately a good thing since it represents maturity. Assertions like this are hard to argue with, which is both a blessing and a curse for Reading Comics. So much of what's within is phrased as opinion and generalization that ultimately the book reads something like a memoir, more of a peek into Wolk's basement than into the history of comics.

To Wolk, comics appear to be a sort of ugly girlfriend. He seems to appreciate the cheerleader superhero types, but he's much more into the chicks with tattoos, the Suicide Girls and American Apparel ads of the comic book industry, the ones that stem from "a conscious choice to incorporate a lot of distortion and avoid conventional prettiness in style." He loves them for what's inside, for their intelligence and depth, and acknowledges their surface flaws, never hesitating to refer to them as ugly. It makes one wonder; if a graphic novel asks you if they look fat, do you say yes?"
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Level Design For Games

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "As a content writer I was not heavily involved in the level design process at my last game industry job, but Phil Co's level design For Games: Creating Compelling Game Experiences accompanied me to work every day. Not only is it a good introduction to the world of level design, but it also provides an excellent overview of the entire game design process.

In the past I've been rather verbose when reviewing books about game design, as I wished to provide evidence that justified the often less than stellar score I gave the book in question. I'm pleased that I don't have to do that with this book, which as far as I can tell is a nearly flawless introduction to level design. As such, this review will be more of a recap, so as to help you decide if the book's content is right for you.

Chapter 1, "How Do You Make a Game?," discusses the game development process from Pre-Production through Gold Master by way of showing how level design fits into the overall scheme of things. Also discussed are design documents, basic level geometry, and the difference between alpha and beta, and A, B, C and D bugs (A being "fix this now" and D being "nice to have, maybe later").

Chapter 2, "Defining the Game," focuses on the various types of games on the market and the differences between them, from first-person shooters to platformers, action RPGs to MMORPGs. Also discussed in some depth are themes (fantasy, sci-fi), ESRB ratings and audience age, and system limitations.

Chapter 3, "Enemies and Obstacles: Choosing Your Challenges," is where the book really begins to get into the nitty-gritty of the level design process. This third chapter covers the placement of enemies ("mobs") and objects within the level, the types of levels (hubs, boss levels, etc.), skill trees and the application of skills to obstacles within each level.

With an idea of what needs to go where, Chapter 4, "Brainstorming Your Level Ideas," delves into the creation of concept sketches and reference images, the creation of a level's storyline, the drafting of a level description and the design of the puzzles and scripted sequences within the level (which incorporate the mobs and objects discussed previously).

Chapter 5, "Designing With a Diagram," is where all those ideas and brainstorming begin to take concrete shape. A primary concern here is the scope and order of levels within the game, particularly in terms of a player's progress through each level. Once you know where your level fits into the overall schema, the author tells you to lay it out in diagram format by creating a grid; this is not unlike a Dungeon Master carving out 10' by 10' dungeon corridors on graph paper for a D&D game. You know who you are.

Chapter 6, "The Template," introduces the reader to UnrealEd, a level editor for which a demo is provided in the back of the book. The author walks through the basics of using UnrealEd, from the basic creation of a room and the placement of an NPC within it to slightly more advanced topics such as vertex editing and static meshes. It's a fairly technical chapter, but is laid out clearly with numbered instructions and plenty of screenshots to guide the reader along.

Chapter 7, "Improving Your Level," jumps ahead in time a bit, assuming that you've already mastered the basics from Chapter 6 and have created a level template that can now be play-tested. It focuses mostly on that play-testing process and how to adjust and balance one's level based on feedback in order to make it fun and functional.

The next chapter, "Taking It to 11," is more concerned with polish and quality. Topics include architectural style, the addition of details like trim and borders, the appropriate use of textures and props, and the like. The second third of the chapter takes the reader back into UnrealEd to practice some of these skills, including the creation of new shapes and a radial building technique to create curved hallways an rounded rooms. Finally, the chapter discusses the addition of other game elements, including scripted sequences, ambient sounds and music, and other special effects such as fog.

