Single Player Palaver

Look! Two blog posts in quick succession; check me out. That said, this post was started fairly soon after the last one, it may yet take a while to finish. I started this out as a big old thing, and decided halfway through that there were a couple of topics that I wanted to cover. This part will be about the trend for single player titles to feature fairly redundant multiplayer elements.

On one hand we have developers complaining about games being too long and expensive to make, and at the same time we seem to be determined to add in extra content to existing IPs to help elongate the experience. Why? Why do Uncharted 2 and Bioshock 2 both have multiplayer? Adding it in costs time and money, and is always going to be somewhat tacked on compared to the main campaign. In Bioshock 2’s case, the multiplayer is a fairly standard assortment of various modes, while Uncharted 2 has those elements as well as a fairly fun cooperative mode that utilises the franchise’s trademark banter and sense of fun. But I’m still concerned as to why they were put into the IP in the first place, and whether or not the resources used could have been spent elsewhere during the games’ development cycles.

This isn’t a rant against multiplayer, by the way. I have spent tens of thousands of hours playing Counter Strike and Command and Conquer and World of Warcraft and Eve Online, so have nothing against killing and being killed by various people on the other side of a television/computer screen. I also appreciate that a lot more people are online these days (and indeed have to be if you want to play anything by Ubisoft), so appreciate games that take the time and effort to make thoughtful use of multiplayer elements in their titles. Games like Demon’s Souls, Army of Two, Kane and Lynch… even Resident Evil 5 were built up with multiplayer in mind, and the various implementations have been terrific. Some games just aren’t thoughtful about the multiplayer experience though, and we end up with the “tacked on” feeling I mentioned earlier. Then there’s White Knight Chronicles, which manages to completely balls-up the single-player experience in a ham-fisted attempt to add multiplayer. Here’s how:

White Knight Chronicles is an RPG from Level 5, a respected and normally reliable developer most famous for the Professor Layton series. WKC was the developer’s first PS3 title, and so expectations were suitably high. Before the game came out, cinematic trailers showcasing stunning FMV and hinting at an epic story. Starting the game takes you into a Character Creation process as flexible and thorough as the system we used in Aion. Then, after spending however long creating your little avatar chap (a good half-hour, in my case) you’re thrust into the game, and you start as someone completely different! Leonard is the star of the show, the character who soon finds the White Knight and becomes him whenever necessary. You soon bump into your character though, and sit down looking forward to see how what part they play in this grand story. Haha….

That’s the point when you discover that your avatar is, in fact, a mute mannequin. Mine never says a word, is only acknowledged at the very start of the game, and has absolutely no interactions with any of the other characters during any of the cut-scenes. It’s like my guy is this needy, mute loner who has found the only group of miscreants who haven’t yet told him to piss off, and is clinging onto them because he thinks that means he can finally add people on Facebook (or “Ye Olde Face Booke” or whatever) when he gets back from saving the bloody kingdom. He’s a completely redundant character, necessitated only because Level 5 decided to implement this strange game-within-a-game multiplayer thing in which your character runs round areas you’ve already been to in the main campaign, smacking big bastards around the head with their staff/sword/whatever you’ve decided to specialise in. Even if they were dead set (random plug: Dead Set is an excellent Big Brother/zombie outbreak series - watch it) on having that multiplayer thing in, couldn’t they just have Leonard transform into him? He can already turn himself into a thirty foot, glowing-eyed, armoured knight, for Christ’s sake; I’m sure him morphing into whatever freak of an avatar you create for the MP parts would have been less weird than those creepy, creepy cut-scenes. Here’s an example - the player character is the tall bald dude in the dress. See? Weird.

I’m interested in knowing just why developers see so much value in incorporating clumsy multiplayer aspects into their games. The internet is a fantastic resource, and multiplayer gaming has come a long way in recent years, so why are so many development studios adding in exactly the same multiplayer functionality? In so many cases we just see Capture the Flag reskinned and renamed, and what for? Another bullet point on the back-of-box text? Madness.

