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Play Journal #5

For this week’s play journal I played South Park: The Stick of Truth, a turn-based combat role-playing game, but for a role-playing game it’s actually pretty linear. It gives off the illusion of being an open world where you can go anywhere and do anything but many areas and activities are gated behind the main story progression. Luckily, me being a huge South Park fan, the narrative was interesting enough to keep me on the path the game wanted me to go on. Of course with it being a South Park game the dialogue is extremely aware of itself, often referring to itself as a video game, which might detract from a player’s immersion who doesn’t really watch the show. By being based on a TV show, there is a certain “literary repertoire” (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 184) that the player must have in order to fully interact with the game, meaning that if you have no prior reference to South Park material and who the characters are, there is a bit of disconnect with the characters and the game. For me however, there was a disconnect between myself and the player character.

This video shows and talks about the character creation and customization in the game and how within minutes of first creating your character, the game makes your appearance irrelevant by putting new clothes on top of the ones you just chose, and how in the end game the higher level gear almost completely covers you up. Furthermore, I lose a connection to the player character in games where your character doesn’t have a voice, adding to the fact that your actions have little impact on the story already, making your character just a tool for story progression, which works in the sense that “the player is not rooting for a character to succeed, in the way they might with a book, a film, or television show, as much as they are rooting for themselves as they try to win the game” (Shaw 103). Except this game relies on the player’s previous experiences with the South Park show, which is one of an observer. There was a moment while playing the game where I walked into a room, triggering dialogue that went on for a few seconds, all the while I had not noticed that I could have been moving the whole time until the dialogue stopped and I was just left there standing still in the silence. With this in mind, I believe the game is still very enjoyable for fans of the show thinking of the game more of as an interactive episode over a traditional role-playing game.

Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon. Heide Smith, Jonas. Pajares Tosca, Susana. “Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction.” Routledge. 2008.

Shaw, Adrienne. “Gaming at the Edge.” University of Minnesota Press. 2014

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Play Journal #4

For this week’s play journal I played the indie adventure game Journey. Journey is a game that evokes strong feelings of wonder and calm in the player through its aesthetics and sound design. The flowing sand and sounds of your cloak blowing in the wind creates a liveliness despite being in a vast and seemingly empty desert. The soundtrack compliments the action in the game, building up when the game is progressing and at times completely fading out when you are left to explore. Karen Collins in “Game Sound” writes that “a crucial role of music and sound effects in games is the preparatory function that the audio serves...sound may inspire us to look to the direction of a sound, to incite the look to go there and find out.” In Journey for example, the flying bird-like ribbons will direct you the way you are supposed to be going both visually and audibly. When you see them flying over a mound of sand you know to follow, but if you can’t see them they have a similar chirp function to the players which can indicate you to turn and look for them so you can progress. Simon Niedenthal in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Game Aesthetics,” states that “games can be approached as artifacts that have the potential to give rise to an aesthetic experience,” and in Journey, the entirety of the story and the world is expressed visually. The game begins with a sweeping shot of sand abruptly into the face of your character giving a sense of wonder and mystery to who you are and what you’re doing, and only telling you parts of the story through the help of cutscenes. About halfway through the game you reach a turning point that is presented beautifully in the video shown below.

As you slide down the sand you reach a point where the camera shifts towards the mountain that you have been trying to get to all game and a city-like area, coupled with a slow hopeful sounding score that makes you believe that you have finally made it to your destination. Suddenly you take a sharp turn downhill where the music picks up until you plummet off of a cliff, all the while building suspense and tension in the music before it completely drops out, leaving you alone in a dark and strange place. Through its visuals and immersive sound design, Journey proves that video games can be considered an art form.

Collins, Karen. “Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design.” The MIT Press. 2008.

Niedenthal, Simon. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Game Aesthetics.” Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication. 2009.