The final chapter, "Ship It!," revisits the concept of Alpha, Beta and Gold Master in more depth, discussing optimization, the creation of zones (with an UnrealEd tutorial to help the reader along), game balance, and bug testing. It closes off with some discussion of helpful skills and practices one might pick up, including how to file a good bug, why you should archive data, and how to take good screenshots.

On the subject of screenshots, it is worth noting here that the book contains one such shot from Flagship Studio's Hellgate: London, a game which I am downloading from the EA store as I write this review, and which is scheduled for official release on Halloween, 2007. In my experience, many books on game design tend to incorporate screenshots and examples from older games, and it's rare to find a book that includes a screenshot from a game that is not only current, but as of the book's publication was yet unreleased. Indeed, most of the examples in the book are of games released in the past several years (Psychonauts, Half-Life 2, Doom 3), and this gives the book added relevance, appeal and longevity.

Aside from the more technical language involved with the UnrealEd tutorials, the book's clear language and friendly tone makes it quite accessible, even for those not of a technical persuasion. While I can't speak to how much the book would help a more experienced LD, it definitely seems appropriate for a beginner who's eager to learn the craft, or anyone interested in the game industry as a whole. I highly recommend it."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "Billed as the "first complete guide to writing for games," Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames provides an excellent overview of the ins-and-outs of writing for the videogame industry. As might be expected from a publication of the IGDA's Game Writers' Special Interest Group, the book is dense with information, addressing everything from high-level narrative theory to the specifics of dialogue engine design and game localization.

When I see that a movie has multiple writers involved, I get a little nervous. It's usually a bad sign, generally indicating that the narrative will be somewhat piecemeal and uneven. As this book has 13 writers and a half-dozen additional subeditors, I was likewise nervous, but I was happy to discover that although each chapter has a different emphasis, the general tone remains steady throughout the book. There's a little more fluff up front, and a little more crunch in the back, but taken as a whole the book maintains a coherent focus. These 13 voices speak in harmony, and adequately cover both the creative and technical aspects of writing for games without any noticeable bumps.

The preface by Chris Bateman explains that a book on videogame writing is difficult to write, as many areas of the industry are still ill-defined. Whereas Hollywood has a fairly standard screenplay format that's fairly easy to work with (how else to explain the existence of Epic Movie?), the videogame industry offers no single script format, due the the different requirements of different genres and different companies. Personal experience has taught me, for instance, that Microsoft Excel is one of the more useful tools when writing for games; one would not generally associate spreadsheets with narrative flow.

The chief complaint here is that there are no clear examples of "great game narratives," with the industry's shining stars "falling somewhat below the highest standards of work in other media." My interpretation of this is that Half-Life 2 is less Godfather 2, and more Escape From L.A. — good enough, but not great. According to Bateman, chief culprits for the lack of artistic polish may include the fact that the game industry is so young (compared to radio, television, and movies) and the lack of artistic freedom within the industry.

Worth calling out here is an example of where the industry seems to be falling short. At one point, the book discusses the concept of "forced failure" in games, and why it's a narrative tactic to be avoided. A good example of this (my own, not the book's) is near the end of the original Half-Life game, which sees Gordon Freeman captured, stripped of all his gear, and dumped in a trash compactor, with the player unable to do anything but watch. Yet Half-Life won numerous Game of the Year awards, and is still considered by many to be one of the best games of all time. The point is not that Half-Life is a bad game for using "forced failure," but rather that it could have been a a better game if it hadn't resorted to that tactic. In other words, even good games can do better, and this book is a first step towards achieving that goal, by way of establishing a "coherent narrative language" for games.

The book itself is divided into 14 chapters. The first three can be roughly clustered into a category called "Game Narrative," as they all focus on higher-level narrative theory. Chapter 1 provides an overall introduction, defining story, character, and other such terms before delving into what makes game writing unique (as compared to other media) and how a writer uses the tools provided (dialogue, cutscenes, etc.). Chapter 2 covers the Basics of Narrative, including Aristotle's Poetics, Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, Freytag's Pyramid, Syd Field's Screenplay model, and the other sorts of things we English majors learn in school in lieu of math and science. Extensive discussion of Star Wars: Episode IV and how it maps to these models is provided, along with some coverage of Jungian and Campbellian Archetypes. Chapter 3 is an overview of what's involved with writing for games, covering the difference between narrative and story, types of narrative, pacing, structure, and the concept of player agency.

