A few recent articles have gotten me thinking about the nature of narrative in video games and about video games as a medium. The popular distillation of Marshall McLuhan’s research of media is the dictate that “the medium is the message,” and if we entertain that notion for the sake of argument, it does allow an analysis of video games that is somewhat different than the usual “can it be art” argument.

Perhaps it is more appropriate to use the current favored phrase for video games and describe them as “interactive entertainment” since that gets to the heart of what video games are as a medium. The medium is not simply “video” since it incorporates that interactive element. Without that interactive element, a video game would cease to be a game at all, and it would simply be a movie or a television show. The intrinsic characteristic of video games that separates it as a medium from any other medium is the twinning of the interaction with video elements. The message carried by such a medium is one of agency. The player, within the constraints of the game environment, determines the outcome of the game. For it to be a true video game, that agency must be true agency and not just imagined agency.

Allow me to elaborate. I place in front of you a DVD player. In that DVD player, I place a copy of Casablanca. If you were able to press play and then watch Casablanca, there would be no question in your mind that you were watching a movie, right? Let’s say the DVD player is broken. Every two minutes, you have to press the play button again to continue watching the movie. Aside from being annoyed at the inconvenience, would that change your perception of the type of media in front of you? Almost certainly not. You would still consider it to be a movie.

The simple addition of a binary decision to continue or not to continue the entertainment does not transform a movie into a video game. Such agency is false agency. Or, rather, it is the agency that one possesses whenever dealing with any medium. This brings me to the title of the post, a genre near and dear to my own hear, Japanese RPGs.

As one might expect with any indictment of a particular genre (or sub-genre), I am going to be somewhat reductive in my arguments. There are exceptions these statements within Japanese RPGs, but most adhere to a few well-known cliches. My real issue with Japanese RPGs (or console RPGs, depending on your perspective), is not the abundance of cliches but the lack of true agency. I don’t require that every game I play have multiple endings or open sandbox environments, but the gameplay in many of those RPGs has been so streamlined, so simplified that they lack any real challenge. Designers are trying to adjust the gameplay to address this concern, but there are still RPGs out there where, aside from updating equipment, the player essentially just mashes a single button through combat (and through dialogue sequences). Either the player is forced to repeat the same action again and again to advance the story (one source of entertainment) or mash another button to skip the narrative and get back to the combat (an equally valid source of entertainment).

The fact that many such RPGs present the same stories over and over again, ad infinitum, really is not the issue. The fundamental issue is that Japanese RPGs tell relatively static stories and make those stories interactive by tacking on genre conventional gameplay. A game can only have so much of its story presented primarily through full motion videos before it loses its very game-ness. The narrative or the character development must arise out of the gameplay.

In virtually every RPG I play, I am obsessive about power-leveling and completing every side quest and side plot. In Final Fantasy XII, I was able to take power-leveling to an entirely different level. As the the combat in the game is mostly automated based on certain macros you put into place (gambits), a savvy player is able to set up a team with macros that will require virtually no intervention from the player. I pressed the analog stick to move into combat, my characters fought, and then I pressed the stick again to move to the next encounter. The open environment of the game allowed players to reach the maximum level and possess the greatest weapons before even a third of the narrative was complete. I did that. By no means would I say that such… insanity is typical. But I still did have a team of unstoppable characters before the narrative had really begun. So, between story elements, I essentially solved top down mazes like those you would find in a copy of Highlights and my over-powered characters took care of all the work. The video game became a movie with a faulty play button.

Not all Japanese RPGs can provide such extreme examples, and it’s worth noting that the two of the games I consistently cite as my favorite of all time are console RPGs (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III). Nostalgia makes experiences seem more deep and meaningful, and everything looks better in the sepia-tones of the past, but I think my steady descent into disappoint with this genre has been at its lack of evolution compared with other genres. It used to be that I could depend on better, if cliched, characterization coming from a console RPG than from a platformer or action game, but that has changed with games like Portal and Shadows of the Colossus. In many ways, these RPGs are becoming nothing more than iterative games like a sports franchise.

