61 Frames Per Second : dice

F**k Your Future: Mirror’s Edge, Blade Runner, and the Future City

John Constantine — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The image above is a little bit of Deus Ex 3 concept art from Eidos Montreal, the crack design team who broadened our sexual horizons with Fear Effect and taught us that controlling sociopathic murders is boring as sin with Kane & Lynch. I can imagine the dialogue between the artists and producers when this image was submitted for approval:

"What do you got for us today, concept artists?"

"Check dis!"

"This isn't Deus Ex! This is just a screencap from Blade Runner with the guy from Deus Ex 1 smoking in front of it!"

"I'm fired aren't I?"

"No! It's perfect! That’s all these nerds want anyway."

I kid. There is no Deus Ex without Blade Runner, after all. While its influence isn’t quite on the level of Aliens, Blade Runner’s vision of a nightmare cityscape in the far-flung-but-familiar future is a close second. Its towering super-skyscrapers and dank alleyways are the aesthetic meat of beloved games like Shadowrun and Snatcher, but you can also see them in mid-period Contra, Flashback, Abe’s Odyssey/Exodus, and even recent blockbusters like Mass Effect. Then again, it’s not just games. Syd Mead’s Los Angeles has been the template for depicting the urban landscape of the future in all media for close to twenty-five years.

I’ve been curious for awhile now as to what the next popular conception of the cityscape is going to be. The Blade Runner type came on the heels of the ultra-slick Logan’s Run-style, cities of spires all white and sterile that typified science fiction from its 1950s heyday through the 1970s. This may not be the most academic logic in the world, but since sci-fi literature gave us our Future City model post-WWII, and sci-fi film bore its successor, I’m looking to videogames to create the next archetype.

If you’ve been reading 61FPS regularly, you probably won’t be surprised to hear me say that I think Mirror’s Edge features the most likely model for tomorrow’s City of Tomorrow. Edge’s nameless city has the same whitewashed sterility that was the hallmark of the 60s/70s future city but twists the model by coating it in streaks of primary color and keeping the architecture familiar. The buildings, subway stations, and shopping centers recall today’s Montreal but with a consistent modernist bent. Edge’s dystopia is also a recent institution. The story constantly reminds the player that the totalitarian government responsible for the city’s current shape hasn’t been in power long, and so the omnipresence of architecture-as-construction-site provides a fine narrative metaphor: you play behind the future city’s façade of perfection. Whether or not this model fully captures the zeitgeist of 2008 and beyond remains to be seen, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing Edge’s city more often then Blade Runner’s, especially in games, going forward.

Note: Forgive my hate against Eidos Montreal. Yeah, Fear Effect and Kane & Lynch suck, but they made Soul Bubbles. They’re alright.

(Link: Gamereactor via Kotaku)

Related links:

The Three Stigmata of The Halcyon Company: Philip K. Dick Comes to Games
Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
The Eternal Question: Why Is Super Mario Bros. Fun?
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

While reading Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds’ sharp history of postpunk, I started thinking about videogames. I’m nothing if not predictable, I know. There’s a slight corollary between the gaming zeitgeist and punk rock. Not politically, of course. Videogames are, at least popularly, more conservative today than they’ve ever been. Just look at Bobby Kotick’s reasoning for dropping Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters from Activision’s release schedule: "[Those games] don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises.” I realize that Activision is in the business of making money and not artifacts to inspire the human soul, but publicly stating that your publishing ethos is assembly-line-production makes it difficult to assess the creative merits of Guitar Hero: Buy This One Too, Just ‘Cause.