L’art de Traducteur

I’ve worked as a writer at NCsoft for nearly two years now. Being part of the GPS (Global Production Studio) means I’m in the team responsible for turning Korean game text, and game worlds, into western-friendly game text and game worlds. Compared to other writing jobs in the games industry this might seem a little restrictive, however there are two games that have recently been in the games industry spotlight which perfectly highlight the importance of the localiser’s/rewriter’s role. The games I want to talk about (before going off on a slightly related tangent, not that I’m writing this note during my proofing run or anything) are XSEED Games’ Half-Minute Hero, and From Software’s 3D Dot Game Heroes.

As I’ve already said, my role at NCsoft is essentially to take foreign text and make it palatable and interesting to “western” (NA and EU) audiences. This requires more than simple translation; it requires adapting the text into something genuinely interesting, and intertwining the world with the strong characters, relevant themes and characterisations that are presumably lost in the translation process and culturally significant elements that don’t exist in the original text. There are a couple of fairly famous examples in Aion where we had to edit whole quests because the subject matter, presumably fine and dandy in its native Korea, just wouldn’t sit well with us or our audiences. That brings us fairly neatly to a fairly important question: how large a role should localisation staff have in adapting a foreign game to an entirely different group of customers? Should we treat Korean or Japanese gamers as a fundamentally different demographic, not just because of the differences in gameplay that they’ve come to expect, but also because of the different ways that story is treated in various territories?

I mentioned Half-Minute Hero and 3D Dot Game Heroes not because I think the localisation staff really had and have a great deal of say in the style of the final translated text, but because I like to think that they did, and will. I’m sure the Japanese text in Half-Minute Hero was equally brilliant, and that the Japanese text in 3D Dot Game Heroes (which is now being copied to my clipboard) is as uninspired as its game play. I’m fairly sure of that, but I still like to think that the localisation staff XSEED turned to had this brilliant idea, that the text had been all serious and standard and that this magical, inspired localisation team had decided to take that text, bin it, and create something brilliantly witty and self-referential instead. See, that way this post actually has some form of purpose. That way I can sit here and bang on about how localisation staff have a duty to speak to the development staff and advise them on what could and should be changed in their game for the secondary (i.e. not native) markets. Half-Minute Hero, for those not in the know, is a pseudo 8-bit RPG for the PSP. It takes a fantastically satirical look at the RPGs of the early 90s, and rips them to pieces with knowing comments and casual observations. Bosses that refer to themselves as crap because the developers were clearly running out of time, NPCs that berate you for refusing to help (I think the actual in-game line was “When did anyone get anywhere in an RPG by saying no anyway?”), deliberately bad English, and credits that run after every thirty secondish rampage before the game introduced the next level as the previous game’s sequel. The game has its flaws and is far from perfect, but as an exercise in writing it works brilliantly; it’s self-aware, satirical perfection.

Then there’s 3D Dot Game Heroes. 3D Dot Game Heroes shares many similarities with Half-Minute Hero: they’re both stylised, retro RPGs and both draw from similar source material (3DDGH is basically pure Zelda, which HMH is a bit Zelda, a bit Final Fantasy). However, the English text for 3D Dot Game Heroes hasn’t yet been seen. Half-Minute Hero is a fantastic homage to old-school role-playing games, 3D Dot Game Heroes essentially IS an old-school role-playing game just with incredible graphics. As Eurogamer’s Keza MacDonald puts it “When you open your first chest in your first dungeon and find a boomerang, it’s difficult to suppress a smile, but by the time you get to the third or fourth dungeon and find bombs, a hookshot and a fire wand, the joke starts to wear a little thin”. Now, the review was based on an imported, Japanese version of 3D Dot Game Heroes, so there is still some chance of the title being edited into something special. As MacDonald himself commented, “Atlus’ interpretation of the tone for translation is going to be crucial”. They could simply go through a word for word translation, or they could try something a bit special with the text.