Unlike Madden, however, Japanese RPGs can only expect a certain level of success without the Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior monikers attached. We gamers have already lived through a fallow period of adventure games until the advent of episodic gaming brought the genre back with Sam & Max and the imminent arrival of the Penny-Arcade game. How long before the Japanese RPGs fall by the wayside as well?

Without waxing too philosophic, the majority of popular video games, even those without any typically violent content, explore the darker impulse of the id: destruction. This is not limited to the fine purveyors of first-person shooters. Destruction is not limited to the eradication of another human (or alien) life form. Consider for a moment two puzzle games that were recently en vogue: Snood and Bejeweled. In the former, the player wins by clearing the stage of all of the snoods and in the latter, every set formed leads to the annihilation of that jewel set. It may seem odd, but few games focus on the other side of that coin. Today I look back at one of the greatest games of creation in the annals of gaming: SimCity 2000.

First released in 1993 by Maxis, SimCity 2000 was the sequel to the surprise hit SimCity. While the other Sim games, like SimAnt, SimEarth, and SimLife, languished on store shelves, SimCity racked up a collection of awards and was ported to a variety of systems including the SNES. Will Wright, the mastermind behind the game, had clearly hit simulation gold in a game based on the tedium of city planning. As SimCity found the sweet spot in the creation folds of gamers’ brains, a sequel, once all of the side Sims were out of the way, was inevitable.

SimCity 2000 literally added a whole new dimension to the city building process. Shown from a dimetric vie, the maps in SC2K included height and depth in the construction of the city. Players were able to terraform the land, creating their own Nob Hill or a new Grand Canyon. Furthermore, players had to concern themselves with the intricacies of subterranean development in the form of the sewer system and a subway system. Where the previous game took a lot of the customization out of the hands of the player with its rigid block zone structure, SC2K introduced new buildings such as hospitals, libraries, museums, marinas, prisons, schools, stadiums, and zoos.

The level of immersion in the game was incredible. As mayor of the burgeoning city, the player could subscribe to relevant news updates in the form of fictional newspapers that informed the player of opinion polls, new technologies, and problem areas in the city as well as humorous, throwaway anecdotes about the city. The budget was presented to the player at the end of every year, and it gave the obsessive player an opportunity to delve into minutiae of costs in running cities, such as the amount of government funding to allot to hospitals and police stations.

Embedded in the game was a sense of environmental responsibility that elevated the game above other computer gaming fare of the time. Each power plant had certain drawbacks with the most damaging being the coal and oil power plants. The nuclear power plant, while producing less pollution, came with the caveat that it could meltdown one day. The most efficient power plant, of course, is a fusion power plant. Granted, I was young, but SC2K was the first I ever heard of that holy grail of physics research: sustained fusion. That is one of the things the game did best: it provoked questions. It was so deep, so founded in a certain vision of the world, that players could transfer some of the gameplay knowledge into the real world. Although the logistics of the game are far simpler than those of real life, players came to accept the rules of the game as potentially governing aspects of their own world. At least, that was the case for my own impressionable mind.

One cannot discuss the SimCity series without touching on one of the most compelling aspects of the game to many players: disaster. At the beginning of the article, I pointed out that the game, in contrast with many others, is focused on creation. But what’s the fun of building up a giant Lego castle if you don’t later pretend to be a giant and crush those sharp little bricks under your feet? Why bother putting together a jigsaw puzzle if you aren’t going to break it up again at the end? Enter natural disasters: fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and marauding aliens. If a disaster ever struck a player’s city while he was still constructing it, the site of that twister or fire could inspire terror and fear because the game is, ultimately, about feeling completely in control of tiny universe of people. They’re all the player’s people and until that fateful moment when the player decides, with a mad gleam in his eye, to stomp his foot down on those poor people, the player feels attached to those little opinion polls. As an aside, the scenarios in SC2K, typically focused on specific disasters, are quite well rendered such that, even today, watching the fires race through the virtual Oakland hills, I get a little chill.