No, videogames in 2008 are, like punk rock in 1974, taking a medium that’s become marked by excess and stripping it back to its most basic. Even beyond Capcom’s retro efforts and traditional two-dimensional, genre exercises (Braid, Castle Crashers) on Xbox Live, designers like DICE are trying to keep games simple and raw. Mirror’s Edge, for all of its visual polish, uses only three buttons for the bulk of its action and the game’s goals are uncomplicated (run to, run away.) Games are also trying to put the power of creation back into the audience’s hands. Halo 3’s Forge, LittleBigPlanet, and Maxis’ Spore might not be putting players into the guts of design, but they are inlets for everyone to make their own games. You don’t need to know how to play guitar to rock, and you don’t need to know C++, or draw, or write to make a game. Add these mainstream juggernauts to the booming independent dev scene, the confrontational tedium of games like No More Heroes (as Goichi Suda says, punk’s not dead,) and we may look back on the 2010s as gaming’s punk rock era. But how does punk lead to postpunk, the rebellion of aestheticism through the surreal and the futurist against the simplistic and traditional? What would that game even look like?

Modern gaming’s genesis came during postpunk’s six year lifespan and the two, strangely enough, shared many of the same audio/visual tics. But where postpunk’s visual tendency toward angular, primary colored geometry and aural predilection for jittery electronics and propulsive bass lines were born of artistic statement, videogames came to them out of necessity. This is why envisioning a surrealist gaming experience is problematic; the hallmarks of surreal a/v media are traditionalist hallmarks in games. While a game like Deus Ex Machina, Mel Croucher’s 1984 Spectrum title – a game that could very well have been a Fast Product Records release a few years before – look like ready examples of surrealist design, but were it released today, it would look like little more than retro fetishism. In order for a game to be successfully surrealist, its mode of expression will have to be tied directly to play and not traditional presentation. The game has to subvert expectation based on established mechanical tropes to garner the desired subconscious effect. The seeds for this are out there, in places you might not expect. Mario tends to be associated with childlike psychedelia, but the manipulation of perspective and gravity in Super Mario Galaxy are a larval form of potential surrealist play; for twenty years, Mario would die if he jumped into a void, and here the void propels him to new heights.

A game can be most anything the designer wants it to be. In the coming years, the most difficult task for both designers and players will be looking backward, seeing what games are and have been, and figuring how they can break them to create something brand new for the future. Punk play to postpunk to whatever comes next. Now if only we could figure out how to get the vital social commentary in there…

(Thanks to 1UP for the Bobby Kotick quote and Edge Online for the Deus Ex Machina retrospective)

Related links:

Yeah, But Is It Art?: It Will Never Be the Same
Kenji Eno Is a Mule of Epic Proportions
Far Out, Man
Easy Access

The Eternal Question: Why Is Super Mario Bros. Fun?

John Constantine — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

No, seriously, take a minute to think about it. Pour yourself a stiff drink or brew up a nice cuppa tea, put on your thinking cap and try to summarize your conclusion in a single sentence. It’s a peculiar question, really. I found myself trying to answer it late last night after spending some time with Mirror’s Edge. DICE’s platformer shares a lot of the same fundamentals as good ol’ SMB and, concerning the question at hand, both are fun for similar reasons. Super Mario Bros. lets you go wild on a playground where the laws of gravity are paying only loose attention and injury is not a threat. You can run and jump to your heart’s content, and if you see something, like a shiny coin or glowing box that might hide unknown treats, you can hit it with your fist and never worry about bloodied knuckles. Super Mario Bros. is fun because running and jumping, whether in real life or on a screen, is fun, and it’s this maxim that’s fueled platforming as a genre for twenty-five years. But the greatest platformers, the Marios and the Mega Mans, owe their success to more than just running and jumping. They also let you change their world. In Mario, especially in later series entries that allowed flight, crushing bricks opens new ways to move through the Mushroom Kingdom’s surreal landscapes. Mega Man has to destroy robots to ensure safe landings after a jump. If jumping and running was all you did in Jon Blow’s Braid, it could barely be called a game at all.

When you settle into Mirror’s Edge, when you trust yourself to move through the level properly and let DICE’s carefully laid out obstacle courses subtly guide you, it manages to transcend the natural abstraction that comes from making things on TV move. It is physically and mentally affecting. It is fun. But, and mind you I’ve only played the first three levels of the game, all you do is run, jump, and climb. It is purely a jungle gym, and when you’re confronted by hostile elements, your chief task is to avoid them, not eliminate them from the play field (at least, not unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so.) As I continue through the game, I find myself stopping to wonder if there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing, some other facet of the challenge that is going to change the rules after you’ve learned how to run. What is its platformer hook and, more importantly, does it need one?

