Since when is 1-1 Ice World?

Remember Line Rider? Sure, it's not the craziest track ever made with it, but I think it's the coolest.

Minor Item on game violence

This was buried at the end of a Washington Post column, mostly focused on embattled (and criminally dishonest, in my opinion) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

Guns and video games: ABC's "This Week" host, George Stephanopoulos, noted that the father of Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) called for new gun laws the day after 14 were shot dead at the University of Texas in 1966, and the host asked Dodd, a 2008 presidential hopeful, whether he would follow in his father's footsteps. Dodd replied that there is more than guns to talk about: "mental health, what's on our television and video things. And it isn't just about legislation or regulation. It's having a leader in the White House that's willing to talk about these issues."

Honestly, the heading (in italics in the original article) is a bigger mention of games than what came up in the actual interview. Also, I happened to catch the McLaughlin group on Sunday morning, and I don't recall a single mention of games, although gun control was hotly debated.

On a side-note on gun control. I would self identify as very liberal, but I don't want to take anyone's guns away. However, if Virginia is on the cutting edge of gun control laws because you can only buy one gun a month, I've got to stop and take a second look. Do we really need to be able to buy 12 guns a year in this country? Stop and think about that, 12 guns a year.

Every year in this country, about 3,000 kids and teenagers are killed by guns. About half are suicides or accidents. Those are completely preventable and are directly influenced by more guns in society. Those kids shouldn't die because you're afraid of a burglar or think it's cool to have a gun or want to shoot at wildlife.

When we look at some parts of the world, we think that their cultures are violent. They look as us in the same way. We think it's stupid, dangerous and ignorant to fire assault rifles into the air at weddings for the most part. We think it's bad in Iraq that so many people have so many guns, and maybe it is, but those are people who have legitimate cause to protect themselves. I'm rambling, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is this --

To those of you who do not want any change in gun control laws in this country: there are costs in human lives for the way we act towards and think about guns. I've tried to amend another point here, but it comes off as preaching or whining, or just jabbing at the other side because I don't agree with them. The way we live is a choice, and if we continue to live in the same way, we shouldn't expect anything different than what we're used to.

No need to invent that time machine (until Spetmeber)

It looked as if we were going to have a nice little run, the Halo 3 Beta in May, Mass Effect in June, Bioshock in August, GTA IV in October, Halo 3 in "Fall." Sure, it was packed, but at least we had enough time to play them all. That seems to be no longer the case.

A September release date for Mass Effect just kills everything. This means that there's a good chance that Bioshock, Mass Effect and Halo 3 could all hit in the same month (fall begins September 21st of so). When you toss in GTA and Metroid Prime: Corruption, things get even messier.

I guess this means we're going to face a game drought this summer, and that this Holiday season is going to obliterate previous sales records for games. Start saving your pennies, guys, because this fall is going to break the bank.

Negative Sum Game - Part 1

In his last post, Chris speculated on the possibility of a game in which the protagonist doesn't win and is doomed to failure from the start. This made me curious: how would a game that a player can't win really look. 'Winning' takes on very specific meanings when it comes to video games, so it may not look the way we think it would.

First, let's split games into the two basic categories so we can determine what winning means in different contexts.

• Narrative-based games: games with a plot that a player is expected to follow. In this type of game, winning can be defined as playing the game through to it's successful conclusion.


• Round-based games: similar to board games, this type of game is based around a gameplay system that is implemented across different settings. In round based games, in order to win you must defeat other players or achieve specific objectives in a set time-frame or under certain conditions.

Now, there is some crossover between these two types of games, but most eventually fall into one camp or the other. Most modern games are narrative-based games (Gears of War to name but one), and older games were more likely to be round-based (Pacman, Pong, Battle Zone). However, some more recent games are round-based, such as most racing games, the Mario party series, and all competitive multiplayer games currently on the market.

It is very simple to determine what winning is in a round-based game, and that is to beat all the other players, be they human or computer controlled. In this context, games that are un-winnable are games that would not allow players to measure who did the best in any measurable way. This would be tremendously dull. Imagine a racing game where every player has a different track and the game never let any player know if they finished before another player. In the context of a round-based game, an un-winnable game doesn't sound like much fun.

So now we've defined what winning (and not winning) is in a round-based game, how can we define a narrative-based game that cannot be won? Well, the most basic way to lose a game is to die (provided you're not playing Prey). So does that mean in a narrative-based game that you lose the game if your character dies at the end of the story?

Not necessarily. Winning and losing are more complicated than that, because winning is as much an emotional experience as it is a hard-and-fast set of conditions. Winning also means you were successful in what you were trying to do. For example, the T-800 (the Governator) in Terminator 2 'wins' because he A) destroys the T-1000 and B) saves John Connor. However, he has to destroy himself in order to avert Judgment Day (unless you accept Terminator 3 as canon, which I don't). He dies, but he doesn't 'lose,' so even if the protagonist dies at the end of the narrative, he can still win.

What if the main character were to die, and failed the objective the set out to achieve? Now that would be losing! However, games are funny in the way they structure a narrative. Unlike in a movie, where you sit and watch things happen to a character, in a game you are in control of events and you can replay the game as many times as you wish. For these circumstances to result in anything other than 'winning' at some point, then the game itself would have to be designed to result in the failure of the protagonist. But again, we're undermined by the psychological dimension of winning, because in the absence of a traditional positive ending, gamers will feel a sense of accomplishment in having completed the game, overcome any challenges and progressed through the narrative of the game. So we're back at square one again - we've created a different ending, but the player still would feel like they won, since they achieved what they set out to do. Knowing your quest is hopeless from square one makes failure meaningless, and like I said before progress through the game becomes a surrogate for actual success.

Our trouble lies in expectation. Fiction depends to some degree on a willing suspension of disbelief, putting ourselves inside the world or the game, movie or book. In non-interactive fiction, this serves to keep us emotionally invested in the characters of the work, but in a game, where we can take control over the story, suspense isn't usually as sharp because we can react to surprises and no situation, no matter how dire, is ever hopeless because we can take control. Worst of all for narrative structure, if we die, then we jump back before the dangerous event that led to our demise. We can adjust tactics and strategy and best of all, this time we won't have been victims of the element of surprise. As we play through the game, we learn what to expect and adapt our sense of winning to our experiences. So to not win, our expectations have to be subverted. The ending, and how it unfolds, must be a surprise.

So in order to lose in a narrative-based game, the protagonist has to fail, and the player has to not know that this failure is imminent as they play through the game. Otherwise, they simply adjust their expectations to the structure of the narrative. So now, we finally have a working definition of a narrative-based game that is not winnable: a game that leads players to expect they will succeed, but is designed and plotted to result in nothing other than failure. If a player suspects this twist is coming, then the game goes from an un-winnable tragedy to a dark ending to our hero's noble quest.

In the second part of this article, I'll investigate how anyone would even make a game like this, if anyone should, and what losing can teach us about how to make games better.