So then, how comprehensively can a localisation team change the feel of a game anyway? Now let’s first assume that every gamer ever reads every line of text, listens to every second of audio and watches every single cutscene. Based on that (not entirely reasonable) assumption, I’d say that a rewrite localisation effort can substantially change the nature of a game. After all, without text and audio, all that’s left of a story is a series of isolated events, a bit like a join-the-dot picture without any lines drawn in. Without text, a quest might involve you talking to an old man, killing a monster, then returning to the old man. Now, given free scope, that quest could be given a number of raisons d’être; perhaps the monster had ruined his crops or killed his son, perhaps his star boar had fallen sick and had started rampaging through the forests, or perhaps his wife had been cursed to live the rest of her life as the monster and the heartbroken old man had no choice other than to deliver her to the afterlife. In MMORPGs this is actually easier than other genres due to its actual nature: there’s an overarching story, sure, but you’re never really taken through any tightly scripted missions. Indeed, it’s in the interests of MMORPG developers to employ a kind of hands-off approach to players, give them a world (sandbox is the term bandied about at the moment) to play in rather than a finite path to walk down. Compare something like the scripted, linear world of Uncharted 2 to the open universe of Eve Online. Both are excellent titles, wonderful achievements and shining examples of the various genres present in today’s industry, but are entirely different in nature to suit the environments the players have grown to expect from their respective genres.

Aion’s text was changed in a fairly substantial way, I feel. We spent a great deal of establishing tone for the two main races, establishing a sense of empathy towards the Asmodians who had, up until then, been dark-winged, red-eyed demons. Conversely, the Elyos were pure and uncorrupted, the angels of Atreia. I had no interest in writing a good versus evil game, so we set about giving both sides shades of grey instead. A key change was giving the Asmodians a sense of esprit de corps, colouring them as the downtrodden victims of an earth shattering disaster. We created new lore for them in which their circumstances forced them to rely on each other for support. They became a family because the only alternative was to die alone. They became tough and resilient, and we eventually worked out a mantra for them - “blood for blood” - that would perfectly embody everything that they had become. We also brought the Elyos down a few notches, made them arrogant and haughty; our first design documents even referred to them as fascists. They were the all-powerful, all-conquering chosen few, delivered to paradise by their god and tasked with cleansing Atreia of the few stragglers that had survived the (then Epic) Cataclysm. It all ended up a little bit too close to a certain movement of the mid-20th Century, but even after scaling back a little, they were still much more interesting to write for (and hopefully read) than they would have had we done little more than a simple polish of the Engrish.

I suppose we were lucky to be given free reigns in regard to our rewrite process. I’m sure that if I ever create a game in my career, seeing it being changed and edited because a localisation team felt the original content wouldn’t appeal would sting more than a little. It is clear that different markets expect and demand different things though; just look at the sales of the Monster Hunter franchise in Japan compared to the rest of the world, and the sales of Uncharted 2 in the west compared to Japan. Occasionally you do get games which appeal to western gamers because of its Japanese nature, the Final Fantasy series being a fairly clear example. Actually, perhaps that helps explain why, as Square-Enix works to make the game more “Western friendly” they actually just end up alienating the fans who had grown to love its quirks. Hmm.

Regardless, localisation has come forward in leaps and bounds in recent years. The days of translations such as “This guy are sick”, “A winner is you” and (of course) “All your base are belong to us” are long gone, to the extent where we can now have legitimate blogs posts discussing the role a localisation team has in getting the secondary languages to be as relevant and interesting as the original language. Which is handy.

When did this happen exactly?

I listened to a song a couple of weeks ago that really reminded me of another song that I couldn’t quite place. The strings were basically pulled directly (albeit transposed) and even the drums were almost the same, just slowed. Anyway, after trying to figure out what the original song was, it was eventually brought to my attention that it was Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Philadelphia. I was listening to the song on YouTube, and doing my usual thing of reading up about it when I came across which genuinely startled me: the vocals in the video were recorded live at the video shoot, something Springsteen himself insisted on so as to make the video as authentic as possible. Just to give context, just yesterday there was a news article on Yahoo suggesting that Britney Spears’ live concerts come with a warning that her performances featured no live audio, and that she was in fact miming.