The next four chapters of the book contain less high-level theory and more specific application. The first two cover the path the character takes through the game, with Chapter 4 being an exploration of Nonlinear Game Narrative (branching structure, parallel paths, and how to merge story and game) and Chapter 5 discussing how to keep the player on track (breadcrumbing, funneling, the "edge of the world", etc.). Chapter 6 covers Game Characters (including types of protagonists, antagonists, and NPCs, and the traits and characteristics thereof), and Chapter 7 deals with the specifics of cutscenes and scripted events, and the dangers of removing player control.

Chapters 8 through 10 see the camera zooming out a bit more to cover the broader concepts of Writing Comedy for Videogames, Writing for Licenses, and The Needs of the Audience, respectively. Of the three, the last is the crunchiest, covering specific demographic data and the issues of gender, ethnicity and disability as they relate to a game audience.

The final four chapters cover issues specific to videogame writing, and as a whole generally focus on dialogue. The short Chapter 11 deals with Localization issues (translation, lip synching, cultural differences), with Chapter 12 covering Voice Actors more generally, including: a discussion of context, inflection, and emotion; the need to be at the recording session; and other technical considerations. Chapter 13 deals with Interchangeable Dialogue Content, and covers stitching, dialogue driven by game events, and the problems associated with simultaneity, interruptions and inflections. Chapter 14 closes the book on a crunchy note, covering Dialogue Engines in some detail, with many examples of the codelike format involved (dynamic elements, if-then statements, cases and states).

Although it probably goes without saying, this is obviously a book by writers, for writers. The book is very heavy with text, featuring only a very few charts and icons to break up the copy, so as far as layout and flow there's little to complain about aside from some minor inconsistencies, such as the little "Note" icons which appear in Chapter 3 and nowhere else. Though dense with information, it's fairly easy to find your way around, as the book features an 8-page glossary, 6-page index and a perhaps too-detailed 9-page table of contents. Also worth noting is the copyediting; aside from some very sporadic typographical issues, the book gets an A+ for editing (with Chapter 2 perhaps only an A). Overall, it's hardly worth mentioning, which is always a good thing when it comes to typos.

My biggest complaint with the book is what's not covered. For instance, "examples from real games" is billed as a main feature on the back cover, but there could have been more of them, especially with regards to more current games. This is not to say that they're not in there, but certain chapters (particularly those in the book's first third) would have benefited from less Star Wars and more Knights of the Old Republic. It's helpful to be aware of the high-level theory, but this is after all a book about game writing, so more examples from relevant games would be welcome.

I also found myself wishing that the book had devoted a chapter to breaking into the field of videogame writing. Books on other aspects of game design and development typically include such information: I have several on my desk right now that discuss how to create a portfolio and land a job as a Level Designer or Game Designer. Do videogame writers simply spring from the head of Zeus, ready for battle? With this information in place, the book would be a more useful tool to everyone from the pro writer to the complete novice; as it stands, the book is much more helpful to those already in the field. However, wishing that the book covered job entry is, I admit, somewhat akin to wishing that a book on carpentry also included a chapter on lumberjacking. Relevant, but not to be faulted for its absence.

As a whole, the book does what it sets out to accomplish, and provides a good overview of the issues involved in writing for videogames. It's a must-have for anyone in the videogame industry, or anyone who wishes to be."
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Character Design For Mobile Devices

Submitted by
Aeonite
Aeonite writes: "According to the Introduction, Character Design For Mobile Devices is "the first book on the designs, the technologies, the issues, and the techniques behind character design for mobile devices and games." Unfortunately, what could have been an interesting and unique coffee table book suffers from an unclear message, poor design, bad editing, and an authorial voice that is rather too present at times, and too oblique at others.