I’m beginning to suspect that Mirror’s Edge isn’t revolutionary because of its presentation, perspective, or control. It’s revolutionary because it’s redefining the plumber’s definition of fun.

Related links:

Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
E3 Day 4: No Blades, No Bows. Leave Your Weapons Here.
Mario Will Not Retire. He Will Outlive Us All.
Super Mario World is Terrifying!

Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True

John Constantine — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Since the beginning of 2008, I’ve been watching Mirror’s Edge from a distance, pining away for its delicious cityscape, smitten with its sterile and pristine blues, whites, reds, and yellows. It was, and is, a visual panacea to cure the over-bloom-lit, over-brown, over-textured HD gaming landscape. When the first gameplay videos started hitting the net at the beginning of May, Edge’s smooth parkour action and emphasis on non-violent flight transformed my infatuation into full-on love. I needed this game to be as good as it looked, to deliver on its proposed fluid play. I’ve been dreaming about a game based on momentum and escape for years now, and here it was in action. But the proof, as always, is in the play. After playing Mirror’s Edge at EA’s fall preview event today, my first impression is it’s exactly what developer DICE has been promising. Everything you’ve heard is true.

Much has already been written about ME’s brand of platforming – most everything in the environment is climbable given the right positioning, almost every wall can be used as a surface for running or leverage, and the appropriate path over rooftops and through hallways is typically marked in red – but its controls have been something of a mystery to me. It turns out that Mirror’s Edge is quite simple to play, but deceptively so. The four left and right triggers on a PS3 controller (the triggers and bumpers on 360) are coupled with traditional first-person analog controls (left analog to move, right to look) as the main inputs. L1 let’s you jump but it’s also a context sensitive catch-all used to climb up surfaces or interact with usable objects, such as support cables between buildings. Mirror’s Edge wants you to never stop moving through the world, constantly jumping, climbing, or sliding under any obstruction. As a result, the majority of the game finds you using only a few buttons. Actually cutting your path through the world is a different story though. I miscalculated a number of jumps repeatedly, having to re-do them until I had a better sense of the actual timing in the game. This was more reassuring than frustrating; it meant that the game requires practice and skill to play instead of automatically making you look cool with limited inputs. The game, like David Belle’s art of movement, is elegant.

The demo I played is the same one seen in this video. That is the game. It’s only a tiny chunk of the game’s introduction, so it remains to be seen whether or not the rest of Mirror’s Edge exhibits the same level of creative environmental design throughout. This appetizer was enough, however, to get me excited, even downright amorous, all over again. An action game about not killing, a platformer about escape, a game of speed that gives you constant control. I could not be more excited.

Related links:

Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
E3 Day 4: No Blades, No Bows. Leave Your Weapons Here.

Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge

John Constantine — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

SCEE showed the first public footage of Dice’s Mirror’s Edge at their Playstation Day 2008 event this past Tuesday and it’s thrilling to say that it looks every bit as good in motion as early screenshots have implied. The first-person parkour play looks like it may be initially disorienting but if the control ends up being as streamlined as ME’s world, it will be one of 2008’s most exciting works on a sheer mechanical level. But beyond the way it moves, Dice deserves a huge high five just for their choice of setting and character. The blindingly unblemished cityscape and blue skies are a serious change of pace from the Blade Runner-inspired dank metropolises that have typified gaming for years. And protagonist Faith, well, not to be blunt, but she doesn’t have a monolithic bust line, she’s wearing athletic attire that’s actually suited to her actions, and she’s not white. Hell, she’s not even baring a mid-riff! If it weren’t for the silly eye tattoo, I’d be comfortable saying that she’s hands down the most interesting female lead since Beyond Good & Evil’s Jade.