When did this happen? I assume there wasn’t a flick of a switch, turning music as an art form from overly-authentic (the idea of recording vocals live at a music video set is a little absurd to me, especially considering ol’ Bruce was walking around an open city) to entirely false overnight, so presumably we’ve been subjected to the changes gradually, over time, and the changing demographics did not care enough to raise their hands and protest.

The whole music industry has undeniably changed into a less artistic, less authentic monster over time. Maybe this was dictated by the newer generations simply caring more about the artist rather than what the artists produce, but before you would never have been able to put a pretty face on stage and get him/her to simple gyrate for millions of pounds because the audience for that type of “music” just didn’t exist. Even studio recordings are false, with singers singing songs written by other people, singing lyrics penned by someone else, and with the singer’s actual vocals getting pitch-corrected by clever software to hide the fact that often… they just can’t sing. People interested in today’s pop music are essentially watching people with pretty faces dance around, while what constituted pop music up until the early/mid 90’s was mostly genuine, mostly real.

I’m going to stop now. Just like to quickly point out that I couldn’t give a rat’s arse what pop music sounds like these days, I just wish it were real. Music’s an art form, and the stuff that features in the charts these days as far removed from Springsteen era pop as pantomime is from Wilde.

N.B. The song that kicked off this little rant is The Autumn Leaves by some chap called ATB.

A quote I like.

“It is not in the nature of man-nor of any living entity-to start out by giving up, by spitting in one’s own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that their fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.”

- Ayn Rand.

So, who writes what?

A good friend of mine linked me to this article a while ago, asking for my thoughts on it. For those too lazy to click the link, the article is all about how writing in games is being taken over by movie writers, and the industry is desperately in need of novelists to come in and save our poor, infant industry. The article is not subtle, and starts with the sentence “There aren’t enough novelists writing videogames.” and ends with the ominous “We can’t let those guys take over.”

The article annoyed me for a number of reasons. First off, part of the article describes how novelists should flock to games to keep themselves in pocket. “A vast new audience is opening up for interactive fictions,” it starts, “With book sales nose-diving, it would seem to be a natural avenue.” Natural to who exactly? The author lists a number of reasons why games should be written by novelists instead of film scriptwriters, but completely misses one glaringly obvious solution: that games should be written by game writers.  The notion that game writing (which, by the way, is fundamentally different from film, radio, TV and book writing) should be done by specialised game writers doesn’t even occur to the article’s author, and only highlights how far our industry STILL has to go before it can be recognised as an independent medium in its own right. The image of game writers and novelists arguing over who should write for big budget Hollywood films is absurd, and rightly so, so why isn’t it for games?

Games writers need to quietly cough, wave a hello at the other writers in the entertainment industry, and point out the differences that make games so different and so unique. The biggest difference is obviously interactivity. Yes, other mediums have attempted interactivity: Andrew Ryman’s 253 is a fine example of a hypertext novel (and a fine example of why hypertext novels don’t work), and every now and then you’ll see “interactive movies” popping up online where the user chooses one of a few paths, the most recent that comes to mind being the now dead (oh the irony) The Outbreak.

Genuine interactivity, when the user dictates pacing and plot makes games fundamentally different from movies and novels. Subsequently, the skills required in the staff are also fundamentally different. This applies to writers too, so just as one would rightly expect radio scriptwriters to have different skills from film scriptwriters, game scriptwriters also need different skills. In fact, because of the massive gulf in interactivity, I would happily argue that games writers need even more specialised skills than other entertainment writers. Furthermore, as technology improves, games will have the potential to become even more interactive than they are now. Having film writers and novelists writing scripts for these games risks hindering the potential of our industry, and should be avoided at all costs.

We work in a burgeoning seedling of an industry, one that should be protected as much as possible and left to flourish into its own unique space. I couldn’t think of a good way to finish this article, so I’ll steal the Guardian’s exit line. We can’t let those guys take over.