The title of the book can be read in at least two different ways. First, it could refer to character design from the perspective of the fan, as in "I will read ABOUT the design of these characters." Secondly, it could refer to character design from the perspective of a prospective student: "I will learn HOW to design characters." While this book occasionally dips its toe in the latter waters, the technical tidbits are not plentiful enough to warrant the book being sold as a "How To" guide to character design. The ambiguousness of the title might be overlooked if it was not coupled with a misleading back cover blurb, apparently written by someone who didn't read the book. "Learn to design vibrant, identifiable graphics and recognizable characters with only a few pixels at your disposal!" boasts the first line on the back cover. You will not learn any such thing from this book. This is not in any way a guide on how to design pixel art. It is a coffee table book about pixel art, and it must be reviewed in this light.

What's Inside

After briefly covering introductory topics like "What is a pixel?," the book quickly moves into the much meatier Chapter 2, which covers the "History of Portable Devices." Often repetitive (e.g., the same information about Nintendo's Game & Watch appears several times), it is nevertheless a pretty good overview, covering everything from the aforementioned Game and Watch and Microvision to the current generation of portables and everything in between (e.g., NeoGeo pocket, Atari Lynx, Wonder Swan), including a two-page spread about some Lego-like Pixel Toys.

Chapter 3, "Changing Hardware," is not so much about hardware changes (Chapter 2 covered that), but about the impact of changing hardware on what designers are able to achieve. The first few pages cover cellular phone games, and how they differ from consoles (vertical orientation, color and memory sizes), but the discussion seems unnecessarily (and somewhat archaically) tilted in favor of ye olde CRT monitors, only at the very end reversing course and saying that "The little LCD is tried, true, and able to keep up..." Pages 58-59 are probably the crunchiest in the book — covering graphics tools such as Graphics Gale, Corel Paintshop Pro, and Grofx2 — but the information is unfortunately less than clear. The author states that "Photoshop... is inappropriate for pixel art" but then two sentences later points out that "Photoshop is nearly ubiquitous and very popular with pixelers." How can this truly be the case?

The chapter then changes gears to present a series of Artist Foci, which are less focused than one might think. The first piece on Henk Nieborg mentions that "His next game was Lionheart, which sold well considering its platform..." but we are not told what platform. Later, the author says of another game that ."..the final effect is almost reminiscent of Metal Slug." And what is Metal Slug? We're not told here. Fewer problems appear in the Army of Trolls Focus, aside from the underlying problem that this is a book about mobile devices, and Army of Trolls don't design for mobile devices; they work on "pixel art."

One of the quotes in this section is quite telling when you consider the back cover's claim that this book will help you "Learn to design": "If I am working on a cityscape, I'll copy and paste buildings into the image and mess around with them in Photoshop layers until I am pleased with the layout." Somehow this is less than enlightening, although it's still much more so than this Zenlike piece of insight from the Chris Hildebrand Focus that says nothing about anything:


"Chris has a broad range of skills and methods that have allowed him to produce an incredible range of graphics in many styles. He works with whatever speeds his methods require, creating pixel graphics from a number of sources using various techniques."


Chapter 4, covering "Mobile Developers," mingles the author's own words with quotes from others in the "pixel art industry," and it's often confusing who's saying what until you get to the end of a paragraph and find someone's name in bold. Sometimes there are multiple quotes from the same person (as with Charles Barnard) but rather than being arranged in any particular order — like, say, alphabetically, or by subject matter — they are just dropped into the text seemingly at random. The material here is interesting and often insightful, but even when the book is at its best, it's stumbling; page 98 contains a "How To" from Capybara's Nathan Vella and Anthony Chan, but the name in the chapter title is misspelled numerous times as "Cabybara." Later, in a discussion with Sato Takayoshi, "palette" is misspelled as "pallet" numerous times; forgivable elsewhere, but not in a book about design.