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Play Journal #3

For this play journal I chose to play Limbo, a dark 2D side-scroller about a boy trying to escape a deadly environment. This game was interesting to me because of the way it presented itself. After first loading up the game there was no menu screen or tutorial popups, instead it just began the game and I hadn't even realized. It didn’t help that I tried for at least a minute to figure out how to move since a large majority of computer games use the WASD keys for movement, and it wasn’t until I looked in the controls settings where I found out you actually use the arrow keys to move, which is when I decided to plug in a Xbox controller and play with that since it felt more intuitive. Rather than having you play a tutorial level or flash messages on the screen telling you how to play, the game gives you nothing and makes you figure it out on your own in order to maintain its mysterious atmosphere. In doing so, it becomes a game of trial and error where you progress through the game by running into an obstacle and dying until the knowledge of your previous attempts as well as surveying the environment around you allows you to determine how to pass the obstacle. Miguel Sicart defines game mechanics as “methods invoked by agents, designed for interaction with the game state,” so in the case of Limbo, the game slowly introduces you to its mechanics one during the beginning of the game so that you can understand how the game works for when it throws multiple mechanics at you at once later when the game gets more difficult. These mechanics are presented by first making you jump over a pit, climb over a rock, climb up a rope, swing from the rope, push and pull objects, and many more. In the video above you see many of the ways in which your character can die in the game, for example there is a part where you start to run up a log at an incline causing a boulder to come rolling down over you. Most likely you won’t expect this to happen at first so you end up dying, but by using contextual mechanics which Sicart describes as “analytical concepts that can be used to understand how players decode the information in a level - how a player perceives certain structures and how those structures are used to communicate intended uses or behaviors,” you would then be able to determine that jumping on the log causes the boulder to come down where you would jump back the way you came to a safe spot in order to avoid getting hit again. With these traits in mind, I believe the games developers presented the rules and mechanics of the game to the player effectively.

Sicart, Miguel. “Defining Game Mechanics,” Game Studies. 2008.

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Play Journal #1

For this assignment I decided to play one of my favorite classic arcade games Galaga. Developed by Namco in 1981, Galaga was the successor to another popular arcade game from the late 1970s, Galaxian. In Galaga, the player controls a spaceship and tries to survive endless waves of enemy spaceships that are trying to destroy you by either shooting your ship down or crashing into you kamikaze style. The game was originally developed as an arcade cabinet, however I played it as a port onto the NES Classic, which is a miniature version of the Nintendo Entertainment System containing several classic games from that console. In his article titled “Game Analysis: Centipede,” Rouse lists out a series of traits that most classic arcade games have in common and how they shaped the genre. One of these traits is “input” in which he stated that arcade games have complete control over the way the games controls were designed. On the original arcade cabinet, Galaga’s controls consisted of a joystick that only moves left or right and a button to fire the spaceship’s weapons, but the NES Classic’s controller doesn’t have a joystick, so in order to control the ship's movement you would use the left and right arrows of the directional pad, slightly limiting the amount of precision in the movement. In all other facets laid out by Rouse, Galaga adheres to almost all of them. It has single screen play, the possibility of infinite play, the concept of multiple lives, no story, and it has a high-score tracker. One thing I noticed when looking at images and videos of the Galaga arcade cabinet was a sort of hint or guide for one of the game mechanics. Rouse describes classic arcade games as being simple and easy to learn to the point where there are no instructions on how to play, instead the player just learns the mechanics while playing.

This hint contains images and instructions about how if the player’s ship gets abducted by one of the enemies and the player was to shoot the enemy who abducted that ship, they would then free their previous ship and add it to their current ship, giving the player a secondary fire. On the NES Classic version there is no such tip, and although I had already known this mechanic prior to playing the game for this post, I’m sure I would have been able to figure this out without the help, making the image on the arcade cabinet useless and go against Rouse’s traits. After my time playing Galaga, still not being able to beat my dad’s high-score, I can see the appeal of arcade games that Rouse is so adamant about but I feel like a bit of the luster was off due to my playing of the game outside an actual arcade and not having quarters on the line.

Rouse III, Richard. “Game Analysis: Centipede.” Game Design: Theory and Practice, 2004.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELYVbdq0PlM

https://www.etsy.com/ie/listing/590970800/new-galaga-arcade-cabinet-cpo