Although the game has no true goal, no end point, there is one way to reach resolution in the game: exodous. At the end of the technology cycle, players are able to create vast arcologies, self-contained cities within the city. These elegant structures looked like science fiction creations, and, of course, they were science fiction creations. There were four possible arcologies, each reflecting a certain sociological view of the future. The obelisk arcology seemed domineering and fascist. The launch arcology looked like some sort of ecologists Utopian environment. One of the more clever Easter eggs around is that if a player created a large number of launch arcologies, they would all launch into space triggering an exodous. One can imagine these arcologies going on to found the settlements of Alpha Centauri. I know it’s juvenile, but when I was young, playing this game, I wanted very badly to live in an arcology. The game made it seem possible, and even if it weren’t possible in real life, it was possible in the game, which was almost as good.

By now, I know I’m never going to create the next great city or civilization. I’m probably not going to contribute to the creation of an arcology that blends nature with technology, but in games like SimCity, I’m able to imagine the future. A future in which entropy is constantly being held at bay by the innovation of mankind. I know it’s just a game, but it’s a game of new beginnings and those are the games worth remembering.

In reality, the life of pirates was not unlike the life of a man without society in Hobbes’ estimation: “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Conditions on sailing vessels were dire and grim, and the peril of travel across the sea only increased for those renegades of the high seas. Scurvy was rampant. People died. There was no code of honor among pirates. They were, for all intents and purposes, really dirty thieves confined to the deck of a ship.. Even the gallants were not so gallant. And yet the pirate mythos has never had a stronger hold on our culture. Just ask Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp.

Introduction:

The foundational text of pirate mystique is Robert Louis Steven’s Treasure Island. The story of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver originated many of the motifs in pirate literature. In Treasure Island, X marks the spot for peg-legged sailors with parrots on their shoulders. As a coming of age story, Treasure Island evoked an evolving sense of adventure in readers and imbued the pirating life with glory and gold. Moving on to another coming of age story, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan crafted Neverland as a place of high adventure and Captain Hook was the natural pirate antagonist. In some ways, these books confronted the possibilities of adulthood and maturity while at the same time as situating themselves on this side of juvenilia.

Looking at the recent surge in pirate-themed movies and properties, headed by Pirates of the Caribbean, it is as though Hollywood big budget pictures have grown tired of the invasive grit of contemporary war and have chosen to set more adventure titles in an environment that can avoid the dark themes of war. Even when confronting the possible demise of the pirating life, it is not seen as a war nearly as much as a loss of individuality. Pirates are emblematic of the good-natured wastrel: a drunk, but the kind of drunk you enjoy being a round. How much of the popularity of pirates is precipitated by Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Jack Sparrow is up for debate, but the genre invites the sort of cosplay usually reserved for Star Wars and Star Trek premieres.

Pirates being, as they are, a refuge for the little boys and girls who don’t want to grow up, are a favorite topic for video games.

Sid Meier’s Pirates! (2004):

This update of the original Sid Meier’s Pirates! takes everything from the original game (and Pirates! Gold) to an entirely new level. As one would expect of a new video game, it is 3D with compelling graphics and the same sense of exploration and adventure I discussed in my retrospective. The game, well before its release, had developed quite a following among gamers based on nostalgia for the original game, which is appropriate since the appeal of pirating games is nostalgia for something imagined.

The game takes many of the elements from the earlier editions in the series and expands upon them, including the plot, and updates the game with more mini-games including a rather brutal dancing segment. The game’s sales have not been reported that I can locate, but it reviewed well with nostalgic gamers, meriting an 88 at Metacritic.

Sea Dogs (2000):

To be honest, Sea Dogs is essentially rip-off of Pirates!, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It had a stronger story than the earlier iterations of the Pirates! series and also included RPG elements including multi-tiered conversations in the vein of most computer RPGs.

The game has a decent rating of 71 on Metacritic, but it has largely floated away amid the flotsam of other failed computer games. Like a dead pirate not named Drake or Blackbeard, it has blown away like dust in the wind.

Skies of Arcadia (2000):

One of the surprises for the Dreamcast, Skies of Arcadia is a typical Japanese RPG set in a world of sky pirates. There are some elements of steampunk in the technology that other ships can employ, but the main character Vyse finds his home on a lovely wooden galleon that floats miles above the earth. Despite being an extremely traditional RPG in most respects, Skies of Arcadia won over gamers with its sense of whimsy and heart. The characters in the game were based on stereotypes from the pirate genre but viewed slightly askew. Its sense of atmosphere was stellar, providing a new take on the pirate genre. One of the few complaints about the game was the overwhelming number of random encounters–a frequent .complaint in Japanese RPGs.