In Chapter 5, titled "Genre/pixel Histories," the book devotes some twenty-five pages to an exploration of RPGs, Fighting Games, and Platformers, and the remainder of the chapter to "Sprite histories" of characters like Mario, Sonic and Bonk. This is all fascinating stuff, and in many ways this is the most interesting part of the book, but the problem is that this is a book called Character Design for Mobile Devices, and nothing in this chapter has anything to do with handheld gaming aside from a few sentences that vaguely hint that it's "only a matter of time" before a good mobile RPG game is created, and that such a game "could be impressive indeed."

Despite the fact that it's interesting and engaging, the content is not without flaw. Page 147 spends an entire paragraph discussing Konami's "first modern fighting game" but the author fails to mention it by name at any point. This is followed on page 148 by a mention of "Garou: Mark of the Wolves" and its "visually incredibly evolution," but there are no pictures of it or further discussion. The next page mentions "a short-lived fighting game that never disappointed in any category, especially the visuals," but your guess is as good as mine as to what game that was. A few pages later, the author discusses three characters from SNK fighting games without mentioning what games they're from.

The Sprite histories are often just as confusing. The evolution of Mario contains a cascade of images, some of which are not clearly labeled — page 160 shows six sprites and four captions; page 162 shows eleven sprites and only one vague caption. The histories of Donkey Kong and Castlevania are a little clearer, but confusion returns with the Sonic, Arthur (of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts fame), and Bonk histories, with the latter at one point referencing the image that is "second last on the column below" on a page with three rows of images, the first two in four columns and the last one in six columns.

It's worth noting that this problem with captioning occurs elsewhere in the book, too:
  • Page 15 has twelve images in six rows but zero captions.
  • Page 23 has three images and two captions. Image 1 is of the TurboGrafx 16 and is so labeled. Image 2 is of the Turbo Express and is unlabeled. Image 3 is a close-up of the TurboGrafx 16 clearly showing the logo of the TurboGrafx 16; it is labeled "Turbo Express."
  • Page 33 has seven images and three captions but two of the images are labeled with the number 1.
  • Page 43 has fifteen images and five captions but only the first five images are labeled.
  • Page 118 has screenshots from two different game platform versions of Sonic the Hedgehog, and two captions both labeled Sonic the Hedgehog, with no indication of which is which.


It is, frankly, a mess.

A Mess of Pictures

As with the title of the book, "a mess" can be read in two different ways: as a synonym for "a lot," or as a reference to clutter. In this case, it refers to both, which is to say that this book contains a whole lot of pictures, and they're very messy. Were this a book about HOW to design characters, poor design decisions would be less important than the content, but for this type of book it matters a great deal, as the design and the content go hand in hand: only 25% of each page (on average) contains words.

The nineteen images on the cover seem haphazardly and randomly chosen, including fifteen pieces of random pixel characters, three shots of miscellaneous handheld devices, and one icon which simply reads "Character Design Library." Described in this way it's a bit difficult to get across exactly why this is a bad idea, so perhaps an analogy is in order. Imagine a book about American History, with a front cover consisting of fifteen images of Presidents, three pictures of sailing ships, and a photo of a Stop Sign. Random, much?

Between the covers, the design is also a scattershot affair. The book's chapters are color coded (Pink, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, in that order), with color coordinated boxes at the bottom of each page which sporadically mirror the topic. In the second chapter, the chapter title consistently appears in the box on the left hand page, but in the third chapter the title only appears maybe half the time, with the page subtopic sometimes appearing instead, or even the title of the second chapter. In addition, these colorful boxes skitter wildly across the page, sometimes flush left, sometimes centered, but mostly just sprinkled hither and yon.

As one might expect in a book about pixel art, the pages are filled with screenshots and other bits of artwork, but unfortunately many of these are oddly chosen or placed. In places, paragraphs describing a particular product go on and on, but the photos that should accompany them are one or two pages away. For example, on a two-page spread that discusses the Nintendo Gameboy are a large photo of a PlayStation Portable and a Nintendo DS. This occurs again a few pages later, where GameBoy Advance and the PSP are pictured on a two-page spread that covers the GameBoy, GameGear, Genesis and TurboGrafx. Later, more of the same: a discussion of Final Fantasy is graced with images from Dragon Warrior; a paragraph about Karate Champ is accompanied by a shot from Street Fighter; and a page about Super Mario Bros has screencaps from Super Mario World.