Unfortunately, Skies of Arcadia came out toward the end of the life cycle of the Dreamcast and few gamers had a change to play this wonderful title. Fortunately, this oversight was remedied when the game was re-released for the GameCube.

Sadly, despite being well-reviewed, with a Metacritic rating of 93, the game did not sell well on the Dreamcast and it may have sold as few as 75K copies in the U.S. on the GameCube. Rabid fans still hold out hope that a sequel will surface one day.

Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (2005):

What is with pirate games and exclamation marks? Puzzle Pirates is a massively multiplayer online game in a sanitized world of pirates. Created by Three Ring, all of the normal activities of a pirate are broken down into, and enabled by, puzzles. Here is a spirited description of sword fighting from the Three Rings site:

Sword fighting is the noble art of Piratey combat and can be struck up via a Puzzle Challenge or Brawl, or joined after a Sea Battle when the two Crews meet face to face.

A Swordfighter groups the falling pairs of blocks into colors, then uses the corresponding breaker pieces to shatter the groupings and send vicious sword attacks to his foes. These attacks fall onto the victim’s screen as either silver pieces that slowly turn to breakable colors, or the more sinister and potent swords, that hack through other pieces before breaking into silver blocks. It is in the balance of building attacks to shatter and leaving space to defend that lives the art of a Swordfighter.

Sound familiar? It’s pretty similar to all of those other colored block games except with the added incentive of boarding a rival pirate’s ship! Oh, no. Now I’ve started doing it.

The game is clever and engrossing without ever becoming a grind like so many other MMOs out there. A large part of the appeal of the game is the number of players in the game who maintain piratey personae. Playing the game is not unlike playing make believe with Legos with some friends and occasionally taking a break to play some Tetris.

The game is free to play, but there are subscription only oceans that offer added content to the obsessed pirate.

As with most MMOs that aren’t World of Warcraft, Three Rings is hesitant to release subscription numbers (or user numbers). According to Daniel James, one of the co-founders of Three Rings:

With MMPs, I think we have been selling to the same audience, and I don’t think that’s going to work. I think there’s been some growth, but of PC game players, a lot of them are subscribed to a MMP at any given point, and a lot of them have multiple accounts. This makes some of the subscription numbers very misleading, because these people have a lot of disposable income. We have people who have two accounts on Puzzle Pirates, and some of them seem to have four accounts on Ultima Online, storing items they’ve had for years and years. So that’s a distortion that may come back to bite us. With respect to Puzzle Pirates, I hope, and the jury isn’t in on this, I view our market as the 50 million people who played Bejeweled, and they haven’t been sold to on this front yet. It’s a new experience for them.

At any given time, it seems as though there are about 5K people playing the game, and that isn’t so bad for a casual MMO.

Conclusion:

As much as I love pirates, it appears as though most of the games set in pirate worlds fare very poorly at market unless they’re backed by a franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean. We would-be renegades should cross our hooks and pray that game developers still have a tiny Jim Hawkins in their hearts yelling out, “Yarrr!”

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, LucasArts was a bastion of creative gaming thought amid an ocean of mediocrity. Perhaps I’m overstating the point given that plenty of wonderful games were produced other studios during those years, but a certain amount of idealization of LucasArts of that era is well-deserved. At its inception, LucasArts did not even tap into Star Wars, the greatest franchise at its disposal. Instead, the company created entirely new characters and games primarily in the adventure game genre. Although Sierra certainly did its part with the Kings Quest series, LucasArts lent its own particular flair to the genre from the outset with Maniac Mansion.

The point-and-click adventure game has largely fallen by the wayside as a major game genre, but in the early 90’s it was pure gaming gold. With the creation of Maniac Mansion and the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) language, adventure gaming entered a golden age. As the primary game designer for Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert pushed adventure games to have a more rigid interface with user interaction in the game governed by set verbs rather than the previous text-based system which inevitably led to the player being eaten by a grue. Armed with SCUMM, games like Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure poured out of LucasArts, and all of them are fantastic games worth any gamers time, but I’m going to focus on one of my favorites: Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993).

In the product cycle of LucasArts, Sam & Max emerged as a new intellectual property after the company had produced two Monkey Island games and had just refreshed Maniac Mansion with Day of the Tentacle. The characters were based on the comics of Steve Purcell, a LucasArts employee. The set-up, as with many great games, is rather straightforward: you control a dog detective with a homicidal lagomorph companion as you investigate the disappearance of a big foot from a circus freak show.

As alien as I may make that sound, one compelling aspect of the game is that its humor arises not simply from wacky hijinx but also from a knowledge of detective noir in both film and literature. In order to properly satirize the genre, one cannot simply impart a sense of ironic distance to the protagonists because such distance is intrinsic to the genre. When the viewer watches Humphrey Bogart tracking down leads in The Big Sleep, he is completely in command of every situation with a sarcastic or flip remark in his arsenal to turn each conversation to his advantage.

You find that same wry grin and winking eye in every single novel by Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet, so Steve Purcell had to go to extreme lengths to establish an effective parody. Humanoids are out, so our protagonists are mammals of unknown origin. The other characters in the game take the existence of these creatures for granted, and Sam and Max are frequently presented as being on a level above all of those around them. Well, Sam is, at least. That characteristic of detectives is still in place.

As for ironic distance, Sam and Max are not only aware of the detective genre, they are aware of the medium:

Max: He’s not a real guy, Sam! Can I keep his head for a souvenir? Why do you suppose its ticking?
Sam: That’s no head, Max! It’s one damned ugly timebomb! Let’s leave this criminal cesspool pronto!
Max: Good idea, Sam. Maybe we can ditch the head somewhere while the credits are running. Mind if I drive?
Sam: Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.
Max: Sam, is “pronto” a real word?

They know that they are characters in a video game even though they only acknowledge it intermittently, and they use that awareness to humorous effect. With his slouching posture, fedora, and trench coat is the very image of a dog shamus, but he subverts the stereotypes of noir. He is a dog, after all.

This is a game where it really isn’t about the goal. Certainly all of the adventure puzzle elements are there, but solving each puzzle is a lesson in hare-brained humor. The player keeps clicking to hear more from these incredibly hilarious characters. As I played through the game, I rarely tried to solve the given puzzle of an area until I had tried to See/Touch/Take/Talk to everything in the room. As an example, one of the set pieces involves Sam and Max visiting the world’s largest ball of twine, and upon arrival, Sam and Max exchange witticisms:

Sam: The words “big” and “large” only begin to describe this thing.
Max: I think “stupid” and “inane” would be useful additions.
Sam: Not to mention “grotesque.”

And that’s fantastic, but what’s great is that many players will insist on Look(ing) at the ball of twine that they have already been introduced to, which elicits a throwaway line:

Sam: I haven’t seen that much twine since that night in Tokyo in ’68.

Every bizarre environment is filled with these nuggets, and it’s a testament to the greatness of this game that players seek out each piece of dialogue for more mad-capped wit. Much of the humor is violent (in a cartoonish way), but it really runs the gamut. Look at this wonderful play on words:

Sam: I don’t have anyone to call.
Max: Call me, call me!
Sam: You’d have to get cellular.
Max: I’m pixular! It’s better than cellular!
Sam: That was bad, Max. Really bad.
Max: Hey, who cares? I’M CUTE!

In all their violent glory, Sam and Max are cute. They’re adorable and friendly. In short, they’re exactly the sort of characters to build a franchise on.

Unfortunately, for over a decade after the release of this wonderful game, there were many attempts at a sequel, but no success. On the plus side, for all of us Sam and Max fans, Telltale Games is now releasing Sam & Max games in an episodic format. The success of the first “season” of the game has lead to season two. I haven’t yet played the games, seeing as how I was on a Mac for a long time, but now that I’ve upgraded to an Intel Mac, I think it’s time to test these games out with a fresh Windows installation.

I can’t yet vouch for the new installations in the Sam & Max oeuvre, but I can say that any fan of adventure games, detective movies, or zany hijinx absolutely must give Sam & Max Hit the Road a try.