Much of the artwork also seems randomly chosen, rather than illustrative of a particular topic, or even indicative of a game's main characters or features. Page 86 contains three images from an unnamed "Military Game," two of which show the same empty warehouse (or possibly the back stockroom at a McDonald's). An artist focus on Chris Hildebrand contains numerous references to his most successful release, Heli Attack 3, yet not one image from this game appears in the six pages devoted to him; instead, two pages show us generic landscapes called "Mangrove Swamp image," "Waterfall image" and "Tropical image." The cream of the crop is page 128, which contains the following note: "The Super Nintendo Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts (left) was a visual marvel when it was released, with colors so lush and vibrant they rivaled arcade games at the time." The stunning "image on the left" is the game's title screen.

Every graphical sin is committed somewhere in the book. Numerous pages (particularly in Chapter 2) suffer from "random cropping," where large images are cropped square with no attention to what's being cropped out; in one instance, a discussion of the Turbo Express contains an unhelpful close-up of the Select and Run buttons. Page 82 and 92 contain duplicate artwork, and the latter also contains a horribly oversized pixelated pirate that serves no purpose but to look ugly and fill space. Page 94 features the infamous "marketing image masquerading as screenshot," notable here because this is a book about pixel art, and this is not a piece of pixel art.

In Conclusion

The book ends abruptly, sans conclusion, before diving into a Glossary full of unnecessary editorializing to put Wikipedia to shame. The entry on "2D" refers to them as "often more vibrant than 3D," and "pure and fun," whereas the entry on "3D" refers to how 3D games "killed off pixel art," "require an incredible increase in computing power," and how "many older players blame the rise of 3D games and a new push for realism over style, and accuracy over creativity, for ruining games." Is this a glossary, or a pulpit? It seems we are to believe that 2D gaming seems to represent elegant perfection, and 3D gaming represents all that is wrong with the world.

The book's introduction opens with a statement that "(t)his book is a tribute to 2D gaming graphics and portable game graphics." Why the word "Design" is in the title, and "Tribute" is not, I don't know. There's nothing wrong with publishing a tribute to days gone by. "There will hopefully always be a place for a simpler style of art on cellphones due to the small screen resolution and limited palettes", says Henrik Pettersson on page 86, before adding "If you're looking for a lifelong career within visual arts, I wouldn't recommend pixel art as your only skill." Not that Pettersson's point of view is the only one; Gary Lucken of Army of Trolls insists on page 65 that "pixel art is a viable career move again for budding artists."

So which is it? This author seems to imply that the latter is true. "Looking forward isn't always the best way to advance an art form," he says, adding that "the pixel is not seen as primitive, but rather as a way to express a simple artistic elegance rarely seen in today's complex jumbled gaming landscape." However, it's worth noting that one of the tutorials in the book is Ian McPherson's guide to designing games for the PC Engine system, a defunct console that hasn't seen an official game release in nearly a decade.

In this light, my earlier comparison to American History is worth coming back to. Character Design for Mobile Devices could (and perhaps should) have been an excellent history book, a nostalgic tour of days gone by. Instead, it doesn't quite know which hat to wear, combining tangential discussions on console gaming, conflicting "How-To" advice from pixel artists, and repeated pro-pixel commentary from the author which is akin to wishing for another Boston Tea Party, just because it was kind of cool the first time.

The book is far from a "Jumbled-Up Piece of Crap" (to use a term mentioned on page 88), but it would definitely benefit from a "new and improved" second edition that cleaned up its many problems. With more appropriately chosen art, more consistent captioning, and a clearer message, it would find appeal with a broader audience. As it stands though, the book really only has appeal for truly die-hard (and extremely nostalgic) fans of pixel art, those thirtysomethings who own Atari 2600 T-shirts and have Ms. Pac-Man cabinets in their basements. You know who you are."

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